I remember back in the day using DJGPP (DJ Delorie) with the Allegro library (Shawn Hargreaves), building little games that compiled and ran on Windows and other OSes, and being part of the community.
I was, but my application was less fun: porting Perl code from Windows NT to MS-DOS to integrate with software that required direct hardware access to a particular model of SCSI card.
Worked great, and saved a bunch of time vs writing a VDD to enable direct hardware access from NTVDM or a miniport driver from scratch.
IIRC, the underlying problem was that none of the NT drivers for any of the cards we'd tested were able to reliably allocate enough sufficiently contiguous memory to read tapes with unusually large (multi-megabyte) block sizes.
I remember back in the day using DJGPP (DJ Delorie) with the Allegro library (Shawn Hargreaves), building little games that compiled and ran on Windows and other OSes, and being part of the community.
You can still play the little game I made in under 10K for the Allegro SizeHack competition in 2000: https://web.archive.org/web/20250118231553/https://www.oocit...
Back then I was also writing a bunch of articles on game development: https://www.flipcode.com/archives/Theory_Practice-Issue_00_I...
Anyone on HN was active around that time? :) Fun time to be hacking!
I was, but my application was less fun: porting Perl code from Windows NT to MS-DOS to integrate with software that required direct hardware access to a particular model of SCSI card.
Worked great, and saved a bunch of time vs writing a VDD to enable direct hardware access from NTVDM or a miniport driver from scratch.
IIRC, the underlying problem was that none of the NT drivers for any of the cards we'd tested were able to reliably allocate enough sufficiently contiguous memory to read tapes with unusually large (multi-megabyte) block sizes.