Assembly or ....ok

[mcdonald at uxe.cso.uiuc.edu]

-My, how quickly we forget.  SubLOGIC developed their initial products,
-including Flight Simulator, exclusively for the Apple II.  The original
-Flight Simulator used monchrome line graphics; it was a big hit.
-
-I'm waiting for an Apple IIGS version.  Because SubLOGIC built
-everything the hard way (not only CPU-specific assembly code, but
-also their own disk file system), it's taking them longer than it
-would have to produce a new port like that.
-
-The real question is, how much of that was really necessary?
-I haven't tried to figure out their particular methods, but I know
-of ways to do much of what is needed for Flight Simulator in C,
-and I know of spiffier flight simulators on real graphics systems
-that are coded entirely in C.

On an Apple II or an original PC, with 48 K memory and tiny disks,
yes, not only was assembly necessary, it probably was stuffed to the gills
with the most arcane hacks ever thought of. I still think that the original
FS was the most impressive program I have ever seen. Certainly it impresses
more than the simulator I saw on a friends Iris 4 super graphics
workstation. The ONLY thing going on that is the supersmooth graphics.
I've written molecular dynamics graphics simulations on PC's,
and on anything less than a 16 MHz 386 they need to have the actual
graphics part done in mostly in assembler, and extremely carefully
hand coded at that. The rest is in C; on a good 386 all could be in C
(on a PC of course, where the C compiler puts outp instructions
inline. On a 386 PC running Unix - oh my God, I seriously doubt if it
could be done. I know that I tried originally to use a VAX780 and
failed miserably due to no bitmapped graphics.)
Doug McDonald