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Honest question: Why is this kind of retro programming at all attractive to younger people who didn’t grow up with that hardware? For people like me, it’s clea

Honest question: Why is this kind of retro programming at all attractive to younger people who didn’t grow up with that hardware? For people like me, it’s clearly childhood nostalgia. But to be honest, 8-bit programming was so painful that people couldn’t wait to get rid of those limitations back then. (I tend to think the 16-bit era was the sweet spot in terms of capabilities vs. complexity.)

bodge5000 4y ago
Creative limitations would be a big reason. I'm sure someone else can explain it better, but being forced into a far smaller scope than you'd usually work in makes you have to consider the impact of every small thing. Its not just a programming thing, people do the same with music, art, any medium. Its also quite nice as it acts as a levelling of the playing field. The limitations of modern tech are far outside the reach of most solo-devs, but put 100 devs on it, and you could reach it (and therefore create something more technically impressive). With those limitations on, a solo dev can far more conceivably create something technically impressive. Unless it has real world consequences (eg you can export to a gameboy ROM or something), I don't really care if its based on an actual retro system or a fantasy one, they achieve those same results.
- deaddabe 4y ago
  Having to program down to the bit (not byte) sparks a little something for me. I feel proudness in the craft, even if this is a bit (pun!) far frow nowadays’s constraints. I just learned the hex decades (1, 16, 256, 4k, 64k, 1M, 16M, 256M, 4G…) and now if I need to generate a 1M empty file I know that `head /dev/zero -c $((0x100000)) > 1M.bin` would do without having to multiply 1024 three times. This kind of little things. :) Nevertheless, it can still be useful if you write Linux device drivers or some other low-level tasks. Microcontroller programming, too, but without having to buy them in the first place (MCU shortage…).
michaelgrafl 4y ago
I find programming where you get to know exactly what each instruction does is a very satisfying feeling. Makes me feel empowered, self-sufficient, excited, etc. A bit like bootstrapping a village out of primitive resources in Minecraft.
rahen 4y ago
Mystery and craftsmanship. It's the same feeling as restoring an old car and being captivated with some very simple, ingenious and alien mechanics. Same with computers, the older it gets the more interesting it becomes, down to deciphering some 1947-1948 machine code running on the ENIAC. https://eniacinaction.com/the-articles/3-los-alamos-bets-on-eniac-nuclear-monte-carlo-simulations-1947-8/ https://eniacinaction.com/the-articles/3-los-alamos-bets-on-...
ciroduran 4y ago
Creativity flourishes with the right restrictions. In this case, the graphics and sound limitations. Also, just because you're targeting old platforms doesn't mean you need to use old platform's tools. Modern tools make it so much easier to develop on these old platforms, check out this talk about coding in C++17 for the Commodore 64 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBkNBP00wJE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBkNBP00wJE
asiekierka 4y ago
For me personally, there's a few reasons: 1. It's a kind of code golf - or rather, it's about seeing how much one can squeeze out of a highly limited and fixed platform. Writing this, I think of things like Mahoney's Cubase64 ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTGkf21UpJ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTGkf21UpJ8 ), which uses a combination of skilled coding and creative (mis)use of hardware functionality to perform real-time effects on sampled audio data on the Commodore 64. As the demonstration itself states: "You need 32-bit, 2000MHz, 1GB at least; what if... 8-bit, 1MHz, 64KB is enough?". 2. Creating a game which can stand its own to the platform's contemporaries on an 8-bit ecosystem can be reasonably achieved by a bedroom coder in their spare time. To do so for modern consoles or machines, one typically needs a higher budget and multiple people. For this point alone, though, there are arguably easier ways to accomplish this. PICO-8, the herald of the "fantasy computer" phenomenon, created a system inspired by 8-bit limitations in graphics and sound, but offering a modified Lua interpreter in place of coding assembly by hand, in an attempt to balance the stack more towards creativity and away from complexity. (And, of course, nobody is stopping anyone from simply making a retro-styled game with modern tools. Many indie games do exacly that. There's two separate "notable" Game Boy jams on Itch.io - one enforces games actually targetting the real platform, the other cares more about matching the look/feel.) 3. The ability to reason about every component of the system down to bare metal is a welcome retreat from writing complex, object-oriented code running on top of stacks on top of libraries on top of runtimes... In the end, it's a novelty which tickles a particular part of my brain, I suppose. So long as I enjoy it...
VikingCoder 4y ago
The software stack is enormously deep. If you want to make a "real" game now, you do it in an engine, adding your code to a framework on top of libraries on top of an operating system, on top of drivers, on top of bios... You're just so far removed from anything tangible. Tinkering with an 8-bit (or a virtual 8-bit) system feels much more tangible. Visceral. And yes, nostalgia.
lynndotpy 4y ago
For the same reason we write haikus, or 280-character long messages!
aa-jv 4y ago
The 10-liner BASIC competition, for example, can show you an answer: its fun, its powerful, and .. we seem to have lost something in the rush for the next upgrade. https://gkanold.wixsite.com/homeputerium/rules2021 https://gkanold.wixsite.com/homeputerium/rules2021 The last two years' winners were both astonishing in completeness and functionality - in 10 lines, a LUNAR LANDER clone .. and then, a year later in another 10 lines of code, a DUNGEON CRAWLER. When you go backwards and see how things were, you also see what we've lost.

