9 ms·

How Crash Bandicoot hacked the original Playstation (2020) [video]

325 points by agomez314 4y ago

Yliaho 4y ago
The extended version goes more in-depth and I highly recommend watching it instead. https://youtu.be/pSHj5UKSylk https://youtu.be/pSHj5UKSylk
- Operyl 4y ago
  Thanks! I saw the original a while ago and didn't know there was an extended cut.
zxspectrum1982 4y ago
I used this on the PS2. It worked too.
ElCapitanMarkla 4y ago
Andy Gavin's blog on this is a 10/10 read - https://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/02/making-crash-bandicoot-part-1/ https://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/02/making-crash-ba... It comes up every year or so on here and every time I end up rereading that series from start to finish.
- stepupmakeup 4y ago
  "My Hardest Bug Ever" is also a fascinating read, also about Crash Bandicoot on PS1. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/my-hardest-bug-ever https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/my-hardest-bug-eve...
andrepd 4y ago
All of that series of videos is outstanding. Here is another of my favourites: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=qzD9ldLoc3c https://yewtu.be/watch?v=qzD9ldLoc3c
- RL_Quine 4y ago
  I find it really hard to watch because of the really constant camera focus changes, I don’t know why anybody would edit video to be so annoying.
- acomjean 4y ago
  Yew tube. (I expected trees..) I’ve seen a few in the series. Less technical but The NES comes to America is pretty good https://youtu.be/Sn5v09L_uDg https://youtu.be/Sn5v09L_uDg And the Ultima online tried create programmatic eco system is kinda hysterical. 7 minutes (with lord British) https://youtu.be/KFNxJVTJleE https://youtu.be/KFNxJVTJleE Ars (the publisher)has a whole list of them. Non YouTube but seem to have transcripts. https://arstechnica.com/video/series/war-stories https://arstechnica.com/video/series/war-stories
  - andrepd 4y ago
    Oh yeah the Richard Garriot one is my absolute favorite. I love Ultima Online, and the B-roll footage of the wolf-head pipe just kills me.
louthy 4y ago
Anybody who did PS1 dev back in the day will have had to do some crazy hacking stuff to get performance or memory. The first project [1] I worked on I had a C version of my graphics engine and animation system, and in parallel I'd have a MIPS assembly version which was super optimised (the C version was effectively a reference). I made the whole engine and animation system fit in 4K so it would fit into the instruction cache of the CPU. The whole frame update cycle wouldn't need to touch main memory (for the code). Also, because loading from main memory was slow (4 cycles) and the chip was RISC (1 operation per cycle), you'd need 3 NOPs after the Load-op for the register to be loaded. The C compiler (if I remember right) never really filled those 3 NOPs with useful stuff. So, I'd do hand written concurrency (in MIPS assembly) by loading other stuff I'd need into those NOPs - this was particularly effective when working with 3 dimensional vectors or 4 dimensional matrices. Trying to keep super-optimised hand-written concurrency in assembly, in my head, was a challenge and not something I'd recommend! Still, the engine had more throughput than Sony claimed of their machine. Every bit of performance gained would mean an edge over the other games. Then the game was canned by Eidos. Pretty devastating for my first industry job :/ [1] https://www.unseen64.net/2020/11/16/lunatik-pure-entertainment-cancelled/ https://www.unseen64.net/2020/11/16/lunatik-pure-entertainme...
- smcl 4y ago
  > I made the whole engine and animation system fit in 4K so it would fit into the instruction cache of the CPU That's an impressive feat. The screenshots in the linked article look pretty nice particularly for the a PSX-era game, it has a good futuristic, but dirty industrial cityscape thing going on. Did you manage to utilise any of the tech in another project, or was the whole thing just completely binned?
  - louthy 4y ago
    > Did you manage to utilise any of the tech in another project, or was the whole thing just completely binned? At that time we used to bin everything and start again (from the engine point of view at least). Usually it was so complex and hacked together by the end that there wasn't a generalised system to extract. We'd obviously take what we learned into the next title, but less so the code. PS2 was probably the first time I remember reusing engines.
FZ_BA 4y ago
This kind of creativity and ways to defeat limitations always fascinated me.
atan2 4y ago
I always loved this interview. Great gems there. I studied the PS1 tech for a while and it's amazing how even small artifacts (polygon jittering, affine texture mapping, etc.) became looks we now try to replicate for the sake of nostalgia. Fun times!
pxeger1 4y ago
This guy is an excellent communicator. For a modern HN audience an explanation of virtual memory paging is not exactly necessary, but he does a great job of it and I'm sure this video would be really interesting for a much more general audience.
CloudGreed 4y ago
Damn, This stuff is interesting.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mkjonesuk 4y ago
Watched this a few times since it was released. Real talent and determination. Sounds bad but I've recently put this on a couple of times as background video to fall asleep to as well. Work's like a charm!
NeveHanter 4y ago
I highly recommend checking the GameHut channel (https://youtube.com/c/GameHut https://youtube.com/c/GameHut). It's the channel of the Jon Burton, the director of the Traveller's Tales, he worked on games like Sonic 3D Blast or Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex. It's full of interesting stories with technical details about how things were achieved on old hardware or why were they done in some funky ways.
cosmodisk 4y ago
This brought back some very nice memories when we used to play PS1 until our eye became red:)

325 points by agomez314 4y ago

The extended version goes more in-depth and I highly recommend watching it instead. https://youtu.be/pSHj5UKSylk https://youtu.be/pSHj5UKSylk

Operyl 4y ago
Thanks! I saw the original a while ago and didn't know there was an extended cut.

zxspectrum1982 4y ago

I used this on the PS2. It worked too.

