Most impressive games written in assembly

[Keatah]

1 hour ago, Creamhoven said:

Thank you for sharing your insight. This helps me understanding the current state of things and how we got there.

I believe my opinion came from two time periods. Playing the top DOS hits of the day when 486s and Pentiums were the thing. And the early 2600 cartridge days. Days when the only 3rd party mfgs were like Activision and Imagic. Most everything after those companies were fluff & stuff that turned me off - and helped speed up the crash.

 

It's not to say I won't change my mind ever. It just hasn't happened yet.

 

1 hour ago, Creamhoven said:

It seems to me like great people have worked hard to develop great things such as gaming, and later on people who are of lesser quality pile up more and more creating hideous contraptions.

I see it differently. The early pioneers were exploring a new medium. And many things looked good right off the bat. Because. New. As expectations refined and grew, more demands were placed on developers. And they had to contend with all kinds of marketing forces. Videogames were becoming commoditized and commercialized.

 

1 hour ago, Creamhoven said:

I saw a modern game not to long ago were a woman makes hideous and obscene faces, like her brain is being eaten by worms or something. The people that come up with this stuff must be really sick freaks. Imagine the trouble the romans went through to build the colloseum. With this kind of challenge they had to face they would never have dreamt of doing anything less than absolute greatness.

 

If this current gaming industry would vanish and would be slowly replaced by decent people, nothing would be missed.

Sounds like shock value. I can appreciate that and get into it. But I wouldn't miss it if it suddenly vanished.

[Keatah]

1 hour ago, zzip said:

I think one problem is too many people are tolling away in the digital world while the real world is falling apart.   Imagine if just a fraction of the effort to build virtual worlds was spent in the real world?

This is a huge modern-day issue. Our neighbors down the thoroughfare just paid like $30,000 for a new floor. And the damned thing is not level. There's visible dips and some of the tiling isn't even with adjacent tiles. So the next step is to just re-level the existing mess and build another one on top of what's left? It makes me angry and it isn't even mine!

 

Mean to tell me that the installers couldn't see the problem as it developed?

 

1 hour ago, zzip said:

You can't stop people from making horrible things,  usually you resort to curation to separate out the outstanding work.

Curation is something I wished I learned about early on, like in the late 1970's. Instead I let the completist mindset dictate the of shape my collection till it became untenable and crashed.

 

1 hour ago, zzip said:

Some modern platforms barely have curation, it's like walking into an art museum where the artwork of Mrs. O'Mally's kindergarten class is displayed next to a Rembrandt and it's up to the user to find the gems through a mountain of mediocre stuff.

It takes time and trial and error. And I don't have much patience for that these days.

 

1 hour ago, zzip said:

There's also a blanket hatred of modern games around here that isn't justified,    there's games made for every taste.  Some real works of art too.

It would go a long way (to getting me onboard with modern gaming) if inconveniences like excessive DRM and bloated size and required zero-day patches were eliminated. Basically cartridge collecting again.

[Creamhoven]

11 hours ago, zzip said:

You can't stop people from making horrible things,

You surely can.

11 hours ago, zzip said:

usually you resort to curation to separate out the outstanding work.

Yes, that is a good option. The Nintendo quality seal is a solid idea. Maybe that would be a good direction to take things.

11 hours ago, zzip said:

Some modern platforms barely have curation, it's like walking into an art museum where the artwork of Mrs. O'Mally's kindergarten class is displayed next to a Rembrandt and it's up to the user to find the gems through a mountain of mediocre stuff.

Yeah and some things shouldnt be platformed at all.

11 hours ago, zzip said:

I don't think there needs to be a barrier,  game design requires multiple talents that not every programmer possesses.   Programming,  visual design, music, sound design, story.   In modern game design, those tasks go to people who specialize.   In the old days it wasn't uncommon for one person to take on all that with varying degrees of success.  There might be a decent game with terrible sprites because the programmer wasn't an artist.   Plenty of hackers on this forum have been replacing sprites in old games with better ones.

I agree, I just wish there was a barrier that would lock nasty people out of the process. If you are able to program at least you have a functional brain that can think structurly. You also have more respect for your coding work to rake greater care that the other elements are as good as you can make them. I'd rather see crude graphics than high fidelity disorderly nastyness.

