It’s still very, very young and obviously not yet finished, but I made a little pool billiard game for DOS:
https://movq.de/v/71b4f0230c/MVI_6870.MOV.mp4
(Full disclosure: Back in the day, there was a very similar game called “Magic Pool”: https://movq.de/v/06a59f5876/s.png https://movq.de/v/b82807d277/s.png It had a higher resolution with more pixels, but also way more flickering. My program took quite some inspiration from the UI of this game.)
Programming on DOS is surprisingly enjoyable and rather easy to learn, assuming you know a tiny little bit about 8086 assembly – that’s necessary to read docs like this one, which describes the mouse driver API:
https://stanislavs.org/helppc/int_33.html
All this is certainly much, much easier than anything we have today. Try getting a pixel on the screen with modern OpenGL. 😒
On the other hand, getting high resolution timestamps is hard(er). The resolution of _dos_gettime() is only ~55 ms, which is unusably low. It took me quite some time to sift through this and the source code of DJGPP, now I have a short function that gives me timestamps of ~900 ns resolution:
ha, I remember being a kid on the 90s and mind-blowed of seeing a pool/billiards game made on QBasic. Didn’t know of trigonometry or physics, so for me it was like magic.
Never made a game like that (I don’t enjoy digital billiards, got to say) but was always on my mind of something cool to exist.
Congrats!