04-16-2003, 01:17 AM
Hi,
The early days of home computers were much closer to this as well. You didn't have tons of different parts for your Texas Instruments, Atari STs, Amigas, Apples, etc.
Nowadays there's basically three home platforms to develop for: Mac, Wintel, and Linux. Most game developers totally ignore Linux, develop for one of the other two and (usually) do a half-assed port to the remaining one.
But I think back to the '76 to '81 period (pre IBM-PC) and there were more platforms than you could keep track of. The closest to a "standard" was the S-100, but that was a hardware standard. People ran all kinds of processors and systems on that. CP/M was more or less a standard for OSes, but everyone and their uncle were tweaking it.
The Apple ][ was about as close as you could come to an appliance computer back then, and almost right from the start it had all sorts of plug ins. B&W cards, color cards, sound cards, speech cards and speech recognition cards.
There was a card for the early IBM-PC and clones that was effectively a complete Apple ][. The PC acted as an I/O interface for it.
So, no. Things are really a whole lot cleaner now. Apple always had its standards pretty well together. The Wintel world is a little bit more cluttered, but the PnP standards and the various flavors of DirectX have all made development a whole lot more straightforward. Most of the problems with compatibility have either come from driver programmers who don't understand what they are doing or game programmers who are taking shortcuts.
But screwier than it was in the early days? Hahahahahahahah! Half the people I knew that had personal computers then had home brew wire wrapped jobs.
--Pete
The early days of home computers were much closer to this as well. You didn't have tons of different parts for your Texas Instruments, Atari STs, Amigas, Apples, etc.
Nowadays there's basically three home platforms to develop for: Mac, Wintel, and Linux. Most game developers totally ignore Linux, develop for one of the other two and (usually) do a half-assed port to the remaining one.
But I think back to the '76 to '81 period (pre IBM-PC) and there were more platforms than you could keep track of. The closest to a "standard" was the S-100, but that was a hardware standard. People ran all kinds of processors and systems on that. CP/M was more or less a standard for OSes, but everyone and their uncle were tweaking it.
The Apple ][ was about as close as you could come to an appliance computer back then, and almost right from the start it had all sorts of plug ins. B&W cards, color cards, sound cards, speech cards and speech recognition cards.
There was a card for the early IBM-PC and clones that was effectively a complete Apple ][. The PC acted as an I/O interface for it.
So, no. Things are really a whole lot cleaner now. Apple always had its standards pretty well together. The Wintel world is a little bit more cluttered, but the PnP standards and the various flavors of DirectX have all made development a whole lot more straightforward. Most of the problems with compatibility have either come from driver programmers who don't understand what they are doing or game programmers who are taking shortcuts.
But screwier than it was in the early days? Hahahahahahahah! Half the people I knew that had personal computers then had home brew wire wrapped jobs.
--Pete
How big was the aquarium in Noah's ark?