🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1993Jan11.113722.5383@gdr.bath.ac.uk> mapmh@gdr.bath.ac.uk (M Hagger) writes:
>I'm curious, just what do you mean by shitty programmers?  In the real 
>world do you seriously expect game writers (ie people trying to screw the
>maximum performance out of a machine) to worry about their program being
>a little incompatible with future generations of chips?  

Yes.  Case in point of bad programming of this ilk: STOS.  Every time
the slightest change was made to the OS they had to send out an
update.  You don't have to break the rules to get the best performance
possible out of the machine.  Get things fast is one thing.  Getting
things fast, and properly, is far better.

>Particularly if they are not even aware of the these new machines etc
>when the software is written.

In some cases of course, they are victims of what you describe here.
If the computer company rips the rug out from under the programmers,
there's no one to blame but the company.  But Atari hasn't really done
that; they've said  (in their own muddled way) what you could and
couldn't rely on, and they've done pretty well at not screwing
programmers who followed the rules.

>Maybe you would prefer it if the games were a little slower or a little less
>impressive, but I certainly wouldn't.

Following the rules will NOT slow your program down.  Game Workbench
runs fine on Falcons and TT's, and we never had those machines to
develop on.  It was more time-consuming, in some sense, to be careful
to follow the rules, but doing so did not affect efficiency any.

Dave Baggett
--
dmb@ai.mit.edu           MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory                  
ADVENTIONS: interactive fiction (text adventures) for the 90's!
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