great book on how early arcade games work

brzezicki

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Just bought a book "Making 8-bit arcade games in C" the other day (published this year)

https://www.amazon.com/Making-8-bit...r=8-1&keywords=making+8-bit+arcade+games+in+c

while I'm only a little bit through it I wanted to point it out as though the name seems to indicate it's about programming games (which it is) there's a ton of information on the actual architectures (sega/gremlin dual vic) midway 8080, galaxian etc.. which is why I bought the book

I'm only on page 44 and I already learned something that has confused me for a while and I just learned something I didn't know that might make it viable to make a carnival high score saver which I previously though would have been too hard due to certain limitations.

I'm really impressed with the way the author made stuff really easy and accessible. I always try to write and explain stuff so people with 0 programming or computer engineering experience can understand, but this guy really did an amazing job making it accessible. While you need to have SOME programming experience, I think anyone who has tinkered in really any language (java, javascript, VB, perl, python etc) could make sense of things.

-brian
 
Uhhh, were the old school games written in C back then? I thought it was all assembly. I'm probably wrong here but, this seems like an odd title.
 
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No they were assembly I think marble madness was the first C

The book is teaching people how they work and how to program with c though which is much more accessible for most people

They have an online emulator and c compiler which is great I bought it for the hardware info but having the nice online c compiler is amazing
I want to use it to make some test roms easier and maybe do some game upgrade (high score saves etc) writing in c will make the development a billion times faster since for me that online compiler and emulator will be useful too.
 
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That said they do talk about assembly, I was impressed on how on page 6 they were introducing assembly.
 
I'm only on page 44 and I already learned something that has confused me for a while and I just learned something I didn't know that might make it viable to make a carnival high score saver which I previously though would have been too hard due to certain limitations.

I already wrote one.
 
I already wrote one.



Oh do tiles exist for all the alphabet characters in the existing roms or did you have to create your own bitmaps for some letters and load them into the tile memories?

I see the game code does not actually reference all letters just the ones you see in the game. But I just saw in the book that you can load your own bitmaps. Which makes sense now thinking about it but I was not aware of.
 
How well does the C compiler work? The first review says it doesn't.

haven't tried it yet, will let you know when I do. I plan on using it in a couple days.
apparently it looks like they just put a web wrapper an open source z80 compiler so that's also good to know. I was planning on writing my own z80 C compiler some day, maybe I still will just for fun as I've never wrote a compiler before and I figure that would be a good learning experience.
 
Ordered! Thanks! I might buy his book on making games for the atari 2600 too! :)

yeah I probably will pick that one up too. I'm not a big 2600 fan but I hear there were alot of wierd limitations of the 2600 that the programers had to get around which sounds like some interesting stories/and good learning and historical information.
 
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