20 years later, the return of the "dark force" video modes for the dos version !

[Tux]

This was a hack for version 0.28 but which was not fully understood at the time and which was totally forgotten for all this time, it allows to switch to a given video mode and then make it to display only 1/3 of its lines on screen, excellent for extra wide games like darius. These modes were impossible to select since the vesa modes display only the supported video modes now, and they are not directly supported, it's like a virtual video mode, you need to switch first to a mode with 3x the number of lines you want for it to work... !

So... ! I found this by looking in the code how the triple buffer worked in dos, and found this instead. So I added them back, but I had some trouble to test of course, I wanted to wait until I have access to an old pc to test this on a real screen, but I don't have it available right now. Well I just found that dosemu in linux emulates this perfectly, here is a screenshot :

And ingame :

Oh yeah cut a part of the title bar on this one, testing a new screenshot tool...

Anyway it works great, and it would work on any pc able to switch to 1024x768, so all normal pcs then !

I just added the 3 most standard modes at the end of the list of the standard supported modes, they appear with a "dark " prefix in the list, and are used automatically when loading a game if "auto mode change" is selected, and it's the default. (these standard modes being 640x160, 800x200, and 1024x256, used here by darius).

Quite amazing to see such a come back !

Edited September 10, 2020 by Tux

[Robert]

Very nice!