| They used very low level programming and access to machine low level interfaces. You could do the same thing today but spend at least 4-5 more time developing your software. For example, I was a kid and used to fill the screen using Look up tables fo colors, you had access to the frame buffer and do things like displace the elements in the table, as a cycle, the entire image will change giving a movement impression. The work was done by the electronics of the framebuffer. In the past the people that had access to real terminals did the same, change the information of the text on screen and the hardware will render it beautifully(even prettier that today's terminals). But those terminals were super expensive and proprietary(tens of thousands of dollars). Today shells are standardized, free and open source(and usually use much ugly fonts)with fonts from all over the world(terminals have very limited character sets). Also game consoles did the same. The hardware did draw tiles that were previously drawn. You told the console what tiles to draw and the hardware did most of the work. >Is it possible to recreate this level of efficiency on modern systems? Of course you just need to pay the price: Development is so slow and painful. Low level programming is prone to very hard to find bugs. Programming things like FPGAs or GPUs is hell in life. You work super hard, you get little reward. |