[OT] Which IDE / Editor do you use?

[PauloPinto]

On Thursday, 19 September 2013 at 07:24:19 UTC, Nick Sabalausky 
wrote:
> On Wed, 18 Sep 2013 13:31:48 -0700
> "H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:
>> 
>> I remember in the old DOS days, some games would load up custom
>> graphics into the video card's text font buffer, so that they 
>> can
>> draw sprites just by writing the corresponding characters into 
>> the
>> video card's text buffer.  You can get very fast drawing rates 
>> since
>> the video card does most of the work for you (and you only 
>> need to
>> transfer 1 byte per 8x8 block of pixels instead of 8 bytes or 
>> more).
>> 
>
> That's essentially the same strategy behind the graphics 
> hardware in
> most 8/16-bit consoles. Basically the ones from around SMS/NES 
> and then
> up until 3D. You can identify them from the grid-based
> layouts (which were a huge improvement, for both gamers *and*
> developers over the "carefully time your opcodes to adjust the
> scanlines while they're being drawn" used by Atari VCS/2600 
> and, I'm
> guessing, probably the ColecoVision and SG-1000, which is what 
> make
> them so amazingly affordable at the time).
>
> In DOS, a lot of CGA/EGA/VGA games used a similar approach as
> DOS-text-mode/NES/SMS/etc, but it had to be done in software.
> Obviously in those cases it didn't reduce the amount of data 
> sent to
> the video card, but it did still reduce (significantly) the 
> amount of
> HDD and RAM required to store the levels, and it somewhat
> simplified/reduced the amount of processing needed to render.
>
> (I've done a bit of old-school homebrew, and got my real coding 
> start
> in DOS VGA gaming. Fascinating and incredibly fun stuff to 
> develop for.
> I'd love to design/build my own tile-based console someday, 
> just for
> the heck of it.)

You are not alone. These guys are still in business selling 
hardware just for that.

http://www.xgamestation.com/