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Having written games back in that time, I can at least tell you why I wrote my own VM: You get a custom language/compiler, which makes iteration time significan
by groby_b 10y ago
Having written games back in that time, I can at least tell you why I wrote my own VM: You get a custom language/compiler, which makes iteration time significantly faster than recompiling your game yet again, for yet another tiny tweak.
Or, worse, writing every bit of your game in assembly. (Worse in the sense of time consumed. In the sense of fun had, the VM approach takes some of that away ;)
- ryiron 10y agoThis is the impression I get from reversing it: the virtual machine mostly assists quickly porting to other platforms. I previously reversed another game engine called Comprehend (for 1980s text/graphical adventure games) which also had a VM. I ended up talking with one of the original developers, who said that portability was a major reason. Their company wrote the original Apple 2 implementation, and then contracted development for the other platforms out, so they just provided specs for the VM. The Lost Vikings development may have been similar. In the Lost Vikings the VM implementation was almost certainly written in assembler. There are various tricks used in the binary which I don't think compilers of the day were capable of. The other parts of the game also appear to have probably been written in assembler, which I think is interesting since it was developed quite late in the DOS era.