Welcome to the Jungle (article about the future of parallel computing)

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Paulo Pinto" <pjmlp at progtools.org> wrote in message 
news:je9e3t$1g3l$1 at digitalmars.com...
> Hi,
>
> so you are also following Andre's attemps to revive the
> old homebrew developer feeling. :)
>

Yea, I grew up on that sort of thing. And I'd been working with Andre' 
(LaMothe, of course) since well before he started doing hardware kits. His 
old DOS-based game dev books are what moved me from various forms of BASIC 
into finally really grokking things like C, pointers and low-level 
programming (which I had only "kind of" understood before). Then I just 
happened to end up in contact with him through a mutual aquaintence (via AOL 
1.x ;) heh, yea, way back then). Andre' was starting up a budget-game 
publishing company and was looking for a breakout clone, which I happened to 
already be working on. So there was that, and then he started some gamedev 
forums that I was a regular on for years. Then Hasbro Interactive fucked 
everything up with unsubstantiated litigation and typical corporate "drown 
in legal fees" tactics, and then he got into doing hardware kits like he's 
doing now.

IMO, Indie gamedev is really the only way to go if you want to make games. 
All the way until college I was convinced I wanted to work for a major game 
company. Then I started learning more about the nature of the industry at 
the time (around 2000-2001), and that was also the point where the industry 
itself was starting its slow descent into becoming into the 
Hollywood-wannabe cesspool it mostly is today. ("Fuck actual gaming, we're 
gonna be cinematic storytellers!" Too many Pixar rejects in the industry 
now, I guess...Not to mention all the "packaged-goods" managers...)

> I also miss those days. I grew up with the ZX Spectrum,
> doing some BASIC and Z80 stuff, then most of my friends
> moved up to the Amiga 500 and I eventually got a PC,
> since my dad was the opinion the PC would be the future.
>

For me, it was Apple IIc and ApplesoftBASIC (I'm normally critical of apple 
products, especially after having spent a year or so with OSX, but the Apple 
II line is the one major exception for me. I guess you could say Woz was the 
*real* Apple for me). Plus a small amount of Logo and machine code on the 
machine. Then I got a [Packard Bell, remember them?] 486DX2 and moved to 
QBASIC, had an enormous amount of fun with that. (IIRC, Amiga was pretty 
much out of the picture by then, and I hadn't even heard of it. Sometimes 
now I feel like I really missed out on it.)

Tinkered a bit with C/C++, but didn't quite "get it". Then did VB 3 (It came 
on a bunch of floppies and was for Win3 :) ). Then I found Andre's DOS books 
(this was still *just* before DirectX, or at least around the time of what 
was then called the "Game SDK"). Was into that for years, and somehow 
managed to get sucked into web dev, and these days all my free time goes to 
D-related projects (mostly things that will directly or indirectly make my 
webdev work slightly less painful).

> Anyway, I had lots of fun doing x86 assembly programming
> with some Turbo Pascal and eventually C. Then quite a few
> languages after that.
>
> Nowadays I develop business software mostly in JVM and .NET
> languages, running in clustered environments. With development
> teams scattered around the globe.
>
> Doing low level programming and graphics related stuff is
> now only a hobby, when real life permits to do so. Until the
> day I manage to change area.
>
> Wow, now I am a bit nostaligic
>