Re:Racing the Beam (2009)
by fidotron on Wednesday January 01, 2014 @01:34PM
(#6995870)
This is a really great book.
One underappreciated aspect of the games industry is the extent hardware dictates game design. This is very clear on the 2600 where the limitations were ludicrous by modern standards, but extends through the tile and sprite acceleration hardware of the 16 bit era to the present day with issues like touch control or video processing latency making the very reaction driven titles that were so common on the 2600, by virtue of the limited time you had to process an update and the direct manner the video signal was produced, practically impossible on modern hardware.
One underappreciated aspect of the games industry is the extent hardware dictates game design. This is very clear on the 2600 where the limitations were ludicrous by modern standards, but extends through the tile and sprite acceleration hardware of the 16 bit era to the present day with issues like touch control or video processing latency making the very reaction driven titles that were so common on the 2600, by virtue of the limited time you had to process an update and the direct manner the video signal was produced, practically impossible on modern hardware.