Atari 2600 Game Development 317
gjb6676 writes "An article over at ExtremeTech is covering recent game development projects on the Atari 2600. The amount of cartridge space they have to work with is a sobering thought:
'A two-word file in Word 2002, for example, requires 20 Kbytes. "That's 20 Kbytes, five times the amount of (ROM) space developers had to work with in the 2600.'"
That's ongoing development, not news (Score:5, Informative)
I think.. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I think.. (Score:2, Interesting)
> does about the 2600...
I think that this probably says more about
current software development than anything
else. These days memory is cheap and I fear
that too often not much effort is put into
making programs efficient. While it isn't
practical to squeeze every bit of space and
time out of a program, there should be some
effort. These days many progams really are
in fact inefficient hogs (for whatever reason...
lazy programmer, bloated system libraries, ???)
Re:I think.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No offense but. . (Score:5, Funny)
Granted, the OpenOffice file is merely bloated while the Word one is reminiscent of the restauraunt scene in Monty Python's The Meanting of Life.
thats microsoft.... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:thats microsoft.... (Score:2)
Err...I hate to break this to you, but Word suffers from the same bloat, custom widgets and statically linked libraries (well, for all intents and purposes, since most Office code isn't shared with other apps).
Re:thats microsoft.... (Score:2)
antidisestablishmentarionist same amount of letters. I don't think you can do an ismist.
thats would be like talking about terrorismists
Re:thats microsoft.... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Blah blah blah, 20KB my ass (Score:3, Informative)
I just typed Hello world. and saved the file using Word XP. Windows reports the filesize as 23.5 KB (24,064 bytes), with size on disk being 24.0 KB (24,576 bytes).
Now I typed Hello world. in Notepad and saved that. Windows reports the filesize as 12 bytes (12 bytes), with size on the disk being 4.00 KB (4,096 bytes).
I'd be happy to email you the files if you still aren't convinced.
Custer's Revenge (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Custer's Revenge (Score:5, Funny)
Sobering thought? (Score:5, Funny)
The trick is to exploit Moore's Law, and avoid Gates. Then technology becomes a Good Thing.
Bank switching? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:RTFA. (Score:2, Insightful)
The "only" 128 colours that the article mentions were really a hell of a lot, not just in the late '70s, but throughout most of the '80s. I believe this is one reason the console survived so long. Compare the pretty gradated sky displays of some Activision titles to the weak colour palettes of the Intellivision, Colecovision, or NES (not to mention icky PC CGA and EGA) and you can see where some of the reward comes from. The other consoles had notable technical superiority - framebuffers, higher effective resolution (not that the 2600 has a fixed "resolution" exactly), much faster processors - but the games didn't look as good on a TV because the colour sucked. You can actually fix the point at which the 2600 stopped production and the last cartridges were produced with where colour palettes finally outstripped it on hardware like the SNES.
The sound was actually no slouch either for the time, and you can make real in-tune music using just the internal hardware (Pitfall II doesn't count as it has a much later "Pokey" sound chip inside). Games like Pressure Cooker and Sentinel have catchy tunes that play throughout. Sure they're repetitive, but has that really changed much in video games? Nowadays you get several hundred bars instead of just several, but most game music still makes you want to pull your teeth just for the distraction.
The other reason the 2600 continues to attract developers is that it has no fixed limitations - newer systems have a fixed pixel resolution (hell, they have pixels - although it's notable that the Vectrex also has a fairly thriving development community), a certain number of sound channels of a certain sample resolution, etc. These things are known at the outset and are seen as limits on the design. With the 2600 that isn't the case - there's the feeling that you can always get it to do what you want, if you could only work out how. And you can.
And if I remember correctly, no screen buffer (Score:5, Informative)
It allowed the system to extend its usable life of the platform after developers got familiar with how to work with it.
