Thanks, that brings back soooo many good memories!
I wish there would still an easy way for kids to do similar graphics programming on modern PCs. Back then it was very easy to bring pixels to the screen, you just needed a few lines of code to switch to the correct mode. But nowadays with Direct X / Open GL you have layers and layers of abstractions between you and the pixels. And "setting up"Turbo pascal is still way easier than a modern Visual Studio.
I wish there would be some sort of modern Turbo Pascal which lets you do similar programming by faking / emulating the whole VESA stuff.
Canvas doesn't need more than a browser. It's not the same thing of course, but it's easy to get into, you can do cool things quickly, and it's a useful skill to have now anyway.
(I know Chrome even comes with an editor built in.)
I think the larger problem is that back then, those demos were indistinguishable from magic -- they looked more amazing than anything else you saw on that computer screen. Now, with 60-120fps HD video on your screen, writing assembler to produce some "ugly CGI" is just not attractive.
If you're running 32-bit Windows, it will still run the oldschool 16-bit .com and .exe formats; and from there, an A000 framebuffer and graphical mode is only an int 10h away.
If you're running a 64-bit OS, then DOSBox will work nicely too.
I wish there would still an easy way for kids to do similar graphics programming on modern PCs. Back then it was very easy to bring pixels to the screen, you just needed a few lines of code to switch to the correct mode. But nowadays with Direct X / Open GL you have layers and layers of abstractions between you and the pixels. And "setting up"Turbo pascal is still way easier than a modern Visual Studio.
I wish there would be some sort of modern Turbo Pascal which lets you do similar programming by faking / emulating the whole VESA stuff.