dartsman Member Posts: 484 From: Queensland, Australia Registered: 03-16-2006 |
Hey, I'm trying to track down Microsoft C 6.0 Compiler. I know it's old, and any reply saying that it's old I honestly don't want to hear. I've spent the day trying to find it, hopefully someone might know some ftp or link to download it. So far found out it might be called 'msc60.zip'. Thanks to anyone who can help. ------------------ |
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dartsman Member Posts: 484 From: Queensland, Australia Registered: 03-16-2006 |
ah, nvm... ------------------ [This message has been edited by dartsman (edited May 08, 2006).] |
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buddboy Member Posts: 2220 From: New Albany, Indiana, U.S. Registered: 10-08-2004 |
did you find it, or does that mean you don't care/gave up on somebody answering? cuz if it's the latter, i know how ya feel lol... ------------------ |
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dartsman Member Posts: 484 From: Queensland, Australia Registered: 03-16-2006 |
I still want to find it, just things such as possible work have come up, and so I need to concentrate on that, I'm still looking for it, thought I had found it once, turned out to be Norton Guide. Anywho, still looking for it. So atm I'm sort of putting it off, but also still looking, I have other things I need to concentrate on atm, so until things ease up I'll ease off trying to find it. Spent a whole day (9am-4am) trying to find it so far. but if anyone knows of it, or even the "Microsoft PC Graphics Library" which has the "graph.h" header file and anything else. I know it's old, and no, I don't want to hear about DirectX9.0c or anything like that. Note: I'm being a bit aggressive (i think) with trying to avoid having ppl say it's old or newer things to try and stuff like that, as I've seen on many forums ppl ask the same question only to be blasted with "oh thats old, u should try such and such". It ended up wasting everyones time and the poor guy asking the question didn't get any help. ------------------ |
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dartsman Member Posts: 484 From: Queensland, Australia Registered: 03-16-2006 |
ah, I finally found one!!! It's the Watcom Compiler. It's a C/C++ compiler. You can download the update for it from... http://www.openwatcom.org/ftp/ I just needed it for the graph.h and graph.lib stuff, also any other headers it was including (such as _comdef.h, etc.). I'm doing some old school C/ASM coding, following the "Tricks of the Game Programming Gurus" book, it's an oldy (out of print) but a goodie! I know it's old, and if it's any consolation I do know OpenGL & DirectX9.0c and I can do 3D pretty easy (been programming in C++ for 2-3 years), and general programming for 4 and a bit years. Also I have a Degree for games programming too... SO I do know this is all 'old school' stuff, and I like it!!! NOTE: Sorry, just on other forums ppl have been flamed and/or ridiculed for wanting to learn this stuff (16-bit C/ASM graphics, mode13h, etc)! I'm hoping CCN won't be the same. ------------------ |
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Elusive Pete Junior Member Posts: 5 From: Paisley, Scotland Registered: 05-29-2006 |
I think it's a tad short-sighted of people to flame you for looking at the old stuff, especially when it comes to ASM. I've just finished Degree-year of a Computers Game Technology course in uni, and one of the modules I studied was called "Compilers and Interpreters". We didn't use ASM as such, but we did use a similar (although somewhat simplified) language for learning code generation. Very complex in places (debugging is a nightmare!), but still very relevant to any serious programmer, as it can teach a lot about optimisation of higher-level code and so forth. Out of interest, though, couldn't you compile old-style C using any of the recent MS VC++ products? I know MS don't exactly have a great reputation for conforming to standards lately, but I was under the impression that they included most (if not all) of their original C-compliance in their more recent products? (In saying that, I'm a hardcore C++ man, so I could be wrong about the C stuff). ------------------ |
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Jari Member Posts: 1471 From: Helsinki, Finland Registered: 03-11-2005 |
I used to use VC6 introductory edition and the problems started with templates. Sure there are some other minor things with it and of course the newest c/c++ features arent available but you will ok with it if you dont use templates, too much because it can handle just basic templates but not templates with classes very well. By the way, welcome to the CCN forums Elusive Pete! ------------------ [VoHW] (Help needed) [Blog] - Truedisciple (mp3) |
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Elusive Pete Junior Member Posts: 5 From: Paisley, Scotland Registered: 05-29-2006 |
Thanks! I originally started learning C++ on VC6, although I migrated to VC7 (.NET 2003) a couple of years ago. It certainly has all the major features, and complies as well as most compilers... as long as you resist the lure of the Microsoft-specific features that is! I'm actually doing some pretty intense templating of classes these days, and aside from totally incomprehensible error messages if I make a typing error, it works great.
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dartsman Member Posts: 484 From: Queensland, Australia Registered: 03-16-2006 |
Welcome to CCN!!! yeah, microsoft compilers do support most C-style code... that wasn't the problem, they don't support direct interrupt calls with assembler, correct me if I'm wrong though. Such as you could not type...
