Albeit it sort of worked for the kidlets on their lo-rez screens, demoscene- and/or game-style visual aesthetics were (and often still are) a bad choice for good application UI design. But that's of course mostly just preference talking.
Back then (no Internet for most and scarce documentation) learning proper coding wasn't easy; I recall when a good number of games, demos and some utilities too stopped working because programmers ignored or simply didn't know the guidelines (RKM books were costly for demoscene kids) and used address registers to store data. The plain 68000 CPU had internal 32 bit address registers, but physical address bus was 24 bit only, so one could use the most significant 8 bits to store data that wouldn't affect at all the working on a 24 bit bus, but when CPUs with full physical addressing came out, any program using that trick would point to other locations than those intended and thus would fail.
An interesting feature of getting old is when you see something you haven't in 30+ years and it suddenly snaps into focus. X-Copy was invaluable.
I had the same feeling when I read the interview along with the attached screenshots. A nice way to start a Sunday morning.
Albeit it sort of worked for the kidlets on their lo-rez screens, demoscene- and/or game-style visual aesthetics were (and often still are) a bad choice for good application UI design. But that's of course mostly just preference talking.
Back then (no Internet for most and scarce documentation) learning proper coding wasn't easy; I recall when a good number of games, demos and some utilities too stopped working because programmers ignored or simply didn't know the guidelines (RKM books were costly for demoscene kids) and used address registers to store data. The plain 68000 CPU had internal 32 bit address registers, but physical address bus was 24 bit only, so one could use the most significant 8 bits to store data that wouldn't affect at all the working on a 24 bit bus, but when CPUs with full physical addressing came out, any program using that trick would point to other locations than those intended and thus would fail.
Even AmigaBasic (by Microsoft) did this, so it also broke on 68020+.
The Amiga was so, so cool. So sad it couldn't keep up.