Posit-92

"Not retro for nostalgia. Retro for power."

A handcrafted game framework for Turbo Pascal 7.0. Inspired by the raw speed, minimalism and creativity of pre-2000 tools.

The name comes from Positron and 1992 (the year in which TP7 was released), combined to resemble an isotope like Uranium-235 because it sounds cool :D

My goal is to create something like a fantasy computer such as PICO-8 and TIC-80 but uses TP7 because I believe it's fast enough & easier than C.

I'm also inspired by LoveDOS (also, the working fork with the audio working: https://github.com/SuperIlu/lovedos), and TempleOS

Rainfall demo (YouTube):

More demos are inside DEMOS folder

Games that I've made are available on my itch.io page: https://hevanafa.itch.io/

Getting started

1. cd to boilerplate,
2. Call copy_units.ps1,
3. Copy all the files inside the boilerplate directory (except for copy_units.ps1) to your DOS drive

Then, you can use GAME.PAS as the primary file

If you're using DOSBox or DOSBox-X, you can change the cycles setting to 32090 (emulating Pentium 60MHz), that's the setting that I usually use to develop

When releasing a game made with this framework, I recommend you to change the cycles setting to max, and the machine to vgaonly

Included units

Primary units

• GAME.PAS: Program starting point

All the demonstrations are placed in DEMOS

Utility units

• ADLIB.PAS: AdLib utility
• BITMAP.PAS: Utility for BMP files
• BMFONT.PAS: BMFont support utility
• BMPROT.PAS: Procedural bitmap rotation & scaling
• CONV.PAS: Common conversion features
• FPS.PAS: FPS counter utility
• GRAPHICS.PAS: Primitives drawing utility
• KEYBOARD.PAS: Keyboard utility
• LOGGER.PAS: Debug logger utility
• MATHS.PAS: Math-related utility functions
• MEMORY.PAS: Memory debugging utility
• MONOBMP.PAS: 1-bit bitmap support utility
• MOUSE.PAS: Mouse utility
• MSFNT.PAS: Microsoft bitmap font (FNT) utility
• PANIC.PAS: Panic halt utility
• PCS.PAS: PC speaker utility
• STRINGS.PAS: String operation utility
• TIMING.PAS: Time-related utility
• VGA.PAS: Utility for VGA access

If you want the scancodes for the keyboard, you can refer to these lists:

• https://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/rtl/keyboard/kbdscancode.html
• https://www.freebasic.net/wiki/GfxScancodes

Mode X units

All Mode X units are prefixed by an X to differentiate from Mode Y (mode 13h) operations

• MODEX.PAS: Base Mode X unit
• XBITMAP.PAS
• XMOUSE.PAS

Some units have Mode X implementation, which can be activated with the {$DEFINE MODEX} directive, such as FPS.PAS