8 bit guy

https://www.youtube.com/user/adric22

Amusing Gootube channel about the Commodore 64. He does a better job covering it than others, in better quality & in more detail than average. Things would have been different if the younger lion kingdom had access to highest end supercomputers of the day, but there was no option of buying time on a Jeff Bezos compute node or knowing someone with a university computing account in those days. The only exposure to how multimedia programming was done was what consumers could afford, which was far inferior to the way the highest end systems worked.


You could be forgiven for thinking the way C64's did multimedia was the way it would always be done. The C64 was lightyears ahead in multimedia than anything else of the same price, for at least 6 years. It was invented by guys a lot smarter than you, surely pursuing the easiest architecture possible for programmers. In fact, it was the opposite of convenience but a need to optimize every single transistor down to the maximum a consumer could afford. It took a while to realize high end arcade games weren't using sprites & character sets in creative ways but using entirely new hardware. The 6502 assembly language remaned quite relevant to modern assembly languages.


It makes you wonder if at the rate human intelligence is going down, are future systems only going to have 64k again & are we going to have to use "multicolor bitmap mode" again. Future generations aren't always going to know the merits of addressing the screen in raster lines instead of character cells.


What about running into future limitations which might require multicolor bitmap mode. The C64's graphics were dictated by the minimum resolution to resolve text, making colors the constrained resource. Today's resolution is constrained by the minimum framerate to resolve motion & would have to be reduced by quite a bit before it couldn't resolve text.