The Classical Software Studies would be quite useful. Go write a game in 64kb of RAM in BASIC. It would really stretch your creativity and coding skills.
Agreed, it would be very interesting to see some of the care taken for resource management that is lost now because every machine has “enough” RAM and cycles…
I’m e long thought the Gameboy Advance would make a great educational platform. Literally every aspect of the hardware is memory mapped. Just stuff values into structs at hard-coded addresses and stuff happens. No need for any OS or any API at all.
Yeah I think a CompArch class on Gameboy would be pretty interesting. But only as an introductory course because students need to learn other advanced concepts that Gameboy does not have.
I think working on that kind of system would be actively harmful for most programmers. It would give them a totally unbalanced intuition for what the appropriate tradeoff between memory consumption and other attributes (maintainability, defect rate, ...) is. If anything, programmers should learn on the kind of machine that will be typical for most of their career - which probably means starting with a giant supercomputing cluster to match what's going to be in everyone's pocket in 20 years' time.
Ha. You call it "history". I call it "childhood". I did that years before getting to Uni :)
Although, to be fair, while it was a helpful practice at coding, I'm not a game designer, so it was a game too terrible to play.
First year Uni though I spent too many hours in the lab, competing with friends, to recreate arcade games on the PC. Skipping the game design part was helpful. To be fair by then we had a glorious 640k of ram. Some Assembly required.
