Found while looking for other articles about this: http://web.stanford.edu/group/htgg/sts145papers/jdelahunt_20...
How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
221–230 of 254 posts
Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#222Pretty awesome. Goes to show the great lengths taken even on state of the art hardware at the time. And the PS1 wasn't even the worst of it. The Sega Saturn and N64 were both considerably more difficult to develop for. And the PC market was terribly fragmented and had a high rate of obsolescence. This stuff can give you nightmares: http://koti.kapsi.fi/~antime/sega/docs.html
I sometimes wonder what could have been had Sega released proper documentation and a decent dev kit earlier for their difficult to program for Saturn. It was only later on in its life did Sega start to utilise the second processor. Shenmue was originally being worked on for the Saturn. How's that for ambitious. It was rumoured to require the 4 meg ram cart. That I believe 100%. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foZUcPQ…
Absolutely. I've seen the Shenmue video and it's stunning. It's more impressive than anything that launched on the PS1 or N64.
>I sometimes wonder what could have been had Sega released proper documentation and a decent dev kit earlier
That is a complaint I have heard a lot, and it is valid. But ultimately I think Sega shot itself in the face by even having a second CPU. Concurrency is a hard problem, and certainly game devs back in the mid 90s were not up to the task of utilizing a second CPU. They had enough on their hands with transitioning from 2D to 3D already. I have read that most games developed on the Saturn only used one CPU.
Choosing quads over polygons was also a major blunder of the Saturn's design. The list of Sega's mistakes with the Saturn is so lengthy that it's impossible to think it had any chance of succeeding.
But I still play mine. :)
The sad thing is while Sega did everything wrong with the Saturn, they did everything /right/ with the Dreamcast and it still failed miserably. I kind of think of them as the Commodore of the games industry. Technology that was ahead of the curve, awesome products, but ruined by terrible management and stomped out by juggernauts (MS Windows, Sony Playstation).
Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#223> and this had to be paged in and out dynamically, without any "hitches"—loading lags where the frame rate would drop below 30 Hz. This is what gets me. Modern game development seems to say "eh, a little hitching won't hurt anyone", and then we wind up with games that run like shit. Even on consoles.
> Modern game development seems to say "eh, a little hitching won't hurt anyone" Or just like in the PS1 days, game developers still have to make trade-offs to meet dead drop dates set by publishers. Online enabled patches can allow developers to be a little more cavalier with the quality, as they push to build more features closer to ship date.
"Online enabled patches can allow developers to be a little more cavalier ..."
That just means that we get to deal with buggy crap while they tell themselves it's OK because they can ship another update.
Sigh.
Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
Metal Gear Solid
I worked on the port of MGS to PC back in 1999-2000. Here is what I've learned: - Models were not "skinned" as it was popular in the day. Some textures were covering only the front part of the body, others arms, etc. As such it was possible to use very little colors per texture (16) and use palettes (which is a very small "texture" in the graphics memory). If models were skinned they would've required all the colors…
> it also uncovered things like "CONTINEKU" "METARU GIRU SORIDU" (Continue, Metal Gear Solid), and at first I was like... are these folks writing english with japanese symbols?
It's pretty normal for Japanese people to write English words in katakana, especially in things like games. Many program menus are perfectly readable by English speakers if you can read katakana. It's something taught in every Japanese school, so being skilled in it makes you look intelligent.
It was probably closer to KONEKUTTO and METARU GIRU SORIDO though.
Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#225If you haven't read the "Making Crash Bandicoot" blogposts, you're in for a treat. http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/02/making-crash-ban...
I don't know if Dave Baggett's heroic essay (well, as heroic as a game debugging essay can be), "My Hardest Bug Ever" is part of those blogposts, but it's one of the things I now mentally associate with the legacy of Crash Bandicoot (which apparently involved all manners of engineering feats): http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DaveBaggett/20131031/203788/M... HN discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6654…
Why don't to actually link to the original Quora answer where the gamasutra post was lifted from?
Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
That comment shows how much you understand about compilers and Android. javac has nothing to do with Dalvik or ART.
That shows how little you understand about the Android build tools. Dalvik and ART are not compilers. Prior to this year, javac compiled the Java code to .class files and then dx translated the Java bytecode in the .class files into Dalvik bytecode in a .dex file, with some simple dedupe optimizations. Only this year did the Android build system switch to Google's own compiler.
Go take a degree in computer science, learn about intermediate code representation, compiler frontened, compiler backend, CPU instructions, JIT compiler, AOT compiler, register selection.
Then make little drawings about which piece of Android is converting intermediate code representation into native CPU instructions.
For brownie points compare the quality of generated Asssembly code between Hotspot, Dalvik and ART for the same unmodified jar file.
Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd rather play a game that, if I should want to play it 20 years from now and there are no update servers - which I do still do with my old consoles - I can pop it in and not worry about bugs I have to figure out how to get patched. Games will inevitably have bugs, but developers have become too reliant on the update mechanisms and games have shipped completely busted.
That's an interesting point. I hadn't considered the impact of ondemand updates to future abandonware - looks like another case where pirated illegal versions might have better preservation than official ones.
Some fans even made patches for bugs in Master of Orion, in the binary.
Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
A Pentium 133 with 8MB and 800x600 (32bit colors) run fine in with Win95a and several open applications. Try that with Android, even with 2GB RAM and quad core CPU - the Java based system on top of Linux is quite resource hungry. Flagship Android 5 phones have at least twice the hardware spec (twice as much RAM and CPU) of the iPhone 6 and are comparable in performance and user experience (latency) and not faster. Th…
One icon in Win95 had 512 bytes (32x32, 16 color, 4 bitplanes). One icon in Android has 256 kB (256x256, true color). The 800x600, 16-bit hicolor (that's what I used at the time) framebuffer had a bit under 940 kB. The 1920x1200 truecolor has 8,8 MB, not counting the texture backing stores used by modern display servers. The amount of RAM needed has to do with assets used by the code, not the code itself. The code it…
my android phone does :-)
asus ze551ml
Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there no standard? Like, if fps drops below 30 on a play through - red light and fix.
The problem is, that fps stays below 30 for 90% of the development cycle. Only in the last few months of a project everyone rips out useless code, debug code, debug overlays, loggers, extra network connections for statistic and performance servers,and finally you can produce a "nearly" final version of the game that doesn't have any debug code in - and only in that state you can see how it will run on actual hardware…
I remember an interview with some guys from criterion who said they always made sure to maintain 60fps through the development of their game.
Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know if Dave Baggett's heroic essay (well, as heroic as a game debugging essay can be), "My Hardest Bug Ever" is part of those blogposts, but it's one of the things I now mentally associate with the legacy of Crash Bandicoot (which apparently involved all manners of engineering feats): http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DaveBaggett/20131031/203788/M... HN discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6654…
Why don't to actually link to the original Quora answer where the gamasutra post was lifted from?
Just to be clear...the "Dave Baggett" who authored the Quora post seems to be the same "Dave Baggett" who is listed as the author of the Gamasutra post. Usually the phrase "lifted from" implies an act of plagiarism, but I think in this case, the two authors are one and the same.
As to why I didn't link to the Quora answer? Because not everyone on HN has a Quora account. And in the past, Quora has sometimes erected a login-wall for non-users trying to view a post. Gamasutra does not.