4 ms·
Whenever people ask questions like this, my feeling is always: you’re welcome to try :) It’s hard to fathom, for people used to modern computing, just how limi
by wk_end 2y ago
Whenever people ask questions like this, my feeling is always: you’re welcome to try :)
It’s hard to fathom, for people used to modern computing, just how limited the SNES’ 65816 is. Even at the time it was pretty underpowered.
I don’t know about the specific techniques you’re referring to (though I’d be surprised if they weren’t known about back then, when lookup tables were king!) but something to bear in mind is that, in general, most advances in math programming knowledge since that era hinge on the availability of floating point, which is a non-starter for the SNES.
The tiny amount of ROM available was also a limiting factor - I think Pilotwings was only 512kb, at most 1mb. There wasn’t even a lot of space for lookup tables!
- qingcharles 2y agoThis is the video that got me thinking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFKFoGiGlXQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFKFoGiGlXQ I was writing software texturers etc in the late 80s/early 90s, and even recently I've seen x86 people humble me with all sorts of info that I had no idea about at the time, concerning pipelining etc. I would just sit all day randomly reordering assembler instructions and reprofiling teapot renders to see if anything would move the needle.
- wk_end 2y agoYeah, this is a great example of what I'm talking about. Even though there was only (only!) a roughly five year gap between the two, to bring up the N64 in the same breath shows that you're wildly overestimating what the SNES gave you to work with. The N64 had an FPU and could work with floating point values. The SNES...couldn't. You're talking about pipelining; this video is talking about caches. Well, the 65816 has no pipeline. The 65816 has no cache. If you were writing doing 3D graphics in the late 80s or early 90s, you might've been working with a 286 or 386. These are chips that run circles around the SNES' 65816. And the R4000 in the N64? Forget about it. It was running at a clock speed nearly two orders of magnitude higher than the SNES' CPU, and could do vastly more per cycle to boot.
- qingcharles 2y agoAppreciate the feedback. I was just throwing a wild idea out there. I didn't know underspec'd the SNES CPU was. I think I was probably up to a 486@25Mhz by the time I was arguing with Jez [San of Argonaut] on Usenet about rendering optimizations!