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by Sharlin
3318 days ago
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On the other hand, the C64 had standard hardware without a need for abstraction layers, and the hardware was trivial to use from assembly - just put numbers into various memory addresses. Plus the HW natively supported things like sprites and sound synthesis. I guess one of the most difficult platforms for demo programming (in terms of having to write things from scratch) was PC in the DOS/Win16 era. You could get into 320x200x8bit graphics mode quite easily (the so called Mode 13h) but beyond that you were on your own. |
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Best think about standard hardware was that, if somebody wrote something faster/better than you did then their code was demonstrably better - you couldn't blame it on drivers or anything else.
I had this situation with somebody called Darek Mihocka who wrote an accelerated text function for the ST. I beat his code, he then came up with something nearly twice as fast as mine! I went crazy wondering how he did it until the 'move.p' instruction came to me, I shit you not, whilst I was asleep.
Good times, and a great way to learn how to code and more importantly what really happens on the machine underlying it.