Tech Stream

Dilbert Z
"...Back in the late 1970's and early 1980's when PCs were 8 bit, ran at 1MHz and had 4K to 56 KB of RAM, my brother and I used to play adventure games. We had the Colossal Cave adventure game for our own home brew 6800 and 6809 system and Infocom games for the Z80. We would buy books containing adventure games written in BASIC and my brother inspired by Scott Adams Adventure games wrote an adventure game compiler. Adventure games works as a sort of state machine, with nouns and verbs enabling you to link objects and locations. It was an introduction to natural language processing. Things have progressed a long way since then and now at 52 I feel I have been left behind. In recent years I have used programmable logic in the form of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) to design the internal logic of the 8 bit microcomputers of my youth. Even that is getting dated by people designing 32 bit pipelined RISC machines. There are quite a number of people using FPGAs to replace the hardware for 1980s pinball controllers and arcade games. I would imagine writing gaming software for the current generation of hardware would be a major undertaking, involving designing eye catching graphics and getting across graphics rendering engines and the like. It's a long way from writing Bressenham line drawing algorithms and using wire frame chunky graphics :-) I'd imagine there is open source graphics rendering engines available these days like MesaGL (?) but putting together that game play is probably beyond the capability of most individual programmers these days...."