wayback machine | Learn C Games Programming Blog

My earlier work in C, C++ and C#

Posted on September 25, 2020September 23, 2020 by David

The tutorials I wrote on C++ and C# on cplus.about.com between 2006 and 2013 are all a bit dated now. Both languages have been updated several times since 2013 when I stopped writing for About.com. But thanks to the Wayback machine you can view all of my work from the early stages in Mid 2006 to the finish in July 2013. I owe the copyright to this material so I can reuse it as I wish.

On this page, there’s an index to 43 C tutorials, most written by me. So as a little side task, I’m downloading these, cleaning them up, fixing the odd error and adding them to this website via the Tutorials page. Some but not all are also available on the ThoughtCo website which is the reinvention of About.com.

Ironically I got better at writing for them towards the end. About.com had been very successful back in the late 90s when the web was still fairly new but could never sustain that and declined more or less from the year 2000. I think the highest daily viewing figure I ever got was 12,000 pages but some of the others (particularly Southern Cooking) got in the millions.

I recommend you visit archive.org earlier in the day as it slows up a bit once the USA wakes up typically around 1.00 PM (GMT). Given the volume of stuff it stores, it is a totally amazing place.

Browsing the source code of old and commercial games

Posted on June 17, 2020June 12, 2020 by David

Archive photos — Image by Pexels from Pixabay

This page on a website called WikiZero has a long and very extensive list of games whose source code is available. That doesn’t always mean you can build the game. Many games are very old and in BASIC or assembly (.g. Elite is available in various forms).

It might have been created for a different platform or more likely the source code is available but the graphics and sound assets aren’t, unless you have bought the game, perhaps from sites like gog.com and so have them.

One thing to be aware of, many of the links on WikiZero go to the excellent wayback machine which is part of archive.org. This is under threat by some commercial publishers because they have lent ebooks during the Covid lockdown period without any limitation. So if you are interested in anything I suggest you check it out sooner rather than later, just in case.

For instance here is the C source code for a TRS-80 game from 1979 called Paravia. It looks like a much expanded version of the Classic Computer game Hammurabi. Note the wayback machine can take a few seconds to retrieve a webpage. They have a very large chunk of the web’s websites in there…