Hot Win95 Game Programming

These pages are being created by what I call interactive development. Here's how it is works... The more you show me interest in the topics I have here, the more I get inspired to work on these pages. So go ahead and mail me and tell me what you want to see here soon.

Topics:

What in the world could Windows 95 be doing to help games?
Where can I get all this neat stuff?
What about NT?
DirectDraw™
This accelerates hardware and software animation techniques by providing direct access to bitmaps in offscreen display memory as well as extremely fast access to the bit-block transferring and buffer-flipping capabilities of the hardware.

DirectPlay™ - coming some day...
This allows easy connectivity of games over a modem link or network.

DirectSound™ - coming some day...
This enables hardware and software sound mixing and playback.

DirectInput™ - coming some day...
This provides joystick input capabilities to your game that are scalable to future Windows hardware input APIs and drivers.

Direct3D™ - coming some day...

DirectAmination™ - coming some day...

DirectShow™ - coming some day...

DirectX and Visual Basic
DirectX cannot be used with VB 4.0 or earlier. It can be used with VB 5.0. This is because DirectX makes use of something called 'callbacks' This is when an external function in a DLL is able to call a function in your code. VB 5.0 supports this. However, I have yet to see anybody actually do it.

DirectX and Delphi

Other DirectX pages:

Yahoo's DirectX	Wow there are a lot of DirectX pages now
Game X	Programming games for Windows 95 using DirectX Technology
The DirectX Developer's Page	Lots-o-great stuff about Direct X

What in the world could Windows 95 be doing to help games?

Father Bill's scripture on hot games:

The Microsoft® DirectX™ Software Development Kit (SDK) provides a finely-tuned set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that give you, as a developer, the resources needed to design high-performance, real-time applications, such as the next generation of PC games and multimedia applications.

Microsoft developed the DirectX SDK for several reasons. The primary reason is to make performance on Windows-based platforms rival or exceed performance on MS-DOS-based platforms and game console-system platforms. Another reason is to promote game development for Windows, and to assist you by providing a robust, standardized, and well-documented platform for which to write games.

A Road Map of Microsoft Game and Interactive-Media Technologies - overview of DirectX and other technologies
Programming for the Windows 95 Game SDK
Press Release: Microsoft Ships Windows 95 Game Software Developers Kit

GameSpot

Into the Breach - An overview and history of DirectX

Where can I get all this neat stuff?

I want the DirectX SDK. Give me! Give me! Give me!
1. From MS: http://www.microsoft.com/directx/default.asp
2. Also... it is included with a MSDN Professional (Level I) membership. ($495 just for the SDK is a little steep, huh!)
3. And... I hear the original (the game sdk) DirectX ships with MSVC++ 4.1.
4. I've had requests for other versions, presumably for testing purposes. Does anyone know where they can be downloaded from?
I want to write DirectX drivers

DirectX 5.0 DDK

I want DirectAnimation and DirectShow

Platform SDK Components for DirectX Media Developers

What about NT?

Windows NT 5.0 will include complete support for the DirectX 5.0 feature set

Windows NT 4.0 shipped with "in-the-box" support for DirectX2 on Intel, MIPS, PowerPC, and Alpha platforms. DirectX3 is available for NT 4.0 with Service Pack 3 for Intel and Alpha platforms only.

Windows NT 3.51 has no support for DirectX.

Send your questions and comments to Tod Semple. Suggestions for new topics you would like to see here are greatly appreciated. Page last updated on 11/03/97. This page has been accessed times.
© 1997 Tod Semple