4 ms·
I didn't know that GB consoles didn't have a flat memory model. That was horrible to program with x86/DOS and must have sucked even more on a tiny hand-held.
by gcv 13y ago
I didn't know that GB consoles didn't have a flat memory model. That was horrible to program with x86/DOS and must have sucked even more on a tiny hand-held.
- pdw 13y agox86/DOS actually was much nicer than most consoles, as it had a 20 bit address space. All memory in the machine could be addressed, even if you had to juggle NEAR and FAR pointers. The 8/16-bit consoles could only address 64k, which was to be used for program, data, VRAM and memory-mapped I/O. So you were forced to partition your code and data in 8k or 16k banks and manually swap them in and out. If bank 1 was swapped in, there was no way to access bank 2...
- g-rex 13y agoThe NES had 32K addressable RAM...while some behemoths like Castlevania 3 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castlevania_III:_Dracula%27s_Curse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castlevania_III:_Dracula%27s_Cu...) had 256K of program code to fit in that little box. Every game company solved this problem differently, it seems: http://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/Mapper http://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/Mapper