bodge5000 4y ago

Creative limitations would be a big reason. I'm sure someone else can explain it better, but being forced into a far smaller scope than you'd usually work in makes you have to consider the impact of every small thing. Its not just a programming thing, people do the same with music, art, any medium. Its also quite nice as it acts as a levelling of the playing field. The limitations of modern tech are far outside the reach of most solo-devs, but put 100 devs on it, and you could reach it (and therefore create something more technically impressive). With those limitations on, a solo dev can far more conceivably create something technically impressive. Unless it has real world consequences (eg you can export to a gameboy ROM or something), I don't really care if its based on an actual retro system or a fantasy one, they achieve those same results.

deaddabe 4y ago
Having to program down to the bit (not byte) sparks a little something for me. I feel proudness in the craft, even if this is a bit (pun!) far frow nowadays’s constraints. I just learned the hex decades (1, 16, 256, 4k, 64k, 1M, 16M, 256M, 4G…) and now if I need to generate a 1M empty file I know that `head /dev/zero -c $((0x100000)) > 1M.bin` would do without having to multiply 1024 three times. This kind of little things. :) Nevertheless, it can still be useful if you write Linux device drivers or some other low-level tasks. Microcontroller programming, too, but without having to buy them in the first place (MCU shortage…).

michaelgrafl 4y ago

I find programming where you get to know exactly what each instruction does is a very satisfying feeling. Makes me feel empowered, self-sufficient, excited, etc. A bit like bootstrapping a village out of primitive resources in Minecraft.

rahen 4y ago

Mystery and craftsmanship. It's the same feeling as restoring an old car and being captivated with some very simple, ingenious and alien mechanics. Same with computers, the older it gets the more interesting it becomes, down to deciphering some 1947-1948 machine code running on the ENIAC. https://eniacinaction.com/the-articles/3-los-alamos-bets-on-eniac-nuclear-monte-carlo-simulations-1947-8/ https://eniacinaction.com/the-articles/3-los-alamos-bets-on-...

ciroduran 4y ago

Creativity flourishes with the right restrictions. In this case, the graphics and sound limitations. Also, just because you're targeting old platforms doesn't mean you need to use old platform's tools. Modern tools make it so much easier to develop on these old platforms, check out this talk about coding in C++17 for the Commodore 64 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBkNBP00wJE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBkNBP00wJE

asiekierka 4y ago

For me personally, there's a few reasons: 1. It's a kind of code golf - or rather, it's about seeing how much one can squeeze out of a highly limited and fixed platform. Writing this, I think of things like Mahoney's Cubase64 ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTGkf21UpJ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTGkf21UpJ8 ), which uses a combination of skilled coding and creative (mis)use of hardware functionality to perform real-time effects on sampled audio data on the Commodore 64. As the demonstration itself states: "You need 32-bit, 2000MHz, 1GB at least; what if... 8-bit, 1MHz, 64KB is enough?". 2. Creating a game which can stand its own to the platform's contemporaries on an 8-bit ecosystem can be reasonably achieved by a bedroom coder in their spare time. To do so for modern consoles or machines, one typically needs a higher budget and multiple people. For this point alone, though, there are arguably easier ways to accomplish this. PICO-8, the herald of the "fantasy computer" phenomenon, created a system inspired by 8-bit limitations in graphics and sound, but offering a modified Lua interpreter in place of coding assembly by hand, in an attempt to balance the stack more towards creativity and away from complexity. (And, of course, nobody is stopping anyone from simply making a retro-styled game with modern tools. Many indie games do exacly that. There's two separate "notable" Game Boy jams on Itch.io - one enforces games actually targetting the real platform, the other cares more about matching the look/feel.) 3. The ability to reason about every component of the system down to bare metal is a welcome retreat from writing complex, object-oriented code running on top of stacks on top of libraries on top of runtimes... In the end, it's a novelty which tickles a particular part of my brain, I suppose. So long as I enjoy it...

VikingCoder 4y ago

The software stack is enormously deep. If you want to make a "real" game now, you do it in an engine, adding your code to a framework on top of libraries on top of an operating system, on top of drivers, on top of bios... You're just so far removed from anything tangible. Tinkering with an 8-bit (or a virtual 8-bit) system feels much more tangible. Visceral. And yes, nostalgia.

lynndotpy 4y ago

For the same reason we write haikus, or 280-character long messages!

aa-jv 4y ago

The 10-liner BASIC competition, for example, can show you an answer: its fun, its powerful, and .. we seem to have lost something in the rush for the next upgrade. https://gkanold.wixsite.com/homeputerium/rules2021 https://gkanold.wixsite.com/homeputerium/rules2021 The last two years' winners were both astonishing in completeness and functionality - in 10 lines, a LUNAR LANDER clone .. and then, a year later in another 10 lines of code, a DUNGEON CRAWLER. When you go backwards and see how things were, you also see what we've lost.