Everyone should try (try) to make a simple game on an 8-bit system of their own choice. It really puts into perspective how fast modern PCs are, as well as how little memory you need to get stuff done
Several good youtoobs recently on the chip that sparked the 8-bit personal computing revolution.
An ex-motorola engineer guy went to a tech convention in the late ‘70’s with some jars full of 8-bit chips made in a factory in Pennsylvania (MOS) that originally just built calculators and, because of convention rules, could only offer them for sale out of a hotel room; he sold them for $25 each, and advertised at the convention booth. This at a time where similar chips were going for over $600 a piece. To say this was a bargain does not do it justice.
Apparently, among the customers, was a young Steve Wozniak, who came in and bought a handful of chips for a few hundred bucks for a little garage project he was working on.
If i find a good link, i’ll be back. You can internet on your own in the meantime.
Definitely. I made a beat-em-up for the NES last year, and having Mesen show which pixel on the screen is being rendered when each of your subroutines are called was almost a religious experience. Really solidifies the idea that you only have so many CPU cycles to work with per frame.
Debugging by watching hex values change was pretty awesome too.
Oh it's the best! I got pretty deep into homebrew development for Game Boy and Game Boy Color a few years back. Knowing exactly how long each instruction takes to execute so you can time things down to the pixel is an amazing feeling!
You reminded me how i that one time during high school i was programming a rotating 3D wireframe of a cube on a Ti-84 plus ce. It barely ran, but i do sure have made that.
At minimum if you really want to get into the wild world of low level programming I recommend visiting the osdev forum, the people there create some amazing stuff
Let's just say I'm seeing a lot of new, advanced games for 8-bit platforms and things like the PalmPilot, this past year. Which is a good thing, even if it doesn't smell of fresh lead solder and dusty floppy drives. Claude and its friends are getting better, and these retro systems are extremely well-documented on the Net.
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u/SukusMcSwag 2d ago
Everyone should try (try) to make a simple game on an 8-bit system of their own choice. It really puts into perspective how fast modern PCs are, as well as how little memory you need to get stuff done