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Comment by zellyn | Hacker News Reader

Sad that the author didn't run across Denthor's tutorials… http://textfiles.com/programming/astrainer.txt

Discussed a few years ago on hn: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8837545

Thanks, that brings back soooo many good memories!

I wish there would still an easy way for kids to do similar graphics programming on modern PCs. Back then it was very easy to bring pixels to the screen, you just needed a few lines of code to switch to the correct mode. But nowadays with Direct X / Open GL you have layers and layers of abstractions between you and the pixels. And "setting up"Turbo pascal is still way easier than a modern Visual Studio.

I wish there would be some sort of modern Turbo Pascal which lets you do similar programming by faking / emulating the whole VESA stuff.

Canvas doesn't need more than a browser. It's not the same thing of course, but it's easy to get into, you can do cool things quickly, and it's a useful skill to have now anyway.

(I know Chrome even comes with an editor built in.)

I think the larger problem is that back then, those demos were indistinguishable from magic -- they looked more amazing than anything else you saw on that computer screen. Now, with 60-120fps HD video on your screen, writing assembler to produce some "ugly CGI" is just not attractive.

If you're running 32-bit Windows, it will still run the oldschool 16-bit .com and .exe formats; and from there, an A000 framebuffer and graphical mode is only an int 10h away.

If you're running a 64-bit OS, then DOSBox will work nicely too.

You could try Shadertoy, which looks to be in the same spirit: https://www.shadertoy.com

Processing (https://processing.org/) is a decent option, though it doesn't replicate the same low-level experience.

Holy smoke! Denthor of Asphyxia, now that brings back memories. My two most valuable sources of knowledge back then were PCGPE (PC Game Programmer's Encyclopedia) and Ralph Brown's Interrupt List. Thanks for the stroll down the memory lane!

These were the best. I was looking for them but couldn't remember the guy's name.

Thanks! I hadn't seen those.

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