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War stories: how Crash Bandicoot hacked the original Playstation (2020)
- Synaesthesia 5y agoThe original PS1 was so freaking limited. 33mhz? 2mb RAM? I used to wonder how they made games work on it. But looking at them today, you can see the short draw distances and the limitations very clearly.
- anthk 5y agoa 33 MHZ MIPS CPU would be close to a Pentium 90 and 4MB of RAM. Not bad at all.
- ranma42 5y agoWouldn't x86 have the higher code density? https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=56207 https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=56207 "Finding an IA-32 CPU most like the MIPS R3000A" "a 40MHz MIPS R3000 gets 18.1 MFLOPS, while a 66MHz 486DX2 only gets 3.1 MFLOPS. So, the MIPS is downright Pentium-class for floating-point code. For integer code, the MIPS R3000/40 manages a score of 22.6 in SPECINT89, while the 486DX2/66 gets 34.0" So its also only "Pentium-class" for floating point math, not for integer.
- mysterydip 5y agoIt should, by nature of CISC. However, the other coprocessors on the playstation meant you weren't wasting all your CPU cycles on rendering, which was the majority of the time on a 3D game of the era.
- hrydgard 5y agoThe PSX CPU did not even have floating point support. It's nowhere close to a Pentium 90.
- bluedino 5y agoPentium CPU's often matched the performance of SPARC/MIPS chips clock-for-clock, at least in non-floating point operations. And at that time, almost no games use floating point anyway.
- TapamN 5y agoThe CPU in the PlayStation is nowhere near a 90 MHz Pentium. The CPUs in the Saturn, PlayStation, and N64 were single issue, and could execute at most one instruction per clock. The Pentium was superscalar and could execute two instructions per clock. The Pentium would likely average, for integer operations, more than four or five times the performance. Much higher for floating point. The MIPS CPU in the PlayStation is much closer to a 486 in performance-per-clock for general purpose code. A similarly clocked 486 might win some G.P. code competitions due to better caches, but the PSX's CPU would smoke the 486 in transform and lighting, thanks to it's DSP coprocessor, and the MIPS would still have much better performance-per-dollar than the 486.
- Comevius 5y agoIt had additional fixed function hardware (GPU, SPU), a vector coprocessor and a coprocessor for decoding images and video. It was made for PS1 games, it's just that Sony's C library did not initially expose the vector coprocessor, and the 2 MB RAM and 1 MB VRAM required developers to chunk resources from a 650 MB CD-ROM.
- fps_doug 5y agoIt's still magic though, isn't it? The hardware was slower and more limited, but at the same time the GPU wasn't event that much of a GPU by today's standards, for example. You had to do a lot of what modern GPUs do for you by yourself, on the CPU, sacrificing even more of what little performance it had. A modern dev would wonder how on earth he's gonna get Node.js plus a thousand npm packages running on this so he can create a WebGL context to start making a game. ;)
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- 28uwedj 5y agoYou are confusing a development machine with a production machine. You think they developed these games on those systems?
- pjmlp 5y agoThe original Amiga 500 was so freaking limited. 7.16 MHz? 1mb RAM?.... The original C64 was so freaking limited. 1 MHz? 64KB RAM?.... The original 48K was so freaking limited. 3.5 MHz? 48KB RAM?.... It is a matter to know the tools and hardware.
- buggeryorkshire 5y agoYeah. I programmed the Amiga and it was awesome - no middleware, no crap, if somebody else's code ran better then their code was better. Same with the Atari ST. I kind of miss those days.
- pjmlp 5y agoSame here, you can get some of the experience back targeting something like ESP32.
- dehrmann 5y ago> no middleware, no crap Not sure if this applies to the Amiga, but one of the huge drawbacks to DOS was that you wrote your own video and sound drivers. It wasn't abstracted away, so you could get better performance, but it was a lot of repeated work, and it doesn't scale.
- vnorilo 5y agoI mean, for most DOS games the "video driver" was one interrupt and start writing pixels to framebuffer at 0xa0000. Sound drivers were more complicated, but there were a ton of libraries - it's how FMod got started!
