Gaming

I love watching videos about old game systems programming. The gymnastics you had to do to code, like, super Mario, just to show more than 3 colors is really interesting.

The games then were closer to embedded dev than software dev. The cartridge had huge limitations and the devs had to know those limits and work around them.

I think it was David Braben that used the video buffer as extra ram. Coded text on screen in the same colour blue as the sky and stored it there.

Sometimes they did it just in case they needed those limited resources, but its not really needed. SMW is a good example, where spite interactions are only checked every other frame, but modders generally remove that limitation without any issues. There might be weird edge cases where in vanilla without glitches you could theoretically accumulate enough sprite on stream it causes a slightly more noticeable slowdown without the ever other frame. With cape float, it only checks if you are holding the jump button once every 4 frames or something like that. Totally unnecessary and makes the game feel less responsive. Granted, during a casual playthrough, you'd probably never notice that floating stopping after letting go of the button varies by 50ms depending on which frame you let go of the button relative to which frame it checks.