3 ms·

If you only had 4K of ROM and 128 bytes of RAM you’d find a way. That’s what we all did back then. This isn’t to diminish Atari’s achievement (this stuff was su

If you only had 4K of ROM and 128 bytes of RAM you’d find a way. That’s what we all did back then. This isn’t to diminish Atari’s achievement (this stuff was super hard and also super satisfying), it’s just to say that doing these kinds of tricks was what you did when you wanted to create something state of the art with few resources. Here’s a silly example: https://blog.jgc.org/2022/11/primality-testing-on-commodore-p50.html https://blog.jgc.org/2022/11/primality-testing-on-commodore-...

falcor84 3y ago
> That's what we all did back then. I think you might be "suffering" from the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Even if I accept that "all" the coders at that time were able to do this, that would just mean that the pool of people who were capable coders then is vastly more skilled than the typical coder these days.
- jgrahamc 3y ago
  Anyone who wanted to push the limits of hardware at that time had to do tricks like this. There just wasn't any other choice. Sure, there were plenty of programmers back then who weren't capable. But it's not magic, it's careful thinking and hard work.
- ddingus 3y ago
  Well, for some perspective tricks of the kind being discussed here were frequently published in magazines found in the local grocery store! Getting an extra sprite on a horizontal line, or putting more colors on the screen, various math tricks, how to pack multiple flags into a byte, and many other discussions were common. When others say, "we had to", they are in part, communicating how thinking was done. The lower level details were often published down to the bits in registers and doing even simple things took one into tricks land more often than we may realize today. Now that said, the VCS (2600) is a difficult machine. But, it was not above an average programmer to be successful as much as it did demand one go through the careful steps and thinking as told today. In fact, just doing what the machine was designed for; namely, "Combat" required that thinking. I think you may be getting hung up on scope and scale. What I mean is the field was not as broad in some ways, and most everyone was a lot closer to the hardware than we mostly are today too. Kids were jumping onto micros and literally figuring it out with the info they could glean from one another, manuals shipped with the machines (maybe), magazines and the like were the basic communications happening daily. I was one of those kids and in my peer group it was expected to understand the hardware well enough to follow code. So yeah, overall it was just different in ways that may well prove confusing today, depending on what any of us may have chosen as our start point.
kstrauser 3y ago
That's perpetually true. "You're trying to do machine learning on a desktop PC?" "Hmmm, I wonder if we could use the GPU as a math engine?" But holy cow, that chess game really pushed the limits! (A side note I like to bring up occasionally: my first "computer" was "Atari BASIC" on my 2600. It had 63 bytes of RAM, I think. That didn't last long until my parents brought home a TS1000 with a luxurious 1KB of RAM.)
- jgrahamc 3y ago
  Yes. I was thinking about that after my comment. All the folks doing machine learning optimizations, weird stuff with AVX2, etc. are the same folks who would have been stuffing chess in 4K of ROM and 128 bytes of RAM. In 1985, me and another boy from school wrote a whole reliable network transport and stuffed it into unused memory on a Research Machines 480Z. We had 128 bytes for the receive buffer so in order to do anything we'd literally ship a packet across the network containing machine code and the stub code would CALL the receive buffer to perform tasks. Executable packets!
  - kstrauser 3y ago
    I could listen to stories like this all day long.
    - jgrahamc 3y ago
      Enjoy: https://blog.jgc.org/2013/05/from-ground-up.html https://blog.jgc.org/2013/05/from-ground-up.html
      - kstrauser 3y ago
        How could you do this to me on a work day?
        kirubakaran 3y ago
        Call in sick. I faked a stomach ache when my parents got me Apple //c

falcor84 3y ago

> That's what we all did back then. I think you might be "suffering" from the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Even if I accept that "all" the coders at that time were able to do this, that would just mean that the pool of people who were capable coders then is vastly more skilled than the typical coder these days.

jgrahamc 3y ago
Anyone who wanted to push the limits of hardware at that time had to do tricks like this. There just wasn't any other choice. Sure, there were plenty of programmers back then who weren't capable. But it's not magic, it's careful thinking and hard work.
ddingus 3y ago
Well, for some perspective tricks of the kind being discussed here were frequently published in magazines found in the local grocery store! Getting an extra sprite on a horizontal line, or putting more colors on the screen, various math tricks, how to pack multiple flags into a byte, and many other discussions were common. When others say, "we had to", they are in part, communicating how thinking was done. The lower level details were often published down to the bits in registers and doing even simple things took one into tricks land more often than we may realize today. Now that said, the VCS (2600) is a difficult machine. But, it was not above an average programmer to be successful as much as it did demand one go through the careful steps and thinking as told today. In fact, just doing what the machine was designed for; namely, "Combat" required that thinking. I think you may be getting hung up on scope and scale. What I mean is the field was not as broad in some ways, and most everyone was a lot closer to the hardware than we mostly are today too. Kids were jumping onto micros and literally figuring it out with the info they could glean from one another, manuals shipped with the machines (maybe), magazines and the like were the basic communications happening daily. I was one of those kids and in my peer group it was expected to understand the hardware well enough to follow code. So yeah, overall it was just different in ways that may well prove confusing today, depending on what any of us may have chosen as our start point.

kstrauser 3y ago

That's perpetually true. "You're trying to do machine learning on a desktop PC?" "Hmmm, I wonder if we could use the GPU as a math engine?" But holy cow, that chess game really pushed the limits! (A side note I like to bring up occasionally: my first "computer" was "Atari BASIC" on my 2600. It had 63 bytes of RAM, I think. That didn't last long until my parents brought home a TS1000 with a luxurious 1KB of RAM.)

jgrahamc 3y ago
Yes. I was thinking about that after my comment. All the folks doing machine learning optimizations, weird stuff with AVX2, etc. are the same folks who would have been stuffing chess in 4K of ROM and 128 bytes of RAM. In 1985, me and another boy from school wrote a whole reliable network transport and stuffed it into unused memory on a Research Machines 480Z. We had 128 bytes for the receive buffer so in order to do anything we'd literally ship a packet across the network containing machine code and the stub code would CALL the receive buffer to perform tasks. Executable packets!
- kstrauser 3y ago
  I could listen to stories like this all day long.
  - jgrahamc 3y ago
    Enjoy: https://blog.jgc.org/2013/05/from-ground-up.html https://blog.jgc.org/2013/05/from-ground-up.html
    - kstrauser 3y ago
      How could you do this to me on a work day?
      - kirubakaran 3y ago
        Call in sick. I faked a stomach ache when my parents got me Apple //c