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Robert Sundling

@robertsundling.bsky.social

370 followers 300 following 280 posts

Solo game dev and retro enthusiast, making indie games since the DOS days. Currently working on RASDAN, a DOS/VGA game I started in 1996 and never finished. It's still for DOS! Why not? Madison, Wisconsin, USA, Earth, Sol System, Milky Way, The Universe.

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Robert Sundling @robertsundling.bsky.social · Jul 31

Back in 1991, I wrote a fully functional text adventure development system for DOS. I never ended up making any actual games with it, and it's now been untouched for almost 35 years.

Just for fun and historical interest, I've decided to make it and its source code freely available on GitHub. Enjoy!

GitHub - RobertSundling/ADVGEN

Contribute to RobertSundling/ADVGEN development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

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Robert Sundling @robertsundling.bsky.social · 4d

Amazingly, your post was in my feed directly under this one.

Anatoly Shashkin💾 @dosnostalgic.bsky.social · 4d

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Robert Sundling @robertsundling.bsky.social · 9d

And yes, the lazy dog is "calming" simply to demonstrate Monaspace's texture healing, which loves the word "calming." 😃

Robert Sundling @robertsundling.bsky.social · 9d

I am increasingly a fan of the Monaspace font family (monaspace.githubnext.com).

I've added support for Monaspace features to the GUI TTY interface for my DOS game engine (which takes the place of an external MDA monitor). It's fantastic to be able to customize its look and feel so thoroughly.

RASDAN Remote TTY settings window showing the Fonts tab. The font family is set to Monaspace Neon, with adjustable sliders for font weight, bold weight, italic slant, and width. Options for texture healing and several ligatures (equals, greater/less or equal, arrows, markup, F# operators) are visible, with most enabled. On the right is a live preview panel displaying sample text, numbers, and ligature symbols. The entire screen is amber-on-black, styled like a retro DOS MDA terminal.

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Robert Sundling @robertsundling.bsky.social · 20d

Darn. So you'll have to handle Windows tech support, too, telling users to do this...

Perhaps instead you could work around it by having your game play a continuous, very loud 22 kHz sine wave, inaudible to most humans, to keep the audio system active. Absolutely no way that could go wrong. 😉

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Robert Sundling @robertsundling.bsky.social · Aug 27

It seems that what happened was Walgreens removed the “Healthcare Solutions” section of their site as part of a restructuring, which included the Walgreens Respiratory Index page. But that actually just displayed this external Power BI content in a frame.

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Robert Sundling @robertsundling.bsky.social · Aug 27

It’s still there, if you visit the PowerBI page directly. Not sure for how long or if the data will keep being updated, but it says it’s updated yesterday: app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrI...

Power BI Report

Report powered by Power BI

app.powerbi.com

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Robert Sundling @robertsundling.bsky.social · Aug 8

It's crazy the kind of stuff you end up writing when you're building a network stack for DOS from scratch in C++26.

C++ function that parses an IPv4 address string into a 32-bit integer, validating each octet and returning an error type if the format is invalid. Uses std::expected for error handling and processes characters one by one.

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Robert Sundling @robertsundling.bsky.social · Aug 8

Well, this is quite unfortunate news. 😢

Mike Bithell @mikebithell.bsky.social · Aug 8

Sad news today. Bithell Games, having been unable to secure a new larger scale project, is reducing in size. This means that eleven jobs are being made redundant. This constitutes the majority of our full-time staff.

It became clear leading up to the release of our most recent game that we were not immune to the challenges faced by many game development teams seeking funding partners in 2024 and 2025. We’ve fortunately been able to communicate these challenges ahead of time, and work with affected staff to ease departures as much as possible via severance packages.

It’s important to state that this was an incredible team of exceptionally talented people. If you’re a developer reading this, and you’re hiring; anyone among those affected would be a great addition to your studio, please reach out if we can help to put you in touch.

This news will not impact the availability of our existing self published games and ongoing support for them. We are incredibly grateful for our audience, and hope that your interest in our work follows individual team members as they head into other roles.

Bithell Games was always defined and elevated by our people. Today we
are less.

- Mike Bithell

Robert Sundling @robertsundling.bsky.social · Aug 8

Congratulations to the GNU Compiler Collection team for their successful launch of GCC 15.2! Great work, everyone! 🥳

GCC 15 Release Series - GNU Project

gcc.gnu.org

Robert Sundling @robertsundling.bsky.social · Aug 7

I'm testing GCC 15.2 today.

I just used it to build the various test programs for my game engine for all available platforms, including DOS and Windows.

Success! But it's always hilarious to me to see a test that runs at 60 fps in DOS on a 486 with a VGA run at 13,000+ fps on a modern machine.

Screenshot of a simple test of a game engine, showing 13,745 frames per second.

Robert Sundling @robertsundling.bsky.social · Aug 7

GCC 15.2 drops tomorrow. Got a head start today and built a cross-compiler for my 32-bit DOS apps from the 15.2 RC.

It's working well so far!

(It reports as 15.1.1, but that's fine. I didn't touch gcc/BASE-VER or gcc/DATESTAMP, where I could have bumped it up to "15.2.0 20250808" had I wanted.)

