The Brave Sun

Every planet is a sprite: a tiny picture he drew once (Earth in blue with green land, Venus in brown) and saved. Each frame he stamps it in its new place. The picture carries a black edge, and that edge paints over the spot where the planet stood a frame before, so nothing ever needs erasing. In a browser today you would stamp the same sprites onto a canvas with drawImage.

Where to stamp is school trigonometry. Across is the cosine of the planet’s angle times the width of its oval; down is the sine times the height. Every frame Mercury’s angle turns by π/80, and each other planet turns 88 ÷ its own year as far. So Mars, at 687 days, crawls while Mercury races, as in the sky. Most PCs of 1993 had no chip for decimals, so Borland’s floating-point emulator worked out every sine and cosine in software.

In this graphics mode every pixel stores a slot number from 0 to 15. The graphics card keeps a small table, the palette, that says which color each slot shows. A slot can hold any of 262,144 colors. Change a slot, and every pixel drawn in it changes at once, the way one CSS custom property recolors every element that uses it.

His sun is six filled circles in six slots, each circle a little smaller than the last. First he turns those six slots black, so the drawing happens unseen. Then he gives them six shades of gold, the middle first. The whole sun appears in a blink, glowing from the center, and not one pixel is drawn twice. The stars come on the same way. In all, 129 places in his code change a color slot.

His C program never draws a letter itself. It keeps each line as the keys you would press on an Arabic keyboard: hgals is الشمس, the sun. Then it asks ARABART, which waits in memory like a background service, to join the letters and draw them. ARABART has its own page, where you can type with it.

The shadow draws the line in dark color 8, six pixels right and six down, then draws it again in its own color on top. The outline draws four copies one pixel off on the diagonals, then the line itself in the middle. His section titles use both. In his code, 217 places draw a plain line, 57 an outlined one and 14 a shadowed one, and 59 pick a font. Font 5, the tall letters of الشمس, was made for this program.

The section opens with his own introduction. The sun is named in the Quran 30 times, he writes, and in three ways. It is a sign of God’s creation, it is sworn by in oaths, and it shines inside the stories, such as the people of the cave and the prophet Yusuf. Then come the fifteen cards, from Al-An’am to Ya-Sin.

Each card has its own margins, set by hand to fit its verse. The opening and closing words are small and blue, the verse large and yellow with a black outline, its lines 45 pixels apart. Wherever the verse names الشمس, the sun, it is underlined. A # before and after the word switches the underline on and off, like a <u> tag. Verse numbers are typed backwards, 69 for 96, because ARABART writes from right to left.

He wrote The Brave Sun in Borland C++ for the PC Middle East competition for Arabic educational software, and it won 3rd place. Its title card calls it an educational program for young Arabic speakers, designed and built by Eng. Yasser Mohamed Ali, first release, September 1993.

There are no image files. Every picture, from the planets to the mosque and the phases of the Moon, is drawn by his code from coordinates he typed. 255 places in it draw a straight line. F1 brings up help on any screen, Esc goes back and Alt+X leaves from anywhere, like the shortcuts of a desktop app.