Most old games were written in C
True or false?
Most old games were written in C
Zachary Peterson
Julian Jones
True. Assembly as well.
Xavier Rivera
false
Nathaniel King
Depends on how old you mean. Very old games got written in assembly. I believe that lasted longer in console-land since you could a.) count on the hardware being the same everywhere and b.) it was generally pretty slow so low-level tricks to get more speed out of it were worthwhile.
By the early 90s you were seeing a lot more C. Doom was all C except for a couple of inner subroutines that they rewrote in asm.
Colton Stewart
Nah.
You started seeing a lot more C from the early to mid-90s onwards. Not sure about the details in the computer game market, but console game development up until the PS1 and Saturn days was largely dominated by assembly programming for speed reasons.
Games written in C for older systems tended to perform visibly worse, with one example that comes to mind offhand being Sonic Spinball (the game is in a semi-constant state of slowdown).
Pretty much everything PS1-era onwards is mainly made in C, with specific routines written in assembly language.
Anthony Baker
commodore basic
Luke Murphy
Tralse
Bentley Rivera
Wildly depends on the platform.
PC? Largely yes with some key loops done in ASM for performance (think high performance games like Doom)
Amiga? Usually, but with more ASM code then what most PC titles had.
C64? Very rarely. There are C compilers for the C64, but most all games were either in ASM or Basic
Consoles? Basically everything was straight ASM till the 3DO/PS1/Saturn/N64 landed, then it was mostly all in C with some ASM optimizations on a few high performance loops.
Christopher Johnson
Yeah but just like today there were libraries and engines you'd use instead of starting from scratch
Christian Nguyen
Spotted the zoomer.