Simple Optimization Trick

I will never not upvote an Ahoy video. The guy is a legend in video game documentaries. Check out his Monkey Island video as a follow-up

Best way to play till this day

Who needs git when you have a B: drive and a Save As command for tycoon43.asm

Version control? You mean this?

./src
./src_1998_11_05_added_people_swimming
./src_1998_11_06_added_death_mechanics
./src_1998_11_06_0_removed_swimming_lol

Did the developer use any version control though? SCCS has been around since the early 70s, RCS and CVS since the 80s. The tools definitely existed.

Also, it was a single dev, which makes SCM significantly simpler!

The original goes to 1024 x 786 and has different zoom levels. I've played most of the original parks this year and that does not see to be too high res to me. Give me a sec I'll take a screenshot of mine in a minute.

Edit here it is. It's the GOG version, which launches fullscreen, so the 1024 x 768 are stretched onto the center of my 1920 x 1080 screen.

I wonder if there's anyone alive right now who would be capable of such a task.

Even if one did, say using x86, it would still just be interpreted by the CPU into the CPU's native opcodes, as the legacy instruction sets are interpreted/translated.

Epic Pinball, if I recall correctly, also used some ModeX trickery, meaning it had most of the pinball table in VRAM, and then modified the VGA framebuffer pointer for scrolling, then only moving as much data as it was needed (ball, flippers, etc)

The YouTube algorithm works in mysterious ways.

Because I'm nice, to anyone who doesn't get the reference: https://www.youtube.com/@MarcelVos

Yes

Really? It was required when I was in college. We did MIPS, x86, and PIC.

I like it because there's no mysterious things happening to your bits. Every line is an instruction executed. You control the machine. It's power. It gives you power over the machines.

A little late to this comment but there are some assembly videogames out! They are puzzles and gives you the gist of how assembly works.

I really enjoyed TIS-100. I just never got around to beating it.

I learned z80 assembly back when the cutting edge of technology was a ZX Spectrum, and 68k assembly when I upgraded to an Amiga. That knowledge served me quite well for my early career in industrial automation - it was hard real-time coding on eZ80's and 65c02 processors, but the knowledge transfers.

Back in the day, when input got mapped straight into a memory location and the display output was another memory location, then assembly seems like magic. Read the byte they corresponds to the right-hand middle row of the keyboard, check if a certain bit is set in that byte, therefore a key is held down. Call your subroutine that copies a sequence of bytes into a known location. Boom, pressing a key updates the screen. Awesome.

Modern assembly (x64 and the like) has masses of rules about pointer alignment for the stacks, which you do so often you might as well write a macro for it. Since the OS doesn't let you write system memory any more (a good thing) then you need to make system calls and call library functions to do the same thing. You do that so often that you might as well write a macro for that as well. Boom, now your assembly looks almost exactly like C. Might as well learn that instead.

In fact, that's almost the purpose of C - a more readable, somewhat portable assembly language. Experienced C developers will know which sequence of opcodes they'd expect from any language construction. It's quite a simple mapping in that regard.

It's handy to know a little assembly occasionally, but unless you're writing eg. crypto implementations, which must take the exact same time and power to execute regardless of the input, then it's impractical for almost any purpose nowadays.