11 hours ago, zzip said:

There's also a blanket hatred of modern games around here that isn't justified,    there's games made for every taste.  Some real works of art too.

Name one.

11 hours ago, Mr SQL said:

Good points. There is some overlap and some programs have greater use.

 

 

I agree, thanks to everyone for this great discussion.

11 hours ago, Keatah said:

I believe my opinion came from two time periods. Playing the top DOS hits of the day when 486s and Pentiums were the thing. And the early 2600 cartridge days. Days when the only 3rd party mfgs were like Activision and Imagic. Most everything after those companies were fluff & stuff that turned me off - and helped speed up the crash.

I see. Do you see parallels from that era leading to the crash and what is happening right now?

11 hours ago, Keatah said:

It's not to say I won't change my mind ever. It just hasn't happened yet.

 

I see it differently. The early pioneers were exploring a new medium. And many things looked good right off the bat. Because. New. As expectations refined and grew, more demands were placed on developers. And they had to contend with all kinds of marketing forces. Videogames were becoming commoditized and commercialized.

Okay. I have observed the hollywoodisation of games. I think that is an extremly unfortunate development. The nastyness aside, playing a movie with mediocour gameplay is not that appealing. Id rather watch a movie, read a (audio-)book or whatever. The big push to put hollywood type of people into gaming is baffling to me. Very odd. I think it will grow increasingly thin and break apart. Hollywood should have sticked to movies.

11 hours ago, Keatah said:

Sounds like shock value. I can appreciate that and get into it.

Are people shocked these days? I am sceptical. If you allow me a bit of conspitorial type of thinking, I think they know that people are so desensetised that they are not shocked, and they are doing this just to push nastyness on decent people. Think about it, if you are in the position to make things happen, what is stopping you pushing demoralising stuff om common people? Just a little conspitorial type of thinking.

11 hours ago, Keatah said:

But I wouldn't miss it if it suddenly vanished.

Yes, no one decent will.

[zzip]

16 hours ago, Mr SQL said:

 

Good points. There is some overlap and some programs have greater use.

 

I think it depends how reliant the program is on macro use, and the type of macros leveraged. Some macros generate large block of asm and can be implemented without even looking at the generated code and may be retuned with subsequent releases of the Macro assembler like the C compiler optimizations.

They are not necessarily a bad thing for being higher level. And Macros have gotten very advanced blurring the line with large libraries. 
 

 

Yeah It could be that macro assemblers have come a long way since I used them in the 80s/90s.    Back then, they made life easier, but you wouldn't mistake them for a high level language.

 

As long as you have the ability to tweak the generated ASM code,  I think that's what separates it from a higher-level language where that ability is obfuscated from the user-  although some two-step compilers will produce an assembly version of your code that you can tweak before producing the final binary.

[zzip]

16 hours ago, Keatah said:

It would go a long way (to getting me onboard with modern gaming) if inconveniences like excessive DRM and bloated size and required zero-day patches were eliminated. Basically cartridge collecting again.

GoG sells DRM free games with installers you can download and use offline

 

As for bloat-  It used to be that we'd spend hundreds of dollars for a few dozen or hundred of megabytes of disk and we had to be on guard about what we install there to save space.    These days it doesn't feel like storage space is at a premium anymore.    My other concern about bloat is when you install something and it dumps a bunch of crap on your system that the uninstaller doesn't remove, throws who knows what into your registry,  installs startup processes and worse installed spyware that harms your system's performance.  There was a lack of transparency on what was going on in the system.   I hated that era of Windows gaming!

 

Something like Steam removes a lot of that.   It's easy to install games and remove them to save space (it will maintain your save data in case you decide to reinstall later)

 

It's also one reason I like consoles too, they are dedicated to gaming, they streamlined the process. Spyware isn't a problem-  because they don't allow just anybody to release stuff in their game stores.   You don't have to worry about your important files being compromised because you installed something your shouldn't have on a PC That you share between work and gaming.

 

So to me that removes the bloat risks,  I can try something, remove it if I don't like it and not worry about the space or the other issues.

