To be fair, game devs did the hackiest shit to deal with the constraints of the time. They did things that no programmer would do today because they’re bad practices when you’re not worried about tiny amounts of RAM or storage.
Sometimes they did it just in case they needed those limited resources, but its not really needed. SMW is a good example, where spite interactions are only checked every other frame, but modders generally remove that limitation without any issues. There might be weird edge cases where in vanilla without glitches you could theoretically accumulate enough sprite on stream it causes a slightly more noticeable slowdown without the ever other frame. With cape float, it only checks if you are holding the jump button once every 4 frames or something like that. Totally unnecessary and makes the game feel less responsive. Granted, during a casual playthrough, you’d probably never notice that floating stopping after letting go of the button varies by 50ms depending on which frame you let go of the button relative to which frame it checks.
I love watching videos about old game systems programming. The gymnastics you had to do to code, like, super Mario, just to show more than 3 colors is really interesting.
People who think modern coding practices are bloated should study why certain speed running mechanics work. A lot of them stem from things we would never do today. We’ve removed entire classes of bugs by using “bloated” languages and tools.
Dude livestreamed Super Mario 64 for more than a month with a bot attached that perfectly abused a physics quirk based on floating point precision, just so he can crash the game at 0:00 at New Year’s by overflowing a value. This over-one-hour-long video is the summary.
If you haven’t seen them, look up the Ultimate talk on YouTube. They go into real depth on c64, Gameboy, Atari, Amiga, etc. development and all the tricks that are used.
The games then were closer to embedded dev than software dev. The cartridge had huge limitations and the devs had to know those limits and work around them.
Cartridges were also full on daughter boards instead of just an older version of SD cards. There were massive differences between games. The later SNES games with 3d graphics had a whole extra processor included in the cart.
2d games did, too. The SA1 chip did a lot to make games run better on the SNES. There’s mods out there for running games on the SA1 chip, especially shooters like Super R-Type, and it’s a substantially better experience.
The old Super FX chip. I’m old enough to remember when they released the original Star Fox and flogged the super onboard 3d processing. The ads in comic books mentioned it by name.
I’ve been using zoho notes on my phone for a long time now. It started out really good, but somehow has become so bloated that it’s laggy. It’s PLAIN TEXT. How do you make that lag??
Which one? Obsidian for desktop is 400MB, but it lets you make knowledge trees and includes a zotero extension. Although maybe it doesn’t need to be 400MB.
They were shitty for different reasons. Notice that nowhere on this meme is “shovelware.”
E.T. is always cited as the cause of the video game crash of '82, but it was really the rampart shovelware, no QA to speak of, and a lack of reviews to inform customers what was worth their money and what was absolute garbage. One bad game isn’t enough to topple an entire industry; especially one that is only slightly worse than the best game ever made for the Atari.
This problem was, however, mitigated a lot by Nintendo through the late 80’s and the entirety of the 90’s by creating the kind of licensing agreements between publishers and the console makers that still exist today, as well as the increase in review publications. Most of the best shit (from consumer friendly practices to the games themselves) from the industry came specifically in the 90’s thanks in part to actual curation of the software allowed to be sold for these systems.
At least you can easily determine shovelware from something worth your time when everything has reviews attached to the store page. Still sucks that you have to wade through all that bullshit, though.
DRM is nothing new, we just used to have to keep up with the disk or a Key. If always online was an option back then you can bet your ass game publishers would have implemented it.
It was an option back then. They just know nobody would have accepted it then because
Not as many people had the internet, and
The internet that they did have sucked ass
There were still plenty of online-only games. They just had a damn good reason to be online. Always-online in single player isn’t needed as DRM. There are plenty of other DRM options that don’t use the internet at all or at least only check once in a while when you do have a connection to the Internet.
Jesus…ok obviously it was technically an option, but it would be suicidal in a time when not everyone had Internet in their homes and those that did had unreliable Internet. Don’t be obtuse. Those limitations are largely not an issue in 2024.
I was playing video games on my homebuilt computer in the 90s. I know exactly what it was like.
Besides being a maintenance fucking nightmare, wouldn’t writing a game in assembly make it a lot harder to be cross platform? I really don’t get that panel.
Yes, yes it would. They meant to say that it would improve performance (if done well, which it was). That improved performance would allow it to run on a wide variety of devices, including those with low specs.
