Hot on the heels of 1.1.1 comes even better fixes to string handling in the extension. The issue is that, while the strings returned from the functions were immediately usable, they weren’t being added correctly to the string space AMOS maintains, so you couldn’t do things like concatenate them. I documented the proper usage on the wiki. This fixes up all of the string returning functions in the extension, which means that Socket Recv$ should work as expected now.

Grab it from Hackerbun Gitea or Aminet:

• Hackerbun Gitea: https://code.hackerbun.dev/TheIndustriousRabbit/amos-pro-bsdsocket-extension/releases/tag/1.1.2
• Aminet: http://aminet.net/package/dev/amos/BSDSocket-Extension

I’ve released version 1.1.1 of my BSD Socket extension for AMOS Professional. It fixes two bugs in Socket Inet Ntoa$, a crash bug and an issue where the null terminator in the original string was being copied into the AMOS string, causing issues. There was also an issue with the build script where the latest version of the library was appearing in the wrong place in the archive.

Grab it from Hackerbun Gitea or Aminet:

• Hackerbun Gitea: https://code.hackerbun.dev/TheIndustriousRabbit/amos-pro-bsdsocket-extension/releases/tag/1.1.1
• Aminet: http://aminet.net/package/dev/amos/BSDSocket-Extension

I put up the code and binary for a Smash TV/Robotron-like game I built for DOS and PCs with VGA graphics. It works well enough to be playable.

The code is up on Hackerbun Gitea. It has a bunch of code related to working with the PC and VGA card, and it’s the biggest program I’ve written in C so far. It also has unit tests using CuTest, inline assembler, and compiled sprites built using Ruby.

Take it for a spin if you like. Downloadable files are in the project’s Releases. If you have feedback, send it along. I’m not sure when I’ll get back to working on it because I have a video idea I want to do next, but who knows what the future will bring!

I’ve released version 1.1.0 of my BSD Socket extension for AMOS Professional. It fixes a bug in Dns Get Host Address By Name$ where I was incorrectly handling string termination from AMOS strings. It also adds Socket Herrno to get error code information from the DNS resolver in the network stack.

Thanks to Allanon on Mastodon for finding the issue and testing out the fix!

Grab it from Hackerbun Gitea or Aminet:

• Hackerbun Gitea: https://code.hackerbun.dev/TheIndustriousRabbit/amos-pro-bsdsocket-extension/releases/tag/1.1.0
• Aminet: http://aminet.net/package/dev/amos/BSDSocket-Extension

Young Topaz has an IFF ILBM image he wants to show his dad, but his dad’s on his PC. Learn about what it takes to write a simple IFF ILBM reader for DOS.

References

Source Code

• Hackerbun Gitea (https://code.hackerbun.dev/TheIndustriousRabbit/iff-ilbm-on-pc-vga)
  • All code used in this video

IFF Files

• “ILBM” IFF Interleaved Bitmap (http://www.etwright.org/lwsdk/docs/filefmts/ilbm.html)
  • The original IFF ILBM document from Electronics Arts and Commodore

PC Development

• Open Watcom 2.0 (https://open-watcom.github.io/)
  • The C compiler I used for my PC development
• David Brackeen’s 256-Color VGA Programming in C (http://www.brackeen.com/vga/basics.html)
  • The source for all my VGA learnings
• Ralf Brown’s Interrupt List (https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ralf/files.html)
  • More info than you could ever want about every PC interrupt

Credits

Music

• “Werq” by Kevin MacLeod
  • https://incompetech.com
  • CC-BY 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
• “Onion Capers” by Kevin MacLeod
  • https://incompetech.com
  • CC-BY 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Sound Effects

• Light Switch by TimoSchmied
  • https://freesound.org/people/TimoSchmied/sounds/530973/
  • CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
• Male Gasp 1.wav by jawbutch
  • https://freesound.org/people/jawbutch/sounds/344407/
  • CC0 1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)
• Fast Typing on Mechanical Keyboard by HeinzBBQ
  • https://freesound.org/people/HeinzBBQ/sounds/502653/
  • CC0 1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)

For the fourth time I play through the Night in the Woods supplemental games, “Longest Night” and “Lost Constellation”, on the 2023 winter solstice.