[cmds] Port ttypong to ELKS #1864
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of the curses routines emitted far too many escape sequences which slowed down ELKS. There is now an inter-frame delay of 40000 usecs by default. This can be changed by passing a new value as an argument, "ttypong 20000" for instance, to speed it up.
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Awesome! But all these tty apps and games should be on the hdd images where there is enough space, right? It is not so clear looking at elkscmd/Applications file. |
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Yes, all programs specified in the elkscmd/Applications file, including the somewhat confusing lines without a I am thinking about creating a new facility where individual application program files can be compressed on the distribution, which would allow more programs on each floppy size. The drawback is that the kernel decompression slows down the application start, and can be pretty slow on older 8088 machines. Another idea would be a permanent decompressor that could be run by a user for more often-used binaries. |
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I noticed that you control the racket on the left. Interestingly even if the racket is not there the ball still bounces back in some kind of invisible wall? Can you actually lose the game? |
Yes, that seems to be the way the game was written. Take a look, its a pretty small program, perhaps you can modify it to optionally require a racket hit to bounce back or add other enhancements.
No! I suppose this means its more of a pong demo lol. Did you run this on your 8088 PC, or just QEMU? I'm interested to see how fast it is on real hardware, and what the sleep usecs needs to be. |
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Not yet on real 8088, only https://copy.sh/v86/. |
As a final tty game before the v0.8.0 release, mostly to test the ELKS curses library (which worked for the most part for this port),
ttypongis now running on ELKS.The per-frame output routine had to be rewritten, much like
slrunning extremely slowly as discussed in #1619 (comment) until it was rewritten. ELKS just can't process the huge amount of ANSI escape sequences our mini version of curses spits out.Tested only on QEMU. The default inter-frame delay is 40000 usecs, which can be changed to be half that using
ttypong 20000for instance, to speed things up. It would be interesting to see how fast this runs on real hardware.Unfortunately, at the moment
ttypongis only available on the 2880k disk image, as the 1440k only has ~10k bytes left, andttypongis 11k. Speaking of which, all these ncurses-based games are huge, compared to what ELKS is used to.Here are the current sizes of the tty games and
fm, which also uses curses:Use the up/down arrow keys or
handjto move the racket, andqto quit.