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AppGameKit
The Game Creators Ltd (TGC; formerly Dark Basic Software Limited) is a British software house based in Macclesfield, Cheshire, England, which specialises in software for video game development, originally for the Microsoft Windows platform. The company was established in March 1999 through a partnership between programmers Lee Bamber and Richard Vanner, who were joined by Meash Meakin in 2011 and Deborah Ascott-Jones in 2013. Products DarkBASIC DarkBASIC was released in the year 2000 as a game creation programming language with accompanying IDE and development tools. The language is a structured form of BASIC, similar to AMOS on the Amiga. The purpose of the language is video game creation using Microsoft's DirectX from a BASIC programming language. It is marketed for its ability to allow a novice game developer to make playable games after following its tutorials. It can create both 2D and 3D games by providing function libraries that enable a game to be programmed with ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Privately Held Company
A privately held company (or simply a private company) is a company whose Stock, shares and related rights or obligations are not offered for public subscription or publicly negotiated in their respective listed markets. Instead, the Private equity, company's stock is offered, owned, traded or exchanged privately, also known as "over-the-counter (finance), over-the-counter". Related terms are unlisted organisation, unquoted company and private equity. Private companies are often less well-known than their public company, publicly traded counterparts but still have major importance in the world's economy. For example, in 2008, the 441 list of largest private non-governmental companies by revenue, largest private companies in the United States accounted for $1.8 trillion in revenues and employed 6.2 million people, according to ''Forbes''. In general, all companies that are not owned by the government are classified as private enterprises. This definition encompasses both publ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
AMOS BASIC Programming Language
AMOS BASIC is a dialect of the BASIC programming language for the Amiga computer. Following on from the successful STOS BASIC for the Atari ST, AMOS BASIC was written for the Amiga by François Lionet with Constantin Sotiropoulos and published by Europress Software in 1990. The language was notable for its focus on media and game development capabilities, allowing users to easily create demanding multimedia software and games. It featured full structured code and numerous high-level functions for loading and manipulating images, animations, and sounds. These capabilities made it a popular choice among Amiga enthusiasts, particularly beginners, for creating video games (especially platformers and graphical adventures), multimedia applications, and educational software. History AMOS competed on the Amiga platform with Acid Software's Blitz BASIC. Both BASICs differed from other dialects on different platforms, in that they allowed the easy creation of fairly demanding multimedia s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Abandonware
Abandonware is a term for software, typically video games, that are no longer for sale by conventional means and are distributed by warez websites for free. The use of the "abandonware" term is controversial, as distributing out-of-print software and games is still considered software piracy, and their copyright is not actually abandoned. Some publishers actively file DMCA takedowns of abandonware and defend its copyright, while others do not. However, some video game historians believe that this distribution is justified to preserve history given the lack of viable alternatives. Implications If a software product reaches end-of-life and becomes abandonware, users are confronted with several potential problems: missing purchase availability (besides used software) and missing technical support, e.g. compatibility fixes for newer hardware and operating systems. These problems are exacerbated if software is bound to physical media with a limited life-expectancy ( floppy disks, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
End-of-life (product)
In industry, product lifecycle management (PLM) is the process of managing the entire lifecycle of a product from its inception through the engineering, design, and manufacture, as well as the service and disposal of manufactured products. PLM integrates people, data, processes, and business systems and provides a product information backbone for companies and their extended enterprises. History The inspiration for the burgeoning business process now known as PLM came from American Motors Corporation (AMC). The automaker was looking for a way to speed up its product development process to compete better against its larger competitors in 1985, according to François Castaing, Vice President for Product Engineering and Development. AMC focused its R&D efforts on extending the product lifecycle of its flagship products, particularly Jeeps, because it lacked the "massive budgets of General Motors, Ford, and foreign competitors." After introducing its compact Jeep Cherokee (XJ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Open Source
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentralized software development model that encourages open collaboration. A main principle of Open-source software, open source software development is peer production, with products such as source code, blueprints, and documentation freely available to the public. The open source movement in software began as a response to the limitations of proprietary code. The model is used for projects such as in open source appropriate technology, and open source drug discovery. Open source promotes universal access via an open-source or free license to a product's design or blueprint, and universal redistribution of that design or blueprint. Before the phrase ''open source'' became widely adopted, developers and producers used a variety of other terms, suc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Star Wraith
''StarWraith'' is a series of space combat simulators by StarWraith 3D Games. The ''Star Wraith'' universe and games During the first two parts and also in '' Star Wraith: Shadows of Orion'' the player fights as Alliance pilot in the brutal civil war of the Alliance against the Federation. In ''Shadows of Orion'' a new threat emerges: the alien race, the Vonari. In most of the following games in the series there have been skirmishes or major conflicts with the Vonari. In ''StarWraith IV: Reviction'' the Vonari assault Earth. In ''RiftSpace'' the Vonari guard a powerful secret from humanity. In ''Evochron Alliance'' the Vonari assault the newly discovered EvoChron sector. ''Arvoch Conflict'' is the first game in which humanity counters the Vonari into their own territories. Although ''Arvoch Conflict'' is already the fourth game featuring the Vonari there is not much known about this race. Their technology is superior to human technology. The Vonari are an intelligent, martial ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Interpreter (computer Software)
In computer science, an interpreter is a computer program that directly executes instructions written in a programming or scripting language, without requiring them previously to have been compiled into a machine language program. An interpreter generally uses one of the following strategies for program execution: # Parse the source code and perform its behavior directly; # Translate source code into some efficient intermediate representation or object code and immediately execute that; # Explicitly execute stored precompiled bytecode made by a compiler and matched with the interpreter's virtual machine. Early versions of Lisp programming language and minicomputer and microcomputer BASIC dialects would be examples of the first type. Perl, Raku, Python, MATLAB, and Ruby are examples of the second, while UCSD Pascal is an example of the third type. Source programs are compiled ahead of time and stored as machine independent code, which is then linked at run-time and exe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bytecode
Bytecode (also called portable code or p-code) is a form of instruction set designed for efficient execution by a software interpreter. Unlike human-readable source code, bytecodes are compact numeric codes, constants, and references (normally numeric addresses) that encode the result of compiler parsing and performing semantic analysis of things like type, scope, and nesting depths of program objects. The name ''bytecode'' stems from instruction sets that have one- byte opcodes followed by optional parameters. Intermediate representations such as bytecode may be output by programming language implementations to ease interpretation, or it may be used to reduce hardware and operating system dependence by allowing the same code to run cross-platform, on different devices. Bytecode may often be either directly executed on a virtual machine (a p-code machine, i.e., interpreter), or it may be further compiled into machine code for better performance. Since bytecode instruct ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
DirectX 7
Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with "Direct", such as Direct3D, DirectDraw, DirectMusic, DirectPlay, DirectSound, and so forth. The name ''DirectX'' was coined as a shorthand term for all of these APIs (the ''X'' standing in for the particular API names) and soon became the name of the collection. When Microsoft later set out to develop a gaming console, the ''X'' was used as the basis of the name Xbox to indicate that the console was based on DirectX technology. The ''X'' initial has been carried forward in the naming of APIs designed for the Xbox such as XInput and the Cross-platform Audio Creation Tool (XACT), while the DirectX pattern has been continued for Windows APIs such as Direct2D and DirectWrite. Direct3D (the 3D graphics API within DirectX) is widely used in the develo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
BASIC Interpreter
A BASIC interpreter is an Interpreter (computing), interpreter that enables users to enter and run programs in the BASIC programming language, language and was, for the first part of the microcomputer era, the default Application software, application that computers would launch. Users were expected to use the BASIC interpreter to type-in programs, type in programs or to load programs from storage (initially cassette tapes then floppy disks). BASIC interpreters are of historical importance. Microsoft's first product for sale was a BASIC interpreter (Altair BASIC), which paved the way for the company's success. Before Altair BASIC, microcomputers were sold as kits that needed to be programmed in machine code (for instance, the Apple I). During the Altair period, BASIC interpreters were sold separately, becoming the first software sold to individuals rather than to organizations; Apple BASIC was Apple's first software product. After the Altair 8800, MITS Altair 8800, microcomputers w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Debugger
A debugger is a computer program used to test and debug other programs (the "target" programs). Common features of debuggers include the ability to run or halt the target program using breakpoints, step through code line by line, and display or modify the contents of memory, CPU registers, and stack frames. The code to be examined might alternatively be running on an '' instruction set simulator'' (ISS), a technique that allows great power in its ability to halt when specific conditions are encountered, but which will typically be somewhat slower than executing the code directly on the appropriate (or the same) processor. Some debuggers offer two modes of operation, full or partial simulation, to limit this impact. An exception occurs when the program cannot normally continue because of a programming bug or invalid data. For example, the program might have tried to use an instruction not available on the current version of the CPU or attempted to access unavailable or pro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Function Library
Function or functionality may refer to: Computing * Function key, a type of key on computer keyboards * Function model, a structured representation of processes in a system * Function object or functor or functionoid, a concept of object-oriented programming * Function (computer programming), a callable sequence of instructions Music * Function (music), a relationship of a chord to a tonal centre * Function (musician) (born 1973), David Charles Sumner, American techno DJ and producer * "Function" (song), a 2012 song by American rapper E-40 featuring YG, Iamsu! & Problem * "Function", song by Dana Kletter from '' Boneyard Beach'' 1995 Other uses * Function (biology), the effect of an activity or process * Function (engineering), a specific action that a system can perform * Function (language), a way of achieving an aim using language * Function (mathematics), a relation that associates an input to a single output * Function (sociology), an activity's role in society * Fu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
