Games Programming

Played our freeware games? This programming tutorial will teach you to do all the features of our games and more. All examples are given in DJGPP 2.0 (http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/) and are therefore fairly easy to convert to other C / C++ compilers.

Fast graphics are easy to do in VGA so its the best place to start. Click here to learn how to put the computer into 320 X 200 resolution with 256 colours, and to display pixels.

Bitmaps are an essential structure for most games. Being able to have transparant sections and draw a semi-offscreen image is also very usefull. Get the code for this here.

For games it's no good having each keypress going into a buffer where we read it - followed by a long pause before the key can be pressed again. Having the PC stop and beep when you have pressed a key 15 times is no help either. Avoid all this by replacing the keyboard interrupt handler.

If you understand basic graphics techniques you may want to move to higher resolutions. The VESA standard provides a reliable and documented way to access higher resolutions on virtually any modern (or even old) video card. Read our introductory tutorial here.

Creating sounds for your game will really add to the interactive feel and is well worth the effort. Retro-Games used a simple sound blaster library for DJGPP to do this. (don't reinvent the wheel). Download and learn how to use this library here.