31–40 of 254 posts
I keep hoping for a book with annotated (including lisp) source... Please please!!
Pretty amazing what kind of skills game development required back then. One side of me is happy that we have all these great tools today, the other is sad because you hardly use this low level stuff in todays software development world. We are solving different problems today, but the level of software development skills required for a game that today could be done by a single person in Unity in a few weeks is quite…
Of course there exist very complex components in the category of microcontrollers, some of them even offer enough resources to run Linux, but if you stick to the $1-$5 range the specs are very limited.
Here are two examples, the first one costs around $3 and the second one is less than $1.
http://www.ti.com/product/tms320f28027 http://www.atmel.com/devices/attiny85.aspx
I develop on such platforms and even though there is an interesting challenge in programming these tiny processors and optimizing CPU cycles and memory usage all the time, in the long run it becomes quite strenuous because there is only low-level stuff and I miss the expressiveness and flexibility of more abstract languages.
Wow. Just wow. One can only imagine the amount of hard work and sweat that was put into making this possible. And the pride of developers when it actually worked and the game has become a success. Great story.
Pretty amazing what kind of skills game development required back then. One side of me is happy that we have all these great tools today, the other is sad because you hardly use this low level stuff in todays software development world. We are solving different problems today, but the level of software development skills required for a game that today could be done by a single person in Unity in a few weeks is quite…
Some day I will write a blog post about the tricks we have to pull off to fit all code & assets - or get animations running at 30FPS - on Pebble. Trust me when I say this: low level development is alive and well at hardware companies.
Looks like the system RAM on playstations increased by the factor of 2ˆ4 / 16x with every generation. 2MB to 32MB (PS2) to 512MB (PS3) to 8GB (PS4)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just try to code for mobile or embedded platforms. Yeah they might get bigger storage every year, but the reason why Google, Apple and Microsoft do talks about package size on their developer conferences is that size is number one reason for people to avoid installing apps, or to chose which one to remove. Also given how the app life cycle works on mobile platforms, big apps are being killed all the time they go into…
That's not really the same though. You are not really limited by RAM in most cases, also you are not limited by slow storage media like CD/DVDs as it was/is with most of the consoles. The reality is, hardly anyone on mobile writes their own engines (a part from some of the big players) because it's just too much of an investment and Unity (or one of the other popular engines) is well optimized and allows much faster…
All iOS devices except the iPad Air 2 have less than 2GB RAM (most 512 MB). Android 1-4 devices have often less than 1GB RAM. It's common that only 1-3 apps can stay in RAM depending on the platform and the apps memory usage (foreground apps, not background services).
Applications/games in the Win95/PS1/N64 era were coded a lot more efficient. Back than, a common Win95a PC had 4-8MB RAM, (highend was 32MB).
Pretty amazing what kind of skills game development required back then. One side of me is happy that we have all these great tools today, the other is sad because you hardly use this low level stuff in todays software development world. We are solving different problems today, but the level of software development skills required for a game that today could be done by a single person in Unity in a few weeks is quite…
Just try to code for mobile or embedded platforms. Yeah they might get bigger storage every year, but the reason why Google, Apple and Microsoft do talks about package size on their developer conferences is that size is number one reason for people to avoid installing apps, or to chose which one to remove. Also given how the app life cycle works on mobile platforms, big apps are being killed all the time they go into…
A typical engine controller ECU in a car might have 256KB of RAM (and maybe 2-4MB of flash).
If you haven't read the "Making Crash Bandicoot" blogposts, you're in for a treat. http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/02/making-crash-ban...
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DaveBaggett/20131031/203788/M...
HN discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6654905 (with participation from the author, dmbaggett https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dmbaggett)