Alberto's Blog

32 bits rules

Yea, I was buzzing with excitement when I got my first 32 bit computer, I jump from a 286 directly to a wonderful 486Dx2 66 MHz without ever having a 386 (which I regard as an incredibly good CPU for that time anyway). I think it was then I began to feel a kind of obligation to make programs that put to use all that overwhelming computer power for a good cause. The math coprocessor of the 486 worked amazingly fast (this was the first Intel CPU with integrated math coprocessor) and I decided to stop using integer fix point arithmetic in favor of 32 bit floating point maths. So all the operations started to be much more accurate and a myriad of new possibilities became reachable. Also the games were better, much better, in fact I spent so much time playing Doom that I could see corridors passing by when I closed my eyes, for real, not joking man. Then I got a Pentium 133MHz (without the division bug) and the floating point arithmetic became so fast I couldn’t believe it. So I kept improving my engines and did a two player tank game among other things. Since the game was made absolutely from scratch it teach me a lot, specially about 3D collision detection. Of course I stopped using Turbo C and started enjoying the DOS4GW world of real 32 bit indexing RAM, so much fun.