Re:And if I remember correctly, no screen buffer (Score:5, Informative)
Now, this all had to be done just to keep the background of the display intact. The programmer also got 2 player objects and 2 missile objects to work with... basically primitive sprites. 'course, with such limited resources, writing any kind of advanced game is a challenge. As they mention in the article, the Defender! programmer(s) tried to get around the sprite limitation by changing the sprite objects during even/odd frames to simulate more of them.
Re:And if I remember correctly, no screen buffer (Score:2)
Ah, memories (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, there were two players (8 pixel sprites) and two missiles (1, 2, 4, or 8 pixels wide, if memory serves.) And the "easy" way to set up a display line was to write the bitmap and position of the players and missiles during vblank.
However, there was an underhanded way of getting more than two players on a line, if they were separated by enough space (~12 pixels, if memory serves.) While the line is drawn, you keep track of where the "currently drawn pixel" is. When that location is just past the end of a player, you reposition the player to ~12 pixels ahead of the current position, and rewrite the bitmap. We (General Computer Company, a captive developer for Atari) could get up to 6 players on a line, if they were separated by enough distance.
Yes, I am dating myself
4K (Score:4, Funny)
You can if you're careful! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:4K (Score:2)
Tim
4K Goatsex could work! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:4K (Score:3, Informative)
maybe some ascii pr0n [asciipr0n.com]
Sequels to 2600 games I want to see (Score:4, Funny)
space invaders 'EXTREME'
Atari Football 2003
Night Driver with Infrared Goggles
and Combat: Gulf War
Wow (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Wow (Score:2, Insightful)
1. the programmer didn't write an efficient "Hello, world" program?
2. the point of a "Hello, world" program isn't to acheive efficieny?
3. compiler/linker/OS combinations have become much more complex?
Re:Wow (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wow (Score:3, Insightful)
Writing apps that aren't bloated does *not* necessarily entail lots of debugging and excessive writing time.
Too many programmers have decided that doing a crummy job is good enough (since, thanks to hardware advances, people won't usually notice unless a crash turns up). As a result, the state of software engineering and the quality of the products turned out is downright awful compared to any other field of engineering.
Ah-ah-ah. (Score:3)
Which is more efficient, pushing a string onto a stack and calling a software interupt, or writting something which looks like:
print "Hello, world.";
I can tell you which one is easier to read and write by the humans. You can get a perfect shape for your screws by hand threading them, or you can have a factory which threads thousands of screws an hour (perhaps with the odd dud), which allows you (the human) to design a train engine -- not just concentrate on making that one, perfect screw.
Hardware can do so much, and it can do so much more each year. To not use that is a waste.
duck pond (Score:3, Funny)
mmmm, duck pond.. now with new color graphics!
Memory switching (Score:2, Informative)
They had more than 1 memory chip in there and they could switch to another chip.
Was it Activision that started using that trick? I remember that they had the shweetest games. A friend of mine got the first "extra memory" game, although I don't recall what it was. The one with chopper flying down the river, maybe?
And it was cool the first time I heard my Atari talking to me...(not imagined, really!)
When I was a youngin' (Score:5, Funny)
Re:When I was a youngin' (Score:2)
We walked to school naked, barefoot, uphill both ways, and against the wind-driven snow. We wrapped barbed wire around our feet for traction and also used it to fight off the 3-legged wolves that preyed on the slower 2-legged wolves.
AND WE LIKED IT.
Equiv of ~32K ROM, not 4K (Score:3, Interesting)
According to Chris Larkin, developer of the Atari 2600 card game Kablamo!, each developer typically came up with a proprietary method of bank switching to increase the ROM size to an average of 32 Kbytes of code.
My 2600 died... All I've got left are the pong paddles (wheel things...) and some cartriges.
Re:Equiv of ~32K ROM, not 4K (Score:2)
I used to play Arkanoid on my C64 w/the "wheel things". Ahhh, that's my next move. Buy an Arkanoid arcade machine
Rom Size (Score:5, Informative)
Initially, games were 4KB. But there were also 8KB games (I believe on a single ROM, but I may be wrong) and with an extra chip in the cartridge to handle addressing games of 16KB could be squeezed in.
