Using a "sandbox" wrapper like DirectX gives you the advantage of playing within a certain set of limits without fear of retribution for doing something silly. For example, before there was DirectX, people would program in DOS, writing directly to video hardware using a machine-code language called Assembly.
This could certainly damage your computer if you tried something undocumented (or documented as dangerous
).
But with the advent of higher-level things such as DirectX, it''s relatively impossible to damage your computer. Granted, C++ will let you do things that VB won''t, but as long as you''re just trying to write games, the
worst thing that you might have to do is reboot your computer. The reason for this is when you attempt to write to a section of memory that belongs to another program or process. If the process is OS-related, you might have to reboot.
That having been said, if you''re programming on a Windows 9x-kernel operating system (95, 98, and Me), you''re stuck with the FAT32 file system. This unfortunately is not as reliable and foolproof as NTFS (which is native to Windows NT, 2000, and XP). Coupling an NTFS system with learning to program makes your "sandbox" a little safer, because the file system is protected, and thus less susceptible to damage to critical OS files from frequent reboots. As well, NT has protected-mode memory access, which prevents the problems from paragraph #2.
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