The 2600 was a beast: or maybe more like a mouse coded up to act like a beast. Getting all the housekeeping (inputs, movement, hits, etc.) done during the vertical blank period and then manually drawing each line to the screen is like nothing done today. Comparing any PC game (or likely any Nintendo, Apple, or Atari 5200) to modern games might scale normally by lines of code, but you are comparing an effort to get reasonably fast vs. hard realtime cycle-counted code.
Wumpus
---- I just ate about 7 pounds of meat -theantix [ Parent ]
Not to denigrate his work, but of course programming is easy if the only designer you have to deal with is you, and the only other programmer you have to deal with is also you.
The same argument stands for his view of production. The production organisation complexity of his project is, well, trivial stood next to the organisational complexity of, say, producing a large team implementing a complex AAA title for multiple platforms, with several major stake holders with fingers in the design pie, who all have to be kept happy, and all have their offices in different time zones...--- Thad --- developer of ... ?[ Parent ]
