Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!rice!cimbria.rice.edu!cliffc
From: cliffc@cimbria.rice.edu (Cliff Click)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Mario Bothers
Message-ID: <9926@brazos.Rice.edu>
Date: 17 Jul 90 19:22:46 GMT
References: <2767@awdprime.UUCP> <64280@sgi.sgi.com> <2779@awdprime.UUCP>
Sender: root@rice.edu
Organization: Rice University, Houston
Lines: 35

In article <2779@awdprime.UUCP> tif@doorstop.austin.ibm.com (Paul Chamberlain) writes:
>In article <64280@sgi.sgi.com> bron@bronze.wpd.sgi.com (Bron Campbell Nelson) writes:
>>And you'd be dead wrong.  Video game software is some of the ugliest
>>and most arcane assembler there is.
>
>(I won't include my quote since it's embarassingly unfounded.)
>
>Really?  Is that changing?  I am seeing more and more of the popular
>games very accurately duplicated on radically different hardware (at
>least I assume that these game systems use different hardware).  Do
>they rewrite it completely?

I've worked on a few such games.  Some of the games are very well written in
a HLL, with a few assembler routines to hack out such stuff as graphics,
timer & other interrupt handling, sound, keyboard, mouse, etc.  In short, many
games do port fairly well, especially on the "beefier" machines like a Mac,
PC with 512K, Amiga, etc.  Games that ALSO go to the Apple II or Commadore 64
take a machine-specific "guru" to write much of the stuff in assembler.  Some
of the more spectacular effects are changed/removed when you go from machine
to machine (sound on an Amiga is of a completely different sort than sound on 
a PC).

On the flip side of the coin, I made some routines to do a rasterized polygon 
fill on the IBM PC; the polygons were disjoint, degenerate, and fell partially
outside the screen area.  Naturally the display update was the slowest part of
the code, and I desperately needed speed on a 4.77 8088 - so the assembler there
is of the worst sort; unrolled loops, self-modifing code, the whole 9 yards.

Cliff Code Rot Click



--
Cliff Click                
cliffc@owlnet.rice.edu