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From: balzer@frambo.enet.dec.com (Christian Balzer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: Copper Effects In C.
Summary: Delay() isn't for everyone. ;-)
Keywords: Beer, Rom-Jumpers, Hardware molesters, ;-)
Message-ID: <4050@shlump.nac.dec.com>
Date: 14 Aug 89 14:46:01 GMT
Sender: news@shlump.nac.dec.com
Organization: DEC SWAS Frankfurt/W.Germany
Lines: 65


In article , shadow@pawl.rpi.edu (Deven T. Corzine) writes...
> 
>On 10 Aug 89 22:40:16 GMT,
>451061@UOTTAWA.BITNET (Valentin Pepelea) said:
>Valentin> Tss, tss, tss. Have we forgotten about Delay()?
> 
>Ugly thing about Delay() is that it's part of dos.library...

You're absolutly right, Deven. I personally avoid Delay() wherever
possible. Anybody remember the Delay(0) bug? ;-)

>Valentin> You realize, if I were German and had just swallowed too
>Valentin> much beer, I would have flamed you for this? :-)
> 
>Well, now.  From what appears to be the norm among German Amiga
>programmers, I would expect approval for the busy wait, and
>disapproval for otherwise cooperating with the operating system...
>[You shouldn't need to ask for *permission* to go play with the
>hardware directly!  You know the registers' addresses...]

Sigh, another stereotype. And what's really sad about it, is the fact 
that it's true. :-( :-}

My personal estimate is that still about 50% of the German (European,
Terrestrian?) Amiga programmers prefer dirty tricks over compliance to
well defined guidelines. Or they just don't read the manuals.
This percentage seems to rise dramatically for game programmers.
But they all follow a long and truly American tradition, ;-) 
with Electronic Arts taking the lead.

But here's something that really boggled my mind:
The recent issue of the German Amiga magazine featured an interview
with Mr. AmigaArt himself, Jim Sachs. Within this interesting
interview, Mr. Sachs states that he "takes over the up to it's last
byte" and never uses OS routines or relocateable code. Thus his
programs will never multitask, but since he needs every bit of CHIPmem,
this wouldn't work in the first place and slow down his games too much.
While I can understand _some_ of practices above and would tolerate them
if they would result in a killer game, Mr. Sachs had one more "hint"
for the anxious German public. He said he prefers assembler to C, since
it allows such nice things as self-modifying code!!!

Whoa, I can see the next generation of Amiga games coming, all of them
crashing on my A2620 system... ;-}
(The interview might be a forgery (unlikely) or heavily edited, but
this is what the German audience read.)
I just wait for the kids coming to me and yelling: 
"You're no decent Amiga programmer, Jim Sachs told us so. Now let's go
and take over some blitter registers." ;-)

>p.s. :-)

Appreciated, but not really necessary in this contents. As stated
above, you're (unfortunately) perfectly right. A fact's a fact. ;-)

Regards,

- 
--  _  _
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