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6y

Sometimes I wonder how software development in (bigger) teams worked in the 90s.

Take the first Pokémon games for example. It was the mid-90s and the final product would be Assembler code that goes onto a cartridge with limited space.

I believe version control systems didn't really exist back then (Git & Mercurial: 2005, SVN: 2004). So probably people took backups of the chunks of code they worked on, copied around a stitched-together code, threw everything together at the end of the day, etc. etc. ...

Does anyone here know if there is some kind of documentary about that topic or did anyone here experience that first-hand?

It would be really interesting to see how that stuff worked back then 😊

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  • 1
    RCS was released 1982, so they definitely existed. I guess they were used in a few places only.

    Assembly code can be made pretty modular and given how time-critical the code of the games back then was I don't think even today's git merge would have been of much use. I'd wager the teams were also pretty small back then.

    I would be very interested in a documentary, though!
  • 0
    That's a good question
  • 3
    Started in a company that exists since 1985. When I joined they already had switched to fossil as SCM, but there were still some projects using RCS, which felt really strange and dated. - I think some core components dated back to even 1989. Good ol' C-style.

    Often it took some time to make such a process live in your new project because it had some weird stuff to configure in shared memory, but if you made it run it, it was that rock solid thing that just runs, unless you attached an extra leg that made it fall over again.
  • 3
    @zlice the first pokemon games actually had a lot of bugs and the last cartridges that were sold had a new release with bug fixes. Similar things happened to other old games. So no, it wasn't done properly.
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