Assembly or ....ok

[carroll at s.cs.uiuc.edu]

RE: SubLogic & FS

If I remember my company history correctly, the very original version was
done on a Z80-S100 system, but the first commercial release was indeed for
the Apple. As has been mentioned, the source code is highly partitioned,
and so is not the nightmare you might imagine. The current porting base is
'86 code, but that is a (relatively) recent change. The graphics are
actually written in a language called 'RTAL' (Real Time Animation Language),
a SubLogic internal. To get graphics up, you have to build an RTAL engine,
which is always hand-crafted, and then most of the display is done.
Porting is done by machine experts, programmers who are masters of the
arcana of a particular machine. Bruce Artwick, the wizard who made
SubLogic, is amazing beyond words in assembler skills, and is responsible
for the high quality of the original version, and the assembler-philia
that permeates the company. Also, as was pointed out, in the days that
FS first came out, doing real-time 3D graphics was simple impossible using
a high level langauge. Today, it might be a different story, but you have
to keep in mind that the largest installed base is not the new whiz-bang
25MHz '386 boxes, but old PC's and Apple's. 10 years from now, it could
be a different world, and I would certainly agree that high-level languages
are the rising power, and assembler the fading giant.