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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

#201

Post by balls187 »

i_are_smart wrote: post #52

> 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.

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

#202

Post by Jare »

malkia wrote: post #173
wnevets wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>- Two lessons learned from it - We've put much better high-res textures for the eyes (hired someone from Texas to do it for us), when we got the idea rejected by Hideo himself (by the phone), he told us (through the interpretter) that the game during normal game-play did not have any eye-movement, so higher-res textures would look like crap, while with a blurry texture your own eyes won't see it as a problem - it's…

We've been lucky somehow I guess to discover and talk about such issues in advance. But it could be that a lot of people might not be bothered by them. Even today's game do lack fine touches and are hovering the Uncanny Valley, but it seems people are used to it... The same way I still can't get used to watching Lord Of The Rings in 48fps :)

Hehe I always get a kick off of showing my wife Uncanny Valley examples. The other day she was really creeped by the E3 FIFA footage. I on the other hand must have developed a way of adapting, or teaching my brain what to enjoy, because I loved 48fps Hobbit despite noticing the artificialness that everyone else complains about.

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

#203

Post by Jare »

talmand wrote: post #117
gambiting wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work as a programmer in games industry,and I feel like the problem is made worse by artists and level designers who add more stuff without worrying about performance. I can make a super efficient physics system or model loader,but that only means that someone somewhere is going to add more particle effects or lights or whatever, or maybe placing too many props in the scene so PS4/X1 can't handle it. In fact, the se…

Back when I was somewhat involved in the gaming industry a very, very smart programmer told me the reason his game with his new fancy, innovative, advanced engine didn't work out. If you make it possible for level designers to make six square mile levels, they all make nothing but six square mile levels.

The internal Commandos Level Editor had a bug where it computed twice the memory footprint for the level. When the boss found out, he ordered the tool programmer to NOT fix that bug or tell anyone about it.

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

#204

Post by pjmlp »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #195
pjmlp wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Java is not the problem, rather Google's shitty compilers. Lots of industrial applications run embedded Java with a few KBs and acceptable performance for their use cases.

Android used the Oracle javac compiler until this year, so blaming anything on Google's new compilers is a little strange.

That comment shows how much you understand about compilers and Android.

javac has nothing to do with Dalvik or ART.

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

#205

Post by stuaxo »

frik wrote: post #128
vetinari wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Win95 machines with 4 MB RAM were exceptions, not the rule. It was very painful to use such machine, as it was swapping all time time, otherwise doing nothing. Any realistic setup had 8 MB RAM or more. Application at that time also didn't support i18n, didn't anti alias fonts, had low-res, low-color assets, that were enough at 320x200(240)/640x480 resolution.

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…

Interesting... Fast 486 (120mhz) with 12mb at 640x480 was swapping my so much fun could watch the logo screen rendering slowly down the screen

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

#206

Post by ParrotyError »

Back in the days of the 8-bit micros there were some games that were absolutely incredible for what they could pack into a tiny machine. Elite on the BBC micro (32k) was one, but being poor I had a Spectrum 128. There was a helicopter simulator by Digital Integration for the 48k Spectrum called Tomahawk which was particularly good, and another 3D game called Starglider, which was originally for the Atari ST but there were ports to the Spectrum 128 and 48k Spectrum! I seem to remember an article in Sinclair User where they interviewed the developers who explained how they got it all to fit into such a small machine. Self-modifying code and using parts of the frame buffer to store code and data IIRC...

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

#207

Post by Grazester »

codesushi42 wrote: post #12

Pretty 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=foZUcPQAMvg

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

#208

Post by goalieca »

listic wrote: post #51

I wonder if anyone controls the physical layout of bytes on the disk, at least for things like installing large software packages on an HDD, or a major release of an operating system on a DVD. It doesn't look likely: every time I install Ubuntu, I feel the process could be made much faster.

One really nice benefit of SSDs is that there is no needle or laser to seek. :)

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

#209

Post by vardump »

vetinari wrote: post #159
frik wrote: post #128

Earlier 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…

Android doesn't support LPAE? That's pretty surprising, any sources about that? LPAE doesn't need any usermode support to function. What specifically does Android do to prevent using LPAE in underlying Linux kernel?

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

#210

Post by nickpsecurity »

malkia wrote: post #158
timboslice wrote: post #95

Earlier 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…

Two things to take away for coding in general: clever CRC trick; dedicated optimization programmer. These might benefit other projects in the future.
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