[zzip]

6 hours ago, Creamhoven said:

18 hours ago, zzip said:

You can't stop people from making horrible things,

You surely can.

Depends on if horrible means "not good" or horrible means "sick, nasty, etc"    For the first,  a developer is likely to make bad games before they hone their craft and make good ones,  you don't want to stop that

 

For the other meaning-   even the 2600 got games like "Custer's Revenge",  probably much to Atari's horror and others.    Back then though there was more of a sense of shame.   I only heard about Custer's Revenge carts,  I never saw one.   If a retailer carried it was not on display.  Maybe hidden under the counter or something for those who asked.  Major retailers likely wouldn't touch it at all.

 

Then the internet came and it made Custer's Revenge binaries were readily available for anyone who was curious.   And now you can find games that make Custer's Revenge look tame easily

 

7 hours ago, Creamhoven said:

Yes, that is a good option. The Nintendo quality seal is a solid idea. Maybe that would be a good direction to take things.

Problem is the Nintendo Quality seal was one of the tools Nintendo used to enact anti-competitive practices on the industry.   The question was Nintendo serving the public interest or their own interest with such measures?   Probably more of the latter than they'd admit.   These days we rely on third-party ratings systems like Metacritic scores (which aren't perfect either) to find the quality

 

7 hours ago, Creamhoven said:

19 hours ago, zzip said:

There's also a blanket hatred of modern games around here that isn't justified,    there's games made for every taste.  Some real works of art too.

Name one.

Elden Ring, Switch Sports, Planet Coaster, Dreams are some I've enjoyed recently.  All very different games.

 

7 hours ago, Creamhoven said:

19 hours ago, Keatah said:

I believe my opinion came from two time periods. Playing the top DOS hits of the day when 486s and Pentiums were the thing. And the early 2600 cartridge days. Days when the only 3rd party mfgs were like Activision and Imagic. Most everything after those companies were fluff & stuff that turned me off - and helped speed up the crash.

I see. Do you see parallels from that era leading to the crash and what is happening right now?

There are always people predicting the next gaming crash and they are always wrong,  because there's a fundamental misunderstanding of the crash.   Back then the gaming industry was basically built on one pillar-  arcade games.    Home systems were in a race to get the best arcade games ported.   Problem was by 1982/83 virtually all the 'classics' had been out for awhile and ported to home systems --  Pac-Man, Defender, Donkey Kong, Space Invaders, Joust.  And the next big thing was supposed to be laserdisc games.   But Laserdisc games had limited gameplay and didn't hold people's interests very long,  they also couldn't be properly ported to home systems of the era.

 

So there wasn't a lot going on to hold people's interest when the hype around those games faded, and so people drifted away from games to other things, sales plummeted.   It didn't recover until Nintendo found the next big thing in SMB.  It changed the paradigm being much deeper than the average arcade game before it.

 

These days the gaming industry rests on many pillars,  if one collapses it doesn't bring the entire industry down.   For instance a few years ago, Fortnite was the hottest game around nowadays nobody talks about Fortnite,  you could say Fortnite "crashed", but Fortnite players were able to jump to other games so Fortnite didn't crash gaming.

 

8 hours ago, Creamhoven said:

20 hours ago, Keatah said:

Sounds like shock value. I can appreciate that and get into it.

Are people shocked these days? I am sceptical. If you allow me a bit of conspitorial type of thinking, I think they know that people are so desensetised that they are not shocked, and they are doing this just to push nastyness on decent people. Think about it, if you are in the position to make things happen, what is stopping you pushing demoralising stuff om common people? Just a little conspitorial type of thinking.

Given the daily outrage on social media, I think it's safe to say that people still get shocked.   They just get shocked by different things.

 

I've noticed that some of the shock comedies of the 70s like maybe Airplane! or Monty Python would still be offensive to some today for almost completely different reasons than they would have back then.

[Keatah]

10 hours ago, Creamhoven said:

22 hours ago, zzip said:

You can't stop people from making horrible things,

You surely can.

How would that be accomplished?

 

 

10 hours ago, Creamhoven said:

22 hours ago, Keatah said:

I believe my opinion came from two time periods. Playing the top DOS hits of the day when 486s and Pentiums were the thing. And the early 2600 cartridge days. Days when the only 3rd party mfgs were like Activision and Imagic. Most everything after those companies were fluff & stuff that turned me off - and helped speed up the crash.

