PlasmaPong Refactor

My attempt to clean up an ancient DOS game a friend and I made in high school.

Goals

• Rename, rearrange, reformat, and refactor things to be more sane, but still one file
  • Magic numbers -> constants
  • Deduplicate code
  • Globals -> state object
  • Rearrange code to eliminate prototypes
  • Consolidate constants
  • Defines -> static consts? (not sure if watcom can elide them)
• Test performance on (simulated) pentium 233 to make sure it still runs well (it's probably fine since I eliminated an entire screen copy)
• Get it running under FreeDOS with OpenWatcom compiler
• Fix game-breaking problems
  • Score display
  • Address compiler warnings
  • Crash in non-huge memory model
• Fix QoL problems
  • Restore video mode upon exit

Building

Currently using OpenWactom 2.

For an optimized release build:

wcl -q -mc -wx -we -ox -5 -fp5 -fpi87 -DNDEBUG pp.cpp dos_system.cpp drawing.cpp palettes.cpp sprites.cpp

This game was originally developed on a Pentium MMX 233, hence the -5 -fp5 -fpi87 options.

For debug builds, add one of the debug symbol options, and remove one or both of -ox and -DNDEBUG.

TODO:

• makefile

Running the game

I am using FreeDOS on VMWare with the project directory mounted as a shared folder using vmsmount. After building the program on the host, I can run pp.exe inside the VM.

To exit, click both left and right mouse buttons simultaneously.

Known issues

• Score is not very legible, especially during countdown
• Ball speed calculation is wonky; there is both a speed and ball_[xy]_delta