3 ms·

Many, many games of the older gens (before 2000) worked by "hacking" their console, if by hacking you mean using part of it in ways it wasn't supposed to or to

by nolok 7y ago

Many, many games of the older gens (before 2000) worked by "hacking" their console, if by hacking you mean using part of it in ways it wasn't supposed to or to do something entirely different from what it was supposed to do. From very old 8 bit era "gaming computer" cheating around their CPUs or CRT screens to achieve effects that shouldn't be possible (also very popular in the demo scene), to games on the Saturn being forced to use the mashup of random chips to their best advantage (like running some graphics computation on one of the audio chips), they had to make with what they had. It's not so much that modern dev are not as capable, but modern console are much more malleable and offer much more power relatively speaking. Basically they're PC. The last console which required special tricks was the PS3, because the Cell was a weird ass architecture totally unsuited to mainly single core games, so devs had to do what they could to make it run well. When you look at old stuff, it's less "wow they were great to achieve that with such poor hardware" and more "I genuinely don't think it's possible to do that with the resources available ..." So they cheated. Or hacked. Whatever you want to call it. The Saturn and PSX had some insane stuff. Go look at the tech specs of the PSX and tell me as a dev you think it's reasonnable to expect games like Metal Gear Solid, Crash Bandicoot, etc ... To run on that thing. But still, the crown of "dev has to cheat around to do anything that wasn't 2d" remains with the Saturn, the best worst design ever for a console. On PC we have few equivalent because our chips have always been very multi purpose, historically they were merely vastly underpowered compared to specialized hardware console had (which is why Carmack's 2d and 3d marvels in the early 90s were so impressive, getting an engine similar to keen or wolfenstein or doom isn't very hard, getting it to run fast on the hardware of the time ... Well there is a reason the guy's name is known the way it is). War stories of developpers of that era are some of the best things to read as a non-dev game that enjoy reading about doing stuff you shouldn't be able to do. I remember reading such a thing about Panzer Dragoon II Zwei on the Saturn and it was so great, but apparently I didn't save the link and can't find it back.

737maxtw 7y ago
FX fighter is my favorite example on PC. Sure, the mechanics were a little shallow and camera bugs because it's 3d in 1995, but it ran on a 486/66 surprisingly well! Tie fighter and X wing are other examples in their own right as well. Maybe the graphics weren't that great, but I'm sure managing the game world, dynamic music and 3d at the time was quite the task.
- nolok 7y ago
  Every 3d game on pc that didn't require a dedicated 3d card ans still ran somwhat well is basically a marvel, tech-wise I also had a 486/66 and I loved that thing but it was slow as hell, what so many dev achieved with it is humbling
  - flatiron 7y ago
    I used a 486 66dx2 with 20 megs of ram until 2001 when I got a laptop for college. FreeBSD and console only programs but it got the job done. Did all my high school work on it and an external X2 modem. Even brought it to college and slapped a network card in it to act as a proxy server. They have us 1 gig of data per day. But they did it by MAC address not port. So I just had all my friends proxy over to that box and it would just change MACs right before the gig. Unlimited data!
- Newtonip 7y ago
  Fun fact, FX Fighters development was originally on the SNES.
- temac 7y ago
  A 486/66 ran Doom well and Duke Nukem 3D mostly ok. (Even a 386 run Doom, although quite poorly.) It's quite reasonable to be able to draw a few polygons on it at low res, although it can depend on tricks and skill of the programmer - including math approx yielding a visually good enough result for a fraction of the computing power required for the exact one - to get very good or mediocre results.
raverbashing 7y ago
The Cell was a nice idea on paper but for games it seems beefy cores are the way to go Though I find it ironic that (old) game developers would go out of their way to find out ways of making their games faster while modern ones are saying the Cell was too hard (but I get it, it's a different environment and business now)
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Programming the PS3 only really took off when Sony released PhyreEngine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhyreEngine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhyreEngine Here some videos how it looks like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOptZgaPrSk&list=PLd4fN5qM6ipcloh6PM-3xY9yls1fohZ06 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOptZgaPrSk&list=PLd4fN5qM6i...
- BubRoss 7y ago
  The cell wasn't meant to be the main cpu at any point. It was thought that it could be the GPU. Sony out a separate GPU in later and left the CPU, GPU and cell all mixed together. Also a lot of great stuff was eventually done with the cell. Hacks and tricks are great in small quantities, but the reality was that the cell had lots of power and potential, but sony have developers practically nothing to start. The documentation and examples were supposedly basically nothing. Even for the CPU and Nvidia GPU each game studio had to come up with their own low level drawing. Studios were really starting from scratch with very little help from Sony. Add in that supposedly the cell required fine grained cache control and scheduling, and suddenly it starts to make sense why it left lots of studios frustrated. Sony marketed its power and then left studios to spin their wheels trying to live up to consumer's expectations.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    Which is why they eventually had to release something like PhyreEngine.
pjmlp 7y ago
Yeah, hence why the Demoscene was so interesting back in the day. Nowadays one has to create virtual limitations for the same sort of challenges. Even game coding on one of the ESP32 or Arduino based consoles is much easier that it was for us. Regarding "hacking" the PC, a famous example would be mode x, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_X
- CM30 7y ago
  Well, you don't have to create virtual limitations. You can also work within real ones by coding for long since discontinued video game systems. The homebrew scenes for home computers like the Amiga and ZX Spectrum, and consoles like the NES and Game Boy are still going strong now. Working on a game for those systems can be an interesting look into how development worked back in the 80s and 90s, and really test what limits you can push these systems to. There's also the ROM hacking and modding scenes for old games as well. Whether its console games like Super Mario World or Sonic the Hedgehog or PC games like Doom, there's some insanely impressive stuff being coded for mods these days.
chongli 7y ago
Same goes for old PC games. My favourite example is Elite for the BBC Micro (and other machines as well). This classic GDC talk [1] goes into some of the details of what they accomplished. Brilliant stuff! [1] https://gdcvault.com/play/1014628/Classic-Game-Postmortem https://gdcvault.com/play/1014628/Classic-Game-Postmortem