or whathave you with inline assembler (not to mention that the snippet above is in 16bit asm, which I'm pretty sure MSVS/MSVC is 32-bit now). I wasn't actually looking for Microsoft Visual C (which I have the intro to it too). I was just pretty much looking for an old compiler which had the graph.h header file... I found bits and pieces from just searching around, and found out graph.h was part of the "Microsoft PC Graphics Library" or something, and just thought I was looking for a Microsft C compiler... Anywho it's solved now through watcom (which I'm pretty sure thats what I was meant to find/use as the compiler)... I'm trying to follow the "Tricks of the Game Programming Gurus" book Currently I'm using Visual Studio .Net 8 (2005), awesome IDE Sounds like an awesome Degree!! I did a Bachelor of Interactive Entertainment: Majoring in Games Programming (was the only bachelor specific in games programming in Australia when I stared the course). It was ok, but taught me more the side of using engines to create games (such as Ogre), but also touched on a bit of DirectX 9.0 API which was good. We did the broad games programming stuff such as design, testing, AI, networking, maths. My only problem with my degree was that I wanted to learn more of how to develop an engine using DirectX API, rather then using other 3rd party engines (which were mainly just wrappers around DirectX/OpenGL) to handle things for me... Yeah, to know how your compiler compiles your code, and then links it does help know what optimisation techniques are/aren't useful to use. Low level knowledge of the target platform is also another great way to know how to optimise code... From the little bits and pieces of code I've done in assembler it's made me think more about what my code in C++ will do/look like in assembler... With the whole ppl flaming, it was too common. I had seen people on other forums ask about how to get started with Assmebler 16-bit mode13h graphics and then ppl just come on and say "oh you don't want to learn that, you need to learn DirectX/OpenGL, it's better and you won't have to worry about that old stuff"... People don't seem to understand why I/others would want to learn something so "old", its just awesome to know... on that note.. Elusive Pete, if your interested with joining a team of people interested with game design/development (mainly young ppl), totally non-profit and relatively new site/team, we are looking for more coders with C++ experience. Just check out www.projectnresource.com and go into the forums, if you want to join the team than just post in the "Join Us" section. Otherwise it's fine if you just browse the forum and post stuff. God Bless PS. It's late, 1:10am, plus I'm pretty tired, hope this actually made some sense... lol... ------------------ |
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Elusive Pete Junior Member Posts: 5 From: Paisley, Scotland Registered: 05-29-2006 |
I think Visual C++ supports some form of direct interrupt calling, although I'm not sure to what extent (I am rather an ASM newbie, after all). Anyways, I'm sure you're familiar with the useful "assert" macro? I sometimes need to write one myself, and if the assertion fails, I use this: "__asm { int 3 }". On the VS .Net 2005 side of things, I know what you mean about all the deprecated stuff! I took a look at it when my university first installed it on their computer network in January -- tried compiling a rather big application framework/engine I was writing, and got hundreds of errors. It was not pretty, and while I'm sure the changes are sensible, it drops a massive bombshell on portability! The updates to the debugging are definitely an appealing point. I've not used them yet, but I've read about them, and seen them in use. One of the other major updates I like is to do with Intellisense -- it's a brilliant feature in itself, but had some bad glitches in the 2003 version. My degree has certainly been quite interesting to do. Of the original 60 students who started at the same time as me, only 6 made it through to get the degree (that's a 90% fail/drop-out rate), so it's been quite tough... but well worth it! We've focused a lot on programming, a little on design, and some other related disciplines (such as maths, physics, AI, graphics, testing, and project management). I don't know how degrees elsewhere in the world work, but here in Scotland, we can study for an additional year to get "Honours", which is basically just an extension to the qualification. It's a bit more theoretical, and involves lots of research. I'm going to be starting on that after the summer. Thanks for the link to ProjectNResource btw... I'll check it out, although I'm going to be pretty busy with another project over the summer. We'll see though!
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dartsman Member Posts: 484 From: Queensland, Australia Registered: 03-16-2006 |
yeah... asserts are great  and yeah __asm { int 3 } is valid.. though I don't know either to what extent interrupts are actually available, all I do know is that to access mode13h you can't just do the whole "mov ax, 13h/int 10h" stuff (not to mention thats 16-bit asm), and that I read somewhere that the interrupts are not supported (at least not fully)...hmmm... be interesting to find out more about this stuff... thanks for checking out that other site, we are pretty bare atm... but the forum at least is sort of moving along nicely... God Bless ------------------ |
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HeardTheWord Member Posts: 224 From: Des Moines, IA Registered: 08-16-2004 |
You know, you could always pick up a copy of NASM and compile your assembly code that way. Plus you can always link it to your C/C++ code afterwards. Or if that is annoying then use GCC which fully supports inline assembly and probably has options to compile 16 bit code. Just my two cents... |
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CoolJ Member Posts: 354 From: ny Registered: 07-11-2004 |
ok, I believe you cannot access physical memory locations directly in virtual memory systems (xp, 2000, and nt). Maybe this is why you cannot call the interrupts, these systems require a device driver to call the interrupts, I/O ports, etc. Your code would probably work fine on windows 98. | |
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HeardTheWord Member Posts: 224 From: Des Moines, IA Registered: 08-16-2004 |
I think you can fake it in DOS. The command prompt in Window XP can pretend like it is in a different memory model such as real mode flat model. Another way you could test your programs is with dosbox. It emulates a console fairly well and can handle many of the legacy games so it should work. |
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dartsman Member Posts: 484 From: Queensland, Australia Registered: 03-16-2006 |
yeah, there were many alternatives, such as linking the object file... but that way its harder to follow that book, and most of the other alternatives still provided hassles, I just wanted to be able to just follow the book, pretty much word for word without having a hassle, I guess if I could figure out exactly what C compiler and assembler they were using it would have helped, cause then I could track it down easier... I should give Andre' LaMothe a call, or one of the other authors, lol. Hmmm... coolj, yeah, that could be the problem... Also the book was using that "graph.h" header file some of the time to show examples what it was talking about. There were many options to go through, just none of them really offered the easiest way to do stuff... Currently I've had to put the book (and the C/asm coding) aside to get some stuff for work done... And also working on a project which should be released towards the end of this year. ------------------ |
It's debugging features have changed and are a fair bit better then they used to be, just makes debugging that one bit less annoying to be able to highlight over say a class and then to look through all the members through that highlight... err, might not be explaining it right :S 