Reply To: Book Suggestions
Here’s a selection from my collection!
André LaMothe’s books aren’t going to turn you into an expert, super-optimising MSDOS game developer, but they are *fun* and are a journey through all the important topics. They’re a great introduction if you’re doing this as a hobby and want to enjoy the process. They use a mixture of assembly and C to build ‘engines’ and libraries from scratch.
I wouldn’t recommend actually buying the physical copy of the allegro api (though I have a spare copy if someone wants it), but allegro 4.2 works on MSDOS and is a hugely featured library that can do just about anything you’d want. Definitely worth looking at if you’re more excited about making *games* than spending your life writing engines.
OpenGL isn’t really a thing on MSDOS, but I include it because implementations, partial and otherwise, do exist, and to me it’s a good way to go if your interest is in portable 3D games. If you’re dreaming of 3dfx games, these can be helpful. Super dry though.
Depending on where you’re at in your programming journey, you might want a textbook on collisions. It’s in no way DOS specific but ‘REALTIME COLLISION DETECTION’ is pretty much The Reference on the subject. Can definitely live without this.
Finally I included ‘The Elements of Computing Systems’ because it’s a great lesson on the real low level hows and whys of computer architecture. Definitely not essential but really interesting if that’s your kink.
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