djvu Learning C for Classic Game Systems (Classic Systems in C)

The other four books in Classic Systems in C each teach one real machine — Neo Geo AES, Commodore Amiga, Game Boy, Commodore 64 — and all four assume you already write C comfortably. This volume is the missing first step: for a reader who codes competently in some other language but has never met a pointer, a fixed-width type, or a CPU with no floating-point unit.

There's no single retro machine to install a toolchain for. Every one of this book's 25 example projects compiles with an ordinary C99 toolchain — gcc or clang, on macOS, Linux, or Windows — no cross-compiler, no emulator, no retro hardware required for a single page. Where the later chapters need something that looks like real hardware to explain VRAM, a palette, a sprite, or a tilemap, they get it from a small simulated framebuffer of the book's own design: a buffer in memory, printed straight to your terminal as text.

Four blocks, each building directly on the last:

— C with a systems accent: fixed-width types, operators, control flow, functions, arrays, structs — taught with an eye on the hardware you'll meet in the rest of the series, not as generic syntax.

— C close to the hardware: pointers, memory addresses, how a struct actually lays out in bytes, alignment, endianness, and the bitwise vocabulary — masks, flags, shifts — that every hardware register in every one of the other four books speaks natively.

— Platform-agnostic game-programming fundamentals: a three-phase game loop, movement built on fixed-point arithmetic instead of a floating-point unit none of this hardware has, gravity and variable-height jumping, AABB and tilemap collision, a dead-zone scrolling camera, animation tied to finite state machines, and simple patrol/chase/flee AI.

— Classic hardware fundamentals, still agnostic of any one machine: CPU, RAM, ROM, memory-mapped I/O, VRAM, interrupts and VBlank timing, indexed color and palettes, sprites versus tiles versus tilemaps, and double buffering — with a closing chapter that assembles all of it into a small scrolling demo in the book's own simulated framebuffer

The final chapter maps each of the other four books by name, so you know exactly where to go next — and whichever one you open, you'll already have everything it assumes on page one.

Full source code for every chapter is free to download at danielherby.com.