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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?

#221

Post by radicalbyte »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #215
radicalbyte wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Mainly making cheats for games. Back then you have devices which allowed you to view memory, so I would play games and look for changes made in memory when you did certain actions. Made a map of them. Most of the time a life counter was good enough.

Also for my own games - you don't have pointers as such, you have your memory, and you need to know what lives where (and when it lives where).

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

#222

Post by pvillano »

hulitu wrote: post #209
Pamar wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have zero information about (due also to little interest for) computer games, so this is just a wild speculation: maybe the visuals in terms of "levels/textures/objects/mesh/characters/voice/audio" dominate the planning, now?

The visuals are crap. Greed dominates the game industry.

Greed does dominate the industry, but there's more indie games than ever

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

#223

Post by pvillano »

majani wrote: post #220
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

I was just thinking about some console game that launched with a 60GB day one patch, and how disappointing it must have been for players without good internet to put in the disc and not be able to play or missing half the content.

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

#224

Post by pvillano »

bellyfullofbac wrote: post #111
adventured wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even today Amazon's homepage is less than 1MB, go ahead and check. Pingdom reports 4.8mb (3.3mb of images), 661ms to load, and 298 requests. GT Metrix reports 2.65mb (2mb of images), and 307 requests. An incognito window with Firefox on my system says ~3mb and ~265 requests. Just the top six or seven media assets combined that loaded initially weigh in at about 1mb. Certainly not the worst page ever, granted.

Nitpick: MB = Megabyte. Mb = Megabit. mb = millibit?

Related, in my opinion binary prefixes are better, e.g. MiB > MB (ha)

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

#226

Post by rweichler »

lostgame wrote: post #225
rweichler wrote: post #46

Write C, get good

Honestly - a lot of the best early games were written in Assembler. C is kinda just one extra layer of abstraction. Even up through the PS1/N64 days there was still a lot of assembly stuff.

I was gonna suggest assembly but modern instruction sets are too complicated nowadays

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

#227

Post by musicale »

patentatt wrote: post #192
pkphilip wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 199os were a time when we tried all sorts of tricks to get the last bit of performance out of the hardware. One book which stands out is the one Michael Abrash wrote: Michael Abrash's "Graphics Programming Black Book" https://github.com/jagregory/abrash-black-book https://www.drdobbs.com/parallel/graphics-programming-black-... As CPU power, the number of cores, RAM sizes, HDD sizes, graphics card capabilities hav…

I may be naïve/out of the loop here, but it’s fun to imagine what would be possible with the same gusto and creativity applied to today’s hardware. I imagine that a significant amount of modern hardware, even in games, is eaten up by several layers of abstraction that make it easier for developers to crank out games faster. What would a 90’s developer do with a 16-core CPU and an RTX3080?

You see a bit of this sort of optimization at the end of a game console's life cycle.

I expect the PS3 still has some headroom since few games adequately exploited the Cell processor's SPUs.

Since the Switch is underpowered compared to PS5/Xbox Series X/PC perhaps we'll see some aggressive optimization as developers try to fit current-gen games onto it.

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

#228

Post by Pamar »

hulitu wrote: post #209
Pamar wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have zero information about (due also to little interest for) computer games, so this is just a wild speculation: maybe the visuals in terms of "levels/textures/objects/mesh/characters/voice/audio" dominate the planning, now?

The visuals are crap. Greed dominates the game industry.

I wrote "planning", meaning that the development of the fame assets maybe now takes more time than the actual engine/logic of the game itself.

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

#230

Post by kubanczyk »

lostgame wrote: post #180
smcameron wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember reading the comp.graphics.algorithms news group back when Descent was just out. People were going a little bit crazy trying to figure out how the hell that thing worked. I found this page that talks about some of the things done to do texture mapping: https://www.lysator.liu.se/%7Ezap/speedy.html

Descent blew my mind, as well. IIRC it predated Quake and was the first ’true’ 3DoF FPS? The source code has since been released on GitHub, if you’re ever interested in seeing it!

6DoF, as there are six degrees of freedom. Three correspond to rotational movement around the x, y, and z axes, commonly termed pitch, yaw, and roll. The other three correspond to translational movement along those axes, moving forward or backward, left or right, up or down.
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