> For the first time in the history of the universe, as far as we know, an object built by a living species had left the protective bubble of its home star system...
It's probably this discussion about DiskClick: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39406098 (DiskClick: Ever wanted to hear old hard drive sounds - Feb 2024 - 81 comments). Also, the software was last updated 1 month ago.
Double Dragon II: The Revenge for DOS from 1989 was distributed on two floppy disks, one of which contained the entire source code in a deleted archive file, invisible from the DIR command but easily recoverable: https://tcrf.net/Double_Dragon_II:_The_Revenge_(DOS)
Comparisons between unsigned bytes can be done natively with JC, JNC and JZ, JNZ instructions. Things are more complicated with signed comparisons as there is no overflow flag. It is possible but requires more instructions.
Then certainly that my expectations were too high from what I'd read in the reviews, I was expecting a lot of changes like the second edition of the dragon book. You can see that some programs were obviously written to get around the memory limitations of the computers of the time, such as the assembler and emulator for an imaginary machine.
And to think that's where we come from. The Intel 8008, the ancestor of the x86 processor family, just has a 7-level call hardware stack only used by the unconditional and conditional call and return instructions. So, there is no push and pop instructions. As the only way to access a byte in memory was to store the address in the HL register pair (no absolute addressing mode) before the load or store instruction and as there was no way to disable hardware interrupts, it was almost impossible to write useful interrupt routines without some external hardware trick.
I really appreciate his work. He had a full life. Since yesterday, without knowing, I was just studying a section of a book detailing the code generation of one of the first Pascal compilers for the CDC 6400.
Seriously?