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Call me perverse, but I love the archaeological side of dealing with legacy software too. You start off with code that makes no sense at all, and gradually as y
by petewarden 17y ago
Call me perverse, but I love the archaeological side of dealing with legacy software too. You start off with code that makes no sense at all, and gradually as you brush away soil from the pot shards, a story emerges. Working on porting Diablo to the PS1, there were tiny bits of inline assembler scattered everywhere. Eventually the light dawned: the original programmers had been struggling to understand C's signed/unsigned integer conversions so they fell back to the x86 instructions they were more familiar with.
- DLWormwood 17y agoWorking on porting Diablo to the PS1, there were tiny bits of inline assembler scattered everywhere. Eventually the light dawned: the original programmers had been struggling to understand C's signed/unsigned integer conversions so they fell back to the x86 instructions they were more familiar with. Dang, is that telling. Both shipped Diablo games have been know to be rife with security related bugs, and that kind of coding artifact gives a good indication of the quality of the programmers at Blizzard North it seems...
- petewarden 17y agoAs my lead reminded me at the time when I made a snide comment about their quality: "We're sitting here porting it for peanuts, while they're busy counting their royalties" Much as I prize technical quality, that lesson stuck with me.
- Oxryly 17y agoBlizzard didn't pay out much in royalties in those days. Now Diablo 2 was a different matter...