I learned this lesson many years ago, back in the early/mid 90s. There was a well known American developer named Tran (Thomas Pytel) who wrote some mindblowing stuff back in those days...very proper hacky things in bizarre screen modes using more colors than should have been possible, and using sound hardware in crazy ways to produce more sound channels than anybody thought possible in those days, and all running faster than should have been possible on the hardware of those days. Incredible optimized stuff for the early 90s.
My friends and I would always try and by the best hardware available to run this stuff as quickly as possible. The first person with a 486dx2-66 pretty much ended up running their system on display mode during meetups on all the old demos.
What did Tran have? A 386sx16 if I recall. A machine that was so slow, so last gen, that he was probably unable to even watch most of the demoscene releases available at the time. No math co-processor, 16MHz, and yet he managed to write an amazing amount of highly influential and important code used far outside of the demoscene (most notably PMODE http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PMODE which was used in many game productions during that era).
I remember him crediting the fact that his home machine was so slow that it forced him to optimize the hell out of his code to make it run decently, and the side effect was that people with faster machines had their minds blown. I personally think that Tran, and his works, should be mandatory study for any developers, as an inspiration for what they can do with minimal hardware and the importance of optimization.
My friends and I would always try and by the best hardware available to run this stuff as quickly as possible. The first person with a 486dx2-66 pretty much ended up running their system on display mode during meetups on all the old demos.
What did Tran have? A 386sx16 if I recall. A machine that was so slow, so last gen, that he was probably unable to even watch most of the demoscene releases available at the time. No math co-processor, 16MHz, and yet he managed to write an amazing amount of highly influential and important code used far outside of the demoscene (most notably PMODE http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PMODE which was used in many game productions during that era).
I remember him crediting the fact that his home machine was so slow that it forced him to optimize the hell out of his code to make it run decently, and the side effect was that people with faster machines had their minds blown. I personally think that Tran, and his works, should be mandatory study for any developers, as an inspiration for what they can do with minimal hardware and the importance of optimization.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Pytel
A short list of his accomplishments from those days:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PMODE
http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=2878
http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=2879
http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=2880
http://www.oldskool.org/demos/explained/demo_misc.html
One of his most famous works Amnesia
Part 1 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F69aA4XSimo
Part 2 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9_ZMuyO0m4&feature=relat...
One of the first PC games to feature Multi-plane parallax scrolling http://www.mobygames.com/game/kaeon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_66
One of the lead Programmers for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prey_(video_game)
One of the lead Programmers for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal