He has a fantastic youtube channel documenting lots of tricks and facts about games he's worked on.
There's a ton of old-school programming cleverness that you just don't see now a days!
My favorite "wtf how is this possible" classic game will probably always be the SNES port of DOOM. It's definitely among the worst ways of playing DOOM now, but for a port to the SNES, even with the SuperFX chip assisting it, it really does not feel like that should have been possible.
Mine are from the demo scene. Second Reality, free-flying in 3D in a time where running Doom taxed machines.
The 8088MHz demo: 1024 colors on CGA.
64Kb demo generating really good mountain landscape.
That sort of thing.
Do you mean Elevated? It is actually 4 kB, even more impressive:
At any rate: stunning.
The summary of it's development could be summarised with "It's LFSRs all the way down"
I guess the CGA demo is working by very quickly overwriting the display buffer and switching the palette, using Persistence of Vision. I did the same thing on VGA in 640x480x256 color mode to get 24-bit color in the late 80s.
https://int10h.org/blog/2015/04/cga-in-1024-colors-new-mode-...
An obvious other counter would be 3D engine development (Unity, Unreal) where the developers of those engines will be employing some obscure seeming low level stuff to make this look good. Not to be unclear though I'm 100% in agreement that for most devs, those days are mostly over. [0] https://youtu.be/5XOV3pZj8rI
[1]https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php
Games are distributed using custom small PNG files.
It definitely keeps the C64 spirit alive.
Opps sorry. I normally make an effort to use gender neutral addressing too.
Ouch.