Programming graphics in assembler?

I've developed a running Super Mario Sprite using Visual C++ 6.0 and DirectX. But this isn't very satisfying to me (raping a 3D-Multimedia-framework for displaying a 2D sprite only), so I would like to be able to program an animated sprite using C and assembler only.

So, when looking to old games (Wolfenstein, for example) it looks that most of the game is written in C and everytime it comes to graphics output there is the use of assembler.

Unfortunatly when trying to use this old assembler code there is always the error message "NTVDM.exe has found an invalid instruction" so this things don't seem to work nowadays.

Is there any tutorial on graphics programming in assembler that is still usefull?

(I don't want to use any bloated frameworks or libraries, I just want to develop everything on my own. WinAPI would be OK for creating a full screen window and for catching user input, but not for graphics because I read GDI is too slow for fast graphics.)

I'm using WindowsXP and MASM or A86.

graphics assembly

Edit Report

It sounds like you only use Assembler because you seem to think that this is necessary. This isn't the case. If you don't have any other reason for it (i.e. wanting to learn it), don't use Assembler here, unless you know exactly what you're doing.

For your average graphics engine, Assembler programming is completely unnecessary. Especially when it comes to a Super Mario style 2D sprite engine. Even “slow” scripting languages like Python are fast enough for such things nowadays.

Adding to that, if you don't know very precisely what you're doing, Assembler will not be faster than C (in fact, chances are it will be slower because you'll re-implement existing C functions less efficiently).

answered 2009-03-03T11:49:07.780

Programming graphics in assembler?

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