Programming Windows Screensavers - Agon Light Graphics Programming

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3 ай бұрын

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I'm learning how to program the Agon Light, and as a project thought it'd be fun to try and program two of the classic Windows 3.11 screensavers - Mystify and Starfield Simulation.
My aim is not to simply program the Agon Light by cloning the Windows 3.11 screensavers, but to learn how to program the Agon Light at all. Ultimately I want to learn how to program games for the Agon Light.
In this video I learn how to program the Agon Light's graphics system which is very similar to the BBC Micro's graphics system.
#programming #bbcmicro #agonlight #agon #learnprogrammingonyoutube #retrocomputer

Пікірлер: 29

@dechair3113 3 ай бұрын

Computer Engineering student here, just commenting for better reach. Hope you keep making these videos, there aren't many made on such a low level,.

@TSteffi 3 ай бұрын

Just a little side note on screensavers: The burn-in problem is also affecting OLED displays to some degree. It does not affect TFT screens with separate backlight, because the color layer on those does not wear out. Only the backlight wears out over time, making the screen dimmer and eventually breaking. But OLED displays use tons of individual LEDs to generate the picture, and those wear out over time. So if you have an OLED display, you might want to activate a screen saver to prevent your desktop and/or taskbar from burning in on it.

@adammontgomery7980 3 ай бұрын

I remember getting an early webcam that came with some screensaver software where it would overlay bubbles on it's view of you, and you could pop the bubbles with your hand. Hours of fun when I was a kiddo. Before that I remember watching starfield, and a 3d maze (like Wolfenstein) solver. Do kids feel the same sense of awe today?

@ciscornBIG 3 ай бұрын

In my experience, no, they do not.

@ncot_tech 3 ай бұрын

No, kids take all the current tech for granted. Although they do still get amused by being able to create their own things.

@adammontgomery7980 3 ай бұрын

@@ncot_tech in the US, giving kids a laptop to turn in their homework is considered helping them to "learn technology". While I do think that familiarity with the devices is important (typing mostly), they aren't learning anything. It seems to me that starting with simpler machines would be more approachable. A modern x86 or ARM architecture is almost impossible to wrap your mind around, much less the OS.

@zooblestyx 3 ай бұрын

More than as a tutorial, I see this as basic research. I don't know what I'll learn along the way, but I trust there will always be something new to learn.

@reinoud6377 3 ай бұрын

I really love this Agon graphics interface

@arronshutt 3 ай бұрын

I like watching programming videos - you should do more of them. And you've got a good line in shirts given that it's been chucking down now that Spring is here :) I don't know whether you can do any of the 3D screensavers from Win95 but I think that could be a stretch goal for your Windows Screensaver project. If you manage to do the 3D Flowerbox, 3D Maze or the 3D Pipes then that would be most impressive on a machine completely unsuited to doing 3D :)

@AmaroqStarwind 3 ай бұрын

4:54 There used to be so many screensavers... On my Windows 7 machine, I actually grabbed an ISO of Windows XP and installed it in a virtual machine just so I could grab 3D flower box.

@ncot_tech 2 ай бұрын

I liked the pipes one from NT4 onwards, randomly it'd draw the OpenGL Utah Teapot. It always amused me that inside all 90s video cards or drivers that were OpenGL compliant was a mesh for a teapot.

@AmaroqStarwind 2 ай бұрын

@@ncot_tech Is there a single function call to draw a teapot, or something?

@MikePerigo 3 ай бұрын

Screensavers existed on pre windows 8-bit machines long before Micro$haft included copies of the more popular public domain offerings into Windows. Even commercial programs like After Dark (which included the famous flying toasters) was available on the Mac before it was ported to Windows. Since Mystify is a fairly simple program it is quite likely you had access to an PD version before it was actually included in Windows.

@stephenelliott7071 3 ай бұрын

Fascinating video, looking forward to the next one!

@willofirony 3 ай бұрын

I loved the BBC computer. The graphics were challenging but it was amazing what could be done. Any onewho has seen the Elite game can vouch for that. Though what the Elite creators did to acheive that was way beyond what this channel is trying to acheive. Nevertheless, I will share what they did. It is a good example of thinking out of the box: Along with many 8 bit machines in the early 80s, the BBC (or Beeb) had a number of modes of video display. The number of pixels and colours of each mode was a bargaining process. the mode with the most pixels had only 2 colours. So if you wanted to display 80 characters per line on the screen you did so with a monochrome display (fine for word processing). If you wanted 8 colours, you had just 40 chunky characters per line. That was it, or was it? Well, that wasn't good enough for the Elite creators. So, they divided the screen into zones the top zone was just window dressing, the middle was the view out of the front of your space vehicle that was monochrome (what would you expect in space) with lots of pixels to draw many different enemy space crafts. The bottom zone was the colourful Dashboard and the controls. They did this by switching the mode of the display 3 times every frame of the vdu. The result was breathtaking. Would you have thought of that?

@rog2224 2 ай бұрын

A procedurally generated universe in 22K of memory was impressive.

@LearnAgon 3 ай бұрын

Love this, was trying to figure this one out myself

@SPimentaTV 3 ай бұрын

Very inspiring video 👍

@Codeandpi 2 ай бұрын

Thanks for this, just about to purchase an anon light 2 or the console 8 not sure if there is much difference other than where they are produced. Really like your style of teaching and getting your points and ideas over. Thanks again

@R.Daneel 3 ай бұрын

All of the monitors in my first workplace had this very clear, severely burned-in message at regular intervals down the screen: THIS SCREEN HAS BEEN BLANKED TO SAVE THE MONITOR FROM BURN-IN. *** PRESS SPACE TO RESUME ***

@MadMatty72 3 ай бұрын

Nice vid, keep em coming

@nickmoore385 3 ай бұрын

Flying toasters FTW. ;-)

@delphicdescant 3 ай бұрын

Great video. Just found your channel. I'm taking offense to your analytics calling me old, though.

@CommanderKlag 3 ай бұрын

Is the screen saver running at full speed or is there a speed control variable in the code? Seems al ittle slow.

@NateDohDoubleGee 3 ай бұрын

I didn't see any code that restricts the speed in the video, but it does seem slow considering the computer is around 5x faster (at least) than the NES (also 8-bit). Great question!

@ncot_tech 2 ай бұрын

The code is running at vblank so drawing at 60fps, but it is a little slow due to the horrific things I am doing. There's some floating point maths and sin/cos going on in there. It's not optimised in the slightest. It also judders slightly when my capture device loses sync briefly.