5 ms·

The final products of those amazing programs that show up late in the platform's lifetime are indeed running on the same hardware, but aren't those programs oft

The final products of those amazing programs that show up late in the platform's lifetime are indeed running on the same hardware, but aren't those programs often developed using faster computers of later periods? For instance, Donkey Kong Country does run on an unmodified SNES purchased on its launch day, but its creation shouldn't have been possible were it not for the Silicon Graphics workstations used to create the art, which was most likely vastly faster than the development hardware used to create the earliest SNES games. Many amazing pieces of code involve pre-rendering or other various forms of precomputation that are extremely computationally expensive but the final result will run on a low-powered machine. What we're seeing on the BBC Micro, MegaDrive/Genesis or other evergreen demo platforms is not "what would happen if computers never got any faster," rather it's more like "what would happen if only the computer running the final product never got any faster." We still need faster, better hardware.

falcrist 6y ago
Well there are a couple responses to that. First of all, just because computers stopped advancing doesn't mean all computers will be the same. You'll still be able to use big, powerful machines as workstations where you write and deploy software for smaller machines. At the same time the N64 came out, there were MUCH more powerful machines you could use. Secondly, there's really nothing in principle that would stop you from creating the late N64 games on less powerful computers. Certainly it would be more clunky to compile and deploy from an older, less powerful machine, but you could still do it.
- tsss 6y ago
  Certain static analysis is out of the question for sure. You absolutely need a more powerful computer for that, or rather you need more memory.
- needle0 6y ago
  That's true in principle, but beyond a certain degree it would leave the realm of practicality, eg. You can pre-render something complex in 3D or do some complex calculations to populate a precomputed table on any computer no matter how slow, and it might be clunky and inconvenient yet still possible if it's merely 2x or 3x slow. But if it's something like 10000x slow doing it would pretty much be out of the question, as real-world projects (even hobbyist ones) are bound by limitations of time and budget.
weinzierl 6y ago
> The final products of those amazing programs that show up late in the platform's lifetime are indeed running on the same hardware, but aren't those programs often developed using faster computers of later periods? They are developed on faster computers but that was already the case at the heyday of these games, so the difference might be less than you would expect. What is a huge difference though is access to information. Back in the day I got my weekly homeopathic dose of assembly language from a local home computer magazine. That's all there was. Today every ever so obscure detail is just few searches away. I cannot stress enough what difference this makes in learning and development speed.
- pritovido 6y ago
  >Back in the day I got my weekly homeopathic dose of assembly language from a local home computer magazine. I had the same experience, until I (we)found that the knowledge of those magazines were taken from books, so I(we) went to the source, the library of the University. I was a kid at the time and had friends that shared the same interests as me. The library was magical. Even today, when there is lots of amazing materials on the web, the real deep stuff is in books. One of the great things of Internet, specially videos is that they introduce you to a topic so you can understand the book.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - gumby 6y ago
    > Even today, when there is lots of amazing materials on the web, the real deep stuff is in books. Years ago my then 7yo was given an assignment: Find out how long woodchucks live in captivity. It was in late January in the USA so the idea is there would be many possible sources of info due to "Groundhog Day": newspapers, books, the Internet, TV... All the kids heard "blah, blah, the Internet, blah" (this was before smart phones and kids that age typically didn't use the Internet so it was exciting). Much to his annoyance I forced my kid to come with me to the library where the librarian happily showed him how to find the answer. We made some photocopies and wrote the answer at the top. He actually brought home a book full of animal pictures. I was in school there next day and discovered every other kid had brought a printout of the web (Wikipedia, an article about Groundhog Day, etc) but none actually had the answer to the question. Our photocopies did. Whether my intransigence had any long term value to the kid is unclear to me.
Vogtinator 6y ago
With a bit more memory (or just storage in general), it would've been possible to do the pre-rendering on a SNES as well, it would just take a while. So having faster hardware isn't necessary, it just makes it easier and more convenient.
- hypertele-Xii 6y ago
  I don't think that's right. There is absolutely no way that a SNES can, with just "a bit more memory", perform the same computation as a Silicon Graphics workstation of the time. That's like saying you could write a library's worth of books without a printing press if you just had a bit more ink for your pen. No, you couldn't. You would grow old and die long before completion, even if you wrote every second of every day of your entire life.
arexxbifs 6y ago
Amazing demos are released on the C64 today. High quality productions spanning several disk sides, still pushing the boundaries of the machine and doing things like playing video streamed from floppy, using the SID chip for sample playback with incredible quality, squeezing the last out of every single byte of RAM. It shows how well the authors know the system. Many of them have coded for it for more than 30 years and know every little bit about it by heart. Still, those demos couldn't have been created on an unexpanded C64 without the help of modern cross-development: running an assembler natively takes up memory that can now be freed for data and code. The same goes for some of the audio and graphics: using a PC to downsample from a higher resolution yields better quality and those resolutions wouldn't fit on a floppy, let alone the unexpanded memory. Some of it could maybe be done natively with a RAMLink and hard drive, but not all of it.
- wiz21c 6y ago
  Yep, special use case : data compression. Many compression that work on old computer are actually the decompression side of an asymmetric compression scheme. Asymmetric meaning that it requires a lot more CPU power than a mere C64 can provide to compress data whereas the same C64 can easily decompress... I've coded myself a Bad Apple video demo for the Apple 2+. Takes minutes of compression on my I7 but can be decrunched on a 1Mhz 6502.
  - Retric 6y ago
    If computers stop getting faster then larger investments in software development become reasonable. As we are not limited to a single i7 today, the C64 was hardly the most powerful machine of that time. A Cray X-MP released just after the C64 might take hours to run that same compression, which would have been expensive but hardly impossible.
    - eggsome 6y ago
      A Cray X-MP could only do 800 flops. Even a first gen i7 is many orders of magnitude better than that.
coldtea 6y ago
>Many amazing pieces of code involve pre-rendering or other various forms of precomputation that are extremely computationally expensive but the final result will run on a low-powered machine. Well, if by "many" you mean "mostly games", yes. Not true for other kinds of software...
- majewsky 6y ago
  An increasing proportion of software includes some sort of pre-trained neural network. These also fit the description.