Also at the time writing for x86 only would have been plenty portable. Even today that would cover “standard” PC architecture. (Although nowadays you probably want to put it on mobile devices, gaming consoles or macOS, so not ideal.)
Yeah, it being about performance makes sense. Still don’t know how that dude managed to write a full-ass game in assembly though. Takes a special brain to even be able to think that way.
That idea comes from the tycoon games because they run on newer windows versions easily. But it’s not because they were made in assembly. Any programming language can do that as long as the program doesn’t depend on specific OS features that get changed or removed. I think assembly is just synonymous with everything being from scratch.
I kept scrolling for this comment. Writing in assembly means you can only write for one specific instruction set. The innovation of programming languages was not just making things easier to write, it was the compiling step which could take the same code and produce machine code output for different systems, making it much easier to support multiple platforms.
Yeah exactly. Apparently they meant “most machines” as in “most machines that could run windows”. Like in a performance sense. Weird way to put it imo, since “most machines” to me would refer to platform concerns.
You realize it’s not devs that make those decisions, right? It’s publishers and execs. You know, the guys who make the actual money in all this. Stop blaming devs for stupid exec decisions.
Meh, it depends on which of the issues you're flagging. Games are large for understandable reasons, both technical and practical. The optimization problem is... complicated, and my thoughts on it get really into the weeds, but it's not as simple as people would think. And I'm trying not to pay too much attention to the "can't fix our game" panel, because at best it makes no sense.
The always-online thing is maybe the most controversial, and you'd definitely find the most developers who agree with you on that unconditionally. But also, tons of offline games get made on all types of scopes.
Also, devs stick around for it. They aren’t providing an essential service, like sticking around as a nurse in a poorly run hospital…they are creating a novelty.
They are technical knowledge workers and hold very privileged credentials in western markets.
To be clear I’m not excusing corporate policy and such, but the same way technical engineers at oil companies are complicit in accelerated climate change, devs at shitty companies are complicit in shitty game products.
I never worked for big bad companies but even the “green, progressive” ones wore me down eventually, there just aren’t any companies in the modern world over a certain size that aren’t scummy one way or another. That’s why I only work for myself now.
I almost worked in NGO but it didn’t work out in the end, I could still be curious to check that out at some point.
No, it’s a fucking stupid comparison, man. One thing leads to dead people, the other thing leads to slightly less convenient entertainment software. Can you figure out the rest for yourself? Fuck all the way off with your “questionable orders”.
I expressed how your comparison is stupid. I’m sorry if you perceive that as hostile and think you need to get a point in by making up an equally stupid scenario about my marriage. Obviously I hit a nerve. Can’t say the same about your shitty attempt at an insult.
Nothing says fun like trying to relax and play a game . Oh no you need an update to the game…Oh did I say game I mean the custom launcher…here is our ads for our other games to click through…oh you must want to go to a webpage…whoops can’t connect to online even if you don’t want to play online…Ok you finally connected oh but the settings have been reset because of the update…Oh wait the cloud sync didn’t work…
And when you finally get the game to run, it needs to compile shaders. Then it need to download another update, from inside the game (and sometimes even restart the game… Looking at you, MW2! ) And the user agreement have changed so you are forced to scroll to the bottom of one or more LONG legal text before you can click “Accept”. And then a season intro cutscene (fortnite and CoD games does that). Then maybe a “Whats new” screen…
I remember Commodore 64 games could take up to 30 minutes to load. But at least I could just go make some food while waiting. Didn’t have to sit there and press buttons.
“The inverse square root function in the C math library isn’t fast enough. That’s okay, I’ll write my own algorithm that abuses floating point numbers in a way that gives me a close approximation a bit faster.”
Oh, man, imagine thinking that minimum requirements weren't a thing before.
I once deleted the operating system just to fit a single game into my hard drive, booted from floppy while I was playing it and reversed the process when I was finished. Sometimes games were aiming at a specific speed of computer and if you had a computer that didn't run at that specific number of megahertz the game just ran like a slideshow or in fast forward. I didn't realize some of my favourite games were running under the speed cap for years sometimes. We just didn't have a concept of things running at the same refresh rate as your screen in the early 3D era until APIs fully standardized. Sometimes you upgraded your GPU and the hardware accelerated version of your old software rendered game actually ran slower.
