This is 386Power (386P) Release 0.999 (beta)
plus part of the XGE (eXtended Game Engine) 0.999

Read ALL the .DOC files (ascii text) for more info.
To run the examples see examples.doc.
These are just beta code & docs , don't expect more than this.

Oh! Well! All i can say is that this code is not harmful
(read: it won't byte you if you don't put your hand into its mouth)
and that i did the best to make everything work as expected.

You will find a dos-extender module (386power) written in assembly
and various assembly source files containing what i call the basic modules
of XGE (eh! XGE is shorter than "that bunch of routines i think are useful
to build games under protected mode" :) ).
The code is a beta release .... and the documentation too!
It will get better when i release 386Power 1.0

This stuff is public domain (but only if you don't remove the credits
and the various messages produced by the dos-extender ).

The dos-extender is based on the PMODE dos-extender by Tran
but is NOT a "patched" pmode, it's a different thing using 
modified algorithms from it AND some chunks of pmode 
(mostly the exception handler stuff and part of the VCPI init code) 
some portions looks the same but act in really different ways, so 
if you coded for pmode, read more carefully my docs
or you could miss some very important points. 
Without Tran i couldn't produce 386P, i found lots of info about VCPI
and DPMI , BUT mostly "function call lists", only pmode gave me a clear
example about how to start up a protected mode program.

The XGE stuff is all mine.
Anyway i have to thank Themie Gouthas 
and all the other people who contributed with code and ideas to XLIB
(the vga mode-x toolkit, not the X-windows one). Into XLIB i found
the info i needed to set up a mode-x screen and how to handle
the vga hardware.

Into XGE you will find TRLE sprite (Transparency Run Lenght Encoded sprite)
routines. If you use them, always store the bitmaps as "pictures"
(planar bitmaps) or PCX images, and compile them to sprite at runtime.
The reason for this is that i may change the TRLE format in the near future.

Lorenzo Micheletto.


