> In the 80's we took perfectly smooth scrolling and animations for granted, because most 80's home computers and game consoles were proper hard-realtime systems.
Proper hard realtime means the software is designed to meet stringent time deadlines. If a deadline is missed then the system has failed.
Soft real time means you tolerate missing one or more deadlines if the system is designed to handle it.
The 80's hardware only ran the game code so there was never any CPU contention. There was no kernel, scheduler, threads or processes. The programmers could wrap their heads round the simpler hardware and use all available tricks to optimize every clock tick to do useful work.
Nowadays we have stupid cheap multicore GHz CPU's for a few dollars with GB of RAM so you brute force your way through everything on a general purpose OS like Linux.
Yes, and also the video and audio chips were "cycle-synchronized" with the CPU (e.g. it was guaranteed that a fixed number of CPU cycles after the vsync interrupt you'd always end up at the exact same video raster position etc...).
OTH making the hardware components "asynchronous" and the timings "unpredictable" enabled today's performance (e.g. by introducing caches and pipelines).
Proper hard realtime means the software is designed to meet stringent time deadlines. If a deadline is missed then the system has failed.
Soft real time means you tolerate missing one or more deadlines if the system is designed to handle it.
The 80's hardware only ran the game code so there was never any CPU contention. There was no kernel, scheduler, threads or processes. The programmers could wrap their heads round the simpler hardware and use all available tricks to optimize every clock tick to do useful work.
Nowadays we have stupid cheap multicore GHz CPU's for a few dollars with GB of RAM so you brute force your way through everything on a general purpose OS like Linux.