31 replies to this topic

[Albert]

batari said:

The source was released on that page along with the binaries, but PCAE was written in Pascal.  I am not making this up.  This could very well be the reason that nobody has taken over the project or why nobody seems to have the source.

It appears it was written in Delphi, which is a great Windows development environment from Borland. And yes, the underlying language is basically Object Pascal, with some improvements (I like the language). It's one of my favorite Windows development tools. But it's certainly not nearly as popular as C and C++, so it might be harder to find someone to pick up the project.

..Al

[cd-w]

Hi Folks,

The last posting of my scrolling maze demo had a couple of "off-by-one" errors which prevented diagonal scrolling from working properly. I have now tracked these down, and attached the corrected code to this message.
I think the core code is now bug-free, although there are probably plenty of optimisations that could still be done. This should be the last version that I post here for a while as I am now going to concentrate on turning this demo into a proper game.

As for debugging, I hadn't realised that Z26 could produce a log file while running. This should be a lot of help, although I think I now need to write a tool to parse the rather large output that it produces!

Thanks for the help.
Chris

Attached Files

•  maze04.zip   16.34K   65 downloads

[Tom]

The windows version uses Delphi, but I cannot find the source code. The DOS versions I found (apparently up to version 2.4, hard to tell, the archives are all named pcaesrc.zip, and the version numbers spilled in the source files contradict themselves !) used no object oriented extensions, just shitloads of inline assembler even in places where it probably wouldn't have been necessary. Much of the code is DOS / hardware specific.

Now, there is Freepascal, and there are SDL-Bindings for Freepascal, so lots of this code could be simply kicked. But the inline assembly that remains would either have to be reworked to account for the different memory model, or translated back to Pascal.

[batari]

I found the pcaewsrc.zip version 2.6 file, or I think so anyway. It was still available at an obscure location on vg-network.com. It was hard to get because the pages were outdated and it was about three levels deep through pages that had immediate redirects to spam/adware sites, so to save all interested parties the trouble, I put it on a geocities location:

www.geocities.com/qwerty123123/pcaewsrc.zip

[Tom]

Yeah, that's it .
Any chance the source for version 2.5 for DOS (seems to be the last DOS version) is around there aswell ? I said I had it earlier, but what I have is actually v. 2.4.

[batari]

Yeah, that was there too. This one is small enough to post here (around 400k) so I'll go ahead and give it a shot.

Attached Files

•  pcaesrc.zip   414.67K   76 downloads

[Tom]

I tried to compile that stuff with Borland Pascal, with debug information enabled. Well, the compiler chokes on pcae.pas, because it generates more debug info than the compiler can handle