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> Once you understand a system – deeply understand – it can do things that its designers never thought possible. I often wonder to what degree that is possible
by avian 6y ago
> Once you understand a system – deeply understand – it can do things that its designers never thought possible.
I often wonder to what degree that is possible in modern computers. Their complexity so hugely beyond that of old 8-bit micros that I doubt a single person could completely understand it. I mean to the level it’s possible to understand a BBC micro - what every CPU cycle does, what function every gate in the video output performs, etc.
A lot of the improvements listed are due to understanding very minute details of the operation, like timing CPU exactly with the video output, changing palettes and sprites on the fly, racing the CRT beam, etc. With a reasonably modern CPU you can’t even reliably tell in advance how many cycles a simple instruction will take.
- bobthepanda 6y agoEven if you could there are endless permutations of CPU, GPU, and whatnot that you couldn't possibly optimize for all of them. Coupled with the fact that an obvious way to boost profits of a game is to design it to be easily portable across some combination of PC and various consoles, and why would you hyper-optimize a game for hardware? We're in a vastly different world than BBC Micro or the Sega Genesis, where a game targeting multiple platforms is now pretty normal, and if it's not it's usually for business reasons rather than hardware incompatibility. And ports in those days were often from-the-ground rewrites, which I would probably hazard is not true today of most of them.