5 ms·
The biggest thing is lower resolution. 640x480 at 256 colors was a high-color, high-resolution mode at the time. Small bitmaps, with indexed palettes and run-l
by thrower123 5y ago
The biggest thing is lower resolution. 640x480 at 256 colors was a high-color, high-resolution mode at the time.
Small bitmaps, with indexed palettes and run-length-encoding to further shrink them.
Caches were tiny, memory was slower, hard disks massively slower, and if you had to hit a CD to load data, forget about it. So packing data was important, and organizing data for cache locality, and writing algorithms to take advantage of instruction pipelining and avoid branches.
Fabian Sanglard has a great blog that goes into the nitty gritty of a lot of these techniques as used in different games.
https://fabiensanglard.net/ https://fabiensanglard.net/