🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1itc67INN4vm@life.ai.mit.edu> dmb@case.ai.mit.edu (David Baggett) writes:
>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!
>dmb@ai.mit.edu *** Compu$erve: 76440,2671 *** GEnie: ADVENTIONS

Anyone who has seen the box of GARBAGE that you get from Atari when
you become a developer should know that all developers have nothing
to start with when writing programs for the ST.  The tools (C compiler,
assembler, resource editor) you get are the worst I've ever seen on
any computer.  Game writers have no choice but to search through the
OS for tricks to use.  I happen to think STOS is a great piece of  
software.  Take the line-A fiasco that Atari has created.  All of a
sudden, Atari has said that routines we have been using for years are
illegal and we have to use the vdi routines which are S**T (hence the
existence of warp-9 and nvdi). If it wasn't for the MWC manual and the
abacus books, I would still be in the dark about programming the ST.
Developers are the most important resource a hardware vendor has and
Atari has shown their developers absoultely no respect.  No wonder
Atari's programming 'rules' are being broken by programmer.

I will now step down off my soap box...

Darren King, GBC --> gbcusg@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca