[gameprogrammer] Re: Pushing on stack in assembly

On Saturday 22 March 2008, Kevin Jenkins wrote:
> Sure, the very first games were in assembly because there was no
> other option.

Actually, the *very* first games were most likely handwritten in 
machine code - that is, entered as raw hex or binary. :-)

AFAIK, most games were all asm on the 8 bit machines (Spectrum, C64, 
MSX etc), and the more demanding games on the 16 bit machines (Amiga, 
ST, X68000 etc) were all or mostly asm code as well.

The MC680xx CPUs were, although supposedly designed for high level 
languages, way too inefficient at low level work, so you had 
to "abuse" the weird high level instructions in various ways that a 
compiler at the time would never think of. Also, when you start 
making use of the quirks of the ALU and related instructions (MUL 
giving a result word twice the size of the operands, for example) of 
any CPU, it's actually harder - if at all possible - to use something 
like C.

Even early PC/VGA games would normally have at least low level 
graphics and sound routines coded in asm, as there was no hardware 
acceleration whatsoever. (The "10% of the code that runs 90% of the 
time" was actually *code* and not specialized silicon.)

These days, asm is mostly used in price sensitive mass produced 
applications on very low end hardware (8 bit MCUs and similar), and 
in some special cases where higher level languages won't do what you 
want.


//David Olofson - Programmer, Composer, Open Source Advocate

.-------  http://olofson.net - Games, SDL examples  -------.
|        http://zeespace.net - 2.5D rendering engine       |
|       http://audiality.org - Music/audio engine          |
|     http://eel.olofson.net - Real time scripting         |
'--  http://www.reologica.se - Rheology instrumentation  --'

---------------------
To unsubscribe go to http://gameprogrammer.com/mailinglist.html

Other related posts: