Comment by xmprt
6 years ago
I'm really glad that video became a meme (probably because of the completely unnecessary argument about what a half-A press is) because it got me interested in how a lot of these old games work. The engineering that went into optimizing them is incredible and it's a shame that newer games typically don't bother as much.
For optimizations, the compilers do much work for you now. So it's not like it's not done anymore, it's done in another way. I myself stopped handcrafting assembler when I noticed that GCC beaten me 9 times out of 10 :-)
But notably not in SM64, where they disabled compiler optimization for some reson. Vintage Gamer has a good video about this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKlbE2eROC0