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by RodgerTheGreat 4162 days ago
The surplus of resources on modern PCs makes it possible to make development tools which would have been positively indulgent by the standards of their day- sophisticated debuggers, the ability to pause, freeze and replay execution while inspecting every byte of memory at will, fancy languages that remove tedium, etc.

For my part I made a pretty nice high-level assembler and IDE for the venerable Chip8: http://octo-ide.com
2 comments
fit2rule 4162 days ago
Wow, looks really useful! Its amazing to think how far we've come, and yet return to these limited machines and push them as far as possible. Something we have to keep future generations of developers enlightened about, I think.
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kabdib 4162 days ago
Yeah, I used to wait 45 minutes for our overloaded department minicomputer to assemble my cartridge, then download it at 9600 baud (only 16K, so not too bad). At night the assembly times took a few minutes.

On a modern PC, this takes seconds; my fingers and brain are the bottleneck, which is how it should be.

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