3 ms·
Are devs somehow cheating at these games made for retro consoles? They look so much nicer than games made during the console's era.
by pupppet 5y ago
Are devs somehow cheating at these games made for retro consoles? They look so much nicer than games made during the console's era.
- nigerian1981 5y agoI believe this requires the RAM expansion unit
- rasz 5y agowhich has DMA capability http://www.zimmers.net/anonftp/pub/cbm/documents/chipdata/programming.reu http://www.zimmers.net/anonftp/pub/cbm/documents/chipdata/pr... 1) Transfer a block of data from main memory to expansion memory 2) Transfer a block of data from expansion memory to main memory 3) Exchange a block of main memory with a block of expansion 4) Verify a block of main memory with a block of expansion memory copy is ~1MB/s compared to manual CPU speed of <120KB/s
- beschizza 5y agoNo, but it requires a RAM expansion that was not very affordable in the 80s, costing more than the c64 itself. Compare to Amstrad CPC Sonic, for a similar 8-bit machine—but only the final and most expensive models.
- detaro 5y agoThe hardcore communities today have a few decades extra experience and time to find tricks, that does help with many retro machines.
- glhaynes 5y agoI have to imagine the development process is a lot better, too. Compile with your 3 GHz processor, launch into it in your emulator… quick feedback loop. (Or maybe this kind of development is still done on the real hardware?)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- white-flame 5y agoREU is a bit of a cheat, and for some releases people are using cartridges with far higher capacities than ever sold back in the day. Cross-platform tools and emulation are also huge dev speedups. But a big thing is that back then, games were often made on a timescale of months, and with a budget. Hobbyist dev has no limits to how much time they want to sink into doing something properly. Ideas & techniques have had many years/decades to percolate into existence.