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A lot of those were written in assembly by teenagers, using WinAPI directly. Yet they still run on Win10/Win11. A lost art.

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Win32 is definitely not a lost art. It's more accessible than ever with modern code generation tools like cswin32.

This inspiration to build things that look like this is what has been lost.

If today's programmers need code generation tools to use what teenagers could use on their own back in the day, then it truly is a lost art.

The code generator just recreates the C header files in C#, let's not be dramatic.

Is it a lost art or does nobody do it more than they have to because it was always such bear?

Those aren't mutually exclusive

Definitely a lost art.

It's not all about WinAPI, it's about the approach.

Today's approach is "let me use electron for GUI and python backend for my bitcoin monitoring app because it's convenient for me". This results in bundling 1 GB of code for a trivial project which is a pain to use.

And the "legacy" approach is "let me use masm32 and winapi because it will be enough".

It wasn’t all assembly (though those were the popular ones), heavy C use too. What really changed the game was when DirectX came.

Thematically, many of them resemble the kind of WordArt we used to make as children in MS Word.

Do you know where I can find source code for such intros?

e.g. on this very site.

https://gdimayhem.temari.fr/index.php?p=datas

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