For instance, Solaris, which was the best gane ever. http://skintigh.tripod.com/atari/solaris.html
Less related: there were cartridges that I assume had 64 4KB roms. The first was a menu to select which of the games to play. I also assume this was done without permission of the copyright holders. Then there were tape drives...
I suppose... (Score:2, Funny)
20kb (Score:5, Funny)
Well, if they didn't append your medical records to every Word file, it really wouldn't be that bad. :)
Reviving dead consoles (Score:2)
Now only if I could find the dial-up hardware/software thing for that. Would be fun just to see how it works.
And in Word XP ? (Score:2)
Game Design, then and now (Score:5, Insightful)
1. the number of programmers has exponentially ballooned since the early 80s, leading to a larger number of less godlike programmers, AND programmers have become more reliant on fat libraries and limitless resources, so coding something this small would bend my brain for sure.
2. game content has changed dramatically. q bert was weird. space invaders was weird. pac man was weird. (yes, sports games did exist, but they weren't mainstream then). games today are less weird. it's either a first person shootemup, sports, or a linear fiction w/some combat.
Focusing on #2, I'd like to see if there really is some creative game writing locked away in some programmer's brain out there, or if we've become a nation of UnReal, GTO, Final Fantasy, and Madden XFL clones.
I don't mean to put down these fine games, I enjoy many console games. What I'm trying to get at is the utter weirdness of what people come up with when severly limited by resources. Facsimile and simulation are out the window, so you really have to dig deep for a good game.
We'll see, I'm very interested in the outcome. Maybe the winners of the IOCCC should check this out.
Re:Game Design, then and now (Score:2)
Re:Game Design, then and now (Score:2)
1 Programming for embedded systems.. you have 4 meg for OS and app, that's it.
2 programming for a PIC.
I have 1024 bytes for my program AND data.. THAT'S IT. when you throw away the laziness of using libs it's amazing what you can do in 512 bytes.
Most CS classes do not teach skill or efficiency. they teach a loose understanding and acceptable practices. and this is producing alot of very medicore programmers.
So for you programmers out there... spend about $50.00 and buy a 16f84 pic and a programmer, download the software and actually learn how to write software that is tight and efficient. you'll also gain something else... understanding of the hardware... something ELSE that should be a requirement in every CS course.
Except for games, everything being done today on office pc's has already been done and being used 20 years ago and 1/10th the size and at least 100 time more optimized.
What's your excuse for how slow and bloated your app is today?
20 KB!?! (Score:2)
Haaaaa... I am getting all teary-eyed now. Those were the days... =)
The Good Old Days (Score:5, Interesting)
* 2D paddle motion
* horizontal or vertical brick orientation
* gravity in some modes
* "English" on the paddle/ball interactions
* single or dual player in competitive or cooperative simultaneous play
* sound effects (CPU generated)
* etc. etc.
Just before release, with 9 free bytes left, a bug was found. The initial fix would break the ROM barrier by 13 bytes. Yet another pass through the code doing the 4th or 5th optimization -- finally got it in and ended up with 11 free bytes.
Amazing what is possible in ASM but, boy, it was many 20 hour days!
So I understand those 'smallest executable' contests, but how much functionality does the executable really have? Or how much of the Word document is really information?
I had a copy of that game! (Score:2)
Of course, I used to program in 6809 Assembler for fun, too.
Ah yes, the 6809... (Score:4, Insightful)
I once hacked together a "multi-line BBS expansion board for an Apple ][" that was 6809 based in 17 chips: 6809, 6883 DRAM controller (two banks of 32K), 2 64Kx4 DRAM chips, a 32K EPROM, three PALs (mostly address decoding), 4 2681 DUARTS (one on the Apple side of the bus, one on the 6809 side for a serial link between them, leaving a spare serial port on the apple side and five for modems on the 6809 side, and buffering chips for a fully independent backplane (separate from the Apple bus).
