3 ms·
This looks very interesting! A. It's terrific to see people really dig into some of these early technical achievements while they're still fresh in our collect
by leggomylibro 9y ago
This looks very interesting!
A. It's terrific to see people really dig into some of these early technical achievements while they're still fresh in our collective memory - limitations tend to inspire creativity, and I think we all like reading about those creative solutions.
B. Modern embedded systems like Cortex-M processors can probably take some design hints from these projects which were developed on/for machines with very limited resources. I was thinking of looking into writing a simple emulator on one, maybe for the [S]NES or an early Gameboy (if anyone knows a good resource...?). It'll be super cool to get an in-depth window into how "3D" was managed without niceties like a programmable shader pipeline. The best that ARM-M chips seem to get is a dedicated memory controller for LCD interfacing, some SIMD operations, 2MB of 'bitband' memory that is rapidly addressable on a bitwise basis, and sometimes a display accelerator for single-cycle pixel operations in higher-end models.
- open_bear 9y agoI've been reading the Michael Abrash's Black Book, and it was quite eye opening, especially when working around serious limitations of the old hardware.