ElCapitanMarkla 4y ago

Andy Gavin's blog on this is a 10/10 read - https://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/02/making-crash-bandicoot-part-1/ https://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/02/making-crash-ba... It comes up every year or so on here and every time I end up rereading that series from start to finish.

stepupmakeup 4y ago
"My Hardest Bug Ever" is also a fascinating read, also about Crash Bandicoot on PS1. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/my-hardest-bug-ever https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/my-hardest-bug-eve...

andrepd 4y ago

All of that series of videos is outstanding. Here is another of my favourites: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=qzD9ldLoc3c https://yewtu.be/watch?v=qzD9ldLoc3c

RL_Quine 4y ago
I find it really hard to watch because of the really constant camera focus changes, I don’t know why anybody would edit video to be so annoying.
acomjean 4y ago
Yew tube. (I expected trees..) I’ve seen a few in the series. Less technical but The NES comes to America is pretty good https://youtu.be/Sn5v09L_uDg https://youtu.be/Sn5v09L_uDg And the Ultima online tried create programmatic eco system is kinda hysterical. 7 minutes (with lord British) https://youtu.be/KFNxJVTJleE https://youtu.be/KFNxJVTJleE Ars (the publisher)has a whole list of them. Non YouTube but seem to have transcripts. https://arstechnica.com/video/series/war-stories https://arstechnica.com/video/series/war-stories
- andrepd 4y ago
  Oh yeah the Richard Garriot one is my absolute favorite. I love Ultima Online, and the B-roll footage of the wolf-head pipe just kills me.

louthy 4y ago

Anybody who did PS1 dev back in the day will have had to do some crazy hacking stuff to get performance or memory. The first project [1] I worked on I had a C version of my graphics engine and animation system, and in parallel I'd have a MIPS assembly version which was super optimised (the C version was effectively a reference). I made the whole engine and animation system fit in 4K so it would fit into the instruction cache of the CPU. The whole frame update cycle wouldn't need to touch main memory (for the code). Also, because loading from main memory was slow (4 cycles) and the chip was RISC (1 operation per cycle), you'd need 3 NOPs after the Load-op for the register to be loaded. The C compiler (if I remember right) never really filled those 3 NOPs with useful stuff. So, I'd do hand written concurrency (in MIPS assembly) by loading other stuff I'd need into those NOPs - this was particularly effective when working with 3 dimensional vectors or 4 dimensional matrices. Trying to keep super-optimised hand-written concurrency in assembly, in my head, was a challenge and not something I'd recommend! Still, the engine had more throughput than Sony claimed of their machine. Every bit of performance gained would mean an edge over the other games. Then the game was canned by Eidos. Pretty devastating for my first industry job :/ [1] https://www.unseen64.net/2020/11/16/lunatik-pure-entertainment-cancelled/ https://www.unseen64.net/2020/11/16/lunatik-pure-entertainme...

smcl 4y ago
> I made the whole engine and animation system fit in 4K so it would fit into the instruction cache of the CPU That's an impressive feat. The screenshots in the linked article look pretty nice particularly for the a PSX-era game, it has a good futuristic, but dirty industrial cityscape thing going on. Did you manage to utilise any of the tech in another project, or was the whole thing just completely binned?
- louthy 4y ago
  > Did you manage to utilise any of the tech in another project, or was the whole thing just completely binned? At that time we used to bin everything and start again (from the engine point of view at least). Usually it was so complex and hacked together by the end that there wasn't a generalised system to extract. We'd obviously take what we learned into the next title, but less so the code. PS2 was probably the first time I remember reusing engines.

FZ_BA 4y ago

This kind of creativity and ways to defeat limitations always fascinated me.

atan2 4y ago

I always loved this interview. Great gems there. I studied the PS1 tech for a while and it's amazing how even small artifacts (polygon jittering, affine texture mapping, etc.) became looks we now try to replicate for the sake of nostalgia. Fun times!

pxeger1 4y ago

This guy is an excellent communicator. For a modern HN audience an explanation of virtual memory paging is not exactly necessary, but he does a great job of it and I'm sure this video would be really interesting for a much more general audience.

CloudGreed 4y ago

Damn, This stuff is interesting.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

mkjonesuk 4y ago

Watched this a few times since it was released. Real talent and determination. Sounds bad but I've recently put this on a couple of times as background video to fall asleep to as well. Work's like a charm!

NeveHanter 4y ago

I highly recommend checking the GameHut channel (https://youtube.com/c/GameHut https://youtube.com/c/GameHut). It's the channel of the Jon Burton, the director of the Traveller's Tales, he worked on games like Sonic 3D Blast or Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex. It's full of interesting stories with technical details about how things were achieved on old hardware or why were they done in some funky ways.

cosmodisk 4y ago

This brought back some very nice memories when we used to play PS1 until our eye became red:)