Re: Apple II Classic Games

["Benjamin S. Yu" <by24+@andrew.cmu.edu>]

>(What's amazing to me is that such a high quality game, a game
>which still holds up today, with top notch graphics was pulled
>off on an Apple II in pure assembly language.  No source level
>debuggers, etc.  Incredible.  Modern games have the benefit of faster
>processors, fancier tools, high-level language compilers, etc.,
>and the overall quality seems to have _declined_.)

My cousin and i always thought that the Apple II designer went further
in exploiting the hardware.  There seemed to be more "break throughs"
(doing things that no body expexted the hardware to handle) as to what
games can do on a system.  Now the way the game is played is more like
"well there is better hardware to do this on we'll move over to that
one, or we need better hardware to do this, it's impossible).  i guess
it's the market that changed things.  Hardware companies have found out
that the more harware they introduce the more they sell.  Apple now
introduces about a dozen computers a year (hey, the Japanese market
recieves a dozen new models each month).  With this strategy working so
well i cannot see the good old excellence in software designing where
almost impossible things can be pulled off.

Ben Savageley