The olcPixelGameEngine for Retro Platforms Part I

I’m very found of the Atari 8-bit machines and the Atari ST. When I saw the PixelGameEngine (PGE for the rest of this text) i thought why not port it? I started to look at the Atari ST. Using my own 520 STM as a the target machine.

I soon realised that a regular port wouldn’t cut it. My first attempt was to remove a lot of stuff just to get it to compile. The first PGE binary needed a 4 MB machine. Not even close for my 512kB target machine. In the test program all graphics routines is written from scratch and that is because of the bit plane situation, more on that below.

Before we dig deeper let’s look at the hardware.

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Casting Bit Magic

Pt. 1 Binary Representation and Endianness

Introduction

This article began as an explanation of the “fast inverse square root algorithm” found in the source code of Quake 3 by id Software. While working on the article and receiving feedback I realized that I would better split the article in a small series about binary representation and the floating point type. We will begin at the basics of bit representation and ending the series with some nice bit trickery with the floating point format. The goal of the article is that beginner level programmers can understand the lower level workings of their machine. I do sincerely hope I have included enough material that also the more experienced programmer will enjoy the content. So here is the first entry!

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Enough! Why rand() cant compress!!!

Unless you are born an information theory genius, at some point during your programming learning you might have considered the following hypothesis:

A file is a sequence of bytes. If I could find the appropriate seed for srand(), surely I could generate the file, just by successively calling rand() % 256? Therefore I could represent the file with just the seed and the expected file length.

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