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Some number of years ago I wrote an mp3 decoder for a game I was working on. It allowed us to put hours of speech onto our 16Mb N64 cartridge (yep, it was quit
by midnightclubbed 9y ago
Some number of years ago I wrote an mp3 decoder for a game I was working on. It allowed us to put hours of speech onto our 16Mb N64 cartridge (yep, it was quite a few years ago).
Knowing we had to get a mp3 license I contacted Fraunhofer who decided that a console game required a hardware decoding license which ran at $10,000s (if we had been a PC title it would have been a few $100 as I remember).
Legal got involved and decided they would license Rad Games Tool's Miles audio (since it already had a mp3 license and they could take any heat from Fraunhofer!).
Unfortunately for me legal then made me completely wipe the first implementation, carefully optimized N64 RSP vector code and all, and do a clean re-write of everything. We didn't use a single line of the Miles code, but they got a license fee and we had happy lawyers.
- juskrey 9y agoDid you consider Ogg Vorbis?
- themodelplumber 9y agoOgg and Vorbis hadn't yet discovered one another back in the N64 days, had they?
- kevindong 9y agoGiven that the N64 was released in the North America in September 1996 and that the first stable release of Vorbis wasn't released until May 2000, it's very probable that OP couldn't have considered/used Vorbis.
- juskrey 9y agoOh, ok. I thought "few years" was meaning actually few years. Did not know much about N64. After googling, it seems devs were still active in 2003-2005.
- midnightclubbed 9y agoIt was probably 1999 that I wrote the first version. Ogg was still in development at that point. I know I considered a few codecs but mp3 was relatively well supported with 'reference' codecs.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- midnightclubbed 9y agoMp3 was the only option that was relatively mature and had good enough compression ratios for what we needed (as I remember). Anything more computationally expensive was completely off the table.
- rangibaby 9y agoPerfect Dark?
- midnightclubbed 9y agoConker's Bad Fur Day. I dont think Perfect Dark used that code, they used adpcm for their speech as I remember.
- rangibaby 9y agoThe reason I mentioned it is I distinctly remembered the MP3 copyright notice from the first screen of the game: https://i.warosu.org/data/vr/img/0015/50/1397802118061.png https://i.warosu.org/data/vr/img/0015/50/1397802118061.png
- midnightclubbed 9y agoHaha, I guess they did use my mp3 code - your memory is better than mine! I see they have the Miles audio copyright in there too despite not only using it for the mp3 license.