Re: A89: Re: Street Fighter


[Prev][Next][Index][Thread]

Re: A89: Re: Street Fighter




 > Did you ever think of how hard it is to debug a program this size?
 > Probably not.  Think about it a bit.  You should be surprised that there
 > are not more errors.

May I beg to differ ? Programmers regularly crank out software which
though (probably) not bug free, can run for very long periods of
time indeed. These programs are quite often much much larger than
anything you could fit in a TI's memory. 

It is a very dangerous concept to accept mediocre software for "it is
so complex that it's a miracle that it doesn't crash more often". This 
attitude is rather advocated by Microsoft for their software is very
crash prone. The rest of the software industry, however, has somehow
higher standards. One example is the unix world, where customers are
used to uptimes measured in months (sometimes years, with hot-swapable 
RAID disks). The other extremely stable area is the embedded systems 
where crashing is simply equivalent to the customer taking the device back 
for a replacement under warranty. They will not just reboot (a la Windows)
their laserprinter, or car engine management, or the microwave or the
answering machine or digital camera or whatever else they have. If it
crashes, then it's broken. Actually, I haven't heard of game consoles 
crashing too often (I have no experience with them, though) and I 
believe that some of the games running with real-time 3D rendering
are at least as complex as the TI89 games ...

Regards,

Zoltan


Follow-Ups: References: