Hi and welcome back! This is week 10 of my GSoC project, and I’m happy to announce that the DOS version of Dungeon Master is almost complete. Finally!
The big focus this week was getting the dungeon walls to finally appear in the right places on screen.
The Layout Engine
Rather than hardcoding where every wall, floor, and ceiling should appear on screen, the DOS version used a data driven layout engine — essentially a small tree structure where each element knows its position relative to its parent.
How It Differs from the Amiga Version
On the original Amiga and Atari ST, wall screen coordinates were stored in a simple, hardcoded array compiled directly into the game binary.
The DOS port, however, moved all of this coordinate data out of the code and into a dedicated configuration resource inside the graphics data file (known as Graphic 696).
Instead of drawing walls using fixed table entries, the DOS engine parses Graphic 696 at startup to build a dynamic hierarchy tree, where every wall distance (D0 through D4) asks the layout tree for its relative X and Y offsets, width, and height.
With that, most of the graphics are now in place and I have begun playtesting. All monsters and explosions look perfect. Here are some screenshots:
Look at the shadow of the mummy’s hands on the back wall 😄 so much detail in this game!
I’ll upload a detailed blog covering all the code changes for the DOS version once it is complete. I know I said the same thing last week — I’m currently busy with university labs and exams, but once the final PR is up, the blog will follow!
That’s it for this week — see you in the next one! 👋