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whobretoday at 12:23 PM1 replyview on HN

Right. I am saying there is a difference between portable and non portable assembly code. If you interacted with the machine via call 05h interface, it was portable. If you accessed computer’s video memory buffer directly it wasn’t.


Replies

MomsAVoxelltoday at 2:01 PM

Good portable assembly would stub the system stuff off, anyway, and once that was done for the cpu class in focus, it was very possible to have a thin HAL and write portable code. A great deal many successful products of the era were written in pure assembly this way.

In any case, you could also get high performance multiplatform video/io assembly libraries on the market, soon enough, back in the day .. it begat a lot of Delphi units too, I seem to recall ..