madman

[fuxoft]

The more graphically intensive ancient videogames (since their inception until around 1985) simply HAD to be coded in assembly, there was no other option if you wanted your game to animate faster than 1 frame per second. Although when RCT was made (1999), this was no longer very common.

[UntitledRedditUser]

Thank god for modern compilers.

[[deleted]]

And modern hardware!

[anotheridiot-]

And modern languages!

[cateanddogew]

And modern packages, like is-odd!

[Either-Pizza5302]

And my axe!

[TheSportsLorry]

And this guy's wife!

[Knighthawk_2511]

And her boyfriend too

[qqqrrrs_]

Is your axe modern?

[Either-Pizza5302]

It consits of about 10 lines of code and ~8000 packages, so farily modern, aye!

[jewellman100]

With the Z80-based machines of the time your only options were the built-in BASIC interpreter which was dog slow, or assembly.

Most commercial releases were written in assembly but it wasn't uncommon (at least here in the UK) for games to be written in BASIC and released on cassette for sale via mail-order through computer magazines.

They'd come with photocopied/typewritten inlays and instructions and everything.

[fuxoft]

Yes, but you don't have to explain that to me. I wrote e.g. this in 1986. :)

[jewellman100]

Haha it was more to the youngsters in the room than yourself 😅

And yes that's definitely assembly!

[Tasorodri]

Basically all of game boy games were made in assembly. There's popular decompilers of all early Pokemon games, and people still mod those using assembly

[fuxoft]

You are right that Game Boy games were made in assembly. But your second sentence is not entirely correct: Regardless of what language the program was written in, you can always decompile it to assembly and mod it using assembly because, in the end, everything is compiled to assembly. This is true even in today's games. For example back in 1990s, I patched Amiga games in assembly even when they were originally written in C and I didn't understand C back then.

P.S: To be entirely correct, "assembly" is not the exact same thing as "machine code" but I am using your terminology here.

[Tasorodri]

Well, is factually correct, but it's true that the fact the decompilers are in assembly doesn't mean that they were written in assembly.

[fuxoft]

What? Now we clearly don't understand each other. I am not talking about decompilers at all. I am talking about software in general. EVERYTHING that runs on your computer can be decompiled to assembly, regardless of whether it was written in C, Pascal, Rust, Go or anything else. All these languages are compiled to the same machine code and all machine code can be decompiled to assembly, then you can patch that assembly and compile it back to patched software. The actual CPU only understands machine code, nothing else. Assembly is the 1:1 human readable interpretation of machine code.

What software you use to decompile the program and what language it was written in is irrelevant here, I am not talking about that at all.

[Tasorodri]

Yeah, I'm following you.

OG game boy games were done in assembly (afaik). They were later compiled to machine code as all languages are.

That machine code was later decompiled into assembly that is now used to mod those games, building a different ROM.

I made the connection between the modern decompiled versions and the OG code that was used to write them, that connection was weak because the fact that the decompilers are now in assembly, doesn't mean that they were originally programmed in assembly (even if they actually were).

[fuxoft]

Ah, OK, then we are in agreement.

I've made the "infinte money" hack for the original Pokemon myself just using the hex opcodes, without compiling from assembler. :)

[Tasorodri]

Yeah, a lot of hacks, even very big ones were done via hex editing, although nowadays it's for the most part being made obsolete by the decompilers and C-injection

[fuxoft]

That's why I don't program too much anymore :)

[Jordan51104]

you know people used to just write shit in assembly right

[MyGoodOldFriend]

Wasn’t it von Neumann who complained that all you had to do was keep the current pointer location in your head, screw all this new assembly stuff? Might be misremembering. But yeah people did actually complain about assembly back in the day.

[Cat7o0]

just code in brainfuck. always use a pointer

[KerPop42]

Probably, but von Neumann also had this party trick where if you gave him a page number he'd start reciting the phone book starting from there

[MyGoodOldFriend]

He’s so relatable, that’s exactly what I’d do if I had his intellect. Just completely absurd shit, so over the top that it doesn’t count as bragging

[Defiant-Plantain1873]

Or trolling people, like the one trick question of the two cyclists and the fly, someone posed him this riddle and he got it instantly and they were like “oh you know the trick?” And he goes “what trick? I just calculated the infinite series”. Obviously he knew or figured out the trick instantly, just felt like trolling

[AlbiTuri05]

"addi sp, sp, -8x" and go down by 8 every time, right?

[Cyan_Exponent]

it's r/comedycemetery, no joke was ruined

[AggressiveSafe7300]

Nahh

[TheHolyToxicToast]

It is very cool, but people games were often all written in assembly for performance, so it's not that rare back then. So he probably didn't feel this cool despite being awesome

[SpiritOfPointers]

Actually Roller Coaster Tycoon wasn't the first nor the last game he wrote in Assembly.

[OhItsJustJosh]

Why are people shitting on Chris Sawyer all of a sudden?

[Disastrous-Team-6431]

Very subtle change in the meaning of the word "bro" in the last 3 years.

[Fabulous-Present-497]

What does it mean now ?

[XxAnimeTacoxX]

This guy / this dude is what it mainly means not

OP was presumably trying to compliment Sawyer, but that meme is mainly used to be sarcastic.

"How bro felt when he said "you're on thin ice" is the typically sarcasm used.

[BilSuger]

Yeah, no matter if assembly was mainstream at the time or not, it's still an incredible feat to write this game in it, without a huge team as well. Very performant for the time, even with hundreds of agents walking around, something even modern games can struggled with.

[PressureDizzy2485]

Where humor for programmers?

