• partial_accumen
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    41 month ago

    Another epiphany I’ve had with my recent c64 work is the speed of the computer. Since before this my only interface for writing anything was BASIC, I always thought the c64 was fairly slow or inefficient with its 1Mhz CPU. Now I know that the slowness is BASIC. Doing the exact same operations in assembler are SOOOO FAAASST!! As a test, one function was 141 times faster on the exact same hardware in assembler than it was in BASIC. Its still hard to wrap my head around that.

    • @Valmond
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      21 month ago

      Yes!

      I made a platformer in BASIC, with killing stars, jumping, dissolving floors and all that clqssic stuff.

      It ran at a “correct” speed but not faster.

      Started the ASM/machinecode version, the sprite just disappeared when moving because it was so fast. IIRC I thought it about 500 times faster.