[game_preservation] Wikipedia thoughts?

[Andrew Armstrong]

Neat bit of history :) someone really needs to write a book about 
programming games over the years. There are books which mention certain 
programmers, but most just detail the design, art, music sides of games 
(if they look at development at all - usually they are just looking at 
the gameplay and story).

Since I didn't grow up then, I don't have the knowledge of those 
systems. Certainly I'll be looking into them sometime or later in 
emulator form though :) now that'll be fun, in a way, hehe.

Andrew

> I have an entire bookcase of my software collection dedicated to games 

> that wrung every last drop of performance out of a machine notoriously 

> difficult to program games for (the original IBM PC with CGA).  Games 

> like Starglider, Turbo Champions, Elite, Interphase, Flight Simulator, 

> Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Simulator (and CYAFTrainer, after the 

> original name got them sued :-), ICON: Quest for the Ring, and others 

> are truly works of programming art for that platform.

>

> [soapbox]A lot of people think the original PC, with it's 5MHz 16-bit 

> processor, would be easy to write fast software for; in reality, it 

> took 4x as long as a C64 to access memory and 6x as long to perform 

> most simple calculations.  Add to that an odd graphics memory 

> structure and no graphics hardware assistance at all, and you have a 

> nightmare to program for.[/soapbox]

>

> I am probably the only historian here who has a category for "most 

> clever/efficient programming" for software history...