[Coco] Seeking advice for an old-school game programmer

[Tony Cappellini]

A bit OT, but still programming-centric.

A friend of mine who got started with the Model 1 & Model 3 is a self-taught
programmer
He is quite bright, but never took any programming classes and learned the
hard way. he wrote many text-based games for the M1 & M3, but all for his
own
enjoyment. he ever pursued anything professionally.

I recently re-connected with him on facebook, after 30 years of not being in
touch. He ported one of these games to the Mac using Real Basic and added
some graphics
to the game. He mentioned that he had written it on the iMac and hard coded
the graphics to the hi-res display for that computer. He never gave thought
to the Mac laptops, thus cutting out the market of many Mac users. He hasn't
quite gotten up to speed on Objective C, and I don't think he's worked much
with C in general.

When I heard this, I tried to tell him should should be using a graphics
library which abstracts away the hardware and would provide him with
content-managment
resizability. Given that he started programming in the 70's, he is still
living in the restrictions of the technology of those times.

This advice didn't quite sink in, and he still thinks he is doing it the bet
way possible.

I've never written 1 line of game code in my life, and writing an efficient
tic-tac-toe game would probably be a challenge. However, I've been working
in a software-writing capacity for over 25 years, and I'm quite aware of
tools that make my life easier. I'm sure these also exist for those who
specialize  in game development.
I haven't had a chance to look at his code yet, but I would expect that he
is doing many things that could be simplified by using function calls,
pointers, structures, etc..

For the game writers on this list (Nicholas, Sockmaster, etc...), what are
some resources you would recommend for someone living in the past, as far as
approaching game development?

Thanks