Programming Matters

Originally I was thinking about calling this article 24 years of game programming: observations and lessons learned. Somehow the title seemed much too stuffy for an entry about something I’ve loved so much over the years.

In this three part series I trace my 24 years of game programming. From machine language in 1982, Pascal in 1987, C in 1992, C++ in 1995, using “high level API’s” like OpenGL in 97, catching the pattern craze in ‘98, the component mantra in 99, coding for 3 consoles at once in 2000, moving into Java, C#, and javascript on the top of C++ in the 21st century. And more!

Let’s go back to 1982:

This is where it all began for me. I had received my first computer a Vic-20 and dreamed of everything I could do with it. William Shatner had advertised it as a gaming system and a computer too (and we all know he has integrity from the whole priceline fiasco). I remember writing my first basic program for it from the thin manual that came with it. An animated bird that used character graphics to flap it’s wings and fly around the screen. I was mesmerized!

I quickly learned the machine inside and out, bought the Vic-20 Programmer’s Reference Guide, hung the schematic of the machine on my wall and went to work. Very quickly I realized that a 1 mhz machine with 5k of ram was going to take some heavy tricks to create games for. So I learned 6502 machine language to really pull the stops out. An 8 bit processor with an X, Y and Accumulator that could add and subtract any 8 bit value! X and Y could only increment and decrement. And of course when the numbers were larger than 255 a little juggling was required.

Very soon the Commodore 64 came out and I immediately upgraded. Programmable sprites, a SID chip for sound, 64k of ram (with 16k bank switched under rom that held Bill’s basic and the “OS”). Now we were playing with power. I wrote more than a few games for the Commodore 64 as a hobbiest in straight machine code. An Olympic games type clone, a chess game that worked with the 300 baud modem, a utility to dump on screen graphics to the printer, some arcade variations, a sprite editor.
These were the truly brass tacks years. 6502 machine language mixed with little bits of bootstrap basic was hardcore by any standards. Jumping to subroutines was something you couldn’t take lightly and the “hardware” stack was only 512 bytes long. It was strictly for keeping the return address from subroutine calls. I was firmly convinced games required maximum power and could only be written in machine language. I was pretty convinced this fact would never change.

I was of course wrong.

Fast forward to 1987:

The IBM PC/XT was starting to show promise and a friend introduced me to Turbo Pascal on it. 4.77 megahertz! 640k of ram. Sure my machine was an XT and only capable of CGA graphics (and character mode graphics - not even programmable at that). But Turbo Pascal was my first true compiler. It was actually possible to write a significant chunk of many games in high level code. Sure low-level interrupt stuff was often in assembly. We spent many, many all nighters coding games and often ignoring our girlfriends. But they couldn’t code:) I slowly got used to the fact that passing variables on the stack was a useful enough concept that it was worth the performance hit it sometimes had on games. We are talking about functions passing parameters on the stack! But this was “non-trivial” and took cycles. Things were still so tight that every cycle mattered.

Fast forward to 1992:

I got my first 386 20 mhz clone with 4 meg of memory and an 80 meg hard drive. I quickly bought a soundblaster card for it. Before long I was coding games in MCGA 320×200 256 color graphics mode. I learned everything I could about palette manipulation and palette color theory. I was coding in C by this time as well 8086 assembly of course. You could actually inline your assembly right there with the C code. It was awesome. I wrote a sprite compiler that would literally turn all the data into straight machine code so it didn’t have to loop and check for key colors. It used a triple buffer, dirty rect system to update the screen as efficiently as possible.

I learned Autodesk animator inside and out and spent hundreds of hours working on a sprite editor with bucket fills, circles, lines and palette manipulation functions as well as animation capability. I was in heaven. I recruited some good friends to do graphics for me and created a number of demos to show off the library.

I still hand-optimized everything and didn’t trust the compilers at all. A C compiler may not use a bit shift for an integer multiplication. The horror!

I made sure and learned all I could about fixed point numbers. At this point floats were still done in software and slower than hell. Since C didn’t support operator overloading the code looked pretty clunky. But it didn’t matter. 320×200 256 color mode was fast - really fast. And I was learning all I could from Abrash books about mode 13 hex that allowed the full 256k of graphics memory to be utilized. At the time the PC was still back switching 64k into it’s memory map. And don’t even get me started on 80×86 segment offset addressing!

I ended up releasing all my code as shareware and learning the ins and outs of shareware distribution mechanisms. I remember printing labels for 5 1/4 and 3 1/2 disks and mailing them off to shareware distribution hubs. This was before the internet took off of course and everything was BBS based.

1995 was right around the corner and soon I would find myself working at Legend Entertainment on Star Control 3 - my first commercial game product.

Part 2 cracks the lid open on my game industry years.