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Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

It was far more important to have the same software work on Amiga, x86 (DOS), Mac and the whole slew of different machines than came and went.

Today we have fewer machines than the great explosive growth of the 80s.

Consider that most 'software' today is JavaScript interpreted by the Web Browser. It's not like those portability concerns didn't exist in the 80s, if anything, it was harder because you had to make your own interpreter back then.

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Many (maybe most?) video games seem to have been written in a VM, at least before Doom / high performance 3d graphics.

I think console games were in C/Assembly for performance.

But 'computer' games at that time was before the standard IBM PC or at least, before the PC won and Microsoft achieved dominance. When you didn't know if Amiga, PC98, IBM PC, Mac, or others would win it only made sense to write a VM.

SCUMM (Monkey Island and many others) comes to mind.

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The Infocom text adventures (e.g. Zork) were based on a VM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-machine

Which is stll working with libre implementations (frotz) and OOP based compilers targeting the Z-machine (inform6 +inform6lib).

> Consider that most 'software' today is JavaScript interpreted by the Web Browser.

I thought most software was MS Excel sheets with interacting formulae :-)

And as it happens, early versions of Excel used a bytecode running on a VM instead of native code. Though the motivation was not portability, but rather memory requirements:

> In most cases, p-code can reduce the size of an executable file by about 40 percent. For example, the Windows Project Manager version 1.0 (resource files not included) shrinks from 932K (C/C++ 7.0 with size optimizations turned on) to 556K when p-code is employed.

> Until now, p-code has been a proprietary technology developed by the applications group at Microsoft and used on a variety of internal projects. The retail releases of Microsoft Excel, Word, PowerPoint®, and other applications employ this technology to provide extensive breadth of functionality without consuming inordinate amounts of memory.

http://sandsprite.com/vb-reversing/files/Microsoft%20P-Code%...

> Many (maybe most?) video games seem to have been written in a VM, at least before Doom / high performance 3d graphics.

This was not terribly common, for the obvious performance reasons. Another World ran at around 10-20FPS on most of the systems it was released for, which is fine for a methodical game like that (and for adventure games like Monkey Island, etc.) but doesn't work for fast action games.

And of course VM games were basically impossible for the entire 8-bit era, with the exception of things like Zork (and the rest of Infocom's Z-Machine games) whose performance needs were so small that the gigantic overhead of an 8-bit VM was hardly noticeable.

Even into the 16-bit era, the majority of multi-platform games were fully rewritten ports.

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