Respect for CPC game programmers

[djaybee]

While I had done some BASIC programming on the CPC, my next machine (Atari ST) is the one where I sank my teeth into assembly programming, which I started when I was 16.

On the ST, a lot of things are reasonably easy when it comes to graphics: there's a lot of RAM so that double or even triple buffering is affordable, the framebuffer layout is friendly to quite a few operations, the CPU is fast enough to copy the whole size of the screen 50 times a second. Of course, there isn't enough margin to be sloppy, especially on baseline machines without a blitter. With a little bit of teenage hubris, though, it did feel like many programmers of commercial games were leaving quite some capabilities on the table, making me feel that I could often have done better.

As emulation now allows me to go back to the CPC, my first love, and as I'm writing assembly for it, I'm gaining a lot of respect for the game programmers of the time. There isn't enough RAM to use a double buffer without sacrificing a lot of features, let alone a triple buffer, especially for games that have to be loaded from tape. The framebuffer layout isn't that fun (I'm finding mode 1 especially painful). Copying large amounts of data is so slow that any naive implementation is just about guaranteed to have slow frame rates. Any half-decent game must have needed some optimizations, and the top games seem to have been written by wizards.

I am not getting discouraged, but I've got to reset my expectations about what it takes to get something that looks good on the CPC, and I tip my hat to those who put themselves through that exercise, either back then or more recently. Well done, folks!