A good friend of mine suggested I come here and read some of the posts from young game programmers, and so I did. After reading some posts from a topic suggested by BIOSME (topic called Good old DOS with a sad face, hehheh), I just HAD to register and add this post, same as the reply I added on his, which you might want to check out afterwards. Now let me see.. Good old DOS? I remember complaining a lot about DOS back in the old days. DOS itself was a bad imitation of UNIX, as far as I remember. I didn't know, of course, things were going to get WORSE. Now, with the way things have gone, I relish DOS. If only things had gone bad in the direction of DOS, and not the way they have. Oh well.. Now, is DOS a better system than Windows is? Well, in what aspect? In the aspect of game programming? But what kind of game programming are we talking about? If you want to get somewhere NEAR a playable game (one which old 'Joystick' magazine readers would play), then there's no question about it. But if you settle for classic action-packed 'Monkey' like games (yeah, the one with the monkey throwing things in Qutebasic), or at best, if you're O.K. with the installation of 512MEGABYTES RAM on your 1.2GIGAHERTz machine to get a quirk-once-a-minute game to run (same as if you like decorating your desktop), then Windows, my friend, was designed for you. You won't need, of course, to know ANYTHING about interrupts, since "time-slicing" will do the job for you (in your dreams, of course). You can kiss bit manipulation goodbye as well (who needs a bit, when I can use THIRTY TWO for the SAME flag? (I've seen this done )) Hardware? What's that? You'll have a bunch of .VXD's to do the 'dirty' work for you. You'll likely get an XboX too, and throw away that annoying PS2 console (Not IBM PS/2, mind you). Also, the terms NUMBER CRUNCHING, STACK SWAPPING, SPEED, FLICKER-FREE and SMOOTHNESS will bear no meaning or definition. And for christmas you're likely to get a copy of "Windows games programming for dummies" too, now for sale as I hear. AND, to taste and feel the pleasure of building your own game machine running your own hardware, you'll have to dream hard, baby, cuz that's as far as you go, but that, of course, is another story. So.. Is an OS built hanging from another OS called an OS? Yeah, sure. Is Windows a better system for game programming than DOS is? What do YOU think? The pen is mightier than DsWORD. 2600. Edited by - 2600 on February 3, 2002 8:49:14 AM

DOS assembly till hell freezes over!!!

And PS2 rulez

Yeah I desperately want a return to the days of no hardware acceleration for graphics and having to write your own drivers for hardware to make games. I''m sure we can do a better job than the people who made the card. Hell I want to go back to not having sound work in half the games I buy because my sound card is unsupported as well, who needs games that actually work as they are supposed to eh?

Although programmers might enjoy working in DOS, the game development time would be extremely high for any current game that is in production. That is probably why many companies won''t release DOS based games ( besides the no-hardware acceleration ). With Windows and DirectX/OGL/etc., it reduces the time needed to complete the game and lets the programmers put more work into the game logic, visuals, etc, and still remain versatile.

I believe 2600 likes the DOS days because the people who programmed had to actually know the low level stuff, how to conserve memory by packing 8 booleans to the byte, etc... If a programmer wanted something done better or faster, the programmer had a much better background to write their own libraries to accomplish it. Programming games now requires less actual knowledge of how and why the computer works and how to squeeze the tightest code to allow inferior systems to run your program at a decent speed.

In summary, programming is now more accessible to the general population. "old-s/<001 3733t" coders may be remiss because of the lack of dedication required to be a programmer now, but what about the good things easier programming brings to the table? Much wider backgrounds, more [potential] creativity, more competition, and many other things. Umm... I think that''s all I have to add.

-Steven

OS wars are not on-topic for this forum.

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