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[–] 27 points 2 years ago (13 children)

I prefer waking my console and pressing a button to play, no disc fumbling

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  • [–] 23 points 2 years ago (10 children)

    Turn on PS2

    Disc starts spinning

    Red screen of death shows up telling me the disc is invalid

    Take out disk and wipe it thoroughly

    Pray

    Repeat 1-5 times until it works

    Yeah, good times...

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    Never had this issue with a Nintendo 64 :P

    I don't think I ever had issues with the cartridges.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (5 children)

    My copy of Beetle Adventure Racing on N64 went through the washing machine after it got picked up with my bedsheets. Left it in the sun for an hour afterwards and popped it back into the console and it kept working perfectly. I don’t know why any console devs ever decided that discs were better than cartridges; it’s just objectively untrue.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    The issue was that you can hold far more data on a CD - 650MB on a CD vs 64MB on the largest N64 cartridges. The N64's 3D hardware was far superior to the Playstation, so sometimes I wonder if having a larger storage medium could have resulted in even better games.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (3 children)

    Take a look at what Kaze Emanuar is doing with SM64 if you're curious what the N64 can do with modern software practices ;D

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (2 children)

    Yeah I've seen his videos - very impressive. He's spent years working on it though (way more than most N64 devs that built commercially released games), and compiler optimizations that exist today didn't exist back then.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    I don't think compiler optimizations matter much - supposedly the final build was compiled without optimizations, presumably by mistake, and the N64 has very specific hardware which compilers don't know how to optimize for.

    What we certainly do have are much more powerful machines and software in general, letting you test, analyze and profile code much more easily, as well as vast amounts of freely available information online - I can't really imagine how they did it back then.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    Some optimizations help a lot. There's a bunch of general optimizations that compiler do that work for any CPU. A simple example would be unrolling small loops. Compilers are fast enough today that they can brute force the best optimization for a given piece of code if needed.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    For real. I remember that despite our best efforts discs would get scratched occasionally, and try keeping those disks pristine with kids. That mechanical drive was also a common and expensive point of failure that's guaranteed to wear out eventually because of those moving parts.

    It's not all sunshine and rainbows, but I think there's a tendency to glorify the past and hyperfocus on the disadvantages. We forget that there were parts of the past that really sucked.

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