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ASM, C, Pascal, or BASIC


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Most likely Assembly since high level compilers like C made programs that were too slow for arcade style games.

 

STOS Basic was primary used in Europe for shareware and even some commercial games but it gained a reputation for being too slow and just anyone making low quality games (much like Unity today).  But with extensions like Missing Link, one could make fast and decent games with it.

 

In the States, GFA Basic was used instead...

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About 60 % of commercial games were coded in pure ASM. And big part of it with Devpac - not all assemblers can produce max efficient and compact code, for instance.  Rest of it was done in C, but often with speed crucial parts done in ASM - better C compilers have support for it.

Small number was done in STOS or some other, I guess mostly GFA Basic - they are used much more in freeware, shareware.

To add that ASM has benefit in code size too - shorter code, and that matters often, like when you want that game run with 512 K machines.

Interesting example is most popular Dungeon Master: coded in C, some ASM parts. And they used special trick with RAM usage to make it run on 512 K machines, basically corrected TOS flaw about memory usage in case of AUTO run.

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