November 3, 2025
Scroll Wars: VGA Edition
Learning a Bit of VGA
Retro dev goes full nostalgia: “VGA wizardry” vs “just ship the game” vibes
TLDR: A jam entrant built slick retro graphics tricks—smooth scrolling, HUD split, and flicker-free drawing—but hasn’t started the actual game. The community is split between applauding the nostalgia-fueled tech deep dive and begging him to ship something, with a side of “it’s VGA, not GPU” throwback humor.
A retro coder signed up for the DOSember jam, pitched a tiny tower-defense, then promptly fell down the rabbit hole of old-school PC graphics. Instead of building levels, he’s teaching himself VGA (an older display standard) tricks: drawing on a hidden screen to avoid flicker, splitting the screen for a score bar, and that flex everyone’s talking about—smooth vertical scrolling on a 30MHz relic. Over in the comments, the mood is a mix of “chef’s kiss” and “bro, make the game.” One nostalgic nugget—“we didn’t say GPU back then, it was called VGA”—sparked a wave of memory-lane posts and mini history lessons about 90s platformers and DOS Game Club. The hot debate? Feature creep vs fun: half the crowd loves the tinkering; the other half wants a playable demo before the deadline clock strikes. Abrash fans are quoting classic graphics lore like it’s scripture, while jokesters quip that the dev has mastered “scrolling forever” but still hasn’t shipped Level 1. Platformer purists cheered the focus on side-scrollers after lamenting “not many good ones on DOS,” but skeptics threw shade: “Fancy tech doesn’t make a good game.” It’s nerd drama, nostalgia, and a ticking clock—the perfect retro soap opera.
Key Points
- •The author shifted from a tower defense idea to exploring VGA hardware-assisted scrolling for DOS games.
- •They improved a 32-bit DOS game library built with DJGPP, fixing bugs and adding mouse support.
- •Using Abrash’s book and PC-GPE docs, they implemented unchained VGA Mode Y leveraging 256K VRAM.
- •Optimizations include latched writes, a screen split for a bottom HUD, and a WIP 1-pixel vertical scroll.
- •All features run on a 386 at 30 MHz, but no actual game has been started with less than a month left in the jam.