And in fairness a lot of microcomputers at the time were closed specs. Even on PC for a while you were theoretically aiming at a 4Mhz XT or, at worst, also wanted to account for a 8MHz AT. By the time IBM clones had become… you know, just PCs, a lot of devs either didn’t get the memo or chose to ignore it for the reasons you list.
Most of the time “lazy devs” are just “overworked and underfunded devs”, but the point is, that didn’t start this century.
Also games have gotten way more complicated since the gameboy colour era. I’ve coded a basic 2D physics engine from scratch (literally just circles with soft collisions) and its not just enough to set up the vector math correctly. You can literally make a true to real life physics model (as far as the math of infinitely rigid perfect spheres on a perfectly flat plane goes anyway) and have all sorts of problems crop up because computers aren’t the universe and order of computation is a bitch.
And in fairness a lot of microcomputers at the time were closed specs. Even on PC for a while you were theoretically aiming at a 4Mhz XT or, at worst, also wanted to account for a 8MHz AT. By the time IBM clones had become… you know, just PCs, a lot of devs either didn’t get the memo or chose to ignore it for the reasons you list.
Most of the time “lazy devs” are just “overworked and underfunded devs”, but the point is, that didn’t start this century.
Also games have gotten way more complicated since the gameboy colour era. I’ve coded a basic 2D physics engine from scratch (literally just circles with soft collisions) and its not just enough to set up the vector math correctly. You can literally make a true to real life physics model (as far as the math of infinitely rigid perfect spheres on a perfectly flat plane goes anyway) and have all sorts of problems crop up because computers aren’t the universe and order of computation is a bitch.