"Nobody programs in machine language"

Way to go, Grumpy Fred! I was reminiscing about my old Atari days after that note came up about the Atari machine at the yard sale and did some web searches last night to see what I could find regarding the work I did. The real hoot was an article someone had written about some of my code (written back around 1983) and how they were perplexed because I wrote a multiply-by-40 routine in assembly rather than use a lookup table. I laughed because they obviously didn't understand the situation. We were writing full-blown arcade-style games for machines with 16K of memory, including the video RAM. We were squeezing code into the display's vertical blanking interval, where a couple of clock cycles made the difference between a good game and one with screen glitches. I remember one program where I, honest to god, had to optimize the code because I was something like 7 bytes too big, and had to go through the code and figure out whether I could move some data to the 6502's "page zero" RAM or use some other technique to shave off the extra bytes! Another huge project I did on the Atari 8-bit machine required my own home-made overlay mamager. God, was that fun. Nowadays, memory limits mean nothing to most people, and I have to admit that I haven't written any assembly code for a while, but 3D Studio MAX, the pinnacle of my programming career, mostly written in C++, has selected bits and pieces I wrote in assembly because there's still a part of me that believes in squeezing every bit of speed out of a processor in certain circumstances. There are times I really miss the old days and the incredibly fun programming challenges that we solved in assembly language. It is too bad that most people don't know how to use it any more -- Have you ever looked at some of the code these C++ compilers spit out? (Shudder) -Tom Fred Cisin wrote: