I don't think breaking TRC would mean taking development rights from you. All you had to do is fix them, and resubmit (each submit to the manifacturer costs som

I don't think breaking TRC would mean taking development rights from you. All you had to do is fix them, and resubmit (each submit to the manifacturer costs some money). Violations are usually user interface problems - not handling correctly if a game controller was pulled, or Disk I/O error happened, or network was disconnected. Some are strict (for example you should have something on the screen no less than N seconds once the disc is put in), some are suggestions for better integration with the system. You should also display how big your save games would be :) (Not sure if this is still requirment everywhere), but it used to be for PS1/PS2. As for RAM - well I guess when the console was first produced, RAM costs were really high. I'm not a hardware guy, but eventually the manifacturers are squeezing that expensive console to produce to something very cheap, and having less memory makes it easier. Just a guess. Not much knowledge in this area. But having only 256MB of RAM is not that bad - we often don't use malloc/free new/delete, or have them working on specific memory blocks (for example to keep recent cache of collisions), and usually allocated with the same sizes. Not having much RAM means you have to be more inventive - you can find savings different ways - streaming, layering, or other techniques. ID's recent tech is just awesome in that respect. Although I've told you that we have different compile options, the HW stays the same :) This is both good & bad - good that you can become really expert in it, bad because by the time you are - next console arrives. Usually that's why the first game suck, and games released 2nd or 3rd year are just awesome, and the last ones released might be better than first ones released for the next generation - God Of War for PS2 was such example. There was nothing that good on the PS3 at that time from the same genre. Metal Gear Solid for PS1 also shaked up the graphics quality. It's still an awesome looking game even for PS1. And this was on 2MB of memory, 512kb video (or was it less or little more), and I can't remmember now well 256kb or 512kb audio. I worked on the port of MGS to PC (mgspc.com), and was amazed of how good the japanese coders were, and the way the music was composed - it was midi/mod like but really really well done (we lied on the PC and released it as .wav file - no mixing). What I'm saying here, is that if you have little digital samples and some notes/tracks you can compose music pieces that otherwise would take you megabytes of memory (APDCM compression was just 1:4 with low quality, unlike 1:10 or more for mp3 and others).