Screenshot snipped from a DOS application, showing:

Build target: DOS (DOS32, VGA) 32-bit
C++ compiler: GCC 15.1.1 20250801 (C++26/C23)
Assembler: NASM 2.16.03

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Robert Sundling @robertsundling.bsky.social · Aug 7

Back in the DOS days, when you’d send a graphical mouse cursor to the mouse driver you’d give coordinates for its “hot spot” too. For a normal cursor it’d be (1,1), not (0,0), due to the one-pixel border around the cursor. Here’s a pointing finger example from the official Microsoft mouse book. 👆

Robert Sundling @robertsundling.bsky.social · Aug 6

I always end up so many levels away from what I'm actually working on.

I was thinking it'd be great to remotely control my various vintage PCs from my main workstation, with them all in little windows. Now I'm investigating custom SVGA + PS/2 keyboard/mouse + power control KVM-over-IP solutions...

Robert Sundling @robertsundling.bsky.social · Aug 6

Aha, I found it! The SVGA that doesn't work properly with its 320x240x256 color VBE linear mode is integrated into the motherboard of an old Compaq desktop PC. I'll probably try that one first with a VGA to HDMI adapter so that I don't accidentally destroy a CRT as I fuzz the CRTC registers. 😉

Robert Sundling @robertsundling.bsky.social · Aug 6

Sadly, I also can no longer remember which of my SVGA cards didn't properly support that 320x240 linear mode via VBE. It's been more than a year. I know I had at least one card that didn't, and that's where I really want to concentrate my testing.

I should have taken better notes!

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Robert Sundling @robertsundling.bsky.social · Aug 6

Although this worked on an emulated SVGA, the first attempt on real hardware was a bust: the CRT monitor lost sync and showed nothing.

I am thinking I should next build an interactive tool that lets me tweak all of these register values while watching what happens, to tighten the feedback loop.

Robert Sundling @robertsundling.bsky.social · Aug 6

Making decent progress on my 640x480 to 320x240 linear mode SVGA project.

I first wrote a CRTC register dumper, then examined values on a card with a 320x240 linear mode. It's pretty clear how this card does it.

Next step will be to take an SVGA card without the mode and apply these same changes.

Screenshot comparing CRTC register values for a 640x480 256-color mode to a 320x240 256-color mode.

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Robert Sundling @robertsundling.bsky.social · Aug 6

My challenge this week is to take SVGA cards with linear VBE 640x480x256 color modes and tweak CRTC registers to turn those into linear 320x240x256 color modes. Some cards expose such a mode already, but not all. The performance gain over Mode X is worthwhile. I’ll open source what I find.

Reposted by Robert Sundling

Wisconsin Watch @wisconsinwatch.org · Aug 5

"The deal is the latest development in a saga involving some of the video game industry’s lowest-paid workers. It comes after Microsoft purchased Activision Blizzard, Raven Software’s parent company, leaving the roughly two dozen testers to negotiate with one of the world’s largest tech companies."

These Wisconsin video game workers were first to unionize at a major U.S. studio. Three years later, they have a contract.

The deal at Raven Software in Middleton affects quality assurance testers, some of the video game industry’s lowest-paid workers. It caps a saga that included a strike and a purchase by Micro…

wisconsinwatch.org

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Robert Sundling @robertsundling.bsky.social · Aug 5

Ullrich von Bassewitz's BGI drivers are excellent SVGA reference code.

The comments are in German. As English alternatives exist, human translation may not be worth the effort, but I used GitHub Copilot to translate the comments to English for my own use.

Someone else may find this useful as well.

GitHub - RobertSundling/uvb-svga-bgi-english: English language translation of Ullrich von Bassewitz's SVGA BGI drivers

English language translation of Ullrich von Bassewitz's SVGA BGI drivers - RobertSundling/uvb-svga-bgi-english

github.com

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Robert Sundling @robertsundling.bsky.social · Aug 3

Looks like I'm successfully parsing MOD pattern data. If you'd like a challenge, see if you can spot this song by the first pattern. 🙂

Pattern data for the first pattern of a particular MOD, displayed as a large text-based table.

Robert Sundling @robertsundling.bsky.social · Aug 3

I'm working on a special-purpose MOD library today and testing it with MOD files by Dr. Awesome (Bjørn Lynne) while listening to his new album Point of Significance. Perfect blend of old and new.

@bjornlynne.bsky.social

Point of Significance by Bjørn Lynne on Apple Music

Album · 2025 · 16 Songs

music.apple.com

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Reposted by Robert Sundling

Official Commodore® @commodoreofficial.bsky.social · Aug 1

We Did It. Commodore Is Home.
With the final payment locking in the deal CEO Peri Fractic signed the final contracts in The Netherlands, officially acquiring all 47 original Commodore trademarks. After decades adrift, the brand is finally where it belongs - with fans.
#WeAreCommodore
commodore.net

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Robert Sundling @robertsundling.bsky.social · Aug 1

I use a script I wrote that I run after I commit old files. It checks the file dates of everything that’s been committed so far, reverts the commits that added them, then creates new individual commits for each file with the GIT_AUTHOR_DATE and GIT_COMMITTER_DATE environment variables set correctly.

Robert Sundling @robertsundling.bsky.social · Jul 31

Those are surprisingly tricky to do. 😂