271–275 of 275 posts
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Yea, after writing this I regretted using zip to estimate usage. Probably would get better number by extracting each zip and look how much zero padding is at the end of the file. WDYT?
hexdump will automatically does "squeezing" of repeated lines. Follow this with a line count and multiply by the bytes/line and you'll get a rough number of non-repetitive bytes. https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/hexdump.1.html
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The thing that blows my mind about the SNES is that even its onboard RAM can't be accessed at the nominal 3.58MHz clock; the system slows down for that. Always confused me why the SNES was so paltry with its speed when the competitor TurboGrafx-16 usually ran at 7MHz, and also had a 6502-family CPU that required similar memory timing. But the TurboGrafx flopped (in the west) and the SNES was a hit world-wide, so I gu…
> But the TurboGrafx flopped (in the west) and the SNES was a hit world-wide, so I guess they did something right. Still have all my old consoles including the Turbo Graphics 16 and SNES. It was all about the software. Mind you this was during a time when games were $50 each which today is something like $100. If you wanted to sample a game you hoped a friend had it so you could borrow or the local video store had it…
There was a time around the turn of the century when some friends and I shared some studio space, wherein we had a long-lasting (years!) high-score competition for that game. (Scores had to be witnessed, and were then written on the wall by the door.)
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I was actually just thinking last night about how something like Fortnite handled emotes. Skins and cosmetics I can understand, but they have 100 players and hundreds of emotes that any player can use at any time. Is it all really just streamed in on demand? Most common preloaded? Made me ponder a bit.
Maybe a little counter-intuitive, but Fortnite emotes (essentially, animations) takes up much less memory than skins. Generally for a modern polygonal game, you are using skeletal animation for the characters. A character consists of a polygon mesh and anywhere from dozens to hundreds of bones. Animations consist of keyframes. Each keyframe represents just a handful of bytes for each bone (the XYZ coordinates for eac…
I do really like how cartridges on the old systems were essentially equivalent to a PCI Expansion Card in a PC. It was directly connected to the Bus and could do essentially anything. Sadly, that practice ended after the GameBoy Advance, and everything since the Nintendo DS has been purely data storage. This leads to crazy modern enhancements like a Raytracing chip[1], or the MSU1 enhancement chip that is AFAIK not a…
That's not entirely true. A few DS carts at least had IR receivers (e.g. Pokemon HeartGold). I think Learn with Pokémon: Typing Adventure adds Bluetooth through the card as well. So there was some limited capability to add features, not quite as exciting as extra CPUs but it's not like any GBA did anything super exciting there either.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guitar_Hero:_On_Tour#Gamepla...
Edit: a better picture of it in action, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Guitar-hero-on-tour-ds-...
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"Pitfall!" on Atari VCS held 255 entirely different game screens in a 4k cartridge :)
Take a look at Solaris. Another huge game with 48 sectors and probably the best graphics seen on the 2600, all in a 16k cartridge. Quite a feat considering how horrifyingly difficult programming the 2600 was. Even the SDK was fairly barebones, basically a VT100 connected to a PDP-11 running RT8 and a 6502 assembler
