When I was 14 in 1986 writing Atari ST stuff I had something come to me in a dream. The ST had a notoriously slow text output system. The display was a bitmap

When I was 14 in 1986 writing Atari ST stuff I had something come to me in a dream. The ST had a notoriously slow text output system. The display was a bitmap and there was no hardware acceleration. Somebody called Darek Mihocka came out with 'Quick ST' which made the text display quicker than stock. As a newbie I wanted to beat this, so I learned 68000 assembly and did the usual optimisation - unrolling loops, precomputing bitmaps etc. I got faster than Quick ST but then he had an update which nearly doubled my speed. I did everything I could to work out what he'd done, including looking at the Motorola reference manuals, nothing came up. I was going crazy. Bear in mind these were the days when there was no middleware, it was you versus the hardware, and if they did it better it's because their code was better. So I went to bed one night and the 'move.p' opcode came to mind. I woke up and read about it - turns out this opcode took a 16 bit number and split it into 2 8bit codes and placed them 2 bytes apart. This matched the ST interleaved bitmap perfectly - I doubled my speed and beat Darek. So, yeah, a dream did actually improve my code. I do miss those days where decent code beat driver, middleware and other issues.