tandy put their sound chip on the 1A interrupt?

[plan_a_to_y@furry.engineer]

@foone I dunno why but that gives me a "subtle thing that's wrong which leads into things turning to horror" vibe.

"Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?"
she's right behind you
run.

[foone@digipres.club]

font_alloc = malloc(local_a);
if (font_alloc == (void *)0x0) {
font_alloc = (void *)0x0;
}

Ahh yes. remember, if you get a null pointer back from malloc(), make sure to set that variable to NULL so it won't be left as... NULL?

[foone@digipres.club]

@Plan_A_to_Y the last thing a young ACME sleuth hears is a chuckle and "nothing personal, kid"

[foone@digipres.club]

The three fonts

[viraptor@cyberplace.social]

@foone inlined helper that optimises out to a null?

[foone@digipres.club]

@viraptor probably. or a macro and a poor optimizer.

[apmasell@mastodon.social]

@foone why does bold, the largest of the fonts, not simply eat the others?

[lambdageek@mastodon.social]

@foone I bet they had a debug build that did something fun inside that branch. Maybe they put some sentinel value there to track which caller of malloc was responsible.
Not sure why their compiler didn't optimize the branch away in the release build, though

[riley@toot.cat]

@apmasell Its tummy is already full.

@foone

[riley@toot.cat]

@foone I've got a copy of Sourcer lying around, if you're interested.

[foone@digipres.club]

@lambdageek well it's a compiler from 1988, it's not the best

[foone@digipres.club]

man, running on 4 hours of sleep is killing me.
I can't even remember the MS-DOS interrupt to open a file!

I know reading it is int 21 ah=3f, closing it is int 21 ah=3d, and I'll never forget that seeking is int 21 ah=42, but how do you open a file?
I mean, not the int 21 ax=6c00 way, that one is only for DOS 4.0+, and obviously a game released in 1990 isn't gonna use that.

[foone@digipres.club]

ahh, now that I've looked it up, it seems I was wrong!
closing isn't 3D, that's 3E! 3D is open!

no wonder I couldn't remember it, I had it confused with another call

[foone@digipres.club]

looking it up took less than 10 seconds, but that's 10 seconds I'll never get back.

[foone@digipres.club]

what the fuck do you mean that carmen.dat is opened on the first call to finish_draw_maybe()?

like, I know there's a "maybe" in that name, but it's not THAT big of a maybe.

[scottmichaud@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@foone The hit single from Carmen Dat Jepson... Call My Maybe().

[foone@digipres.club]

oh thank god, that was a bit of confusion from manually tracking stack frames.
it actually LoadDatFile, which makes a HELL of a lot more sense

[foone@digipres.club]

@scottmichaud hah!
I should get a sticker for my laptop that says "I'd rather be listening to Carly Rae Jepsen's hit 2015 album Emotion than this!"

[foone@digipres.club]

darn. Compiler Explorer doesn't support MS C Compiler 5.1 from 1988. Guess I gotta spin up an emulator again

[foone@digipres.club]

the annoying thing is that MS C Compiler 5.1 is the most mundane-ass DOS application. If I had a 32bit windows install rather than 64bit, it would probably just run natively on my system