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Ask HN: How were video games from the 90s so efficient?

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Re: Ask HN: How were video games from the 90s so efficient?

#211

Post by School-Cotton »

flomo wrote: post #85

In addition, there was an extremely rapid increase of PC specs in the 1990s, and you if you had a 3-4 year old PC you probably could not play those games. "The PC you really want always costs $3500" as a famous columnist said. People bought bleeding-edge games to show off their conspicuous consumption. Everyone else played them years later. People like me would stay late and play Decent, Quake, Warcraft, etc (RCT was…

My impression (from being a teen at the time) is that this was still true at least until sometime in the 2000s.

Re: Ask HN: How were video games from the 90s so efficient?

#212

Post by wly_cdgr »

psyc wrote: post #103
wly_cdgr wrote: post #94

I think the games that are pushing graphical boundaries today are prob just as efficient relative to how high fidelity they are and (have to) use just as many clever optimization tricks. It's just that there's so much room now to make something compelling from a gameplay and/or aesthetics POV but that is technically basic / cookie cutter / off the shelf

For modern-ish examples of very smart optimization-minded programmers still having to work to fit exceptional experiences into hardware limitations, I recommend Jonathan Blow’s talk about fitting Braid’s time rewind system onto the XBox, Natalya Tatarchuk’s talk on Destiny’s architecture, and Factorio’s blog posts on optimization.

Thanks! There was a good GDC talk from a Forza guy too that came to mind after reading your comment. Hmm lemme see if I can dig it up...aahh yup, here it is:

https://youtu.be/COqSiGFnK50

Re: Ask HN: How were video games from the 90s so efficient?

#215

Post by SavantIdiot »

radicalbyte wrote: post #119
SavantIdiot wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You look at the assembly code, grab an Intel Programmer Reference manual (they were about 1000 pages), look up each instruction opcode and that would tell you the clock cycles. For memory operations it is much more difficult due to caching. However, for many hot regions of code, the data is already in the L1s so manual counting is sufficient. (At the time there was a book called The Black Art of ... Assembly? I can't…

It was common back in the day for machines to ship with detailed technical documentation. I spent many an hour as a young child reading the C64 programmers reference guide, calculating the op speed and drawing memory maps. https://archive.org/details/c64-programmer-ref

What were you drawing memory maps for?

Re: Ask HN: How were video games from the 90s so efficient?

#216

Post by flomo »

School-Cotton wrote: post #211
flomo wrote: post #85

In addition, there was an extremely rapid increase of PC specs in the 1990s, and you if you had a 3-4 year old PC you probably could not play those games. "The PC you really want always costs $3500" as a famous columnist said. People bought bleeding-edge games to show off their conspicuous consumption. Everyone else played them years later. People like me would stay late and play Decent, Quake, Warcraft, etc (RCT was…

My impression (from being a teen at the time) is that this was still true at least until sometime in the 2000s.

Yea I stopped paying attention, but the last "show off" game I remember was Crysis in 2007. But at that point Valve games, Sims, and etc were very lower-end friendly.

The premise is just bizzare where OP thinks these bleeding-edge mind-blowing graphical games were somehow "efficient" and conservative in how they abused your hardware.

Re: Ask HN: How were video games from the 90s so efficient?

#217

Post by dragonshed »

One of my favorite techniques you don't see at all today but looked amazing from that era is color cycling (or palette shifting). Its more of an artistic technique, but it shows how creatively people can think with and around constraints.

http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/?sound=1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_cycling

Re: Ask HN: How were video games from the 90s so efficient?

#218

Post by rasz »

_448 wrote: post #208

I was once working for a startup formed by ex-Microsoft employees from DirectX team. I was part of a team to port Mortal Combat Deadly Alliance from Nintendo GameBoy Advance(GBA) to a very innovative Linux phone developed by the startup. I(as well as most of the team members) had no game development experience. We ported the game to the Linux mobile phone. The phone had no graphics acceleration and had very puny CPU…

> management member(who was technical) "Game developers(at the company that originally developed the game) have devilish minds."

Doesnt sound all that technical. TLDR is GBA has hardware sprite(128) engine with scaling and rotation support + 4 individual background layers with full hardware scrolling. Cpu doesnt have to move pixels around, just update sprite indexes. You can be a total idiot and still get 60fps on GBA.

Re: Ask HN: How were video games from the 90s so efficient?

#219

Post by rasz »

andrewjf wrote: post #106
Dave_Rosenthal wrote: post #81

I built games in the 90s. Graphics was obviously the hardest part. We thought about things in terms of how many instructions per pixel per frame we could afford to spend. Before the 90s it was hard to even update all pixels on a 320x200x8bit (i.e. mode 13h) display at 30 fps. So you had to do stuff like only redraw the part of the screen that moved. The led to games like donkey kong where there was a static world and…

Out of curiosity, How did you know how many clock cycles your rendering code took?

https://uops.info

Re: Ask HN: How were video games from the 90s so efficient?

#220

Post by majani »

thewileyone wrote: post #34

The simple answer is you have to work within the constraints you're confined in. I used to work for an ecommerce company, a very early Amazon competitor, and because the Internet was so slow in the early years, we had a rule that our homepage had to be less than 100k, including image icons. Every 1k squeezed was a success and celebrated. Even today Amazon's homepage is less than 1MB, go ahead and check. Now with CSS…

Yup. I am currently developing a game for African players and I have to build my own engine and do old school tricks to get the game under 1MB on a website. CSS sprites and all
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