I'm feeling nostalgic. I want to have a conversation with old DOS game developers. Tell me your stories.
I was just recalling a time where this idiot on a BBS was arguing with me that Turbo Pascal was a bad language. He boldly claimed that it couldn't do anything low-level and that it was impossible to achieve performance code from it. He said you couldn't even do graphics without including Borland's graphics libraries, and that anything you made with it was huge.
I developed a demo in half an hour that used TP's embedded assembly code functionality for all video functions, from handling the interrupts to setup video mode, to assembly loops for rapid blitting. The rest of the code was just generic Turbo Pascal. It smoothly panned tiles around the screen in all four directions which spelled out "Turbo Pascal Is Great" and had poorly drawn fireworks going off. The EXE was less than 64KB.
When I uploaded it to the files section, he said everything from it not being written in Turbo Pascal at all to me not writing it in the first place. But he was fucking raging. It's like Turbo Pascal killed his mother. I'll never understand that.
The real twist is that this is what inevitably got me interested in the demoscene.
pascal is garbage please shut the fuck up
>>3248561
To have been a DOS developer you need to be older than 16, thanks.
>>3248476
>Turbo Pascal was a bad language
>it couldn't do anything low-level
>it was impossible to achieve performance code from it
>that used TP's embedded assembly code functionality for all video functions, from handling the interrupts to setup video mode, to assembly loops for rapid blitting
you proved him right. All the performance-relevant and low level bits, the vast majority of what your program was doing, were not in TP
>>3248476
please add a demo of doing graphics in pure TP without the Borland graphics library. That is, without dropping to asm at any point.
>>3248476
>TP's embedded assembly code
And that's where you lost.
I did enough TP to know that TP itself falls flat to pure asm and C on DOS.
>>3248702
to be fair C was also pretty shitty
it seems like almost every DOS game at the time had in-line assembly
>>3248726
so did (almost) every console game, or games on other platforms.
>>3248739
its weird that the C compilers have that function at all when C was designed to be a portable language
>>3248742
what function?
>>3248745
Isn't in-line assembly a GNU addition to C?
C wasn't designed with it in mind, I don't think.
>>3248747
GCC among many others. Doesn't matter too much anyway.
You write your high level logic and game code in platform-independent C, write performance critical parts in platform-specific asm against a single common interface (a header file containing the signatures for the pure-asm methods is an interface, just not in the OO sense), and then let make sort out what to use together.
Not /vr/, but Civilization Revolution is a more or less an example of that. Its entire game logic, including AI and everything, is written platform independently and hence behaves identically everywhere. The same code drives the XBox 360 and the DS version. Only the UI layer has been made platform-specific.
>>3248659
>>3248662
>>3248702
None of you know anything about DOS programming, do you?
You could use built-in Turbo Pascal commands to trigger interrupts, just the same as C. You could also use far pointers to video memory, just the same as C. All of which without using assembly.
Any competent dev of the time used assembly for rendering functions because no machine at the time was capable of smooth scrolling graphics without it.
>>3248747
GCC didn't exist when Turbo Pascal was created. Borland was the leader and innovator in both Pascal and C. Many things in GCC were "borrowed" from Borland, and none of them were as good.
Why do you think it took over 20 more years before GNU ever became anything close to a relevant OS platform?
The only people who perpetuated the rumor that Turbo Pascal was bad were QuickBasic faggots who didn't want to fork over the $60. You could disable almost all of the extra bounds and safety checks and get code that rivaled C. You could even do it on a per-function level, so that different routines achieved better performance.
>>3248776
>You could use built-in Turbo Pascal commands to trigger interrupts, just the same as C. You could also use far pointers to video memory, just the same as C. All of which without using assembly.
should be easy enough to find a code snippet for that then
>Any competent dev of the time used assembly for rendering functions
So, no TP there, got it
>arguing with me that Turbo Pascal was a bad language
That'd be a strange argument considering that the language is just Pascal. Turbo Pascal is the compiler/IDE, and it's a ghetto version of Borland Pascal at that.
>used TP's embedded assembly code functionality for all video functions
This is more of an ode to assembly.
You might have cause to celebrate the IDE's convenient integration of ASM, but it wasn't really about Pascal.
>>3248476
This guy is the cancer killing /vr/.
in russia we still use tp and bp in schools and universities
this guy is mad thay everyone still says pascal is garbage
>>3248476
I like Pascal because it flows better in my head than C but I guess that has to do with the tight syntax.
>>3249481
That's not as bad as in Hungary, where they are teaching Comenius Logo.
I don't even understand how that thing can run on modern computers, it was designed for Win3.1.
>>3249078
Yeah, everybody knows /vr/ is all about 23 year olds talking about how great Earthbound is.
>and their early memories of playing it on an emulator long long ago in the year 2011.
>>3249514
Dunno how it's done now, but in Poland when I was in grade school(11-12 years old irc) I was also thought Logo. But that was in 99 so much must have changed since then.
>>3249481
A lot of slavs told me they learned Pascal and QBasic in school.
They're lucky.
