This statement will blow your collective minds. | Hacker News Reader

This statement will blow your collective minds.

37 pointsonedev12 comments

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Chris Sawyer wrote the first Roller Coaster Tycoon game entirely in Assembly.

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If any of you have played the game before, you can imagine the sheer monstrosity of such a task. It's absolutely disgusting to think about.

Here are the wikis, in case anyone is interested.

Chris Sawyer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Sawyer

Roller Coaster Tycoon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RollerCoaster_Tycoon

EDIT: Apparently the second version of the game was all in Assembly also. INSANE.

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I don't think it's that mind blowing. My experience with MASM is that the built in macros that it provides for program flow control, defining and using data structures, and calling into code located in other modules (DLLs) takes most of the pain of writing assembly away. Couple this with the ability to define your own macros and it's really quite an enjoyable environment to develop in considering how low level it is.

I've never played the game, but why is this mindblowing, or even particularly surprising? It's how pretty much all games used to be coded.

Edit: Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menuetos if you want to be impressed by hand-coded asm.

I remember reading about this several years ago. Granted its x86 assembly and it was a long time ago, but its still insane.

Assembly isn't difficult to program in, especially with a good macro assembler such as MASM. C'mon. We can give names to functions and call them by name. We can provide names for variables. We can use a linkage editor to produce an executable and resolve external references, meaning we can employ modular programming. How is this insane?

It makes sense when you consider he wrote Transport Tycoon in the early 90's (when the game had to be assembly for performance reasons), and started RollerCoaster Tycoon as a Transport Tycoon sequel. He had all that code to build on and 10 years of assembly programming experience.

What really blows my mind is that he DESIGNED and developed several classic games by himself. The man is a modern-day multi-talented Da Vinci, and I don't quite understand why he hasn't been knighted yet.

I remember being amazed that impulse tracker was written in assembly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impulse_Tracker

My friend John wrote a Pac-Man clone called PET-Man for his Commodore PET in machine code - no assembly required. I watched him do it...for a few minutes.

why should it blow my mind? its an accomplishment .. sure. but there are and have been far more complex systems written in assembler and/or much mor complex/confusing (from todays perspective of a run-of-the-mill ror/ios/webtech-du-jour programmer) technologies because thats all there was or thats what had to be used to accomplish the task at hand.

All NES/SNES were written in assembly too. Just think of Donkey Kong Country written in assembly, AND someone had to have a clear enough understanding of the assembly later to port it to the GBA.

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Super_NES_Programming

Hats off to the hardcore.

WHY?

because c/++ was too slow.

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