Quote:
Quote:
You did not have to worry about the variety of hardware that we do today (i.e. no one had 3D video cards, etc)
maybe doug can say more about this but as far as i know back then it was a lot worse than now. in times of DOS the programmers couldn't simply target directx but had to support and write separate code for a lot of different sound cards, 2d graphics chips,... themselves.
No, Dan is mostly right on this.
In the home market, you had a couple of chip-sets (IntelX86, Motorola 68X, etc.), 2-3 sound cards (SoundBlaster being the big one), and that was it.
Somebody with good knowledge in assembly could really squeeze every last cycle from the CPU. The downside was, they had to. Writing a high-performance game in the early 1990s required some serious optimization (which could be a lot of fun, if you like spending hours thinking like a CPU  ).
Writing to an API like DirectX is much easier IMHO, but you're not able to squeeze as much performance from the hardware (lucky for us, the hardware is a lot more powerful now). And I can see were that would feel a lot less adventurous.
Dan: If you are missing low-level programming, check out the Cell processor. Not exactly the same thing, but it reminds me a lot of the good-old-days. 
| 
