[fpc-pascal] Freepascal newbie [Attn] Nikolay Nikolov

[Nikolay Nikolov]

Ron Weidner wrote:

>Nikolay,
>Why did you translate openPTC instead of some 
>of the other available choices?  What advantages
>does openPTC offer over SDL or Allegro?  Do you
>have any (Linux) demos/games written with openPTC 
>that I can take a look at? What do you think about
>tinyPTC?
>
No serious reason, I just didn't know OOP and I wanted to learn that :) 
Another reason is at the time I was interested only in windows and this 
worked pretty well. I didn't want 3D-acceleration (I didn't have a good 
graphics card) and I wanted compatibility with all windows versions, 
including winNT4.0 (which features DirectX 3) and win95 and all kinds of 
video cards (I had a card that supported 24bpp, but no 32bpp, and I had 
another one that supported 32bpp but no 24bpp, so you get the idea :) )
Later I discovered the wonders of multiplatform programming - I ported 
the X11 code later and it worked. Unfortunately it wasn't as up to date 
as SDL. (must be updated to use dga2 instead of the old dga, and also 
support mode switching/fullscreen graphics without being root)
About tinyptc - there's a delphi port somewhere on the net. But it's a 
very simple library and it doesn't do keyboard input and timers, so it's 
not very good for games, only demos. And then you still need timers :)

About games/demos - here's a small tetris clone I was just planning to 
release (btw I couldn't think of a better name than 'tetris' so any 
suggestions are welcome). What's makes it somewhat special is that it 
has very smooth movements of everything (with subpixel accuracy and 
motion blur!) Note that these aren't features of openptc/ptcpas - I'm 
doing everything myself pixel by pixel :)
Here's the source:
http://debian.fmi.uni-sofia.bg/~nickysn/tetris/
compiles with fpc 1.0.10 or 1.9.4+ (and uses http://ptcpas.sf.net/)