In the history of video games, one of the classic stories of bugs becoming features is the increasingly faster progressive pace of the arcade game "Space Invaders".Recently, Zuhaitz, who calls himself a C/C++ expert, revealed that the increasing intensity of stimulation of this classic Taito arcade game is not due to genius programming, but simply because of the performance bottleneck of the underlying Intel 8080 processor.
In Space Invaders, released in 1978, the more aliens the player eliminates on the screen, the faster the remaining aliens move and shoot, creating an adrenaline-fueled sense of tension.
However, if you check the source code of the original arcade game, you will find that there is no code in the game to adjust the game speed as the number of aliens decreases. As for the reason behind it, it is the performance bottleneck of the Intel 8080.
This processor was released in 1974 and has about 5,000 transistors and a frequency of about 2.0MHz. When the game starts, the processor needs to "change positions, redraw and check collisions" for 55 aliens, which consumes a lot of computing power.
As players eliminate aliens, the amount of calculations that the processor needs to process is reduced, and the overall performance bottleneck of the game is alleviated, allowing the code to run faster and faster, inadvertently creating this tense and exciting feeling of "playing faster and faster".
In later versions of the game and emulators running on modern powerful platforms, manual intervention and speed balancing had to be done through code in order to achieve the "arcade-perfect gaming experience" of the original game.
