[maire]

This article brought back so many memories!

My first job out of college was writing z80 assembly language at Cromemco. Later we ported everything to the 68000. We didn't write anything in a higher level language because it was too slow. In fact the entire CDOS and Cromix OSs were written by a single person. He originally wrote everything in c - but when he ran it was so slow. He then rewrote everything directly in z80 assembly language and kept the c code as comments. Raw c code were the only comments in the code.

I wrote the graphics drivers for screen and printer and a wysiwyg word processor. There were no floating point processors. All math was in the registers (as stated in the article. You can still render a lot of graphics by converting your renderer to additions and multiplication by 2 (register shift left and right). I was happy to find years later that code that I derived to render circles and arcs using only 1 bit step and multiplication by 2 was also derived by someone else and published in graphics books. You live within limitations when that is your only option.