Book excerpts:

This book shows you how to create side-scroller games in a way that anyone who has programmed in C can undertand. It presents a wealth of tips on game design, 256-color and Mode X VGA graphics programming, artwork preparation, fast four- way background scrolling, and animation with a powerful game engine written in C. It also includes source code for both a model game with professional-quality graphics and a full- featured game editor for customizing your own action arcade games.

Keep in mind that this book is pretty old. Some of the opinions expressed in it are no longer relevant. In particular, size optimization are not the issue they used to be. And marketing issues have changed considerably. Surely low resolution DOS games can't compete in today's Windows games environment.

Despite being old, this book still contains a lot of useful information. While you will probably want to write your game engine to support modern technology, this book still provides a roadmap on how such engines are written. Use the ideas presented here, add information found elsewhere, do some independent research, and you will have a good foundation for writing modern computer games.

Reviews:

Amazon.com

:? "This book covers the FASTGRAPH system, which is some kind of MS-DOS API for video access. But anyway, once understood, the tricks are what counts."

:) "Diana Gruber shows you how to create side-scroller games in a way that anyone who has programmed in C can undertand."

erasmatazz.com

:) "I would recommend AAAS to the more bewildered beginners who need a tutorial that will take them by the hand and guide them patiently in the creation of a game."