I had always heard about how RCT was built in Assembly, and thought it was very impressive.

The more I actually started digging into assembly, the more this task seems monumental and impossible.

I didn't know there was a fork and I'm excited to look into it

kevincox 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Programming in assembly isn't really "hard" it mostly takes lots of discipline. Consistency and patterns are key. The language also provides very little implicit documentation, so always document which arguments are passed how and where, what registers are caller and callee saved. Of course it is also very tedious.

Now writing very optimized assembly is very hard. Because you need to break your consistency and conventions to squeeze out all the possible performance. The larger "kernel" you optimize the more pattern breaking code you need to keep in your head at a time.

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mikkupikku 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Macros. Lots of macros.

	▲	cogman10 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Yup. I've done a bit of assembly and it's really only a little harder than doing C. You simply have to get familiar with your assembler and the offered macros. Heck, I might even say that it's simpler than basic.
	▲	timschmidt 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		And presumably generous use of code comments

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markus_zhang 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Back then a lot of people started with assembly because that was the only way to make games quick enough. Throughout the years they accumulated tons of experience and routines and tools.

Not saying that it was not a huge feat, but it’s definitely a lot harder to start from scratch nowadays, even for the same platform.