You raise a valid point - certainly for the Amiga 500 you knew you only had a certain number of platforms and CPUs and you could even make snap judgements like, "No-one's going to run Stunt Car Racer on a top-end Amiga 3000." - thankfully cookie didn't and Stunt Car Racer was awesome regardless of platform, but Mercenary on the other hand was never built with an 060/66 Blizzard board in mind and was impossible to play.
I think the PC world encouraged the use of higher level languages as waiting for VBL's became more important than squeezing all the juice you could because of the potential variations.
Thanks for your comment, it's inspired a new sense of respect for 486 progrmamers (25/33/50? SX, DX? - we can't worry about that, we have TIE fighters to render!)
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You raise a valid point - certainly for the Amiga 500 you knew you only had a certain number of platforms and CPUs and you could even make snap judgements like, "No-one's going to run Stunt Car Racer on a top-end Amiga 3000." - thankfully cookie didn't and Stunt Car Racer was awesome regardless of platform, but Mercenary on the other hand was never built with an 060/66 Blizzard board in mind and was impossible to play.
I think the PC world encouraged the use of higher level languages as waiting for VBL's became more important than squeezing all the juice you could because of the potential variations.
Thanks for your comment, it's inspired a new sense of respect for 486 progrmamers (25/33/50? SX, DX? - we can't worry about that, we have TIE fighters to render!)