So yes, it was the norm back then. My second job (1998), was working on a team that was going to do some software for Intel for the upcoming back then Katmai processor (Pentium I was it). It had all the new fancy SIMD instructions. The software was supposed to be something like media composer - you slap images, rotate them, etc all in realtime using software rendering (GPUs were still relatively expensive).
I wrote a bilinear and bicubic texture mapper with marching squares for transparent areas. It was all in assembly, and I spent lots of time optimizing it. Back then we used Intel's VTune, and it was super-precise (for the processors back then) - how they are going to pipeline, how much (supposedly) instructions cycles would take, waits, etc. That helped a lot!
But the real lesson was, that me and my manager - both claiming to be super good at assembly (after our recent achievements), rewrote the sphere mapping code for a game another team was writting in assembly, but alas our assembly (but no katmai instructions) code was slower than what the compiler did ;) - TBH, if we did proper mipmapping and texture swizzling we would've fared both ways, but hey, demo coders were not always to be found so they had to rely on regular programmers like us!
flipcode keeps a lot of good articles, with lots of good assembly for that - https://www.flipcode.com/archives/articles.shtml - there were even better materials from earlier years, but can't find them.
Turbo/Borland Pascal were so awesome, because they allowed for very easy of inline assembly use (somehow) than C/C++ - though you had to know which registers you can touch or not.
This was back in the Pentium 4 era, where there were deep pipelines and oddities like some simple ALU instructions (ADD, SUB, etc.) taking 0.5 cycles(!), while others (ADC, SHR) took 4 cycles IIRC.
is there a tool that could profile/predict ahead of time, so that one does not attempt to hand write assembly before knowing for sure it will beat the compiled version?
Shifts were bad however, I think they left out the barrel shifter for some ungodly reason.
Edit: Looking it up you might have worked on a larger amount of games than I thought. Very awesome nonetheless. https://www.mobygames.com/game/company:99/from:1998/platform...
I missed that other game forums of similar vintage are now gone.
The way to being able to do Assembly in Borland products, and to lesser extent on VC++, was great.
I always feel like vomiting when looking at the mess UNIX compilers have come up for it, instead of inferring how registers are being used, and the whole string concatenation stuff.
Imagine reading this as a layman
It was written in the same C / inline assembly style. Unfortunately seemed to me like the final ASM didn't quite do the same thing as the original C.
How many freeform interactions like this did we lose because of the Internet's illusion of being connected?
Of course, the (massive) counterpoint is that you get to talk to way fewer people, particularly if they're more than half an hour traveling away. Quantity versus quality, but by having a lot of quantity through more diverse online interactions, you can find the conversations that have a lot of quality for you (overlapping fields of work, hobbies, or just a personality match).
Which is better? Probably something in the middle, where you hang out in chat rooms but are also conscious of the advantages of arranging to meet up. I do find it inspirational (too strong a word, but you get the idea) to hear of other times or cultures where things are done differently
People may say that Discord and similar will compensate, greatly, as the number of interactions can grow a lot. On the other hand, I don't think the experience is comparable to fully focusing on the person you're eating in person with.
Are Discord discussions indexed by any public search engines? What about communities that are invite-only (without much actual reason to be so)? What about community admins who decide to take their whole thing down, communities that break site-wide rules and get removed by site admins, etc? Does Discord Inc. make any commitments towards publishing discussions that have archival/historical value?
How much knowledge is already irrecoverably stuck in Slack's bit bucket, as people flocked away to the next walled-garden chat app?
C'mon dude. The opportunity for people to talk to one another about this stuff is unimaginably better than it was back then. Like, here we are, right now, me telling you you're full of shit. What are the chances of us being able to do that in 1999?
(I'm sorry to be mean, but I remember 1999 very well and it was much harder to get good information about things, and discuss things with others interested in the same topics, than it is today. And it was already markedly better then than it was even 5 years prior to that!)
I had plenty of online conversations on Usenet, IRC and email with guys like Abrash and Jez San etc. It was a much smaller community back then and there was no gatekeeping -- everyone's contact info was out there and inbox zero was still achievable.
The challenge of course is finding your way there. They're not exactly discoverable, and unlike with a job, it's usually through some pretty odd connections that you end up there.
Wow that's a chunky improvement over an already fast lang
For scalar code, it was more that the CPUs got better, as out-of-order execution starting with the Pentium Pro made instruction scheduling less important. The original Pentium CPU was an in-order design with two pipes where the second V pipe had significant restrictions, which was harder for compilers to deal with than the PPro/PII and its decoding pattern.
I have seen applications for MS-DOS, effectively using C as a Macro Assembler, only the data structures and high level logic was C as if Macro Assembler macros.
> The general argument is that if you know you are going to need to release a patch, then you shouldn't be shipping the game in the first place.
https://liquipedia.net/ageofempires/Nili%27s_Apartment_Cup/5
Not sure why they do this, but this even leaves all code as RWX (readable, writable and executable) which is highly insecure.
Not sure if all was true but very fascinating. I think there is a certain character in programmers who went through the fire and storm by writing softwares in assembly language for non trivial CPUs (like Pentium and up) that is unique.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2kdKB18c7I&t=332s
We were just coming out of the age of assembler. The background blitting is all assembler, but the characters are Direct3D. When I put the 3D engine in there it was a 3D software renderer I had written when I was 13 in C++ and x86 and I just pasted it into the game engine, but I think we took the software renderer out and just used Direct3D's renderer. GPUs were just coming onto the market, and I think the hope was that it would get a boost from a GPU, although I don't remember ever testing it on one. (I do remember going to gaming expos and the card manufacturers would just hand out GPUs to every dev that went to their booths...)
AMA.
OOO maybe this is my chance to figure out why the newest "definitive addition" runs so much worse in Wine.
Fun little format to mess with if you find the docs for it - surprisingly not that difficult to implement (there used to be a wiki with the spec on it, might be gone now?)