Coded the whole damn thing in assembler too.
Man, those days were fun! I think I still have that board (wire-wrapped, of course) for posterity. I remember the 6502 had this wierd read after write which didn't jive well with the 2681, so I had to disable odd address reads in the memory space of the card from the Apple side.
What is this submission really about? (Score:2)
I'm sure there are tons of file formats that even when empty take up what would appear to be "large" amounts of space. Never mind that Word is written for today's computers, for which 17K is hardly even noticed, hence there is little need to optimize empty files.
By the way, the newest Word has a built in versioning system. I'd like to know what options on this system were set when this 17K file was created. Also did the user choose to save any other information (Macros, etc.) with the file?
Like I said, this submission isn't really about programming for the Atari. If it was, the obligatory troll wouldn't have been there, and the article would never have been posted.
Re:What is this submission really about? (Score:2)
When you have a website or write articles, you can phrase your commentary however you want.
What about new titles for MAME? (Score:4, Interesting)
BTM
Re:What about new titles for MAME? (Score:2)
Re:What about new titles for MAME? (Score:4, Interesting)
Arcade Development Central [emuvibes.com]
It's a little out of date, but it looks like the links still work. A guy named Charles Doty programmed most of the demos. Most replace an existing game in Mame (or Raine, Callus, etc) rather than adding a new driver for it. Tools for compiling are there too. There was a Yahoo Groups page for arcade development (link on the site, check it out) but the last post was in August.
There is also a Pong clone for the NeoGeo that is not directly supported in Mame, but works with a hacked in driver. The developer had box art for it and everything. Unfortunately, I lost the link to the developer's web site.
Bigger isn't necessarily better (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, Tank and Space Invaders on the Atari 2600 weren't deep, multi-layered games but they did provide hours of fun. Similarly, Paradroid, Wizball and even Elite, the cream of the crop on the Commodore 64 would seem dull and shallow to most of the new generation of gamers used to the depth of Grand Theft Auto 3, Starcraft or EverQuest.
But, to those of us who were gaming back then, these titles were as immersive and addictive as anything available today. Hell, I still fire up VICE (the best C64 emulator available) to play some of those titles today, and not just for nostalic reasons - back then, without the flashy graphics and sound games had to be immediately playable and fun or else they just didn't capture the imagination.
Who remembers breaking joysticks waggling them back and forth playing Track and Field? Who remembers the pride they felt when they finally reached Elite status? Or when they completed Impossible Mission? The shear unadulterated fun of playing Pong and Breakout for hours on end, not giving a damn that the last five minutes weren't at all visually distinguishable from the first five?
It's funny, but even though I'm an avid gamer I've bought fewer games in the last two years than I have in any one year before that, going back as far as 1983. Partially this is because today's games have more depth to them, but mainly it's because there are fewer and fewer titles that really enthuse me any more.
The lack of originality in the games industry today is part of it - I haven't seen a truly original game since Populous - but, ironically, I don't think that today's games capture the imagination half as much as the games of yesteryear.
The Zen of Optimization (Score:5, Insightful)
Last week over lunch a developer posed a programming problem he'd been given on a job assignment. We all suggested a similar algorithm..then I went home and coded it. Then coded a more optimized one. And said I wanted to optimize it more. They asked me why it mattered that in one iteration I had two multiplication operations, and in the second version I had one. Why, because it's faster, of course. That's the sort of thing that's meaningless to an enterprise middleware programmer (for the most part), but everything to a game designer. Maybe you're doing this operation 10 million times a second, and every nanosecond you shave counts.
Hacking means working with the resources you have in the constraints you've been given. It's a shame that so many developers now would look at challenge like that and just dismiss it rather than seeing it as an opportunity to wake up some parts of your brain you don't normally get to use. Why must "solve it" mean "solve it once" instead of "give me the best solution"? It's a pretty safe bet that if you stop at one solution you haven't found the best one. Why be pleased with that?
