![]() ![]() If you work in small, embedded systems, you still work in the old ways - if you've ever played with a PIC or AVR microcontroller (or indeed, any other microcontroller) then you've already done this style of programming. This is exactly the way that, really, all processors/computers work - its just that the operating system hides all that from us today, and takes care of these low-level details for us. Basically each piece of hardware had its own area of memory, and in that memory was a table describing how the hardware was to act or what data is was to act upon - so you'd manipulate those tables to get the desired graphics or sound effect. You were on the bare metal, as they say, instead of calling a library function to draw a sprite, you'd write to a special area of memory that the GPU would look in to find out about each sprite it was supposed to draw. ![]() What the old consoles had, if anything at all, resembled more of a BIOS than anything else. ![]() It wasn't all that different than nowadays really, except that a lot less was done for you - for example, there wasn't anything like an OS to speak of, in the way that an Xbox/360, Gamecube/Wii or PS2/3 have an OS.
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