atariangamer
Active member
Good day, all.
I've been looking into the classic Mac OS (late 68k, early PPC era) for developing a game project I had in mind. And while I'm making a little bit of progress, so far it's been hard to find examples of what I'm looking to do, or if it's even possible. I was originally thinking about the Sega Genesis as a target platform so perhaps my approach to graphics is a bit too geared towards 'dedicated video hardware' instead of the Mac mentality, but I'd like to ask it here and see if I'm on the right track and if there are any specific examples to study.
Without going too deep, I'd like to make a kind of overworld map or hub area by loading a large background map into RAM. Based off the player position, I would then take a sub-area of the map and copy it to a back buffer. I'd then figure out what "sprites" or actors need to be drawn, copy them to the back buffer, then flip the buffer to the front, then start working on building the next frame.
It seems like part of this is done with offscreen Gworlds, at least to handle the taking a small area of a larger image. And I even saw some mention of front and back buffering. But I've yet to find an actual decent example to understand. A lot of documentation that is pertinent in Inside Macintosh is in Pascal, and even the end of chapter C formatted stuff isn't truly clicking with me.
Does QuickDraw have a front/back buffer system? Or does that have to be built in memory and then just rely on CopyBits to hopefully be fast enough to redraw the entire window?
I've been looking into the classic Mac OS (late 68k, early PPC era) for developing a game project I had in mind. And while I'm making a little bit of progress, so far it's been hard to find examples of what I'm looking to do, or if it's even possible. I was originally thinking about the Sega Genesis as a target platform so perhaps my approach to graphics is a bit too geared towards 'dedicated video hardware' instead of the Mac mentality, but I'd like to ask it here and see if I'm on the right track and if there are any specific examples to study.
Without going too deep, I'd like to make a kind of overworld map or hub area by loading a large background map into RAM. Based off the player position, I would then take a sub-area of the map and copy it to a back buffer. I'd then figure out what "sprites" or actors need to be drawn, copy them to the back buffer, then flip the buffer to the front, then start working on building the next frame.
It seems like part of this is done with offscreen Gworlds, at least to handle the taking a small area of a larger image. And I even saw some mention of front and back buffering. But I've yet to find an actual decent example to understand. A lot of documentation that is pertinent in Inside Macintosh is in Pascal, and even the end of chapter C formatted stuff isn't truly clicking with me.
Does QuickDraw have a front/back buffer system? Or does that have to be built in memory and then just rely on CopyBits to hopefully be fast enough to redraw the entire window?
