Assembly

By default, assembly was the first computer language. Assembly language is actually a command-based representation of the actual instructions that your computer's processor runs. That means you will be dealing with the low-level details of your processor, like registers and stacks. If you're looking for a language that's English-like and is relatively self-documenting, this isn't it!

By definition, anything you can do in any other language, you can do in assembly, only not as easily --of course, that's like saying that anywhere you can go in a car, you can go on foot, only not as easily. While the statement might be true, the later technologies made things much easier to use.

In general, assembly language is not used on its own for games. Games that use assembly language use it in bits and pieces where it can improve performance. For example, DOOM is written entirely in C with a couple of drawing routines hand-coded in assembly. They are the routines that are called a few thousand times a second, so making the routine as tight as possible really helped the performance of the game. It's fairly easy to write a function in assembly that is call-able from C, so using both languages wasn't a problem.

Special Note: The name of the language is "assembly". The name of the tool that converts assembly language into true machine code is called an "assembler". It's a common misnomer to call the language "assembler", so start out on the right foot by calling the language by its proper name.

Advantages: Is, by definition, the smallest and fastest language. A talented assembly programmer can write programs that are faster than anything that can be done in other languages. You'll be the first person to be able to take advantage of the processor's latest new features, because you can use them directly.

Disadvantages: Difficult to learn, cryptic syntax, tough to do efficiently, and it takes much more code to get something done --not for the faint of heart!

Portability: Zilch. Since the language is designed for a single processor, it is not portable by definition. If you use extensions specific to a particular brand of processor, your code isn't even portable to other processors of the same type (for example, AMD 3DNOW instructions are not portable to other Pentium-class processors).

Games Written in Assembly: I don't know of any commercial games that are written entirely in assembly. Some games, however, have the most time-critical portions done in assembly.

Resources: When you're looking for documentation for an assembly language, you're basically looking for the documentation for the chip. There is some online information at Intel, AMD, and Motorola for their processors. As for books, Assembly Language: Step-By-Step is well-reviewed.

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