Dear all,
After Shockwave's initiative to start a website dedicated to remakes of crack intros and demos for old platforms like the Amiga, Atari and Commodore C64, and with the increasing number of remakes, lots of members started to request tutorials, examples and source code.
Retro-Remakes is essentially a show-case website or museum for those remakes. Releasing source code on such as site is still under discussion, but definitely, the site is not geared at teaching people how to code intros, demos and old-school effects.
Shockwave kindly accepted my request to release my source code here and use it for educational purposes.
The source code is free of use (commercial and non commercial). I do not request you to give me credit for it or anything else.
The release of the source code will be done using several tutorials, from the very basics, to the most complex.
For those who want to learn, download and compile the source code, please get your hands on a couple of tools:
- Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 (any other compiler may need some source code tweeking, but here is the best place to ask for this kind of help)
- the tutorials here will make use of the C language only. Don't ask for C++ examples, as it will be beyond the scope. The goal here is to learn the basics and make use of the relevant APIs (Win32, OpenGL). There are other threads here to learn such things.
- make sure you have a graphics card with OpenGL working fine. I'm essentially using OpenGL for all the graphics manipulations and a graphics car with OpenGL 1.3 support is required.
- I do not use any vertex/pixel shaders, only in-memory rendering when needed. Again the goal is to learn the basics.
- you will need a graphics conversion tool that is capable of saving bitmaps in the RAW format (unrelated to the digital SLR camera RAW file formats). The RAW format is a generic name for saving only the graphics data without any form of compression or metadata (width, height, colors, etc). Everything will be presented the old-school way. Tools capable to save RAW data are Photoshop, Paintshop Pro, and free tools like XnView, and others.
- enough words.. let's start!
