Well, one of my big goals in life is to create the video games of my dreams. As hard as I tried and even though I did manage to create about 20 or so games, none of them were really the games that I imagined in my head. The main reasons why I was never able to make those wonderful games was because their system requirements exceeded the capabilities of my old TRS-80 CoCo 2. Unless I tried to make an Atari like version of those games and in one case, I did attempt it. However, writing it in BASIC produced unwieldly large and monotonously slow programs and dropping the entire code down to the assembly language was an extremely complicated task. Um, I believe I was being just a tad harsh on the CoCo. Yeah, BASIC was inefficient and writing an entire game in BASIC and running it through the interpreter was slow. However, what made development difficult was the fact that the EDTASM+ cartridge used cassette tapes and writing a large assembly program in the environment meant a lot of saving bits to tape. I also did not have full knowledge of the hardware on that machine. Never-the-less, the hardware is limited.
Such is not the case now that I have a PC, a C compiler and access to the Internet. So that is why I started writing this journal. Before I start creating the games that I've kept in my head since I was age 8, first I need to find out about the system that I am dealing with and how to make it do what I want. That's the main purpose of these logs.
The C compiler is DOS based so I will begin writing games that work in DOS. I realize that with Windows 95 and 98 running the majoriy of computers these days and with Windows NT on the horizon that I am a bit dated on the platform of choice. Eventually, I will start to learn the DirectX API so that I can write games to target those platforms as well. But, I also feel that in order to truly write good games and to appreciate everything that these GUI OS's do for you, you should learn a simple OS and the hardware fairly well. For that, nothing beats DOS in it's ability to practically allow you full access to the underlying hardware. Besides, not everyone in the world is running a screaming fast Pentium 400 machine. Coding to the DOS platform allows even old hardware, such as 486's, to run these examples fairly well, and admittedly, I myself still run a 486 machine on my desktop. I still own that 486 machine. I should get it out the attic and see if I can get it working. Makes for a nice DOS box.