I see. Do you see parallels from that era leading to the crash and what is happening right now?

I don't see any significant parallels. Sure there's more fluff'n'stuff today than ever. But countering that are the literal billions of devices, consoles, phones, set top boxes, PCs, and users, to consume it all.

 

 

3 hours ago, zzip said:

GoG sells DRM free games with installers you can download and use offline

I've bought from them before.

 

3 hours ago, zzip said:

As for bloat-  It used to be that we'd spend hundreds of dollars for a few dozen or hundred of megabytes of disk and we had to be on guard about what we install there to save space.

I even used DoubleSpace to get another 50MB out of a 212MB hdd. I thought it magic back then. Like how'd they do that!?!? WOW! Actually noted some improved throughput too because the bus speeds were slow enough to where compressed data sets were shrunked enough to squirt through in faster time. heh..

 

 

3 hours ago, zzip said:

    These days it doesn't feel like storage space is at a premium anymore.

That's right. It isn't. I hadn't priced an HDDs in the past 3 months, but 20 TB is gotta be in the mid-$200 range now.

 

 

3 hours ago, zzip said:

    My other concern about bloat is when you install something and it dumps a bunch of crap on your system that the uninstaller doesn't remove, throws who knows what into your registry,  installs startup processes and worse installed spyware that harms your system's performance.  There was a lack of transparency on what was going on in the system.   I hated that era of Windows gaming!

I think that started in the era of the registry itself. I've got an XP rig with a 20 year old install going. And I've been extraordinarily religious about keeping track of what is installed/removed and left behind. It's a tight ship because I don't do too much of those activities. With XP having been sunset years ago, I usually just update a few applications now and then. And the list is getting shorter as tools that devs use drop XP support.

 

I only use 3 registry tools (for those past 20 years) to keep track of and root out the crap. Auslogics Registry Cleaner & Defragger, and RegCleaner. Moreso to scan and look for changes and additions which I'd manually delete if needed.

 

Use CCleaner to erase all the temp files and specific lists of crap generated. This is automated and customized for each installed application.

 

I also make use of Ultimate Defrag to conduct some file placement operations, and keeping the metafiles nice and tidy and in one area. All the working programs go at the front of the disk. All the archived installers and supporting/notes/tools files go at the back. Have a tight record of everything and all the necessary reinstall files to redo any application individually.

 

Then there's Paragon's Hard Disk Manager. It's the only proggie I know of that can organize and trim NTFS'es MFT B-Tree structure.

 

Sounds like a lot of work? Naw. It's something I spend about 4-6 hours a year on. And the time includes a backup run too. Take a day for maintenance and optimization.. The whole spiel is about maintaining and keeping a computing environment that's energy efficient, familiar, and fast. This little rig uses about 10w of power on average.

 

 

3 hours ago, zzip said:

It's also one reason I like consoles too, they are dedicated to gaming, they streamlined the process.

Yes that's still a #1 reason to get one.

 

 

2 hours ago, zzip said:

For the other meaning-   even the 2600 got games like "Custer's Revenge",  probably much to Atari's horror and others. 

I remember our schoolyard banter about that game, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Carried a sense of taboo to talk about it. It felt like real shock value. A sense of the other side of grown-up culture even. Something I couldn't understand why I couldn't understand it. It seemed important. But the aura came and went and we got to talking about things that were real and available. Eventually I got to try them and was like meh.

Edited April 6, 2023 by Keatah

[Creamhoven]

2 hours ago, zzip said:

Depends on if horrible means "not good" or horrible means "sick, nasty, etc"    For the first,  a developer is likely to make bad games before they hone their craft and make good ones,  you don't want to stop that

Thank you for your thorough response. As long as they sincerley tried to make something nice, I am fine with that.

2 hours ago, zzip said:

 

For the other meaning-   even the 2600 got games like "Custer's Revenge",  probably much to Atari's horror and others.    Back then though there was more of a sense of shame.   I only heard about Custer's Revenge carts,  I never saw one.   If a retailer carried it was not on display.  Maybe hidden under the counter or something for those who asked.  Major retailers likely wouldn't touch it at all.

