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Comment by klingon78 | Hacker News Reader

What did you use for programming games?

I wrote games for the Apple ][ in basic and created some with The Arcade Machine, but my Apple Machine Language book was largely unread, due to my impatience.

Someone at the time that did have the patience was Jordan M., who wrote Karateka[1], which I thought was pronounced “kah-RAH-tic-a” but is “CARE-ah-TAKE-ah”[2], and please don’t ask me to change. The making of that game was one of the greatest things in the recent history of humanity, at least in my limited experience.

[1]- https://www.amazon.com/Making-Karateka-Jordan-Mechner-ebook/...

[2]- https://youtu.be/QDaFte42odA

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I got started with Borland Turbo Pascal on the Macintosh (yes, they had a Macintosh version very early on).

When it was clear most people were moving to THINK C, I did as well.

Languages aside, the Macintosh Toolbox, specifically "Quickdraw", had a nice routine called CopyBits() that did the blitting. That (and how to create a bitmap offscreen) was what really mattered.

On one hand, I was in awe of people that wrote straight assembler to blit to the screen for even faster performance, but at the same time it was apparent how fragile that was as the machine and OS evolved and broke them.

What did you use for programming games?

I used a Basic compiler, but for the life of me now I cannot remember the name of it. There are several different AppleSoft Basic compilers (such as TASC and Beagle Compiler) but this one used its own variant of Basic, not AppleSoft Basic.

Dang, now I'm going to spend all day trying to remember the name of it. That and reminisce about the space exploration game I was developing that was going to take over the world, but mostly just ended up getting my middle school teachers to yell at me for working on it instead of the class work.

I used Microsoft QuickBasic, then tried pascal and then C. The latter two were much harder to do any type of graphics programming (for me as an elementary school student). With basic, I could basically draw, xor out what I drew and then draw again and it worked well enough.

With C, (at least the way I remembered back then), you had to deal with QuickDraw, double buffering, etc. which was more complicated than I could deal with versus just being able throw up a game to play with.

also creator of the much better known Prince of Persia series!

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