falcrist 6y ago

Well there are a couple responses to that. First of all, just because computers stopped advancing doesn't mean all computers will be the same. You'll still be able to use big, powerful machines as workstations where you write and deploy software for smaller machines. At the same time the N64 came out, there were MUCH more powerful machines you could use. Secondly, there's really nothing in principle that would stop you from creating the late N64 games on less powerful computers. Certainly it would be more clunky to compile and deploy from an older, less powerful machine, but you could still do it.

tsss 6y ago
Certain static analysis is out of the question for sure. You absolutely need a more powerful computer for that, or rather you need more memory.
needle0 6y ago
That's true in principle, but beyond a certain degree it would leave the realm of practicality, eg. You can pre-render something complex in 3D or do some complex calculations to populate a precomputed table on any computer no matter how slow, and it might be clunky and inconvenient yet still possible if it's merely 2x or 3x slow. But if it's something like 10000x slow doing it would pretty much be out of the question, as real-world projects (even hobbyist ones) are bound by limitations of time and budget.

weinzierl 6y ago

> The final products of those amazing programs that show up late in the platform's lifetime are indeed running on the same hardware, but aren't those programs often developed using faster computers of later periods? They are developed on faster computers but that was already the case at the heyday of these games, so the difference might be less than you would expect. What is a huge difference though is access to information. Back in the day I got my weekly homeopathic dose of assembly language from a local home computer magazine. That's all there was. Today every ever so obscure detail is just few searches away. I cannot stress enough what difference this makes in learning and development speed.

pritovido 6y ago
>Back in the day I got my weekly homeopathic dose of assembly language from a local home computer magazine. I had the same experience, until I (we)found that the knowledge of those magazines were taken from books, so I(we) went to the source, the library of the University. I was a kid at the time and had friends that shared the same interests as me. The library was magical. Even today, when there is lots of amazing materials on the web, the real deep stuff is in books. One of the great things of Internet, specially videos is that they introduce you to a topic so you can understand the book.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- gumby 6y ago
  > Even today, when there is lots of amazing materials on the web, the real deep stuff is in books. Years ago my then 7yo was given an assignment: Find out how long woodchucks live in captivity. It was in late January in the USA so the idea is there would be many possible sources of info due to "Groundhog Day": newspapers, books, the Internet, TV... All the kids heard "blah, blah, the Internet, blah" (this was before smart phones and kids that age typically didn't use the Internet so it was exciting). Much to his annoyance I forced my kid to come with me to the library where the librarian happily showed him how to find the answer. We made some photocopies and wrote the answer at the top. He actually brought home a book full of animal pictures. I was in school there next day and discovered every other kid had brought a printout of the web (Wikipedia, an article about Groundhog Day, etc) but none actually had the answer to the question. Our photocopies did. Whether my intransigence had any long term value to the kid is unclear to me.

Vogtinator 6y ago

With a bit more memory (or just storage in general), it would've been possible to do the pre-rendering on a SNES as well, it would just take a while. So having faster hardware isn't necessary, it just makes it easier and more convenient.

hypertele-Xii 6y ago
I don't think that's right. There is absolutely no way that a SNES can, with just "a bit more memory", perform the same computation as a Silicon Graphics workstation of the time. That's like saying you could write a library's worth of books without a printing press if you just had a bit more ink for your pen. No, you couldn't. You would grow old and die long before completion, even if you wrote every second of every day of your entire life.

arexxbifs 6y ago

Amazing demos are released on the C64 today. High quality productions spanning several disk sides, still pushing the boundaries of the machine and doing things like playing video streamed from floppy, using the SID chip for sample playback with incredible quality, squeezing the last out of every single byte of RAM. It shows how well the authors know the system. Many of them have coded for it for more than 30 years and know every little bit about it by heart. Still, those demos couldn't have been created on an unexpanded C64 without the help of modern cross-development: running an assembler natively takes up memory that can now be freed for data and code. The same goes for some of the audio and graphics: using a PC to downsample from a higher resolution yields better quality and those resolutions wouldn't fit on a floppy, let alone the unexpanded memory. Some of it could maybe be done natively with a RAMLink and hard drive, but not all of it.

wiz21c 6y ago
Yep, special use case : data compression. Many compression that work on old computer are actually the decompression side of an asymmetric compression scheme. Asymmetric meaning that it requires a lot more CPU power than a mere C64 can provide to compress data whereas the same C64 can easily decompress... I've coded myself a Bad Apple video demo for the Apple 2+. Takes minutes of compression on my I7 but can be decrunched on a 1Mhz 6502.
- Retric 6y ago
  If computers stop getting faster then larger investments in software development become reasonable. As we are not limited to a single i7 today, the C64 was hardly the most powerful machine of that time. A Cray X-MP released just after the C64 might take hours to run that same compression, which would have been expensive but hardly impossible.
  - eggsome 6y ago
    A Cray X-MP could only do 800 flops. Even a first gen i7 is many orders of magnitude better than that.

coldtea 6y ago

>Many amazing pieces of code involve pre-rendering or other various forms of precomputation that are extremely computationally expensive but the final result will run on a low-powered machine. Well, if by "many" you mean "mostly games", yes. Not true for other kinds of software...

majewsky 6y ago
An increasing proportion of software includes some sort of pre-trained neural network. These also fit the description.