by nolok 7y ago

737maxtw 7y ago

FX fighter is my favorite example on PC. Sure, the mechanics were a little shallow and camera bugs because it's 3d in 1995, but it ran on a 486/66 surprisingly well! Tie fighter and X wing are other examples in their own right as well. Maybe the graphics weren't that great, but I'm sure managing the game world, dynamic music and 3d at the time was quite the task.

nolok 7y ago
Every 3d game on pc that didn't require a dedicated 3d card ans still ran somwhat well is basically a marvel, tech-wise I also had a 486/66 and I loved that thing but it was slow as hell, what so many dev achieved with it is humbling
- flatiron 7y ago
  I used a 486 66dx2 with 20 megs of ram until 2001 when I got a laptop for college. FreeBSD and console only programs but it got the job done. Did all my high school work on it and an external X2 modem. Even brought it to college and slapped a network card in it to act as a proxy server. They have us 1 gig of data per day. But they did it by MAC address not port. So I just had all my friends proxy over to that box and it would just change MACs right before the gig. Unlimited data!
Newtonip 7y ago
Fun fact, FX Fighters development was originally on the SNES.
temac 7y ago
A 486/66 ran Doom well and Duke Nukem 3D mostly ok. (Even a 386 run Doom, although quite poorly.) It's quite reasonable to be able to draw a few polygons on it at low res, although it can depend on tricks and skill of the programmer - including math approx yielding a visually good enough result for a fraction of the computing power required for the exact one - to get very good or mediocre results.

raverbashing 7y ago

The Cell was a nice idea on paper but for games it seems beefy cores are the way to go Though I find it ironic that (old) game developers would go out of their way to find out ways of making their games faster while modern ones are saying the Cell was too hard (but I get it, it's a different environment and business now)

pjmlp 7y ago
Programming the PS3 only really took off when Sony released PhyreEngine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhyreEngine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhyreEngine Here some videos how it looks like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOptZgaPrSk&list=PLd4fN5qM6ipcloh6PM-3xY9yls1fohZ06 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOptZgaPrSk&list=PLd4fN5qM6i...
BubRoss 7y ago
The cell wasn't meant to be the main cpu at any point. It was thought that it could be the GPU. Sony out a separate GPU in later and left the CPU, GPU and cell all mixed together. Also a lot of great stuff was eventually done with the cell. Hacks and tricks are great in small quantities, but the reality was that the cell had lots of power and potential, but sony have developers practically nothing to start. The documentation and examples were supposedly basically nothing. Even for the CPU and Nvidia GPU each game studio had to come up with their own low level drawing. Studios were really starting from scratch with very little help from Sony. Add in that supposedly the cell required fine grained cache control and scheduling, and suddenly it starts to make sense why it left lots of studios frustrated. Sony marketed its power and then left studios to spin their wheels trying to live up to consumer's expectations.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Which is why they eventually had to release something like PhyreEngine.

pjmlp 7y ago

Yeah, hence why the Demoscene was so interesting back in the day. Nowadays one has to create virtual limitations for the same sort of challenges. Even game coding on one of the ESP32 or Arduino based consoles is much easier that it was for us. Regarding "hacking" the PC, a famous example would be mode x, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_X

CM30 7y ago
Well, you don't have to create virtual limitations. You can also work within real ones by coding for long since discontinued video game systems. The homebrew scenes for home computers like the Amiga and ZX Spectrum, and consoles like the NES and Game Boy are still going strong now. Working on a game for those systems can be an interesting look into how development worked back in the 80s and 90s, and really test what limits you can push these systems to. There's also the ROM hacking and modding scenes for old games as well. Whether its console games like Super Mario World or Sonic the Hedgehog or PC games like Doom, there's some insanely impressive stuff being coded for mods these days.

chongli 7y ago

Same goes for old PC games. My favourite example is Elite for the BBC Micro (and other machines as well). This classic GDC talk [1] goes into some of the details of what they accomplished. Brilliant stuff! [1] https://gdcvault.com/play/1014628/Classic-Game-Postmortem https://gdcvault.com/play/1014628/Classic-Game-Postmortem