At 06:24 PM 2/15/99 -0800, Chuck McManis wrote:
>I fired up a couple of my Amiga games, one of which I wish to "clone" using
>modern hardware called StarGlider. This game was pretty revolutionary in
>its time as it provided lots of smoothly animated 3D things on the screen
>at once.
I imagine you met Jez San at the Amiga dev cons. I still keep in touch.
He's still running Argonaut at <
http://www.argonaut.com/>, makers of
StarGlider, StarFox, and Croc. Why, it was only four years ago or so
that he moved out of his parent's house. :-)
>The Game programmers were adamant that you had to "take over the
>machine" in order to get the necessary performance and there was no way you
>would ever have something like StarGlider running in real time with some OS
>back there stealing your cycles.
Take over the machine, indeed. Back in 1986, there was no choice but
to do that for many intensive applications. A decade and a few doublings
of CPU power, and suddenly 3D on the cheap is easy and fast in C++,
even though the .EXE is larger than the amount of RAM in the old computer.
There's also Argonaut RISC Cores at <
http://www.arccores.com/>, where you
can buy "the world's first user-customizable microprocessor".
Some folks still use assembler on today's Windows machines. See
Steve Gibson's site at <
http://www.spinrite.com/smgassembly.htm>.
- John
Received on Tue Feb 16 1999 - 08:58:34 GMT