Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!iuvax!bobmon
From: bobmon@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (RAMontante)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Assembly or ....ok
Message-ID: <15894@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu>
Date: 18 Dec 88 19:13:16 GMT
Reply-To: bobmon@iuvax.UUCP (RAMontante)
Organization: malkaryotic
Lines: 27

Thanks, Doug Gwyn, for having some memory...
-My, how quickly we forget.  SubLOGIC developed their initial products,
-including Flight Simulator, exclusively for the Apple II.  The original
-Flight Simulator used monchrome line graphics; it was a big hit.
-
-I'm waiting for an Apple IIGS version.  Because SubLOGIC built
-everything the hard way (not only CPU-specific assembly code, but
-also their own disk file system), it's taking them longer than it
-would have to produce a new port like that.
-
-The real question is, how much of that was really necessary?
-I haven't tried to figure out their particular methods, but I know
-of ways to do much of what is needed for Flight Simulator in C,
-and I know of spiffier flight simulators on real graphics systems
-that are coded entirely in C.

Did the Apple II, or II+, have a reasonably optimizing C compiler back
then?  I doubt it; I remember them promoting Pascal pretty hard.  I
know my C-64 didn't have any C compiler at all initially, while it did
have FSII.  The extant operating systems didn't offer much help, either
-- I remember lots of custom drivers for the C-64 disk drive, because
the monitor ROM wanted to do bit-serial disk IO at 300bps (with 3 or 4
pointless handshaking lines).

Do those real graphics systems use 1MHz 8-bit cpus with 48K of memory?
Or 192K mass storage with "start drive motor" signals?  (Or even
4.77MHz cpus, with segmented memory in 64K chunks?)