November 2007 Archives

It's a little bit disappointing to see that the industry still are clamoring and lamenting the (supposed) difficulties of developing for the Playstation 3. Meanwhile, the consumers must be either thinking that the PS3 is a load of crap, or that the developers are. I can't really decide if they are correct on both accounts or if we as an industry have to get over ourselves and just stop whining and get to work. Now if it was easy to develop top notch video games, then they wouldn't need us, right?

Ever since I took the leap from Basic V2 to 6510 assembly on my old Commodore 64, I've had a hate/love relationship with assembly. It allowed me back then to do things that were not possibly through any other means (vblank handler, raster coppers etc). My second foray into assembly was through Turbo Pascal funny enough. Turbo Pascal had this really easy mechanism to escape into inline assembly so that you could write your high level constructs in Pascal and then write the guts in assembly. This worked really well for me for a long while, even though real mode x86 assembly is kind of a pain.