- boomlinde 5y agoThe Amiga had pretty similar hardware throughout its entire lifetime, and to some extent, later models were compatible with earlier models. The kickstart ROM included a basic hardware abstraction layer. Of course most game developers largely ignored it. Compatibility is maintained using software like WHDLoad to patch games where the software makes too many assumptions about the hardware. There's nothing inherent about DOS that prevents code reuse. For example, network stacks and audio drivers were commonly reused, and also graphics APIs like Glide and BGI, not to mention game engines. Either way, writing a soundblaster driver seems like peanuts compared to the work I imagine goes into the rendering pipeline of a modern AAA game. It does scale in the sense that matters to a game publisher; you build it once and then you sell a million copies. The bigger the expected number of sales, the more time you can spend reinventing a more refined, custom-tailored wheel, and the simpler the wheel the tools inspire, the less time you have to spend on it. Amiga and old DOS games were probably just at just the right point where extensive reuse didn't pay off. Hardware wasn't very complex and for games like Doom it had to be a first class consideration for the product to perform well enough.
- skhr0680 5y agoOne part of it is you know what to look for and another part of it is SDTVs connected by composite cables (or worse!) hid a lot of jank
- Sohcahtoa82 5y agoI always wonder about how the hell DOOM ran at 30 fps on a 33 Mhz system. 320 * 200 pixels @ 30 fps means they needed to calculate 1,920,000 pixels per second. With a 33 Mhz CPU, that's ~17 clock cycles per pixel, and that doesn't account for time to handle game logic. I know it's not a true 3D engine, and the status bar took up a good amount of space, but even accounting for that, you still don't get a lot of clock cycles.
- joombaga 5y agoWhat makes Doom's 3d engine not "true"?
- monocasa 5y agoThe engine is limited such that it fundamentally can't do up/down rotation of the camera.
- bonzini 5y agoIt can only draw horizontal floors and vertical walls (so the map is essentially 2D even though it is drawn in 3D). The player also cannot tilt their head sideways.
- jsolson 5y agoAs others noted, it only supported horizontal walls and floors. More specifically, though, it only supported _one_ gap (e.g., a single window or door). You couldn't stack floors on top of each other. This allowed a single ray cast against the 2D map to learn which vertical slices of wall texture to paint (no pitch or roll, remember). Floors and ceilings could be painted in vertical order (above / below the horizon line - "floor" and "ceiling" being explicit for any given open area), iirc, and walls filled in based on the ray cast from the eye.
- Narishma 5y ago> I always wonder about how the hell DOOM ran at 30 fps on a 33 Mhz system. It didn't. It ran at ~25 FPS on a 66 Mhz 486 and only ~15 FPS on a 33 Mhz system. It needed a Pentium to reach half the refresh rate, which was 35 FPS at the time. https://youtu.be/HNlcZetLzY8?t=209 https://youtu.be/HNlcZetLzY8?t=209
- magoghm 5y agoLimited? The Atari 2600 had 128 bytes of RAM.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y agoAnd its video hardware only worked on one scanline at a time.
- mulmboy 5y agoThe GameHut channel does a lot of similar videos on how old video games squeezed the hardware. Super interesting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JK1aV_mzH3A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JK1aV_mzH3A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRzKAe9UtoU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRzKAe9UtoU
- oakesm9 5y agoSee also this brilliant series written by Andy Gavin which goes into a lot more detail https://all-things-andy-gavin.com/video-games/making-crash/ https://all-things-andy-gavin.com/video-games/making-crash/
- jjoonathan 5y agoIf you want to see this sort of brilliant hacking on a modern system, I recommend taking a closer look at Unreal Nanite. It isn't just auto-LOD. Oh no. That's the core, but they had to do this same sort of "work around the tools they are given" to make it actually happen. Tiny triangles chug in modern GPU hardware raster pipelines -- so they wrote a GPGPU software rasterizer. They needed more bandwidth, so they wrote a compression engine. Their shaders needed better scheduling, so they abused the Z-test to do it. It's nuts! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eviSykqSUUw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eviSykqSUUw
- bluedino 5y agoUsing the developers' networked SGI workstations to pre-compute the visibility of the levels was so ahead of it's time.
- RankingMember 5y agoI'd love to see a similar breakdown on the original Metal Gear Solid for the PlayStation.