Hey #gamedev, can you point me to a good place to learn about how games worked in the 80s? I'd love to write something akin to Ultima III, so I don't want to even know how to work with sprites or shaders. But knowing how they managed to make games back them would be 10/10. I'm not good enough for asm, so C would be <3<3<3. Low level stuff, just not machine-level low.
Like - how did they animate tiles?
or even "how did they store the tiles?".
@mms Try looking into development for the Game Boy Advance.
It came out later, so some of the tooling is better, but because it was portable, the performance was more comparable to older full-size consoles. And there are great emulators available for testing.
The way you write directly to screen memory and swap buffers and such is a great bridge to the older, more arcane, development.
