They were efficient because they had to do less compared to a modern game.
Ask HN: How were video games from the 90s so efficient?
11–20 of 238 posts
Re: Ask HN: How were video games from the 90s so efficient?
#12Kind of a lame answer but: Google it. There are blogs online that reverse engineer and document old game engines.
Lots of abstracting as pointers, esoteric assembly optimization, compiler hacks, fewer external frameworks, less physics simulation, etc
Re: Ask HN: How were video games from the 90s so efficient?
#13Roller Coaster Tycoon was famously written in assembly by hand. There are some cool blog posts about it that have been posted to HN in the past iirc.
Re: Ask HN: How were video games from the 90s so efficient?
#14Michael Abrash wrote a book or two about it, and a lot of code, and was one of the experts in tweaking performance out of hardware back then.
Re: Ask HN: How were video games from the 90s so efficient?
#15These tricks are things that you could still pull off today. The difference is, outside of competitions or the demoscene, nobody _needs_ to pull them off - it greatly decreases your time-to-market to do things in a straightforward way, rather than a novel way. That wasn't true 20+ years ago - the straightforward way often brought you up against hardware limitations.
Re: Ask HN: How were video games from the 90s so efficient?
#16Broadly speaking, modern developers don’t have to deal with resource limitations (neither computing nor financial) so they instead devote that extra energy on completely unnecessary orchestration systems and build toolchains to feel like they’re doing something complex and challenging.
Re: Ask HN: How were video games from the 90s so efficient?
#17I recommend watching this: https://youtu.be/izxXGuVL21o Naughty Dog Co-founder Andy Gavin discusses various hacks that were used on the Playstation to get Crash Bandicoot to run smoothly. The fuller version is also worth watching.
This one is my favourite. I would call this kind of programming both art and beauty.
Re: Ask HN: How were video games from the 90s so efficient?
#18https://www.quora.com/Why-was-Roller-Coaster-Tycoon-written-... Funny you should mention Rollercoaster Tycoon because it was actually written in Assembly for performance reasons.
For a rube like me who views assembly coders as masters of occult incantations, this is incredibly impressive
Re: Ask HN: How were video games from the 90s so efficient?
#19The source code for Doom is available, and much has been written about how it works.[1] Go look.
Re: Ask HN: How were video games from the 90s so efficient?
#20The biggest thing is lower resolution. 640x480 at 256 colors was a high-color, high-resolution mode at the time.
Small bitmaps, with indexed palettes and run-length-encoding to further shrink them.
Caches were tiny, memory was slower, hard disks massively slower, and if you had to hit a CD to load data, forget about it. So packing data was important, and organizing data for cache locality, and writing algorithms to take advantage of instruction pipelining and avoid branches.
Fabian Sanglard has a great blog that goes into the nitty gritty of a lot of these techniques as used in different games.