The Polygons of Éric's Chahi Another World

This series of articles, together with another_js[1], inspired my port of Another World for the Game Boy Color that I&#x27;m slowly working on[2][3].<p>Getting the basic game running in shades of gray was relatively little work due to the game being bytecode based (and the great single file example VM implementation from another_js!), but getting the game&#x27;s 16 colour palette to work with the CGB&#x27;s 4 colour palettes and still look good is unfortunately a very manual process to work around the limitations of the platform.<p>Anyway, it is a lot of fun to work on. I&#x27;d highly recommend as a hobby project porting it to some other (less constrained) system, or implementing the game&#x27;s VM in whichever new language you&#x27;re interested in trying.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;cyxx&#x2F;another_js" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;cyxx&#x2F;another_js</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=dv00LlmFq0o" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=dv00LlmFq0o</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;mcurrie&#x2F;status&#x2F;1451460454530764800" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;mcurrie&#x2F;status&#x2F;1451460454530764800</a>

A programmer at Interplay, Rebecca Heineman, ported Out of This World to Super Nintendo around ... 1992 or so?<p>It was an amazing accomplishment because the SNES only had a 3.58 MHz (yes, you read that right) processor, and wasn&#x27;t afforded the luxury of drawing into a traditional pixel-oriented bitmap (e.g. one byte per pixel).<p>The code that Rebecca wrote rendered triangles into SNES &quot;chunky planar&quot; format on the fly. The chunks are 8x8 pixel tiles, where the bits of each pixel are spread out across four planes (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sneslab.net&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Graphics_Format" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sneslab.net&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Graphics_Format</a>). And all this at 20 FPS, a feat which still boggles me, 30 years on.

The article is wonderfully technical and full of meaty details, but the stills just don&#x27;t do the art justice. Here&#x27;s a long play that gets right into the action:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=utrxk5_PeEY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=utrxk5_PeEY</a><p>I can&#x27;t believe this was done in 1991. It looks perfectly modern and is incredibly gorgeous to look at.

While working on my own implementation of the bytecode interpreter &#x2F; VM, I built a little tool [1] to render the polygons outside of the game. It can load unpacked resource files of the game (the GOG version comes with uncompressed resource files for example, other versions need an external tool to extract them). It helped me to debug some issues with my renderer. Currently it&#x27;s hosted in my private GitHub Pages repository, but the source code isn&#x27;t obfuscated :)<p>There&#x27;s also a demo of my (private) Another World interpreter compiled to WASM [2]. It bundles the game files of the DOS demo, which means the intro cannot be skipped. My native desktop version supports loading of files from multiple versions of the game (some, like the unofficial GBA version lack support for their music files). Some time in the future I&#x27;d like to add support for &quot;uploaded&quot; game files to the WASM version as well.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;max-m.github.io&#x2F;aworld&#x2F;index.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;max-m.github.io&#x2F;aworld&#x2F;index.html</a> [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;max-m.github.io&#x2F;yaw&#x2F;index.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;max-m.github.io&#x2F;yaw&#x2F;index.html</a>

That was a very interesting article, I was surprised at how dense the byte code was. Seeing what people can do on platforms like that and DOS reminds me that we should always try to make things simpler.

I wonder who takes interest in reverse-engineering these old games.<p>As a professional programmer, there&#x27;s so much to learn nowadays that I wonder how they find the time to invest in time-consuming niche projects which don&#x27;t lead to directly transferable experience. I also assume that the people (like me) who did play these games are older and busy with other things in life?<p>Anyway, I think this is awesome that people do that, and it&#x27;s the spirit of HN. I just wish I had the time...

(2020)<p>Previous discussion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21937607" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21937607</a>

Great series, but one assertion jumped out at me:<p><pre><code> In terms of processing power a PC was far superior to the Amiga and Atari ST we visited last times. The problem for gaming was the video which was extremely slow. </code></pre> I was going to say, &quot;On what planet was a 4.77 MHz 8088 &#x27;far superior&#x27; to an 8 MHz 68000?&quot;, but then looked up the MIPS-per-MHz figures, and the 8088 was indeed faster. I sure don&#x27;t remember it that way.<p>(Edit: looks like I was reading the table wrong. The 68000 Dhrystone MIPS score is indeed better by a factor of almost 2x.)

Just watched a great video on this topic.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;0iz9PJbs5rE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;0iz9PJbs5rE</a>

Wonderful blog, I&#x27;m in awe of people who can consistently write quality posts like this year after year.

Is there a book or blog or video series that “holds my hand” and walks me through the Doom code base in detail?