Coding before it was cool

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Can you code? If so, do you remember your first working programs? Have you asked yourself how the hell could you wrote this crap?

I just did 😀

One lazy Saturday afternoon, decided to do something more productive than trolling on social media and finally clean up the mess I had in backups, some of them were actually pretty old, 2006 and earlier. While performing backup archeology I unearthed a few jewels from the past.

The first ever program I wrote compiled and run was a simple calculator of electric power, P = V * I. It was written in Turbo Pascal, read two values from the input and printed the result to the output. It happened in 2000, I was around 12 at the time and then it was so much wooow! Today it would rather be ‘bitch please’… Well, everyone, every expert, even the best one was a beginner one day.

Among dozens of projects from the past, there are few that were finished and even work to this day. I found a bunch of games I wrote years ago just for fun and because, at the time, it was challenging to make them. Immediately copied their code to GitHub to save them for future, and so, here they are from the very best.

Qrczoks Killer (2003)

I’m not entirely sure what had I smoked that time, but made a simple shooter to kill chickens falling from the sky with parachutes with a large ass cannon. The game was written in C++ with use of Allegro library. I just have tested it and you can download and run this on Windows.

You can download it here and get source code here.

Snake (2004)

Well, this one was the challenge, the game is simple but it was written in pure x86 assembly language, means the language your computer processor speaks. No web, no high level, no objective, no imperative or other paradigm bullshit, pure assembly code line by line. I remember it took me around two weeks to write it, learnt a lot about how computers really work and I doubt I could repeat this today.

You can download it here and get source code here.

Pong (2004)

Every programmer has to write pong! Me either, it’s like having own framework to code next Facebook, you just have to do it! This particular one was written in 2004, in already ancient Turbo C++ and used prehistoric graphics mode, so called 13h mode.

You can download it here and get source code here.

MIcro Hex EDitor (2003)

Not really a game, but when you’re a nerdy kid you wanna hack the planet, and one of the tools hackers use are hex editors, so I made one.

You can download it here and get source code here.