/vr/ - Retro Games

>>8959781
>My friends openly discussed how laggy and unpleasant Ocarina was
Sounds like your friends are of the honosexual variety, old man.

>>8959781
>60 FPS on PC
>in 1998
That's thousands of dollars even before inflation.

>>8959781
it's hard
well was at the time at least

>>8959801
Yeah, all computer parts cost more back then (after adjusting for inflation). Computers are cheaper than ever now.

It also depends on what you're playing. It was totally feasible to have 60 FPS in, like, Descent or FreeSpace in 1998.

Then you load a Nintendo 64 game and it's like..... chug chug chug.

>>8959812
I respectfully disagree with some of that.

Forgetting compiler optimizations in Mario 64 was pure incompetence, and it should've been detected by the developers and playtesters.

Drawing too many sprites in major first-party games like SMB3 (Level 8 autoscrollers, anyone?) was a basic issue with level design. That should've been detected and corrected in playtesting, but they just didn't seem to care. Level 8 in SMB3 really does lag like crazy, BTW.

Giving the N64 a 4K texture cache was an absolutely idiotic decision during the design process, and they should've known better. So was using carts. Sony knew better, and even fucking NEC (PC Engine) knew better.

>>8959781
Nintendo, like many companies, only cared about profit. The Famicom was famously designed to make a profit at an extremely low price point. However, unlike their successor consoles, the Famicom was also a well designed machine. The Super Famicom was a rushed design, and chose to use a 65816 (which was only used in the Apple II GS) to keep backwards compatibility with the NES, which didn't come to fruition, so it had a 6502 with 16 bit addressing and had to be carried by cartridge hardware. N64 was designed by an external firm, an American one no less, as a startled response to 3D technology and the reception it was receiving. The Gamecube was the only other console of theirs that was reasonably sanely designed, unfortunately third parties were unwilling to return and the minidisks was a turnoff for those who did. The PS2 was deliberately designed to be a challenging piece of hardware while the Gamecube was simpler, yet there are a lot of games that never got GameCube versions, or just ran worse.

>My friends openly discussed how laggy and unpleasant Ocarina was.
every kid i knew at the time (regardless of the system) though slowdowns in games meant that the game was such a powerhouse the system was barely able to handle it so we just went "woah" and kept playing (I do remember back then finding hilarious when I played Star Wars Racer 64 on hi-res mode I paused just when I crashed and the frame drops were so big even the pause music began to sound choppy), i dont think there was too many instances when the framerate was so bad we'll complain about it (I think the first time I though the framerate being low was dreadful was when i got to the underwater dungeon in Megaman Legends 2 or when I played Shadow the Edgyhog on PS2).
I honestly still don't care about 60fps unless its a high-speed racer or a fighting game.

>>8959825
Corn and UltraHLE and were game-changers. It's weird how these two have basically no presence on the Internet despite being significant milestones in emulation.

>>8959781
>Why did nintendo not care about the rantings of a deranged 37yo manchild?
No one did. Or ever will.

>>8959781
>forgot to enable compiler optimizations in Mario 64
It's much more likely that the game was debugged without enabling them and they had a deadline to meet.

>Ocarina and Goldeneye runs at 15-20 FPS
>many first-party NES games (even SMB3) draw too many sprites and lag like crazy
Yeah, that's what happens when you push hardware to its limits. Also I don't care about your gay friends, people weren't so sensitive to framerate back then

>bizarre hardware limitations, like using cartridges for N64, the N64 texture cache, and minidiscs for GameCube
Licenses and costs. It's not like Nintendo could ask Sony for a CD reader after the PlayStation

>be lead graphic artist at rare
>nintendo invite me to preview the hardware for their new console
>the specs are good
>what could go wrong
>they tell me to try it out by writing a demo with their sdk
>write a simple demo that fills the screen with triangles
>literally the simplest shit I could think of
>takes two minutes to write
>takes two minutes to run
>that's not good
>hey mr nintendemoto I'm having a problem
>it works but the fill rate is garbage
>this is really important for 3d so you should fix this before release
>hardware is finalised and we've manufactured 2 million units already
>okay

>>8959801
NOOOOO MUH PC MASTER RACE WAS ALWAYS SO GREAT

>>8960372
>>8959801
>it's bad because it might cost a lot

>>8959781
> why did developers struggle with launch titles on a console that was brand new?
> knows nothing about the nes
> knows nothing about nintendo's withered technology philosophy
get a load of this youtube tourist. go the fuck back.

You revisionists and anti-Nintendo guys love to point out whenever there's any slowdown in any Nintendo game but conveniently never talk about the usual slowdown present in many Sega and Arcade games.
Slowdowns were never a big deal back in the day and it's something that gets attention from today's perspective because of actual unoptimized modern games (that go from 60fps to single-digit).
Also, if you're going to complain about old hardware not performing like a modern supercomputer, then maybe /vr/ isn't your place.

>>8960307
>It's not like Nintendo could ask Sony for a CD reader after the PlayStation
that has nothing to do with anything. it was all about loading speed. ROM will always be superior despite its cost.

>>8960543
i know there's a slow down bug in metal slug when there's too many sprites on the screen but if i recall correctly it was a programmer using 1 or 2 wrong 68000 instructions that take up too many clock cycles. patching them fixes the glitch. i used to think it was the neogeo hardware but no. just a simple programming error

>>8960535
>nintendo's withered technology philosophy
Pretty sure that was only applicable to the Game Boy and its calculator components, the N64 was supposed to be cutting edge for the time with little of it coming “off the shelf”.

>>8960372
You got what you paid for, cutting edge hardware which could play some very stellar games with high performance.
PC games generally had options for being playable on lower end systems as well, so they were adaptable to people who didn't want to spend that money and were willing to compromise on the visuals a little.

>>8960272
Exactly. Their target audience was and is 18 minus.

>>8959781
I could be wrong, but the N64’s hardware wasn’t developed in-house afaik. They licensed it from SGI and maybe made some proprietary changes?

>>8960272
Basically this. Nintendo has continued to be successful because they’re smart enough to largely ignore their autistically deranged oldfag fanbase.

>>8959781
If the included the expansion pack in development, there would be a lot more optimised games with a decent frame rate

>>8960543
It's not revisionism, it was a selling point even back then. Did you forget Blast Processing?

>>8960272
>"I'd like my games to have more than single digit FPS"
>deranged rantings

>>8959812
>it's hard
>well was at the time at least
Why were Japanese programmers so bad back then?

>>8961152
>Did you forget Blast Processing?
I only learned about that marketing slogan in the 2000s thanks to the internet, I'm not a burger.
Lots of Mega Drive games with slowdown too.
Didn't the guy who originally came up with "blast processing" actually apologized about it?

>>8961184
>I'm ignorant therefore it didn't happen

>>8959827
> So was using carts.
They used carts because they didn’t think gamers would put up with CD load times and it was a huge complaint at the time

>>8961286
They used carts because they wanted sweet sweet royalties.

>>8961290
They could have made a proprietary disk like they did with the GameCube

>>8961182
>Polygonal 3D just taking off for barely a few years
>hur dur why is it hard

Had anyone figured out how much more expensive the N64 would have been at retail if they had made the texture cache 8k, 16k, etcetera?

>>8961238
Which isn't what he said, he said it's a marketing slogan, it refers to a trick which isn't actually used by anyone, but which a marketer heard a programmer discuss and then turned into a catch phrase.
It's not like the the Genesis isn't a lot more powerful than the SNES already, you don't need to hang on to old stupid marketing buzzwords like a child at the playground, the hardware speaks for itself.

I love the SNES, but it's pretty weak, With the added lifting power of the Super FX chip, memory and storage saving of half sized textures, and even Binary Space Partitioning, the machine fucking suffers running Wolfenstein 3D, while the Genesis turns out to be able to run an extremely faithful port of the original PC version without breaking a sweat. Homebrewed decades later, admittedly, but you aren't getting that kind of performance out of a SNES anyway.

>>8959781
>forgot to enable compiler optimizations in Mario 64
They didn't forget, they determined that it ran good enough without them and didn't have time to run a whole round of testing in case optimizations introduced new bugs.

>>8959781
>>forgot to enable compiler optimizations in Mario 64
Are you talking about the part in dire dire docks?Well the youtubers are wrong and it's not unoptimized

>>8961882
>the YouTubers are wrong

Not only are the YouTubers correct, they are more correct than even forgetting to implement compiler optimizations. The entire Mario 64 code is programmed like shit. A single programmer on YouTube reprogrammed the entire game and got a 6x speed increase, in just a few hundred hours of work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_rzYnXEQlE

>>8962964
Yes this is the one guy whos correct but he's said how the dire dire docks thing isn't entirely correct. He also backs up the devs by saying he can only do this because due to being able to stand on their shoulders

>>8962984
A lot of people don't account for how difficult it can be creating something for release in real time, to a deadline.

I work in publishing, and due to financial pressure and time constraints, there are corners we have to cut to get a book out on time and on budget.

There are things we have to do which I could easily look at from an outsider's perspective and think, 'They were being lazy,' or, 'I could do better than this,' without accounting for the realities of working on multiple projects at once, with lots of people all involved in different facets of a project, etc etc.

>>8963157
Correct. You don't just conjure this shit up out of nothing, it took a lot of time and manpower to make a game like Super Mario 64, and they have a deadline.
In theory, there's lots of worthwhile optimizations they could do, but you'd need some time to experiment and play around with the engine to see what needs to be done, and at the end of the day they just needed to reach their target performance, which was still extremely good for the day.

>>8959781
>Muh FPS
People like you have always been and will always be faggots.

>>8962964
> in just a few hundred hours of work

Do you even realize how many weeks of development that would equal to?

Not to mention that programmers these days have access to better tools and documentation and the best practices have become common knowledge. THIS is why literaly whos on youtube can do this. The work has already been cut down for them.

so yeah, this is just another
>let's apply modern logic and knowledge to old games
thread

many such cases

>>8963716
It's extra frustrating because the guy in that video says that, but faggots don't listen.

>>8962964
>thinly veiled kaze shill thread

>>8962964
your superhero doesn't know you exist

>>8962964
>(You)

>>8959791
Wanna make out, faggot?