[nine_k]

The hardware was so limited and expensive that rather trickery paid off.

For instance, on Sinclair Spectrum the memory refresh and the keyboard matrix scanning were intimately coupled; tape I/O and screen border color circuits were also somehow coupled, which was easy to see with every tape operation.

[agumonkey]

I know, I mean the thought process when designing a program in such constraints where any aspect of a system might be a useful resource and you had almost no other choice (kinda like abrash rotated texture trick on pentium) .. it's so at odds with current processes where everything is split and isolated as much as possible.

[alisonkisk]

Computers do over 1000x as many instructions per second now.

They do more instructions per second than a whole 15min game play.

Imagine trying to coordinate all those interactions without abstractions.