Duane
"256 bytes? It's impossible to write a game in 256 bytes! I need over 100 bytes just to pull the A20 line high and enable extended memory!!"
- badly remembered quote from a rec.games.programmer who just didn't get it
Re:The Zen of Optimization (Score:2)
It mattered to game designers then, but not now. It's rare indeed to need to twiddle on that level these days. When you have hundreds of millions of cycles per second, and multiple instructions executing at the same time, many so-called optimizations are just noise. With complex programs, they key is to keep the code clean and understandable.
Re:The Zen of Optimization (Score:2)
Here's another working definition of hacker -- when you can't NOT solve a problem that's been placed in front of you. You have to solve it because damnit, it has to be solved. Maybe somebody else asked you the question, maybe you just saw a piece of code and wondered "Can I make this faster/smaller/cooler"? Once the challenge is extended it can't be undone.
It's this latter reason that managers often wouldnt want to hire hackers because they would create their own requirements, ignore the real ones, and not give up the code because they wanted to add just one more feature. I personally think that all coders should go through such a phase so that they know how to grow out of it and turn it back on when it's useful to them.
Massively Parallel Word-Processing Supercomputer! (Score:5, Funny)
Did anyone else read that and think "10,240-BIT WORDS? What kind of workstation is that running on?"
what id like to see (Score:2, Interesting)
but seriously the atari had some good shit on it that would be fun to remake
Re:what id like to see (Score:3, Informative)
Word on the 2600? (Score:2)
who cares? what, are they trying to port Microsoft Word to the Atari?
then i guess that's a humdinger. i'll be looking forward to their Oracle port...
The Golden Age (Score:2, Interesting)
Stella programming (Score:4, Interesting)
In my game I'm just at the point where I have a playfield, a moveable player, and one missile I can shoot. And that took a lot of effort. You know you're doing hardcore software development when you have to count cycles to make sure you're not computing when the electron beam is actually being drawn. You have 2700 or so cycles to work with "above" the television image per screen for computation, and only about 48 for each scan line before you start messing up your game image because you're still doing computation. It's interesting because you're tied to the physical progression of the electron beam across the TV.
My Project (Score:2, Funny)
Second article on ExtremeTech--wireless Atari! (Score:3, Informative)
Doom has been ported to everythinge else... (Score:4, Funny)
Doom has been ported to everythinge else, I can't wait to see the 4Kb version on the Atari 2600.
Re:Doom has been ported to everythinge else... (Score:2)
The Official 2600 Doom Page [geocities.com]
(I don't know how long that will last seeing as it's hosted at Geocities, but you can always look at it later).
Doom for Atari 2600 (Score:2)
Here [24.196.120.230] it is.
2600 Homebrew Games Already Released (Score:5, Informative)
2600 Homebrew Search Results [atariage.com]
And here is a list of games that are currently in development for the various Atari consoles. This list changes pretty frequently, and there are some projects not yet listed as the authors aren't very far along with them (Yes, I know that last link is listed in the linked story, just including it here for the convenience):
Titles In Development [atariage.com]
A list of Atari 2600 games that have been hacked to change the graphics, sounds, colors, and more!
Atari 2600 Hacks [atariage.com]
And finally, many games that were only released in either NTSC or PAL formats have been modified to work with the other television standard. This is useful for people who have the ability (such as through a Cuttle Cart [schells.com]) to play these binaries on a real television:
Atari 2600 TV Format Conversions [atariage.com]
Enjoy!
Support until 1997! (Score:2, Funny)
From the article:
Support until 1997? Microsoft won't want us to know about companies that do that. My next OS will be from Atari! Or maybe an Amiga, because it looks there'll be a company called Amiga for the rest of my lifetime.
