71–80 of 101 posts
It feels like programming used to be a much harder job in the past. You not only had to figure out the program logic, but you had to work within very tight hardware constraints. Reading articles like this, or about the Atari and how the code would double as a sprite in pac-man, or how 3D was rendered in Wolfenstein, makes me think one had to be much more clever back then.
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Do we know that the developers didn't confirm this hack with the hardware people? It could be "defined by e-mail".
You are playing semantics to try to justify it. If it's not in the official spec, it's undefined behavior.
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The best definition of "undefined behavior" is: "if some other company created a clone of this console by following the spec to the letter, but otherwise making all their own decisions... would this game run?" Of course, if you don't have cloners immediately nipping at your heels, you might end up releasing a smash hit that takes advantage of UB in a way that forces you to define the behavior as "it works however it…
It's not "best" enough to actually appear in a Nintendo spec somewhere, unfortunately.
It's always interesting how the NES cartridges had their own hardware that could expand the system's capability. Allowing for simple cartridges for simple games and more expensive cartridges for more advanced games.
The same idea extended to the SNES too if I recall, a quick dig up on Wikipedia: "The system was designed to accommodate the ongoing development of a variety of enhancement chips integrated in game cartridges to be competitive into the next generation."
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You are playing semantics to try to justify it. If it's not in the official spec, it's undefined behavior.
Does anyone actually care? This was embedded software designed to run on exactly one system, not some libc designed to run on 20 architectures ranging from 8-bit microcontrollers to VLIW supercomputers.
I hadn't put thought into how important that scroll effect is to the game, but if there was a clean wipe between scenes it would have been tremendously distracting. This technique really is essential to the feeling of immersion.
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It's not "best" enough to actually appear in a Nintendo spec somewhere, unfortunately.
I meant "best" as in "most practical for a third-party dev when deciding what behaviors to take advantage of." Defined behaviors are guaranteed to work in both 1. clone consoles that conform to the spec, and 2. future revisions of the official hardware. Undefined behaviors aren't.
What NES cartridge from 1986 can you plug into current Nintendo boxes?
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The same idea extended to the SNES too if I recall, a quick dig up on Wikipedia: "The system was designed to accommodate the ongoing development of a variety of enhancement chips integrated in game cartridges to be competitive into the next generation."
I wonder if we'll ever get back to that sort of thing... I guess with digital downloads not so much, but i really like the idea.
It feels like programming used to be a much harder job in the past. You not only had to figure out the program logic, but you had to work within very tight hardware constraints. Reading articles like this, or about the Atari and how the code would double as a sprite in pac-man, or how 3D was rendered in Wolfenstein, makes me think one had to be much more clever back then.
You still have to be clever like that today depending on what kind of problems you're working on. Which was also true back then. Not all programmers back then had to derive arcanely clever tricks to get their job done. There's also a part of it that is underappreciated, which is that sometimes the cool effect wasn't necessarily an original design goal, but instead was sometimes something that was stumbled upon one wa…
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I meant "best" as in "most practical for a third-party dev when deciding what behaviors to take advantage of." Defined behaviors are guaranteed to work in both 1. clone consoles that conform to the spec, and 2. future revisions of the official hardware. Undefined behaviors aren't.
Future revisions of the hardware can throw everything out the window regardless of what is documented for the current hardware. What NES cartridge from 1986 can you plug into current Nintendo boxes?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The same idea extended to the SNES too if I recall, a quick dig up on Wikipedia: "The system was designed to accommodate the ongoing development of a variety of enhancement chips integrated in game cartridges to be competitive into the next generation."
I wonder if we'll ever get back to that sort of thing... I guess with digital downloads not so much, but i really like the idea.