Most old games were written in C

Most old games were written in C

True or false?

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True. Assembly as well.

false

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.

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.

commodore basic

Tralse

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.

Yeah but just like today there were libraries and engines you'd use instead of starting from scratch

Spotted the zoomer.

80's DOS games largely used assembler and earlier established programming languages such as (Turbo)Pascal, because worthy, optimizing C compilers (Microsoft C, Watcom, Turbo C/C++) only came out a few years after the IBM PC's release.

Usually C, Assembler or both, plus many others.

Isn't there some kind of advantage to writing your own everything?

IIRC Roller Coaster Tycoon was pure asm

False.

Old here is the 8-bit era and in many cases you didn't have a C compiler or as in the case of 6502 the processor was not suited for stack based languages.

Thus games and software suites such as Visicalc were written in hand crafted assembly code. And therefore it was fast, efficient and compact. Elite, the space game, took 32 KB RAM and that included the screen memory. I'd like to see you do that in C.

some people ITT forget that cross-compilers on VAXen and other high-end computers were a thing and commonly used, though maybe not as often for games

C was like a transitionary phase from Assembly to C++ for games and wasn't used for that long compared to the other two

>Yeah but just like today there were libraries and engines you'd use instead of starting from scratch
false

>key loops done in ASM for performance (think high performance games like Doom)
mostly false, loops dont go faster if you write them in asm

>loops dont go faster if you write them in asm
The thing you do in the loop might. and that's where you spend your optimization effort on, code that gets run over and over so many times that saving a handful of instructions makes a difference

based and redpilled

what is Super Mario 64 written in?

Assembly specific to the Nintendo 64.
In fact most video games used Asm until around this generation.
I speculate that it's because industry inertia was that most people used Asm. And secondly speccing up your console to use newer/faster hardware just to use higher level languages was just not seen as worth it.

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It's because consoles were fixed platforms so if you want to program for them you use their instruction set, that makes the most sense
people didn't use Assembly to make PC games at that time

All id Soft games from Commander Keen to Quake 3 were written in C. That's from 1990 to 1999 - the whole 90s.
Carmack then moved to C++ for Doom 3 development.

>mostly false, loops dont go faster if you write them in asm
Thats true for today since optimizing compilers have come a long way, but they kinda sucked back in the day. So hand optimizing small odds and ends in ASM could net you better performance (less cashe misses, fewer instructions to do the same job, etc).

id Software adopted C++ much later than other companies did

we really need a phrase for pop programming science for people who believe all their stupid memes
"cache misses" were not a thing in the 90s
all C compilers can optimize a loop properly
hand optimized ASM happened but not in the way you probably think it did
mostly for using obtuse processor features or bugs to do something you weren't supposed to do, not because C compilers were bad and you needed more speed so you would rewrite something in Assembly

Like 99%. And released in 1999.