A side scrolling engine using DirectX on a Pentium 133 would acheive about 32 fps with a first generation video card.

Create an off screen surface that is two tiles taller and wider than your viewport. Blit the tiles into the off screen surface, then blit a sub section of that into your viewport. You could also create a blitter that clips and blit the tiles directly into your view port.

Hope this helps. There are lots of good articles in the programming section about tile based games. I've got a 32bit 640x480 tile engine that runs 150fps+ on a Pentium II.

You might want to look into the new Allegro extensions, which add hardware acceleration for some cards. I don't remember what it's called, but last I knew they had it implemented for some Matrox and ATI cards.

And keep in mind that you don't necessarily need 30 fps for this type of game. First Person games and Sidescroller games are two completely different animals.

First, get your generic windows program running. Don't lock the game loop to any frame rate at all. I calculate a variable called DeltaTime which tells me how much time has passed since the last frame. Movement for objects is based on pixels per second / deltatime.

OK, on to the tile part. I'm using 64x64 tiles because I don't need lots of small items. Create a primary surface, attach a back buffer. Create BOTH in video memory! This is important. Load your tile bitmap in the video memory too. If your bitmaps don't fit in video memory, your blits won't be hardware accelerated and will be dog slow compared to ones in video memory.

With your tiles and back surface in video memory, blit your tiles onto the screen. Use a blit function that will clip them to your screen or viewport.

I've got a TNT card (not a TNT2) and everything runs great.

Hope this helps.

Marcus

Anyways, for my software version, I pull off almost 100FPS in 16bit mode. That's a fully tiled (only 1 level, no parallax) 640x480 scoller on a Mystique. It is a little tricky though (many optimizations, but no MMX yet), and if you don't know assembly it isn't likely you'll reach it. Also, for software drawing, the video card write speed is critical, so the FPS values can fluctuate quite a bit.

If you are fairly new, I'll just give you the age old advice of 'get something smaller and easier under your belt'. 2D scrollers are a good place to start, but to make it very fast requires some more experience.

Rock