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. neetro . (monochrome dithering x86 asm demo) |
| The program "neetro" is a demo I challenged myself to make one night when I had nothing better to do. The idea was to produce a cool mouse
chasing fading effect, without the luxury of color. To make things a bit more difficult, I also decided to write the demo completely in
monochrome text mode...and in x86 assembly. After a few hours of hacking, success was had. The goal was met by modifying the VGA font tables with my own precalculated monochrome dithered pattern. This could then be used to simulate the luminance value of individual "pixels". The pixels themselves are actually made up of 8x8 font characters. To simulate 64 scales of gray, the various dither patterns of each "pixel" work to trick your eyes into thinking the picture on the screen is made up of more than 1 pixel intensity. The rest of the program was very easy. The program simply renders a small square at the position of the mouse cursor on each frame. Then, the program takes the current frame and applies a fade effect. The result is a rather smooth looking cursor trail. Many PCs appear to have a problem running very old com programs - so I have recorded a small video demonstrating the program in action. |
| screenshot #1 | screenshot #2 | |
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| screenshot #3 | screenshot #4 | |
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| (c) 2006 Aaron Robinson - All Rights Reserved |