Links
The following are just some links I have found useful when programming using Free Pascal, OpenGL, and SDL.
RetroComputing
- Erik S. Klein's Vintage Computers -- A great resource for information about old systems, their forums were instrumental in the creation and testing of Paku Paku and my continuing retro-game programming efforts.
- Mike's PCjr Page -- having some hard to find information about the internals of the... rather unusual beast known as the PCjr. Another site with a great informative forums.
- RGB Classic Games -- This site helped greatly in promoting the release of Paku Paku, and contains links to DOS games that are legally free by public domain, freeware release, demo, or other means. You can play many of those games online using jDOSBox.
Pascal
- Free Pascal -- A 32 and 64 bit professional Pascal compiler. It is available for different processors: Intel x86, Amd64/x86_64, PowerPC, PowerPC64, Sparc, ARM. The discontinued 1.0 version also supports the Motorola 680x0. The following operating systems are supported: Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X/Darwin, DOS, Win32, Win64, WinCE, OS/2, Netware (libc and classic) and MorphOS.
- Pascal Game Development -- News about games written in Pascal and all the different libraries one can use in building a game. Active forums filled with lots of very helpful posts on most every pascal compiler and library out there.
- Pascal Central -- This is still a very Apple oriented website, but that doesn't mean their general pascal resources aren't useful for those of us who think Apple is complete rubbish. I try not to hold their dipping into the tainted kool-aid against them.
- SWAG -- The SourceWare Archival Group is a collection of source code examples of programming in Pascal. For the most part this is all pre-windows 95 stuff, but if you dig deep there's still a good deal you can learn from the techniques of the time. The original site and it's maintainers has gone into web-rot/404 land, however thankfully a awesome fellow by the name of Sean Dennis has put up an exellent HTML mirror of it.
SDL
- Simple Directmedia Layer -- A cross platform multimedia library letting you target many operating systems and processors from a variety of languages, including Pascal. It also can wrap around OpenGL opening the door to using 3d Accelleration hardware across all the supported platforms. Free Pascal comes with several SDL units built in, so if you are going to work with graphics in FPC, learning this can fast-track any project.
OpenGL
- OpenGL.Org -- the official page of OpenGL. Can be a bit overwhelming since it's got a nasty case of information overload, but if you need to go straight to the horse's mouth, here it is.
- NeHe Productions -- Some very good OpenGL tutorials. They're written in C, but with the 'guts' of openGL being fairly consistant regardless of programming language it is still a 'must have' resource for starting out.
- Free Pascal OpenGL tutorial -- FPC's wiki page is filled with all sorts of useful info, including a brief OpenGL tutorial. They cover using GLUT for starting video modes, as well as some of the basics like rotations, lighting, etc. Another good starting point (Though personally I think GLUT is complete trash)