On Thu, Feb 20, 2003 at 10:04:46AM -0600, Daniel P. Martin wrote: > Ever one to throw gasoline on the fire... "KIM-1, anyone?" > On Thu, 20 Feb 2003, Ferguson, Neale wrote: > > 16K!? Luxury!! You must have had the Level 2. > > -----Original Message----- > > People who never had to write on a TRS-80 with 16K of memory NEVER had to > > learn how to cram EVERY last iota of efficiency into their code.
You are all a bunch of wusses. My current favorite system is the Atari 2600. In its canonical form, the 2600 cartridge is 4K of ROM, coupled with 128 bytes of system RAM and a 1MHz 6502. This was enough to implement _Pitfall_, _Video Chess_, _Adventure_, and, of course, the text adventure version of _Fellowship of the Ring_. Oh, and did I mention the video interface? It's a one-dimensional graphics buffer. You get three horizontal pixels per machine clock. Remember the dragster in the eponymous game? That was the first use of a 48-bit sprite. See, you had an 8-bit register, which was used for one (eight-pixel-wide) player sprite; there were two of these, one for each player. There was a mode to produce these in triplicate, separated by eight pixels. So you'd have A A A. So how did you get a 48-bit-wide sprite? Why, you put the two sprites next to each other in triplicate mode: ABABAB. And then, while B was being drawn the first time (yes, counting instruction cycles is *really* important) you'd reload A. Lather, rinse, repeat. There are bankswitching techniques (used in actual carts) to map more ROM in and out of the address space, and there are people doing really neat interlacing things to get many more apparent colors and to increase the apparent resolution. FMV is right around the corner. Really. Needs a lot of ROM, though. Adam
