3 ms·
This reminds me of the good old homecomputer days, where a similar effect could be observed regularly - but back then it was completely a side effect and uninte
by weinzierl 4y ago
This reminds me of the good old homecomputer days, where a similar effect could be observed regularly - but back then it was completely a side effect and unintentional.
Back in the day memory was very limited. CPU was slow too, but I'd even say memory was the main limitation. So, programs, and games in particular, used every single byte of the RAM. This of course left the crackers, who wanted to add their intros to the games, with a problem.
The solution was to compress the game to make room for the intro. After decompression it would still fill the available RAM 100%, so where to put the decompressor? You'd put it and ran it in the video RAM, which wasn't needed during decompression. It would be overwritten when the game started, but then the decompressor wasn't needed anymore. The only side effect was that you literally could see the decompressor run on your screen.
- xyzal 4y agoAha! I wondered what those colorful stripes while launching Amiga games were. Thanks!
- quincunx 4y agoThe colorful stripes are more likely the decompression routine hammering dff180 (the background color) as a "busy signal" for the user. The Amiga has "chip RAM", which on many unexpanded machines is also the only type of RAM; there are no pre-reserved regions in chip ram; everything (code,data,framebuffers) can be anywhere the programmer wants. I think OP is (probably?) referring to 8-bit C64 era technology, where framebuffers/video ram are at a fixed location in memory?