What level of PC knowledge do I need to be able to understand this article?

Question

Programming

Good afternoon, I would really like to write some game in dandy. I found a very useful article on Habré, but I don’t understand why I need to know the dandy processor architecture and I don’t understand it.

dendy.migera.ru/nes

Answer 1

The dandy's processor is an eight-bit MOS 6502 (it was also in Apple 1, 2, Terminator and Bender the robot). It has eight-bit registers, funny dances with a tambourine for accessing memory outside the 64kb window (and within too), as well as a hard binding to the number of cycles per instruction (because each new instruction is read from memory during the execution of the current one).
There are practically no standard high-level C / C ++ compilers for this antique, Vasik, who existed then, was super-mega-brake. But there are enthusiasts who etched the processor chip with acid and created a gate-identical processor emulator , which is nice.
Games were written in assembler. Hand to hand. It is impossible to write anything in assembler without understanding the hardware architecture.

Answer 2

It is necessary to understand the internals at a low level if your program requires work with graphics or sound, in general, where you need to perform calculations that are difficult for this weak iron in the shortest possible time .
In order to manage to display an image on time and quite beautifully (yes, just color), you need to work with hardware at a very low level, prepare your graphics in the required format and size (for example, features of hardware and algorithms can impose requirements on the aspect ratio of the sprite, the presence or the relative number of transparent pixels and even the way they are arranged relative to each other), and when a limited RAM size is added to a weak processor, it becomes even more fun.
ps if your program does not require any graphics, speed, and the code and its data fit in ten kilobytes, then you can at least write in BASIC

Answer 3

if you want to write games for a dandy, then you need to understand its structure by itself. there is a very specific system of frames and sound. if you do not have a development environment or a high-level language compiler, you will have to create them in assembler, and this implies working with memory directly