It wasn't a long way... I did it without interrupts for another motive... sometime ago there was a thread about clock/timers and somebody was asking advice about a 32 bit routine for a timer.

I asked why that technique (a 16 or 32 bit counter) was used, since you had to convert that number to the corresponding time.

IMO was easier to create variable counters holding the corresponding numbers for hour, minutes, seconds, tenths (as I had used before for a LED display clock project at college).

Then someone explained that my aproach was easier if I just wanted a clock and nothing more, holding the time as a 32 bit number was more adequated if I wanted to do mathematical operations with dates.

After that became clear to me that each approach had its own uses (mine being much more limitated) and with some time in my hands I started to code a clock... Why without interrupts? It wasn't needed... it was just a clock... no alarms, nothing...

Interrupts would permit that alarms be adjusted without interrupting the time counting, some control functions be added, whatever...

But I wanted just a clock and here goes my code... if you look at it you can almost see that it is a software implementation of a clock made with flip-flop counters, where a overflow of a counter resets the counter itself and increments the next counter...

Anyway, lousy...

My first implementation even displayed the time in hexadecimal, but my wife comments about it made me think that the general public don't like hexadecimal clocks... :-)