Steve's Tech Talk: Robotron and OOP http://www.atalasoft.com/cs/blogs/stevehawley/archive/2006/0...
Earlier on HN someone posted an article about a Tron-like light cycle game where the cycles would break out of the framebuffer and start to mess with program memory. What's cool about Robotron is that you are actually killing processes when you wipe out the robots. A true superuser!
A year later, I wrote an emulator for the sound board and on the Mac I had at home it ran at about 60% real time (this was a 25MHz 68K based machine). That's a great number for code written in C because it means that with some careful attention, I could easily getting it running better than realtime, especially if I wrote some of the routines in inline 68K and took advantage of the condition codes of the 68K matching up nearly exactly to the 6800 (thanks, Motorola!). Before I started that task, I ported the code to a PowerPC machine at work and it was running 4x real time, so I decided that Moore's law just won and assembly was a waste of time.
The model of execution was, again, fairly decent for the task at hand. The sound board was set up with either 5 or 6 data lines (depending on the rev) coming in to a latch. When the host game wrote to the PIA, it would latch the value and cause an interrupt on the sound board. The sound board (which was a 1MHz 6808 with 128 bytes of ram) would be lodged in a WAI (wait for interrupt) instruction. When it got an interrupt, it read the latch and then ran an enormous switch statement to decide what sound to make. The output was an 8 bit D/A converter, but it looked like most of the time they treated it like a one-bit, by either writing 0 or FF. Most of the sounds were made by using frequency generators to drive other frequency generators - FM symthesis (more or less) - and the individual sounds would just set up parameters and kick off the sound generator. Most of them were designed to make sound forever (or close to it) or until they were interrupted by another request for a sound.
The two that really stood out in that set (and there are a ton of sounds on it that are not used in Robotron), was a crowd cheer, which was white noise with some envelope modifiers with some whistles mixed over the top, and a peal of thunder. You can hear each of these by dropping credits into a Robotron until they come up. IIRC correctly, Jarvis was particularly proud of these.
Eventually, I modded the code to run as a CGI script and had it running on my website as RobotrOnline, which would let you set up the hardware lines that modeled the lines going in, let you set how many seconds you wanted and when you submitted the form, it spat back a wav file meeting those parameters.
There are people who write solid, supportable, code in any language. keep those people around as they will ultimately create the most code with the least technical debt.
Also, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Programmers_Don't_Use_Pasc... (with links to the essay; look at the email address. That alone shows that we are talking of a real programmer) says it's from 1983.