Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucsd!pacbell.com!ames!sgi!bron@bronze.wpd.sgi.com
From: bron@bronze.wpd.sgi.com (Bron Campbell Nelson)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Mario Bothers
Summary: Ok, ok, already!
Message-ID: <64415@sgi.sgi.com>
Date: 18 Jul 90 06:25:58 GMT
References: <2767@awdprime.UUCP> <64280@sgi.sgi.com> <2779@awdprime.UUCP> <9926@brazos.Rice.edu>
Sender: bron@bronze.wpd.sgi.com
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc., Mountain View, CA
Lines: 34

In article <9926@brazos.Rice.edu>, cliffc@cimbria.rice.edu (Cliff Click) writes:
> 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.
> >
> >Really?  Is that changing?  I am seeing more and more of the popular
> >games very accurately duplicated on radically different hardware
> 
> 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.

I've caught enough flak (by email and to the net) that I feel compelled to
publicly admit my first comment was stupid.  I'm glad to know that some
of the newer stuff can be (and is) well written.  My own recollections
however hark back to the bad old days.  For example, the old Atari 2600
(the first home system that really caught on in a big way).  *That* beast
required some of the worst looking stuff ever:  no frame buffer, so you
had to draw the picture on the screen each frame, and do any computations
during the horizontal and/or vertical retrace time (and of course, count
the instructions to be sure you didn't miss); tiny ROM's in the game
cartridges; 256 *bytes* of RAM; etc. etc.  In those days "porting" a
game actually meant "write a new program that plays pretty much the same
and has vaugely similar graphics."  I'm glad to hear the hardware has
improved, and the bad old days are drifting away (not that the Nintendo
is exactly a piece of cake from all I hear).

--
Bron Campbell Nelson
bron@sgi.com  or possibly  ..!ames!sgi!bron
These statements are my own, not those of Silicon Graphics.