Coder Corner

There was something missing. Just before releasing Japtro we had attended the Intermedia Forum, during which we had discovered the Flipo. This was the first demo from Diamond Design – a bunch of wizards that included, among others, some ex-Oxygene members. That demo was a jewel. They did things that we did not know how to do, and I found that unbearable (*). Similarly, the famous 3D demo from the Overlanders in the European Demos, or the fabulous Brain Damage from Aggression certainly felt like a thorn in my side…

(*) Note that the main force behind the Flipo, Oxbab, is now co-president from Naughty Dog and the main force behind Uncharted. Yes, that game. There is something about old ST coders!

Competition, competition… We could not stop there. We had to do something, no matter the cost. Something better. We were good, but we were not clearly better than the others. And I remembered in my dreams the giant gaping hole that had originally separated TCB from the rest of the world… This is why, in a final burst of creativity driven by jealousy and the desire to “rule” once and for all, we went back to coding. And this time it would be to the death.

Always faster, always more. We had often remade the same effects from one demo to the next, but bigger and better. Blood was no exception. I imagined tortured and twisted tricks to speed up our polygon-filling routines. I did sordid experiments with the video screen memory to save a few cycles. Elric pulled out of his magic hat some of the best routines he has ever created. And for once, following the Flipo’s lead, we paid a minimum amount of attention to the demo’s overall design – for the first time we even got graphics from a real artist, Mic/Dune. The difference was obvious!

Years later the fist disk of Blood remains one of the things I am the most proud of in my life. I go back to it constantly. I still watch it in 1998, amazed after some years of coding on a PC, by the miracles we pulled off with those simple STs. And I am proud of these routines, proud of having lived those times, proud of our contributions to the ST demo world, proud of having been a part of this adventure. It was not so long ago, but it feels like it was in another life already.

I did not exactly find the same drive, the same passion, the same insanity, the same “yes we can” attitude, the same “try to beat this” challenges in any of the things I did on PC afterwards. Coding on PC always feels a bit sloppy. Made/BOMB once said that when moving from Deluxe Paint to PhotoShop he lost “le contrôle du pixel” – control over individual pixels. That was spot on. And that is exactly what I also thought about the code: on PC, we lost “le contrôle du cycle” – control over individual cycles. I miss that. Coding on PC is goal-oriented: you program something as a mean to an end. You program this or that for a game, or for a tool, or just to feed a graphics driver. On the ST however, there was a certain form of beauty in the code itself, in managing to eliminate each and every “useless” instructions, in the certainty you could have that a given piece of code was fully, totally, utterly efficient, without a single wasted cycle. There was a neverending challenge just pushing your own enveloppe, competing with yourself, see if you could do better. The clear optimization rules on the ST made that possible: if you save one NOP anywhere, if will go faster. If you remove an instruction, it will go faster. It is like a game of Tetris, where you try to remove as many useless instructions as possible while organizing the remaining ones in ways that minimize the amount of holes. On the PC, all bets are off. Saving a NOP might go faster, or not. Removing an instruction might go faster, or not. The “optimization” you do on your machine may make things slower on another machine. The optimization rules one day might be different the next day. This makes all the micro-optimizations we loved spending time on completely pointless.

Coding on ST felt like fun. Coding on PC feels like a job.

Maybe I just stopped being a kid who wanted to take over the world, and I became a grown-up.

In any case, Blood was shown at the Place to Be Again, where it only reached the 2nd place. It did feel like a defeat. Having put everything we had in that demo, it felt very disappointing not to reach the 1st place. It was supposed to be a fight to the death, and we had lost. Soon after we stopped programming on the ST. Some amazing things like Tim Clarke’s Mars had started to appear on the PC, and we slowly moved to that machine. Coding on PC was not much fun. The first days were very frustrating: no INCBIN, no IDE integrated with the assembler (WTF!), memory was apparently limited to 64K in real mode (WTF!!), 80×86 assembly was retarded compared to 68000, we had to use different programs to compile and link (WTF!!!), it felt prehistoric compared to Devpac. But the PC’s brute force power was too alluring to ignore, so we bit the bullet and started learning. We later joined BOMB and a few other groups, but this is another, far less interesting story.

What do I conclude from all this?

I feel lucky to have started programming on those old machines. It was so much fun.

I feel sad for the poor kids starting programming in Java.

Idols, heroes, models, mentors, are only regular humans. You can beat any of them with hard work and a strong motivation. “Yes we can”.

You do not even need the fastest code in the world to do so. We got great results in Choice of Gods using very limited 3D rotation routines we got from STMag, and even bits and pieces of the disassembled Line-A. Jeez we really had no shame. “Whatever works”.

Rules are meant to be bent. Limits and world records are meant to be broken.

Don’t be a “prophet programmer”. Be a Nick.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 20th, 2012 at 7:39 am and is filed under Atari ST, Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.