A bit too careful... or maybe not? (Score:2)
The most time-consuming aspect, Larkin said, was just the electronics, as he's a software programmer by trade. The cartridge includes over 180 hand-soldered points, and 135 connections. Larkin said he's also designed a basic vibrating "Rumble Pak" add-on for the Atari controller, and tested it, as well as a multi-tap device that allows 4 players to simultaneously play the 2600 console. Larkin has also asked Nintendo for formal permission to use a link cable to connect his Game Boy Advance to a Windows PC.
Why did he ask Nintendo for permission for connecting his GBA to a PC? There is no license agreement when you're buying a GBA. Is sending ones and zeroes to your own GBA is prohibited by the DMCA? If it is, doing so without Nintendos permission is called civil disobedience and should be encouraged.
Creativity (Score:2)
Think of ASCII art artists. They have limited resources, but combined in nice ways to achieve far more effects. Think Atari 2600 and Commodore 64's memory and disk areas. They only had some outputs for video and sound and generally the system was very simple. In Atari there was no OS (or an extremely simplified cartridge prog runner) and in Commodore, the V2 Basic didnt really provide any software provisions for use to the game code. One programmer could understand the entire Atari 2600 datasheet and make the best use of it, and be creative with it. He could also end up being an expert with his sources and development tools.
Today we have the entire development process so heavily bloated, even the OS needs teams to work on its various parts. The resulting code is therefore neither optimized to the MAX, nor too stable. Gaming aside, the computer industry is in a bad shape. Think of all the layers in an application server like Websphere, or an ERP system with say Oracle as a backend database. We cut the process in so many different layers and standardized the communication between the layers to try and achieve that kind of stability, but each layer is worked on by whole teams on a repository.
So the largest amount of time is shared between learning something new, some standard, protocol or language, exploring huge code repositories till you come across what you need, or debugging, which is all the more complicated. Theres so such thing as creativity among programmers anymore. Theres plenty of space, so just code according to the algorithm.
Free software programmers are exempt from this rule generally. They take their time, make sure they know the language theyre working on, and get creative, free from the control of a project manager or deadline.
Getting exposure for homebrews (Score:3, Interesting)
You can read about that and other interesting bits about Act. Anth. in an interview [linuxgames.com] with the Anthology producer Ken Love.
I need to get my 2600 out of my parents attic! (Score:2, Interesting)
This "movement " is about ten years old (Score:3, Interesting)
Arguably, if you're wanting to experiment with tiny games, then you'd be much better off using Python and Pygame. You could write an Atari 2600-style game in a week of off hours that way, compared with the months of cycle tweaking it takes to get even a simple Atari 2600 game up and running. While it's a noble technical challenge, it isn't a good way to fool around with minimalist game design.
Re:This "movement " is about ten years old (Score:2)
OTOH, if you want to learn how to write efficient code, and produce something fun in the process, then coding for an older computer architecture is a very good way to do it.
I've often remarked on how learning Assembly on the C64 (6510 CPU, wonderful!) made learning C and other language soooo much easier, as I already understood at a very fundamental level, what pointers were, and what the computer was going to do with if(a) printf("%s", a);
Yeah but.... (Score:2)
Well sure, but you can't Mail Merge a 2600 game now can you Mr Smarty Pants?
Even more development system for Atari 2600 (Score:2, Informative)
Retro (Score:3, Informative)
The current issue has a truckload of "The making of..." articles from Edge, covering a lot of games up to the early 90's, including: Space War, Asteroids, Battlezone, Civilization, Carrier Command, Populous and many others
I bought it today and it's excellent, IMHO
Word Document Sizes (Score:4, Interesting)
What people don't realize is that there's quite a bit of formatting information in there. Remember stuff like page size, margins, fonts used (sometimes fonts are compiled directly into the document - depending on your settings - so that when you send it to someone, they don't need those fonts to view it correctly). That's just global formatting. What about stuff like paragraph formatting? Font styles/sizes?
All of it can't come for 0 bytes, and maybe all of the above doesn't account for all 20KB, but I probably haven't touched on half the stuff that's there that people take for granted with a modern word processor.
Damn (Score:2)
So much for my brilliant plan to port MS Word to the Atari 2600...
