I was thinking while answering another question on here, about how old-skool I am about some things. I started reminiscing about days of old when our hardware was so slow/had so little memory of all the tricks we had to do to speed our games/programs up or make them fit in limited resources.

For me, I worked a little bit on a 4KByte TRS-80 Level 1, with a Cassette tape for storage, though I think the TRS-80 Level II with 16Kbytes was the first computer I seriously tried to get a game working on -- the old ASCII based Star Trek game.

Then I worked with a friend to implement a Multi-Player Online RPG on a PDP-11 with 32K of program space and 32K of data space. Hard to be "Massive" on such little hardware.

What's your first hardware and what limits did you have?

First ever was a ZX81 with 1K, but first real dev machine was Commodore 64 with an unsurprising 64k of memory, except some of the 64k was used by the machines own ROM. In the space that was left you had to fit the game code, the sprite animations, backgrounds, maps, music and sound FX.

Every byte counted. Well in fact every bit counted!

Now a single sprite would take up that 50k

progress, eh?

a Manuel stopwatch on a casio it envoled say go then watching the second hand then saying stop

I started on a C64 as well, those old machines were much better at getting people into coding imo. Sure now there are a lot more resources available but you've got to go looking and want to do it, there's not just a

READY>_

right there in your face when you turn the thing on.

my first computer was the Commodore Plus/4, C64's little brother http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plus4

I was 9yrs old and made some text adventures and ASCII games and never really reached the limits of that machine.. erm.. calculator.

later on my first "IBM compatible" I used QBASIC to make games like that super-cool beer brewery simulator :D

-finefin

Tandy Color Computer 3
loved the Rainbow Mag.