16 Feb
1999
16 Feb
'99
3:58 a.m.
At 06:24 PM 2/15/99 -0800, Chuck McManis wrote:
I fired up a couple of my Amiga games, one of which I
wish to "clone" using
modern hardware called StarGlider. This game was pretty revolutionary in
its time as it provided lots of smoothly animated 3D things on the screen
at once.
I imagine you met Jez San at the Amiga dev cons. I still keep in touch.
He's still running Argonaut at <http://www.argonaut.com/>, makers of
StarGlider, StarFox, and Croc. Why, it was only four years ago or so
that he moved out of his parent's house. :-)
The Game programmers were adamant that you had to
"take over the
machine" in order to get the necessary performance and there was no way you
would ever have something like StarGlider running in real time with some OS
back there stealing your cycles.
Take over the machine, indeed. Back in 1986, there was no choice but
to do that for many intensive applications. A decade and a few doublings
of CPU power, and suddenly 3D on the cheap is easy and fast in C++,
even though the .EXE is larger than the amount of RAM in the old computer.
There's also Argonaut RISC Cores at <http://www.arccores.com/>, where you
can buy "the world's first user-customizable microprocessor".
Some folks still use assembler on today's Windows machines. See
Steve Gibson's site at <http://www.spinrite.com/smgassembly.htm>.
- John