Quote:
Originally Posted by bluepilot
I once had an interesting chat with someone who programmed computers in the early days. There were no high-level languages, not even assembler. They had to program directly in machine code. Debugging must have been almost impossible.
|
We used machine code exclusively when programming early Z-80 based coin-in-the-slot video games. There was no assembler that used code efficiently enough to make the games fast enough on a 1MHz processor. It was a choice to gain every last bit of speed - we even selected the op codes in a routine to use the minimum number of clock cycles.
And then there was the problem of squeezing it all into 16k of EPROM, we sometimes used 32k but that was frowned upon, memory was very expensive.