On the NES, it doesn't really matter - mostly because there are no slow mechanical disk drives, and smoothly working games are per design fast and responsive enough to handle user input in main program.
In general, I would say that it can be better to handle user input on irq/nmi level (but, out of laziness, I tend to do it in main program).
For the argument about state changing unexpectedly during game logic, almost everybody has already pointed out that that could be solved by using a local copy, so that's a non-issue. When not using a local copy, I am sure that one could implement the same problem with and without nmi-based reading...
Code: Select all
if read_buttons<>0
start_game
elseif read_buttons=0
do_not_start_game
else
program_has_failed