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Retrocomputing

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  • (a) I don't understand how writing software to directly control the hardware is the lazy option instead of using function calls that took care of everything. The laziness theory doesn't make any sense. It was a ton of work programming Amiga games, they were far from lazy. (b) Living thru that time with friends trying to low-level program the Amiga's graphics, I'd suspect (also guesswork) that programmers wanted to avoid any unknown overheads whatsoever in the graphics operations. Games programmers were trying to squeeze as much from every clock of those systems (same as always, same as today). Commented 20 hours ago
  • @TonyM The argument is that it's lazy because the rationale is "If I need to know all this hardware stuff anyway in order to get best possible performance, and that's enough to implement the thing, why should I waste my time also learning this whole other API?" (Where "learning this whole other API" is at least somewhat necessary to know what benefits you can gain from using it.) Essentially, "lazy" in the "blub paradox" sense. Commented 18 hours ago
  • @ssokolow, yes I know and I'd acknowledged and discredited all that in my first comment, for BrianH. Commented 17 hours ago