Chris Crawford on Game Design

Memory Headaches

In 1984, when I was working on Balance of Power, the Macintosh had just been released and was equipped with 128KB of RAM. This was twice what most computers had in those days, but I couldn't seem to fit the game into the available space. The graphics weren't the primary factor: they cost only about 15K. Part of the problem lay in the number of countries and the vast amounts of information I maintained about each country: the text strings for the country name, capital, leader, insurgency, and so forth. The code itself was also sizable, and of course, some of the RAM was taken up by the operating system.

LESSON 55 Take no pride in facts memorized, but in ideas grasped.

Before the Macintosh, programmers simply took over the machine ...