Quote:
Originally Posted by slaapliedje
This is why modern games suck so much juice! The programmers got lazy and didn't spend the time to optimize their code, "We'll just add more RAM" is frequently heard where I work. It's a crappy programmer that blames the hardware for his program being crap. I've always felt that's why 'PC' games were always so much larger in size than the Amiga/Atari versions, where they had to be optimized to fit. I do agree with it being one of the reasons the platform declined. Not so much that the systems couldn't handle them, but that more and more developers had to make compromises in their software (Ultima 6 is a perfect example, the DOS version is 4mb, whereas the Atari ST version was 2mb (not sure about the Amiga version, but it should be the same, since both were simply EGA ports, the only difference is the music).
Funny story, a marketing person where I work was complaining about SugarCRM being 'sluggish'. "It takes 1-2 seconds whenever you click on a new tab to load! We'd better add more ram to it!" I checked the memory, with Linux, Apache, MySQL and SugarCRM it was using around 700mb out of 4GB.... We nicknamed him "RAM-Man" since he always says this.
When I see contests like the 96k games ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger ) it just makes me think of all the waste that is done on the PC these days. Mobile devices sort of bring back the feeling of "Let's see what coders can do within the confines of these little things!" It's why the demoscene is still around. Sadly I show some of the demos to people now days (even the newer ones) and they just say "oh, that's kind of cool" and don't really appreciate that they are running on 7mhz machines with 1mb of ram.
slaapliedje |
I agree with you. Novacoder shows what is even possible with good old AGA (of course with enough firepower behind it). And with enough optimizations even modern games could run on smaller devices like A1200 (unexpanded). But the style has changed. Nobody (at least no commercial developer) would invest a lot of time to optimize a game for a (limited) submarket. So we can moan about that and stay a small retro-community or try to evolve to some degree and for that we need faster processors, more RAM and so on. Example would be the Antiryad Gx 3D-Engine on 68k. It would definetely not really work on a A500 or A1200, I assume that you end more at 68060 (perhaps with RTG). For a platformer or scrolling action game 68030+AGA could be enough but that depends on the game and how it is written. Many ports will even need more power than that because they are developed on PCs and propably poor optimized.