Posted by atan2 10 hours ago
> For example, if you know the carry flag will always be clear at the jump point, and if the jump distance is within branching range, you can replace JMP with BCC.
However if the BCC crosses a page boundary it'll take 4 cycles, one cycle longer than a JMP.
It's a fascinating contrast to the modern 'move fast and break things' approach. Back then, if your routine was 3 cycles too slow, the sprite didn't just 'lag'—the entire raster effect collapsed. There was a level of deterministic discipline that we've largely abstracted away in favor of developer velocity.
It’s fascinating that in 2026, we’re needing more and more powerful hardware just to keep up with the bloat of basic applications, whereas the Seawolves devs were finding ways to squeeze 'art' out of 64 kilobytes.
In software, the 'cheaply made coat' equivalent (bloated frameworks, unoptimized dependencies) creates a massive technical debt that doesn't just affect the buyer—it affects the entire ecosystem's energy consumption and hardware requirements. The Seawolves devs weren't just saving money; they were respecting the constraints of the medium. When we treat resources as infinite because they are 'cheap,' we stop being engineers and start being assemblers.
I love the stacking of boolean ops before branches, too.