author=jbanes When one considers that early video games often had *less* than 4K of space to work with *and* were often more fun than today's games, one has to wonder where the idea that 4K won't work came from. Have we lost that much of our creativity and "push the envelope" mentality? Does anyone else remember the days when only the best of the best could even hope to code a video game? Not because others were incompetent, but more because you had to know what every byte was doing and how the system used it? There were some serious hardware limitations in those days, and it was up to the software people to make up for it.
Some good comments, here are my thoughts. I just finished rewriting my Double Deck Pinochle 8086 DOS game into Java which took it from an 11k .exe to 110k of classes. Not bad at all, in my opinion.
I originally wrote in Z-80 as tight as possible to run on a 16k Radio Shack TRS-80, and the rewrite in 8086 didn't add that much size. I didn't have any idea how it would size out in Java, and speed is my main concern in any event, but it didn't balloon out that much to my surprise. Both are text interfaces so are directly comparable.
I am especially pleased with the speed. In initial testing I didn't bother putting pauses between plays of the players thinking it would hit a programming error and crash but instead it played and displayed all four players cards instantaneously. I couldn't have asked more from assembler.
I wrote to an abstract interface API so I am now replacing the JTextArea with a GUI implementation of the interface. This is my first Java project and I plan on staying in it now for a career. I've got a lot more to write yet before looking for work, though.
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