Like no one who wrote any code back in the 80s or 90s even for a homebrew game was skipping this stuff, it was in almost every book and tutorial. Stuff like bit shifting was extremely common and a lot of games would have had design choices that were informed by coding challenges. Lots and lots of code had data structures aligned on byte/word boundaries or had data massaged to fit into the limits of hardware in order to make reads happen in a certain # of cycles, etc.. certainly almost all console games had lots and lots of fascinating design choices like this.
This game may have been exceptionally well optimized but it feels like if the original code is not in the public domain these weren't the best examples.
When he started writing about their being a clean sheet re-implementation I thought there was going to be a benchmark comparison of the modern rewrite vs the original on old hardware or something, that would have been interesting.
Thankfully or not I'm just barely young enough that I never had to write anything professional in assembly, though if I had gone into games maybe I would have.
No comments yet.
