Engineering Achievement - by Michael Carr

      Posted 11/05/10 07:51:00 pm  

A number of years ago, a programmer by the name of Richard Walker, tapped me on the shoulder one day and asked if I could come and take a look at the code he was working on. It's a good practice with engineers when they find themselves stuck or not quite sure what it is that is going wrong to have a fresh pair of eyes look over the code. It's easy to miss the obvious and it can save a lot of time bashing your head against a wall. This was what I was expecting when I arrived at his desk.

I sat down in-front of the screen which was displaying some 68000 assembly, if I remember correctly the game he was writing was for Sega's Mega-drive / Genesis system. I read the function which was about a screen and half in length, if memory serves me, it was a straight forward function a few passed in variables, a single piece of returned data. I studied the code, followed the flow of execution, checked for syntax issues, nothing stood out I couldn't see anything wrong with it. I hit the compile button and the code compiled without errors or warnings.

"It looks fine to me, I can't see any issues. What's the problem?" I asked.

"There isn't a problem, I just think it

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