Programmer Humor

You couldn't pay me to write a game in C today. Our expectations of what games have to be are sky high today. You cant get away with the productivity lost writing in c, maybe c++ since its supported by a number of engines. But, im personally not aware of a single engine that uses C. I tried my hand at writing a game without an engine, and it was a hot mess. Writing low level code to make a button with text, no thanks...been there done that, in my game, you could bump into trees and get stuck...not very fun in my opinion, and thats after a few months of writing code.

Before Doom (1993), almost all games were assembly.

Carmack wrote Wolfenstein 3d in C. Star Control and Dune 2 were C.

Just to throw on more factoids:

Wasn't Gabe Newell either the first, or among the first, to port Doom to Win 95?

Eventually it sort-of got a rewrite to create RollerCoaster Tycoon Classic, initially for iOS and Android, later for Windows, macOS, and Nintendo Switch. It largely is a rewrite of RollerCoaster Tycoon 2, with the goal of bringing the game to more modern platforms, and the save files for parks and rides are compatible. In this interview with Atari Club, Sawyer says the rewrite was in C++ but even with a team of people still took longer to write in C++ than it took him to write the original in x86 assembly.

If anyone previously paid attention to RCT Classic, it’s been seeing some development work again and is working on Android again. They also made RCT Classic+ on Apple Arcade (basically just the game and all the expansions included) and also updated the regular versions of RCT Classic so they run correctly again (RCT Classic stopped working on macOS when Apple dropped support for 32-bit applications and Atari didn’t release a recompiled game until recently).

Best way to play till this day

Holy fucking shit this is the best motherfucking news this year

I wonder if there's anyone alive right now who would be capable of such a task.

Even if one did, say using x86, it would still just be interpreted by the CPU into the CPU's native opcodes, as the legacy instruction sets are interpreted/translated.

The YouTube algorithm works in mysterious ways.

Because I'm nice, to anyone who doesn't get the reference: https://www.youtube.com/@MarcelVos

I will never not upvote an Ahoy video. The guy is a legend in video game documentaries. Check out his Monkey Island video as a follow-up

Who needs git when you have a B: drive and a Save As command for tycoon43.asm

Version control? You mean this?

./src
./src_1998_11_05_added_people_swimming
./src_1998_11_06_added_death_mechanics
./src_1998_11_06_0_removed_swimming_lol

Did the developer use any version control though? SCCS has been around since the early 70s, RCS and CVS since the 80s. The tools definitely existed.

Also, it was a single dev, which makes SCM significantly simpler!

The original goes to 1024 x 786 and has different zoom levels. I've played most of the original parks this year and that does not see to be too high res to me. Give me a sec I'll take a screenshot of mine in a minute.

Edit here it is. It's the GOG version, which launches fullscreen, so the 1024 x 768 are stretched onto the center of my 1920 x 1080 screen.

Epic Pinball, if I recall correctly, also used some ModeX trickery, meaning it had most of the pinball table in VRAM, and then modified the VGA framebuffer pointer for scrolling, then only moving as much data as it was needed (ball, flippers, etc)

I want to get off Mr. Bones' Wild Ride.