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by Igglyboo 4314 days ago
I think most people know this already but the original RCT was written almost entirely in assembly by Chris Sawyer[1].

It was almost 15 years ago but still not the norm for the time and quite an impressive feat.

[1] http://www.chrissawyergames.com/faq3.htm

1 comments

I remember reading that and being totally amazed, especially since I personally think RCT 1 and 2 are far superior games to RCT 3. It's a wonder how much discipline and drive went I to those two games - if only we had the code/documentation to review, that'd be a dream come true.
We have the code, just run the binary through a disassembler.

What I think is more interesting is the open source clone: http://freerct.blogspot.ca/ and the indie clone: http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=39904.0

There was also an effort to migrate the ASM to C as a fan project, despite the glaring copyright issue.

Oh yes, of course, but what I meant was the code as it was written. I'm sure, like anything else, comments, and perhaps in this case any whitespace would be removed during assembly!

I'll check those out though, alongside Caesar III, this was one of my favourite games of my childhood.

I never found that writing in Assembler required different skills or mindsets than what I used in other languages. If there is one thing that stood out it is that because assembler is so limited that you automatically 'level up' as a programmer in order to achieve a certain effect, you almost have to otherwise you will never reach your goal.

Let's just say that it is not for people that want instant results and that tend to work sloppy.