Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Lamothe's Black Art book came out in '95. Abrash's black book came out in '97.

Borland C++ was pretty common and popular in 93 and we even had some not-so-great C++ compilers on Amiga in 92/93 that had some use in gamedev.

SimCity 2000 was written in C++, way back in '93 (although they started with Cfront)

An absolute fuckton of shareware games I was playing in the 90s were built with Turbo C++.



Kind of true, however they had endless amounts of inline Assembly, as shown on the Black Book as well.

I know of at least a MS-DOS game, published on Portuguese Spooler magazine, that was using Turbo C++ basically as a macro assembler.

One of the PlayStation selling points for developers was being the first home console with a C SDK, while SEGA and Nintendo were still doing Assembly, C++ support only came later to the PlayStation 2.

While I agree C++, BASIC, Turbo Pascal, AMOS were being used a lot, specially in the Demoscene, they were our Unity, from the point of view of successful game studios.


I also remember by videogame magazines I was reading back in early 90s that another C++ compiler that was a favourite among devs was Watcom C++ that was released in 88.


That doesn't mean that it was used primarily with C++ though. IIRC Watcom C/C++ mainly became popular because of Doom, and that was written in C (as all id games until Doom 3 in 2004 - again IIRC though).

The actual killer feature of Watcom C/C++ was not the C or C++ compiler, but its integration with DOS4GW.


Btw, dont’t remember Turbo C or Borland C++ to be able to compile to 32-bit x86 on DOS


Borland C++, Microsoft C/C++, and GCC (DJGPP[1]) could all target 32-bit extended DOS, but Watcom was the first[2] to bundle a royalty-free DOS extender[3].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39038095

[2] https://www.os2museum.com/wp/watcom-win386/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_extender


OMG, the name "Watcom" just opened a flood of nineties memories of the demo scene for me. Thanks for mentioning.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: