817
What a feeling that was (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/memes@sopuli.xyz
144 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 6 child comments
    •
  • [–] 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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 5 child comments
    •
  • [–] 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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
    •
  • [–] 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

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
    •
  • [–] 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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent