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How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1

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Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1

#41

Post by shultays »

kayoone wrote: post #3

Pretty amazing what kind of skills game development required back then. One side of me is happy that we have all these great tools today, the other is sad because you hardly use this low level stuff in todays software development world. We are solving different problems today, but the level of software development skills required for a game that today could be done by a single person in Unity in a few weeks is quite…

I feel a little sad every time someone says "We have much higher CPU power/memory now, those things are unnecessary". Maybe they are right but I feel like this is not the path we should take

Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1

#42

Post by codesushi42 »

castell wrote: post #38
kayoone wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not really the same though. You are not really limited by RAM in most cases, also you are not limited by slow storage media like CD/DVDs as it was/is with most of the consoles. The reality is, hardly anyone on mobile writes their own engines (a part from some of the big players) because it's just too much of an investment and Unity (or one of the other popular engines) is well optimized and allows much faster…

It's the same. All iOS devices except the iPad Air 2 have less than 2GB RAM (most 512 MB). Android 1-4 devices have often less than 1GB RAM. It's common that only 1-3 apps can stay in RAM depending on the platform and the apps memory usage (foreground apps, not background services). Applications/games in the Win95/PS1/N64 era were coded a lot more efficient. Back than, a common Win95a PC had 4-8MB RAM, (highend was 3…

Except unlike smartphones, the PS1/N64 did not support VM or even had any storage to page to. So no, it's not the same.

Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1

#43

Post by fit2rule »

tluyben2 wrote: post #31

I still play Crash (2/3, not 1) quite a lot on the OpenPandora & on my PS2 when i'm in my wood cabin. I still like it and that's partly of how much constraints there were on the PS1 to get something 'big' like this out there. I keep hoping for a book with annotated (including lisp) source... Please please!!

Crash on OP is a real treat - its also one of my favourite wastes of time from the Pandora repo .. truly wonderful to have it so easily portable!

Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1

#44

Post by agumonkey »

NickPollard wrote: post #15
kayoone wrote: post #3

Pretty amazing what kind of skills game development required back then. One side of me is happy that we have all these great tools today, the other is sad because you hardly use this low level stuff in todays software development world. We are solving different problems today, but the level of software development skills required for a game that today could be done by a single person in Unity in a few weeks is quite…

A good portion of this stuff does still go on in Games Development. I don't work in games any more, but on the last title I worked on (Forza Horizon, Xbox 360), one of my colleagues engaged in a very similar exercise in order to allow data for the open world to be streamed in quick enough to deal with car (travelling at potentially 150+mph) to drive through the world without having to wait for loads, whilst streaming…

Very creative. I love this kind of stories. The first interactive display, made by Sutherland IIRC, had no framebuffer (irrealistic price at that time) so the team had to stream everything to fit into the small buffer they could get. As I understand it, everything was lazy and in sync with the screen 'machinery' so there was no delay even with limited memory capacity. It felt like hardware haskell.

Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1

#46

Post by JustSomeNobody »

shultays wrote: post #41
kayoone wrote: post #3

Pretty amazing what kind of skills game development required back then. One side of me is happy that we have all these great tools today, the other is sad because you hardly use this low level stuff in todays software development world. We are solving different problems today, but the level of software development skills required for a game that today could be done by a single person in Unity in a few weeks is quite…

I feel a little sad every time someone says "We have much higher CPU power/memory now, those things are unnecessary". Maybe they are right but I feel like this is not the path we should take

100% agree. And this goes for everything from server side, to games, to mobile to client side web. Some of my favorite web sites have gone from a 1-2 second load time to well over 6 seconds. And then they're sluggish after they load. It's sad.

Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1

#47

Post by kamaal »

kayoone wrote: post #3

Pretty amazing what kind of skills game development required back then. One side of me is happy that we have all these great tools today, the other is sad because you hardly use this low level stuff in todays software development world. We are solving different problems today, but the level of software development skills required for a game that today could be done by a single person in Unity in a few weeks is quite…

>>the other is sad because you hardly use this low level stuff in todays software development world.

During my engineering days(Circa 2005) I programmed in 8085 and our professor would give us all kinds of crazy assignments and small projects. That was the first taste of any genuine programming challenge I faced in my life. Immediately post that, programming in C felt a little boring.

Recently I worked on a embedded systems project for which I relived these kind of days. I had to invent all kinds crazy tricks to work around with resource constraints.

Your true creativity skills are kindled when your resources are constrained in all manners. Time or other wise. Unfortunately you can't academically recreate the same experience.

Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1

#48

Post by pjmlp »

codesushi42 wrote: post #24
pjmlp wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most mobile games are developed with Unity. And what appear to be the cutting edge titles are usually using the Unreal engine. Any source by mobile OS that you can point to? I am quite sure there are other contenders like home grown engines, LibGDX, Marmalade, Cocos (all variants), SDL, MonoGame, DirectXTK, Project Anarchy , Apple own Scenekit and SpriteKit,... > Besides, most mobile games are being played by the c…

> I am quite sure there are other contenders like home grown engines, LibGDX, Marmalade, Cocos (all variants), SDL, MonoGame, DirectXTK, Project Anarchy , Apple own Scenekit and SpriteKit,... It doesn't matter how many frameworks are out there. If you hang around the game dev scene long enough, you'll see that most small devs are using Unity, and if not that, Cocos2DX. Just head over to Gamasutra, /r/gamedev, or brow…

> It doesn't matter how many frameworks are out there. ....

Former IGDA member, Gamasutra subscriber and GDCE attendee here, hence why I asked for numbers.

> Reducing package size isn't really comparable to writing portions of your game in assembler. I don't consider that low level coding or pushing hardware limits.

It is not, but the goal of fitting as much code as possible in small packages is.

Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1

#50

Post by pjmlp »

codesushi42 wrote: post #42
castell wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the same. All iOS devices except the iPad Air 2 have less than 2GB RAM (most 512 MB). Android 1-4 devices have often less than 1GB RAM. It's common that only 1-3 apps can stay in RAM depending on the platform and the apps memory usage (foreground apps, not background services). Applications/games in the Win95/PS1/N64 era were coded a lot more efficient. Back than, a common Win95a PC had 4-8MB RAM, (highend was 3…

Except unlike smartphones, the PS1/N64 did not support VM or even had any storage to page to. So no, it's not the same.

iOS documentation:

"Instead, if the amount of free memory drops below a certain threshold, the system asks the running applications to free up memory voluntarily to make room for new data. Applications that fail to free up enough memory are terminated."

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