Reddit mentions of Tricks of the Game-Programming Gurus

I'll tell you what, the book that got me into game programming in the first place and probably had the largest effect on my overall life was "Tricks of the game programming gurus" by Andre La-Moth. It covered the DOS era of game programming in depth and is still really fun to go back and read every now and then: http://www.amazon.com/Tricks-Game-Programming-Gurus-Andre-Lamothe/dp/0672305070

It wasn't perfect but was before everyone was openly sharing techniques so was a gold mine at the time. He had so much inline assembly to try and keep speed that the entire blitting library was pretty much just assembly.

I remember reading through it 6 times or so when I was 12 and making my first basic games based off of the display library it builds up. I own 20 more up to date books like this on my shelves but still keep this particular one sectioned off by itself out of respect.

Tricks of the Game-Programming Gurus by Andre Lamothe

Yeah, I tried to download it on a BBS but my modem was too slow. Only got 1 hour per day and the files were too big. Ended up getting it on a CD included with this book.

I remember those textures!

Tricks of the Game Programming Gurus was my jam in the 90's.


I was using Turbo C++, and this book walked you through programming an entire Doom-clone game. It has you coding everything from page flipping when writing to VGA memory to building your own audio engine for SoundBlaster cards, and all via in-line assembly. It also walked you through the math and core concepts of the spaces, coordinates, and rendering, of course. I still have my copy. There are newer versions for Windows game programming, but I haven't read them. Obviously many of these methods in the original book won't be used anymore, but it teaches you how to do things low and fast. It teaches you the optimization tricks and concepts that ID Software pioneered to make games like Doom and Quake possible. It will also give you a solid understanding of everything that the 3D libraries are doing for you. So IMHO, doing everything yourself in C++ and assembly is something you should definitely try out.


I was only 14, and I had some trouble with the vector math, so I had to borrow a calculus book. If you've taken calc and physics, though, you should be good.


and if you go this route, you may need http://www.dosbox.com/ to run everything

I started learning around 1996 when I was about 14 or 15. Doom 2 was my inspiration. My dad got me a copy of Borland C++ 3 on a bunch of floppies and I started tinkering around with any code I could find on the internet. For some reason I always found a lot of pascal, so I had to translate to C and fix any compiler-specific errors.

Then I picked up Tricks of the Game Programming Gurus and really upped my game.

I don’t know how well I can speak for other programmers who only learned in college - I’ve never been there myself - but, I think I learned at a cool time. Microsoft was fresh into the transition away from DOS, so there were still quite a few programs that were being made for DOS Mode. That gave me a footing in both low-level programming and high-level APIs.

I get the impression that programmers these days end up either going into high-level application development, or system development, and there isn’t a whole lot of cross over.