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I love Roller Coaster Tycoon. It’s absolutely crazy how he managed to write a game in a way many wouldn’t even attempt even in those days, but it’s not just a technical feat, it’s a creative masterpiece that’s still an absolute blast to play.
It still blows my mind how smoothly it gives the illusion of 3D and physics, yet it can run on almost anything.
OpenRCT brings a lot of quality of life and is often the recommended way to play today, but the original RCT will always deserve a spot on any “Best Games of All Time” list.
Your game will actually likely be more efficient if written in C. The gcc compiler has become ridiculously optimized and probably knows more tricks than you do.
Especially these days. Current-gen x86 architecture has all kinds of insane optimizations and special instruction sets that the Pentium I never had (e.g. SSE). You really do need a higher-level compiler at your back to make the most of it these days. And even then, there are cases where you have to resort to inline ASM or processor-specific intrinsics to optimize to the level that Roller Coaster Tycoon is/was. (original system specs)
Roller coaster Tycoon is one of a lifetime game.
Now everything is electron or react shit. Gone are the times of downloading fully featured software under 10mb.
Fun quote from an interview with Chris Sawyer:
Latterly the machine code came back to haunt us when the decision was made to re-launch the original game on mobile platforms as RollerCoaster Tycoon Classic a few years ago, and it took several years and a small team of programmers to re-write the entire game in C++. It actually took a lot longer to re-write the game in C++ than it took me to write the original machine code version 20 years earlier.
Further proof C++ is a pita
Well worth it. The mobile version is amazing, that is to say, almost exactly the same as the original.
I guess i just found out there’s a mobile version.
Is there not a way to take assembly and automatically translate it to some higher level language?
Edit: Post-post thought: I guess that would basically be one step removed from decompilation which, as I understand it, is a tedious and still fairly manual process.
Your thought is correct. The basic problem is that higher level languages contain a lot of additional information that is lost in the compilation process.
I don’t think old=good is a good mentality though, lot of people seem to have it
All the old software I know and use is exceptionally good, however I’ve heard about and chosen to use it because it’s survived the test of time (also because it’s still actively maintained and has had thousands of bug fixes over the years)
Vscode and obsidian are pretty good and they’re electron, discord’s alright, pretty sure steam uses some kind of web wrapper as well.
Real issue is electron is very accessible to inexperienced developers and easy to do badly, but I imagine people back in the old Unix days got an equal amount of shit bloated software
Survivor bias is a thing and part of the reason people are nostalgic for old media.
To be fair, assembly lines of code are fairly short.
/ducks
Back in the day we wrote everything in asm
Writing in ASM is not too bad provided that there’s no operating system getting in the way. If you’re on some old 8-bit microcomputer where you’re free to read directly from the input buffers and write directly to the screen framebuffer, or if you’re doing embedded where it’s all memory-mapped IO anyway, then great. Very easy, makes a lot of sense. For games, that era basically ended with DOS, and VGA-compatible cards that you could just write bits to and have them appear on screen.
Now, you have to display things on the screen by telling the graphics driver to do it, and so a lot of your assembly is just going to be arranging all of your data according to your platform’s C calling convention and then making syscalls, plus other tedious-but-essential requirements like making sure the stack is aligned whenever you make a jump. You might as well write macros to do that since you’ll be doing it a lot, and if you’ve written macros to do it then you might as well be using C instead, since most of C’s keywords and syntax map very closely to the ASM that would be generated by macros.
A shame - you do learn a lot by having to tell the computer exactly what you want it to do - but I couldn’t recommend it for any non-trivial task any more. Maybe a wee bit of assembly here-and-there when you’ve some very specific data alignment or timing-sensitive requirement.
Step 1: Begin writing in Assembly
Step 2: Write C
Step 3: Use C to write C#
Step 4: Implement Unity
Step 5: Write your game
Step 6: ???
Step 7: Profit
Good thing I wrote my own game engine using D, and soon there will be 2 (known) games for it.
I’m on E already
