4 ms·
It's also interesting to look at other architectures at the time to get an idea of how fiendish a problem this is. At this time, Commodore, Nintendo, and some
by pragma_x 1y ago
It's also interesting to look at other architectures at the time to get an idea of how fiendish a problem this is. At this time, Commodore, Nintendo, and some others, had dedicated silicon for video rendering. This frees the CPU from having to generate a video signal directly, using a fraction of those cycles to talk to the video subsystem instead. The major drawback with a video chip of some kind is of course cost (custom fabrication, part count), which clearly the Macintosh team was trying to keep as low as possible.
- MBCook 1y agoPlus those weren’t raw bitmaps but tile based to help keep memory and bandwidth costs down.
- s800 1y agoNot sure we're thinking the same way, but the C64 and Atari had bitmap modes, not just tile or character modes.
- jnaina 1y agoBoth the key 8-bit contenders of yore, Atari 8-bit series and Commodore 64 custom graphics chips (Antic and Vic-II) “stole” cycles from the 6502 (or 6510 in the case of C64) did "cycle stealing", when it needed to access memory. I remember writing a cpu intensive code on the Atari and using video blanking to speed up the code.
- nradov 1y agoAnd yet despite the lower parts count the Macintosh was more expensive than competing products from Commodore and Atari that had dedicated silicon for video rendering. I guess Apple must have had huge gross margins on hardware sales given how little was in the box.
- IAmBroom 1y agoPlus ça change...