• NigelFrobisher
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    48
    ·
    5 months ago

    I’ve written software professionally for two decades and I’m still in awe of the people who used to wring every last drop out of 512kb of memory, a floppy drive and 16 colours on the Amiga 500.

    • butterflyattack@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      10
      ·
      5 months ago

      I played some pretty good games on the 48k spectrum back in the day. My first computer was a zx81 with 1k ram, it was a bit challenging to do anything interesting with it - but people still wrote games for the thing.

    • MadSurgeon@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      5 months ago

      While true that it’s impressive, now games have to be made to work on variable screen sizes with different input controllers, key mappings, configurations, more operating systems, with more features than ever. It’s an absolute explosion of complexity.

      Even making a 2D game for today’s hardware is more difficult than making a 2D game for Gameboy.

      • Dadd Volante@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        5 months ago

        Honest question, is that true? It’s my understanding that developing a 2D game today would be a simpler task than for a system from the 90s due to so many improvements in development software.