Food for thought

[Lerc]

The latest C64 demo off the rack.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFdjWSaDlIo[/youtube]

I expect the next Uzebox demo to beat this , You have way more processing power.

[AnthonyB]

I might die if I had to program all that.

[havok1919]

Ok, I'm impressed. That's insane.

I think the recipie for that includes a lot more RAM than we have though... And maybe a palette mode.

Still, the little Uzebox can do a lot of tricks-- nobody's even scratched the surface yet!

-Clay

[uze6666]

Yeah, gimme 64k of RAM, a frame buffer and hardware sprites and we'll see... As Clay just said, we are just scratched the surface. One thing to keep in mind is that my kernel is a generic one. If one develops a custom engine for a demo or specific game, though much tougher, who knows what's the limit.

-Alec

[pragma]

Yeah, gimme 64k of RAM, a frame buffer and hardware sprites and we'll see... As Clay just said, we are just scratched the surface. One thing to keep in mind is that my kernel is a generic one. If one develops a custom engine for a demo or specific game, though much tougher, who knows what's the limit.

-Alec

Pretty much what I was thinking. At the minimum, a palette based rendering mode would allow for lots of neat tricks.

[uze6666]

Well, thinking about it, we could fake palettes with no overhead, only more flash. You would need a bank of tiles/sprites for each palette variation and switch banks dynamically.

-Alec

[ravyne]

I'm always impressed by what these demo coders can do. If nothing else, it just shows how completely lazy even the best of us have become with our megabytes of memory and 10s of megahertz (not to mention the hundreds and the thousands!) That's really why I like the uzebox and similar things, its a chance to get back to the roots and experience the relative hardships of the way things used to be, and I think that makes you a better developer.

[havok1919]

I'm always impressed by what these demo coders can do. If nothing else, it just shows how completely lazy even the best of us have become with our megabytes of memory and 10s of megahertz (not to mention the hundreds and the thousands!) That's really why I like the uzebox and similar things, its a chance to get back to the roots and experience the relative hardships of the way things used to be, and I think that makes you a better developer.

Yeah, exactly. Believe me, running an embedded firmware group in my previous career it became *painfully* obvious just how totally unprepared most CS grads are for anything with less than a GHz or two of CPU and near-unlimited memory. I ended up hiring mostly old game programmers and crackers. When you've got a bunch of assembly language and 36K of RAM for the entire system it weeds out the .NET people in a hurry.

I still advocate for a return to "new hardware comes once every five years". Go back to the Apple ][ and Atari VCS model. This is my computer. There are many like it, but this one is mine. It will be here for five or more years and even then whenever something new comes out it'll take another five years before enough people adopt it to make it worthwhile to code for it. Ten years after that it'll still be state of the art in Central America and half of Europe. If you want your software better/faster, find a better/faster way to do it. Now we just throw GHz and Gigabytes at the problem. ('Nobody has a graphics card that can ever *run* this now, much less enjoy using it, but in a couple years...')

</curmudgeon mode>

-Clay

[ravyne]

Yeah. The low-level stuff is what I really enjoy most I think. The more I've gotten away from it, the less I like it, to the point that I enjoy my technical writing gig far more than I did the web-app stuff I was doing before -- I came to the conclusion that if someones going to be paying me to program for hours a day, it needs to be enjoyable work, otherwise it burns me out from doing the type of programming I like in my spare time.

When my contract is up in a few short weeks, I'm only looking at game programming type positions, preferably on something like the DS, which is somewhat unfortunately the most low-level mainstream console these days. I would be happy to get into embedded stuff, but I find it hard to do given my background -- They generally want experience or at the very least a Bachelors in CS or related and all I've got is an AS in Real-Time Interactive Simulation, even if it is from a place like Digipen. Unfortunately alot of white-collar HR folks equate "game schools" with those damn ITT and Devry ads they run during Jerry Springer.