[sofaofthedamned]

Yeah, that's true. Still remember the hardware register on the Atari ST $ff8240.

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.