Let's compile like it's 1992 (2014)

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Nostalgia for early‑1990s PC development runs through this thread, sparked by an article on rebuilding Wolfenstein 3D with Borland C++ and tiny, self‑contained toolchains. Commenters contrast the ease of installing a single IDE and immediately drawing shapes or compiling whole games with today’s heavyweight ecosystems, shifting dependencies, and complex graphics stacks. Along the way they trade stories of recompiling classic titles, recommend Fabien Sanglard’s Wolfenstein and Doom engine books, and debate how to give kids similarly approachable environments for learning to program and make games.

Nostalgia for early ’90s game development and books

  • Many recall early PC games (e.g., Wolfenstein/Doom era) as both fun and inspiring: small teams creating groundbreaking work.
  • The game engine “black book” series on Wolfenstein 3D and Doom is widely praised for mixing history, low-level tricks, and clear technical explanation.
  • Some lament there will likely never be a similar deep book for Quake/i586.

Recompiling old games and managing toolchains

  • Rebuilding older games can be surprisingly feasible when original toolchains and dependencies are bundled (e.g., Visual Studio 6 projects).
  • Others report the opposite: large struggles compiling certain older titles and mods (e.g., complex engines, old Minecraft mods).
  • Some say commercial/embedded projects often vendor dependencies and pin toolchains, making builds reproducible.
  • Discussion over modern engines: Unity/Unreal often just require the right engine version; Unity does not auto-update and old versions are still available.

Borland-era IDEs, manuals, and TUIs

  • Strong nostalgia for Turbo C/C++/Pascal IDEs: tiny, fast, with integrated debugger and great built-in help and tutorials.
  • Printed manuals and in-IDE documentation were considered excellent learning material.
  • Text-mode UIs with keyboard shortcuts are remembered as extremely fast; some want modern high-res TUIs revived.
  • Free Pascal and RHIDE are cited as modern-ish echoes; Unix terminals’ key limitations are noted.

Old vs modern graphics and “simple vs easy”

  • Older environments made drawing shapes and simple animations trivial; users miss being able to “just call circle” without learning complex stacks (OpenGL, SFML, engines).
  • Some argue modern 2D is actually structurally simpler due to textures/surfaces and GPU pipelines, but less accessible for beginners.
  • A long critique contrasts “easy” modern layers (GPU shaders, web stacks, microservices) with the “simple” feel of direct hardware access and all-in-one runtimes; claims personal productivity was higher in the past.
  • Others respond that modern microarchitectures are largely hard-wired; fully microcode-reconfigurable hardware is not how current CPUs/GPUs work.

Teaching kids and beginner environments

  • Debate over best post-Scratch step: candidates include PICO-8, BASIC/Pascal-like systems, Logo/turtle graphics, Processing, JavaScript canvas, p5.js, FreeBASIC, Python, Godot, Minecraft modding, and mobile Python apps.
  • Tension between “kid” tools and using “real” professional tools for motivation.
  • Short explanation given of dynamic vs lexical scope using a simple function/variable example.

Miscellaneous technical notes and nostalgia

  • One user had trouble downloading the source zip with curl due to redirects; wget or curl -L works.
  • SDL2 is described as a thin cross-platform layer that uses native GPU geometry APIs under the hood; raylib and SFML also recommended.
  • Strong nostalgia for floppy disks, tiny hard drives, the “smell” of older machines, DOS text UIs, and tools like Midnight Commander as modern stand-ins.