Since it wasn't mentioned yet: https://openrct2.io/
this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2025
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Have you seen the insane complexity of modern CPUs? Ain't no one hand coding that like a 6502 in 1985.
I wonder if there's anyone alive right now who would be capable of such a task.
If the hardware was fixed, I don't see why not.
Might not be as fast as the optimisations compilers do these days though.
If you have to support thousands of types of GPU and CPU and everything else, then fuck no.
Even if one did, say using x86, it would still just be interpreted by the CPU into the CPU's native opcodes, as the legacy instruction sets are interpreted/translated.
as the legacy instruction sets are interpreted/translated.
Wth? That's it, I'm sticking to the AVR then
Hello everyone and welcome to another video.
The YouTube algorithm works in mysterious ways.
Because I'm nice, to anyone who doesn't get the reference: https://www.youtube.com/@MarcelVos
Rollercoaster Tycoon was the last of an era, not a sudden burst of genius.
Before Doom (1993), almost all games were assembly. Doom was a shock to the industry. You could now write a high performance, multiplatform, sophisticated game in a compiled language (C). When I say multiplatform, I don't just mean how it was ported to everything later. It was developed on NextStations first. DOS was the first port. So it proved all of the above immediately on release.
We take for granted that C is performant now, but that wasn't obvious until optimizing compilers got good and someone tried.
Rollercoaster Tycoon (1999) is the last notable title that used ASM. It's impressive in many ways, but it wasn't as much of a standout as it seems now. Six years earlier to its release, that was just how games were done.
It's notable that the only port of Rollercoaster Tycoon was the original Xbox, which was also x86. Nobody wants to rewrite it for anything else.
You couldn't pay me to write a game in C today. Our expectations of what games have to be are sky high today. You cant get away with the productivity lost writing in c, maybe c++ since its supported by a number of engines. But, im personally not aware of a single engine that uses C. I tried my hand at writing a game without an engine, and it was a hot mess. Writing low level code to make a button with text, no thanks...been there done that, in my game, you could bump into trees and get stuck...not very fun in my opinion, and thats after a few months of writing code.
Well, as a curious person myself, what programming language would you use to write a game engine in, or at least a game in?
I use Unreal Engine right now, but I've also used Godot and Unity in the past. I dont use Unity anymore, and probably won't ever bcz of some shenanigans they've pulled in the recent past. Also used pygame, and way back before I discovered game engines I tried using OpenGL and SDL directly. (Do not recommend going that route) They are way too low level for you to make any real progress, at least in a timely manner. They are what you'd want to use if you are trying to write your own game engine, but most people aren't trying to do that. Most people just want to make games.
Animal Well was written in C without an engine and it was a decent hit (for an indie). Although that's definitely an exception, perhaps very similar to the RollerCoaster Tycoon example
Wikipedia says cpp
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Before Doom (1993), almost all games were assembly.
Carmack wrote Wolfenstein 3d in C. Star Control and Dune 2 were C.
> almost
I used those as examples but I claim that most everything was C by the early 90's. The statement that C compilers got fast which allowed it isn't true. When a new compiler came out it was always a couple of percentage points faster than the old version. Meanwhile hardware was doubling in performance every two years.
C compilers didn't need much optimization because there wasn't much performance that could be optimized into code on the simple CPUs of 1992 when Doom was being written. CPU's weren't the superscalar multi core monsters they are today. A compiler couldn't take advantage of reordering instructions to use multiple adders because there was only one.
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Just to throw on more factoids:
Wasn't Gabe Newell either the first, or among the first, to port Doom to Win 95?
He was an analyst at Microsoft who was tasked with finding out how many computers ran Windows to determine market share. Part of the question involved asking what other software was installed and the only software used more than Windows was Doom. This made GabeN realize the market potential of games and he left Microsoft shortly afterward.
See, I've heard that story, that he basically ran ... well, arguably, a worm that did network analysis on what was installed on every computer in the MSFT internal network, realized more people had DOOM installed... than Windows...
... and I have also heard that he actually ported DOOM to... either MS DOS, or Win95... ?
I genuienly do not know which is true, if they're all true, if they're all false... I can't remember the source for each of these, but I know I've heard or read all these semi-close variants from somewhere, over the years.
Just saw this article recently. Gabe was part of a team trying to convince developers that they would be better off writing their games with more abstracted code/libraries instead of writing their own interfaces (some of which were written by people convinced they were being really efficient but were actually terrible). One thing they did to prove their point was going to id and offering to have Microsoft port Doom to Windows for free. But the experience and seeing the success id was having distributing their own game led Gabe to launch Valve.
Eventually it sort-of got a rewrite to create RollerCoaster Tycoon Classic, initially for iOS and Android, later for Windows, macOS, and Nintendo Switch. It largely is a rewrite of RollerCoaster Tycoon 2, with the goal of bringing the game to more modern platforms, and the save files for parks and rides are compatible. In this interview with Atari Club, Sawyer says the rewrite was in C++ but even with a team of people still took longer to write in C++ than it took him to write the original in x86 assembly.
If anyone previously paid attention to RCT Classic, it’s been seeing some development work again and is working on Android again. They also made RCT Classic+ on Apple Arcade (basically just the game and all the expansions included) and also updated the regular versions of RCT Classic so they run correctly again (RCT Classic stopped working on macOS when Apple dropped support for 32-bit applications and Atari didn’t release a recompiled game until recently).
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Here's a neat video about the creator and the game - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JouTsMQsEA
I will never not upvote an Ahoy video. The guy is a legend in video game documentaries. Check out his Monkey Island video as a follow-up
Another really good one that I've watched at least 4 times is his Polybius video. He's an incredible documentarian and an equally great researcher.
I'm sure some of the Polybius one was dramatized a little (apart from what was clearly labeled as actors reading the transcripts), but it makes for an unforgettable watch. And the music!!
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is there a NPM package for assembly? I need to keep access to right pad my strings package.
~~This looks like a screenshot in the background of the C++ OpenRCT version because the resolution is too high and not supported by the original assembly release.~~
The original goes to 1024 x 786 and has different zoom levels. I've played most of the original parks this year and that does not see to be too high res to me. Give me a sec I'll take a screenshot of mine in a minute.
Edit here it is. It's the GOG version, which launches fullscreen, so the 1024 x 768 are stretched onto the center of my 1920 x 1080 screen.
Beautiful! I appreciate your research into this matter. I tried to start the OG version but I’m getting some instability. I’m only able to run the open and could not achieve the nice correspondence you got, but it looks legit to me.
Epic Pinball was another game that I recall was written in assembly. When your old 286 struggled to run games at a decent framerate, Epic Pinball would run in a smooth 75fps or whatever you set your CRT monitor to.
Epic Pinball, if I recall correctly, also used some ModeX trickery, meaning it had most of the pinball table in VRAM, and then modified the VGA framebuffer pointer for scrolling, then only moving as much data as it was needed (ball, flippers, etc)
"Try writing it it in assembly"
I want to get off Mr. Bones' Wild Ride.
Chris Sawyer is an absolute legend
Also know as “how to keep a coder busy”
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