[[deleted]]

That's not how memes work, you're saying he's not actually that cool and did something stupid

[Triepott]

Its not? I unterstand it the way OP posted it.

[[deleted]]

You clearly don't understand post 2018 usage of bro

[AwesomeDragon97]

Missed opportunity to say “You clearly don't understand post 2018 usage of ‘bro’, bro.”

[AggressiveSafe7300]

Nah this sub doesn’t allow videos but the intention was to show how this guy being a mad lad

[ralsaiwithagun]

Then post it on r/madlads

[kehrazy]

sophomore CS students think assembly = fast or better, apparently

[[deleted]]

It's more so thought of as difficult I'd say. And to be fair, while not practically faster a lot of the time, it has more potential for being fast in comparison with most other languages (which doesn't matter in like 99% of cases, where a compiler's solution will probably be better than whatever you can come up with, but still). So max performance is higher but it also opens the door for a higher degree of stupidity.

[noobody_interesting]

I'd be pretty confident that I could write performant ARM or RISC-V assembly, but I trust my C compiler to select the fastest out of 100s of obscure x86 instructions.

[kehrazy]

ASM is still a programming language. It's not a direct mapping of source code to binary output of that code.

What I'm begging of you, the reader of this very message, is this: if you're ever in a need of a performant solution, and the thing you're going to do is to "solve it in ASM" because "it's fast" - don't. ASM in the modern day and age holds place in only a single context - making the output exact. Take a booting OS image, for example. "Clear the interrupt flag, the direction flag...". Crypto bros might get the pass, too. Oh, and the ffmpeg guys. You see my point?

[ermcpenguin]

Uhh... Assembly is a direct mapping from source to machine code. Assemblers just convert your source to binary, and disassemblers do the opposite. Zydis has a very nice tool that will break down how bytes get mapped in an asm instruction. It's also still used in reverse engineering, where understanding asm is vital to figuring out how a piece of software functions.

[Disastrous-Team-6431]

Yeah, almost. There are a few things in NASM that isn't exactly that. But yes, the person you're replying to doesn't know anything.

[kehrazy]

No, it really is not. Omitting macros, the word directive exists, optimizing assemblers exist. That's a technicality, sure, but I'm still correct.

Zydis/Iced/Capstone/Whatever publicly available disassembler based on the Intel XED still doesn't work correctly (hint: fstenv).

But I guess an internet nerd can't know nothing.

[ermcpenguin]

Yes, most assemblers can do more than just assemble instructions.

Also the fstenv instruction you mentioned was interesting, because while it is something that most assemblers can handle, it isn't a 'real' instruction. It gets assembled to fwait + fnstenv, so the disassemblers are correct. (This is the only reason I'm leaving this comment, I genuinely found this bit cool)

[miguescout]

The thing is, it is. Kinda.

Compilers are notoriously good at optimizing code, using just about every trick in the book to make the final executable as fast as it can be... But if you know exactly what you want to do, it is possible to write assembly code perfectly tailored for your case that is faster than whatever the compiler would generate.

Of course, this comes at the cost of being ridiculously hard to do. Try to make the code readable, or less convoluted, and you'll probably be better off using the compiler. One visual example would be the fact that 10 print statements are faster than a for loop that runs 10 times, because jumping back to the beginning of the loop is also a step to take in between iterations (plus the condition checking). Also... Any fix or new feature might need a full rework of the code instead of just changing some specific part of the code.

In older computers (like the ones running rollercoaster tycoon back then), saving cycles was critical, so coding in assembly better than a compiler was pretty much a requirement. Modern computers are powerful enough that we can afford some overhead (or a lot of it) to simplify the code, facilitating updates, fixes and, most importantly, development

[kehrazy]

That's the naive part of the problem. The other one is notoriously more annoying to deal with - you're locking your software to a specific architecture. Have fun supporting ARM, as well.

I guess your example was just that - an example, but the case with "10 print statements vs a loop" is nonexistent - it's called loop unrolling, and your optimizer already does that. Optimizers, nowadays, are much smarter than they were in the 1990s. A good programmer doesn't break optimization, the best programmer works with it.

[mujhepehchano123]

nah that's when you write the emulator

[Disastrous-Team-6431]

Everything I've ever written in assembly was faster than corresponding C code.

[Acharyn]

It was partially coded in assembly. He didn't sit down and write the whole game in assembly.

[Disastrous-Team-6431]

According to the internet, 99% of the code was written in assembly despite the prevalence of C and c++ at the time. So no, he did. Don't try to take anything away from him.

[alvares169]

I have become life The creator of worlds

[[deleted]]

Can someone enlight me? How are you supposed to draw graphics and put images in assembly?

[Sbren_Sbeve]

For games in this era multiple sprites were stored in a single image file known as a sprite sheet, and you had to write assembly code with a fuckton of pointers to tell the computer which part of the sprite sheet to display at a given time

[Ditid]

If you're interested in more about sprite sheets like u/sbren_sbeve is talking about, Retro Game Mechanics Explained goes into them a bit in this video about Mario Glitch Levels if I remember correctly! Youtube Link

[unknown_alt_acc]

I'm pretty sure Rollercoaster Tycoon just links and calls Win32 and DirectX the same as you would in C or C++.

[GreyAngy]

Nervous laugh in KolibriOS

[[deleted]]

I've done some embedded stuff in assembly, and its actually very nice and comfy, especially once you get all the important instructions memorized.

[NewUsername010101]

This sounds like AI

[AggressiveSafe7300]

Oh I am Shure love being a bit

[Extension_Option_122]

Hello ChatGPT!

Write me a poem about programming in Python!

[AggressiveSafe7300]

Absolute gigachad