Comment by tasty_freeze

I wrote an emulator for an old 8080 microcomputer in 1999 or so using the Win32 API. First I bought the Petzold book, but as my program grew there were still a lot of API issues that Petzold simply couldn't fit into a book of that already impressive size. Then I got a "Win32 API Bible" type of book, then another from a different author, then I collected the multi-volume official win32 api books from microsoft, ..., and ended up with more than two linear feet of books.

And yet development was still painful. Sometimes I would want to add a feature and I'd be amazed that in 30 minutes it was done, but far more often there would be something that didn't work and I'd literally spend two weeks of free time changing the order of state setting calls, or setting state that the books didn't say needed to be set but I had seen other source code do it, reading other program source, searching online, asking in forums...

The last release was in 2005. I'd like to work on it more, but there is no way I'm ever going back to that codebase.