5 replies to this topic

[Propane13]

Hi!

I hooked up my old, slow college computer tower today.
I was looking for some old files, and was surprised to remember that I was really 7800-happy back in 2000-2003.

Back in 2/16/2002, I had made a graphic-converter program.
What it did was convert raw code into pixels, based on the different modes that the 7800 supported.

I can't remember if a thread like this was done later (probably so), but I thought I'd share what I had done before, if anyone hadn't seen these sorts of things.


Let's start with an easy one-- Hat Trick:


Next, here's Crossbow (which may give you an appreciation of code vs. graphics data sizes)


Here's Asteroids. You can clearly see the "by Ethan and Greg" item, which is only triggered as an Easter Egg.


Here's Joust:


Moving the tiles around, you can see "Pete 'Kid' Gaston". Never figured out how to trigger this one.

Incidentally, the community has never figured out how to trigger this easter egg, to my knowledge.

Here's Choplifter. Nothing too interesting in the code on its own, but...


This is One on One basketball. Note the Choplifter logo there.
It makes me wonder if this is really in the ROM, or if this is the result of a bad dump that was done right after Choplifter was in memory.


Anyway, I thought I'd share. Maybe I can dig up some other weird stuff on my old tower.

Regards,
-John

[gambler172]

Hi John
Would be great,if the Graphic Converter tool could be found and made available.
greetings Walter

[cvga]

That was really cool. Thanks for sharing!

[Propane13]

I think I found the utility.
It's written in Quick Basic 4.5, so if anyone has that, they can try to make sense of my source code.

Next steps that someone would need to take:
1) Download QuickBasic 4.5
2) Open my qbasic file
3) I believe the source code hardcodes the file name, so so you just need to switch that around in the code, and then "run" it with QBASIC. You may also need to toggle some hardcoded numbers (I think I had 1/2/3/4 options for the different graphics modes)
4) Run it through qbasic.

If anyone wants to make it have a friendlier interface, knock yourself out.

 Graphics.zip   1.15K   79 downloads

Any takers?

Regards,
-John

[nonner242]

Thats pretty cool!

[Rik]

To a computer neophyte like me,this is genius!Thanks for posting Propane13, this is really cool!

Edited by Rik, Sat Nov 14, 2009 8:41 PM.