I am fine with this type of situation. This to me sounds like a functional society.

2 hours ago, zzip said:

Then the internet came and it made Custer's Revenge binaries were readily available for anyone who was curious.   And now you can find games that make Custer's Revenge look tame easily

Yes, we will have custers revenges as long as there is more or less free internet spreading around. It cant be helped to a point. Big companies, however, shouldnt be able to dream of pushing nastyness, because they fear machiavellian blowback with good reason.

2 hours ago, zzip said:

Problem is the Nintendo Quality seal was one of the tools Nintendo used to enact anti-competitive practices on the industry.   The question was Nintendo serving the public interest or their own interest with such measures? 

I am sure that they were acting in their own interest. Still, it had positive side effects. Less nastyness, less garbage.

2 hours ago, zzip said:

 Probably more of the latter than they'd admit.   These days we rely on third-party ratings systems like Metacritic scores (which aren't perfect either) to find the quality

Yeah it's a sham.

2 hours ago, zzip said:

 

Elden Ring,

Yes, that is a good example. I have played dark souls and seen elden ring and it is a good game for arguing in favor of videogames having the potential of being art. The japanese, like the people of atariage, are quite intelligent. I respect them.

2 hours ago, zzip said:

Switch Sports,

I only know the wii version. Calling that one art is a bit of a stretch, but it is masterfully crafted no doubt. The japanese people at nintendo have a dedication to clean fun we can all learn from.

2 hours ago, zzip said:

Planet Coaster, Dreams are some I've enjoyed recently.  All very different games.

Dont know those.

2 hours ago, zzip said:

 

There are always people predicting the next gaming crash and they are always wrong,  because there's a fundamental misunderstanding of the crash.   Back then the gaming industry was basically built on one pillar-  arcade games.    Home systems were in a race to get the best arcade games ported.   Problem was by 1982/83 virtually all the 'classics' had been out for awhile and ported to home systems --  Pac-Man, Defender, Donkey Kong, Space Invaders, Joust.  And the next big thing was supposed to be laserdisc games.   But Laserdisc games had limited gameplay and didn't hold people's interests very long,  they also couldn't be properly ported to home systems of the era.

Interesting. What I see now is that large chunks of the hollywood entertainment complex are commited to videogaming. I think they have miscalculated and put alot of weight on this industry, on a shaky foundation. It seems to me that the videogaming industry is currently collapsing under its own weight. (I am talking about the big players)

2 hours ago, zzip said:

So there wasn't a lot going on to hold people's interest when the hype around those games faded, and so people drifted away from games to other things, sales plummeted.   It didn't recover until Nintendo found the next big thing in SMB.  It changed the paradigm being much deeper than the average arcade game before it.

I see. What we are seeing now is a lack of innovation for sure, but I think that the videogaming complex isnt able to even hold the standard they have worked at before. If it wont crash under its own weight, it will regress or at least stagnate.

2 hours ago, zzip said:

These days the gaming industry rests on many pillars,  if one collapses it doesn't bring the entire industry down.   For instance a few years ago, Fortnite was the hottest game around nowadays nobody talks about Fortnite,  you could say Fortnite "crashed", but Fortnite players were able to jump to other games so Fortnite didn't crash gaming.

But if investors loose trust in the culture production of video games as a whole, it might very well crash top to bottom.

2 hours ago, zzip said:

 

Given the daily outrage on social media, I think it's safe to say that people still get shocked.   They just get shocked by different things.

Okay, I cant tell what they are about. Are they just signaling on social media or is it real? You might be correct. I personally am not shocked by media products anymore but disgusted at times.

2 hours ago, zzip said:

I've noticed that some of the shock comedies of the 70s like maybe Airplane! or Monty Python would still be offensive to some today for almost completely different reasons than they would have back then.

I can see that being true. Monty Python, however, has a decency to it. It doesnt insult the intellegence and senses, like some media product today.

Edited April 6, 2023 by Creamhoven

[Creamhoven]

25 minutes ago, Keatah said:

How would that be accomplished?