Forget Atari... (Score:2, Insightful)
Really Small Memory Footprint (Score:2)
Word? D'oh! (Score:3, Funny)
Nine-tenths of a gig,
Biggest ever seen,
God this program's big:
MS Word 15!
Comes on 10 CD's,
And requires -- Damn!
Word is fine, but jeez:
60 megs of RAM!?
Oh, Microsoft, Microsoft, bloatware all the way!
I've sat here installing Word since breakfast yesterday.
Oh, Microsoft, Microsoft, moderation please!
Guess you hadn't noticed -- 4-gig drives don't grow on trees!
I wrote a newbie's guide for Atari 2600 dev... (Score:3, Informative)
Good place to get a feel for the basics.
Re:oo.o rules (Score:3, Funny)
Re:oo.o rules (Score:5, Funny)
The 4K Atari cartridge ROM is only capable of enabling you to play a silly game on your television.
Re:oo.o rules (Score:2)
Though I'm sure the
I did an experiment where I created a document with the letter 'A' in it. 19K. I then typed a page of garbage in it. The resulting filesize was
29K. I took the garbage and copy/pasted it into Notepad and saved it to a
I'm not sure what's in that initial 20k, but it's probably some info describing how the file was made. Is it necessary? No. If you want efficiency, use HTML.
"...is no doubt completely justified by its ability to host a virus capable of bring the Internet to its knees."
Was anybody else able to make sense by that comment? heh.
Efficiency... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:oo.o rules (Score:3, Funny)
*Choke*. You're under 25, right?
Re:oo.o rules (Score:2)
Glad I am. Judging from your response and your moderation, I'm about to be seriously embarrased.
Enlighten me?
Re:oo.o rules (Score:2)
When I wrote that, I was thinking about formatting etc. Unfortuantely, I did a poor job of implying that. HTML is pretty much to the point and has very little overhead compared to a
I would defend word, though, because it was really meant for making print documents, as opposed to blitting stuff on the screen from the internet. It handles that job just fine.
Frankly,
Re:oo.o rules (Score:2)
Re:oo.o rules (Score:2)
Re:Where will the programmers come from? (Score:2)
Of course they're not taught that. If they wrote tight clean code, why would you need to upgrade your PC every six months?
Re:Where will the programmers come from? (Score:3, Funny)
Oh noes! 14 year old script kiddies recruited by Al-Queada are going to DDOS the White House using NETBIOS over TCP/IP exploits they found out when portscanning stuff with NANOPROBES who all buffer overflowed million of WindowsXP UNIVERSAL PLUG AND PLAY ports while zip disks all over the world are DYING along with BSD! Oh woe is me! Fortunately, our New Age online Messiah Steve Gibson will save us with his 1337 routers that can stop DDoSes and his advanced godlike ASM programming skills! HUZZAH FOR LORD GIBSON!
Re:Where will the programmers come from? (Score:2)
Assembler has a place, but not in writing the GUI portions of an app. Otherwise, since open source is so 1337, wouldn't everything (the Linux kernel, KDE, GNOME, Apache, etc. etc) be written in assembler? It would be 6 years late, but man, think of the thightness!
Re:Using Microsoft as a standard of efficiency (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:real programmers do it in less than 4K (Score:5, Interesting)
This is why I actually enjoy programming for mobile phones at the moment - some of them (eg the Nokia 7210) really force you to consider how best to utilise the available memory and CPU resources. Just try to allocate a back buffer and a couple of 128x128 images and you're looking at a crash. Memory fragmentation also comes in, as do memory block limits (some phones limit ANY object to 16K max due to the way allocation works). Swapping out stuff you don't absolutely need, and juggling data is required for anything beyond the simplest games. (Although some phones, such as the Nokia 7650 really spoil you with loads of RAM, I usually attempt to get things working on the worst case target before porting and adding the bells+whistles).
It's fun though!!
Re:RAM!=ROM (Score:2)
128 bytes.