I believe that there are *still* some competitions held for assembly
language programmers to write full fledged games and demos in 32 KB RAM! The
competitions were v. popular in the late 80's and early 90's - so
programmers wouldn't lose their skills - in a world where the famous 'Hello
World' program took over 32KB of binary code to just write 'Hello World' in
text on the screen using the then current C (or BASIC and PASCAL) compilers
in Windoze. I still have a copy of Gianna Sisters (written for DOS in pure
assembly) that takes less than 32KB for the game code, graphics and sound!
In the mid-80s, using VB 3.0, I wrote a simple program:
End
The full program was:
Private Sub Form_Load()
End
End Sub
with the
Private Sub Form_Load()
End Sub
being automatically generated by VB.
which when compiled took just over 32 KB!!!! Note that this END instruction
can (in theory) compile to a one byte RET instruction (or at worst a 3 byte
FAR RET instruction on a PC processor!) - so should have been no more than a
few bytes (allowing for compiler overheads such as setting up the various
memory segments - Code, Data, Stack and Extra (required due to the PC's
stoopid demented memory map).
Allan
PS No trees were harmed in the sending of this message and a very large
number of electrons were asked their permission to be terribly
inconvenienced. (And threw a party for them afterwards for being really cool
about it).
Disrupting the unnatural balance that you, as a conscious human being and a
confused mass of energy, have created.
-Disturb the mind -
>From: Manuel Viet <oly@xxxxxxxxxx>
>Reply-To: olympus@xxxxxxxxxx
>To: olympus@xxxxxxxxxx
>Subject: [OM] Re: What would you do? Now: Horse racing and dog. Well sort
>of . . .
>Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2006 03:02:30 +0100
>
>
>Le jeudi 30 Novembre 2006 02:08, iddibhai@xxxxxxxxxxx a écrit :
>
> > > Olympus = CPM
> >
> > what the *heck* is cpm?
>
>The Zen of Computing :
>
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/M
>
>If your program don't fit in 64 Kb and your data in 128 Kb, you're not a
>true
>CP/Mer.
>
>pfff... nostalgia ; I loved CP/M. So clean, elegant and simple. The 68K
>version is the epitome of *the right thing*.
>
>--
>Manuel Viet
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