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Michael 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.
Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book Special Edition https://www.phatcode.net/res/224/files/html/index.html
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This one is my favourite. I would call this kind of programming both art and beauty.
If I remember correctly the two main hacks were making draw lists such that only certain polygon faces were rendered based on Crash's xyz position (the theory being that it isnt possible for other faces to be seen from that location), and also that he removed functions/files from Sony's standard C libs on the PS1 SDK?
it is far easier, and faster, to use a library that is bad than to write what you need efficiently.
"CPU is cheap." "RAM is cheap." two of the many cancerous sayings that developers use to excuse their poor efforts.
we don't do this now because we simply do not care enough as an industry. we want the software written immediately and for as little money as possible.
Broadly 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I remember correctly the two main hacks were making draw lists such that only certain polygon faces were rendered based on Crash's xyz position (the theory being that it isnt possible for other faces to be seen from that location), and also that he removed functions/files from Sony's standard C libs on the PS1 SDK?
I believe two other huge wins were how they padded the disc for faster reads(though maybe this was common) and how they could trivially cull polys based on the constraint that the game is on a rail. By knowing your position on the rail you just lookups what polys can be culled via precalculated tables.
For the disk, I guess they viewed the disk as merely just an extension of RAM? If the read/write speeds were sufficient for them... page files galore :)
I also remember that they used to write bytes to disk in specific orders so that they would maximize the correct bytes being read into the buffer every microsecond
> CPU > Z80 @ 3.25 MHz[4] > Memory > 1 KB (64 KB max. 56 KB usable)
Now that boggles my mind.
I'm gonna stray a little from the norm here. Most people seem to think programmers of yore were smarter, and generally, that's probably true -on average-. I mean, there weren't boot camps back then. That aside though, the scene has changed. Write your super efficient perfect game, and nobody will play it. Look at Ludem Dare, and all the JSxK competitions. Those smart people still exist today. But the landscape has ch…
Players have always cared a lot about graphics. Descent looked fckin amazing in 1995
You're right - expectations change and most everything else is nostalgia.
Broadly 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.
Developers “didn’t feel like”, they were actually doing something complex, given the limitations of that time and context.