The same way we stop indecency towards children. You can read up on details reading Machiavelli and Foucault for example.

25 minutes ago, Keatah said:

I don't see any significant parallels. Sure there's more fluff'n'stuff today than ever. But countering that are the literal billions of devices, consoles, phones, set top boxes, PCs, and users, to consume it all.

I see. It is very different these days.

[zzip]

18 minutes ago, Keatah said:

3 hours ago, zzip said:

    These days it doesn't feel like storage space is at a premium anymore.

That's right. It isn't. I hadn't priced an HDDs in the past 3 months, but 20 TB is gotta be in the mid-$200 range now.

It used to be not even that long ago (<10 years) that I'd never have a spare hard drive of sufficient capacity if I wanted to test things out,  all the good ones were in use.  If I'd upgrade one system, the HD in the other would die and consume the spare.   But now I have several unused ones and I'm much less concerned about space

 

27 minutes ago, Keatah said:

I think that started in the era of the registry itself. I've got an XP rig with a 20 year old install going. And I've been extraordinarily religious about keeping track of what is installed/removed and left behind. It's a tight ship because I don't do too much of those activities. With XP having been sunset years ago, I usually just update a few applications now and then. And the list is getting shorter as tools that devs use drop XP support.

 

I only use 3 registry tools (for those past 20 years) to keep track of and root out the crap. Auslogics Registry Cleaner & Defragger, and RegCleaner. Moreso to scan and look for changes and additions which I'd manually delete if needed.

I never was a fan of the registry.   The default interface made it needlessly cryptic and user-unfriendly.   I missed the DOS days where everything was installed to a directory and you could safely delete the directory to uninstall.   I notice that there's been a move to "portable apps" where you just unzip and run like the old days,  no installers.  

 

Package Management is great when it works, but too often I've seen uninstallers that don't work or clean up everything.

[Keatah]

7 minutes ago, zzip said:

I never was a fan of the registry.   The default interface made it needlessly cryptic and user-unfriendly.   I missed the DOS days where everything was installed to a directory and you could safely delete the directory to uninstall.   I notice that there's been a move to "portable apps" where you just unzip and run like the old days,  no installers.  

I wasn't either. I'm satisfied with traditional .cfg and .ini files.

 

The actual interface to the registry contents is ok and I never had a problem with it. The data contained in the registry, that's hit or miss. Depends on each individual application.

 

I suppose the registry is necessary because it basically shares and "broadcasts" the data contained in those beloved .cfg & .ini files. Allows for better interoperability.

 

I'm a big portable app fan through and through. In almost all cases I use them over installer versions. I don't know if there's a renaissance move toward portables or not. If it's happening it's not happening fast enough.

[zzip]

17 hours ago, Keatah said:

I wasn't either. I'm satisfied with traditional .cfg and .ini files.

 

The actual interface to the registry contents is ok and I never had a problem with it. The data contained in the registry, that's hit or miss. Depends on each individual application.

Yeah INI files were usually organized so that anyone could open them and understand what is going on.

 

But then even INI files got replaced with XML because it gives the ability to create a settings hierarchy.   I hated XML - too dense and hard to read!  These days JSON seems to have replaced XML, and it's an improvement on readability-  just watch your commas!  

 

17 hours ago, Keatah said:

I suppose the registry is necessary because it basically shares and "broadcasts" the data contained in those beloved .cfg & .ini files. Allows for better interoperability.

I just think it could be presented to users better.    Like the ability to only show me all the settings for a particular application and nothing else, with brief a description for each setting if it isn't obvious from the name.  Could be as easy to work with as ini files.

 

17 hours ago, Keatah said:

I'm a big portable app fan through and through. In almost all cases I use them over installer versions. I don't know if there's a renaissance move toward portables or not. If it's happening it's not happening fast enough.

There's websites dedicated to "portable apps" now.   They used to not even have a name.   Not sure if that makes a renaissance, but it's something.

 

But I've noticed a shift away from official package managers in general.   There's the "Homebrew" package manager for Mac and Linux,  also a proliferation of formats like Snap, AppImage and Flatpak on Linux.    And the move towards "containers"--  running apps in a fully contained semi-virtualized environment (I think it's overkill, but developers seem to love it)