Post by Daniel "MontyOnTheRun" Monteiro in LUATRIS comments

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Daniel "MontyOnTheRun" Monteiro5 years ago

Congrats on your game - it's no easy feat to ship a game for DOS. And you managed to keep a very good file size!

Did some tests on my machines:

486DX 50Mhz 12MB RAM = runs a little laggy, but playable.

486SX 33Mhz 8MB RAM = crashes at startup due to the lack of math co-processor.

Since Lua Number is a 64-bit floating point, your game will require floating point emulator (if you're using DJGPP, add -lemu at your linker command line).

This is also most likely the reason for the lag on my 486DX and also your known bug. But hey, there is a way around it! If you want, I can help you change Lua Number into a 32-bit integer (and most stuff will still work).

My lastest game, The Mistral Report (https://montyontherun.itch.io/the-mistral-report) also uses Lua (5.2), which I modified to use (almost) no float. At the end of the day, I had to add -lemu, but it's perfectly playable on the 486SX)

SOMEWARE5 years ago(+1)

Wow! Thanks for all the information. I don't know what changes could be made to the original program I used to make this which is LOVEDOS as I didn't write it, but it is open source. Still a lot out of my league to change it though. I have been looking into other ways to make native DOS games, even going so far as to look into Assembler (scary), but this was a quick and somewhat dirty way to get a taste of the dream of making a true DOS game.

Perhaps next I'll remove the middle man and make something directly in C and compile it myself to see if I can squeeze a lot more out of the little room I have to work with.

evktalo5 years ago

I'd love to try this game on my 486SX! If you can make a version with co-processor emulation, it'd be sweet!

SOMEWARE5 years ago(+1)

Unfortunately this is more of a closed system. It's written on the back of an open source game making system called LOVE2D. This build is from LOVEDOS and it runs the way it runs due to the interpreter used to turn LUA (what I code in) into C. It's compatibility is untested in most cases as far as I know so you may be able to just play it on an old system without any changes needing to be made. In order to change it I would have to alter the source code which is way above my skill level at this time. You're, of course, welcome to try it on whatever system you like and I do know it runs in DOS on at least a K6-2.