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Comment by DeathArrow | Hacker News Reader

> and managed to do it in real time, even on a fairly plebeian consumer-grade computer. He did so first of all by being a genius programmer, able to squeeze every last drop out of the limited hardware at his disposal.

He did it in the '90s. Now we have Javascript frameworks, SOLID principles, clean coding, uncle Bob and AGILE methodology.

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Wow, easy now. You're throwing a bunch of stuff together and acting like it's all the same evil.

Trust me, the way they wrote games back in the day was the most AGILE methodology you'll ever see.

Clean coding is such a loaded term, too. It can mean different things to different people, but I presume you're throwing shade at the book "clean code".

Finally, Javascript frameworks, well, there is no redeeming there, and to be frank, it started at Javascript.

Anyone remember the SNES port of Doom? By all accounts, it was a piece of sh!t compared to the PC version, but talk about wringing out what you could of the limited SNES hardware

SNES doom was a total labor of love by Randy Linden, the story behind it is very interesting: https://www.shacknews.com/article/117004/super-doom-how-id-s... He created it without even getting the rights to do so first and id was so impressed they had to publish it. It's arguably an even bigger programming achievement than regular Doom as the SNES has no business doing anything remotely close to Doom. A lot of the work to make it run on the SNES (simplifying some levels and such) went on to almost all the other console ports too. Yeah it wasn't the best Doom experience, but it was still pretty amazing for what was basically a souped up 6502 processor on the SNES.

SNES DOOM does have the Super FX chip, which draws textured polygons to an on-cart framebuffer for DMA transfer to main video memory. It runs at 21 MHz, much faster than the SNES console itself and actually not all that far off from the Playstation or a 486 PC.

That's great but doom doesn't use polygons and is a texture mapped raycasting engine. Super FX does help speed up some vector math operations but it's still quite limited.

If you played SNES doom you would know it's really pushing the system to the absolute limits. The frame rate is pretty low and cropped play area is small. They had to simplify a bit of level geometry to get the BSPs and other level traversal logic for stuff like enemy AI to fit in memory (which was 128 kilobytes!). They didn't even have enough CPU power to texture the floor and ceiling.

Why do you censor yourself?

The SNES port was my first introduction to Doom. What a blast from the past.

> Now we have Javascript frameworks, SOLID principles, clean coding, uncle Bob and AGILE methodology.

I see this sentiment here often, but I still fail to see what is inherintly bad in any of these?

Probably not bad, probably less fun though.

And we're all the worse for it.

> Now we have Javascript frameworks, SOLID principles, clean coding, uncle Bob and AGILE methodology.

Oh no, you’ve uncovered his secret plan!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_MkLfD0Ly4

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