Also, game developers "then" made arcade games that literally charged you money for dying, then charged you more money for effectively cheating at the game and actively asked you to literally pay to win. We used to think that was normal.
Also, also, we used to OBSESS about games being bigger. The size the game took up was heavily advertised and promoted, especially on consoles. Bigger was better. We were only kinda glad that CDs could do 500 Mb, so we could keep getting bigger on a single disk, but by the time FMV games got popular triple A games were back to coming into books with disks instead of pages. This was still seen as a selling point.
Also, also, also, the assembly code of a whole bunch of old games is sheer spaghetti. Half of the mechanics in NES games are just bugs. There are a couple of great Youtube channels that just break these down and tweak them. In fairness, they didn't have development tools as much as a notepad and a pencil, but still.
Yeah I remember the specific clock speed thing! I had a game that I loved on a friend’s computer and didn’t get to play it much. Some sort of space sim / combat game. Years later I had my own much more powerful machine and was hyped to check it out. Installed via dosbox or whatever, loaded it up, and it ran at fucking 10x speed! It took seconds to walk around a city and the combat was completely unplayable. So sad but also pretty funny. No idea why they attached the FPS directly to the hardware. If you want an easier game, just get a worse computer apparently.
Hah. In fairness, sound cards weren't "minimum requirements". It's just that depending on the hardware you had the game would just have a completely different soundtrack, 75% of which sounded completely broken. If you were lucky the "minimum spec" was silence. If you were unlucky it was making your beeper sound like somebody had tripped a car alarm.
People these days are out there emulating Roland MT-32s on Raspberry Pis. I didn't have a sound card until the Pentium era. Every DOS game in my memory sounds like a Furby got a bad case of hiccups.
I leave this as an example, but please understand this is the absolute best case scenario. Michael Land and the rest of the Lucas guys were wizards and actually cared to tune things for multiple options, including really impressive beeper music.
I have heard the difference of sound cards before in a video explaining it, but it is still just a wild too me to hear it, and nearly a bit difficult to imagine it actually being that way. Like I KNOW it was how sound on computers was at that time, but it is still hard to imagine my games sounding so completely differently depending on what pc I play it on.
I have the opposite problem, where I have to remind myself that a lot of people making these memes just don't have a frame of reference for any of this. I'm used to having been there for the vast majority of home computing, it's so hard for me to parse having been born with computers just mostly working the way they do now.
I can somewhat comprehens the difference in appearance and sometimes game play, but at the same time not really. I have seen the same game be different on pc vs console and a third version on handheld, and while I know this where all computers, I still very much think of them in the way of game consoles you could also do computer things on, even though I know that they were computers that you could play games on.
I blame it a bit on terminology, every time I hear about old computers, they are always referred to much more similar to how we refer to games consoles today then we do with computers. It is an Amiga 500, Amiga 1000 or an Atari 7800 or Atari ST. That is much more similar in my head to like Nintendo Wii, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 2 or PlayStation 4.
I have never really heard computers be referred to in that manner now a days, they probably are to some extent in some circles, but I have completely managed to miss them, and I do have some interested in computers. Like I can tell you I have owned a Dell, a HP and a Lenovo amongst some, but I would really have to do some digging to maybe be able to tell what version of them it was.
I know my current one start with G and the following looks some what like lam, but I only know that because it kinda looked like Glam so I named it that and because I have needed to Google that exact model, to look up some stuff.
I can however understand how you feel having grown up with with the computers and now talking to and interacting with a lot of people that never experience the older ones. Realising that people have a completely different fram of reference to something is a very weird thing to experience and somewhat difficult to navigate.
I am however happy that you and other people do have different experiences as then I could learn about how sound cards made games sound completely different or how changing GPU or computers manufacturer could completely change the game.
Man I loved the hell out of my SB16. I still play a lot of old DOS games in emulation and work pretty hard to get them to sound like I remember vs the higher fidelity versions.
It was the first time I played it and found the combat frustratingly difficult because of the increased speed. Especially in dungeons where I had to bait enemies one by one just to not get overwhelmed. One hand was always holding a healing spell as well.
No idea why they attached the FPS directly to the hardware.
It’s the most trivial and straight forward thing to do. The game is a simple loop of:
get user input (can be nothing)
calculate new game state based on old state and input
draw new game state.
The speed of the game is now 100% dependant on the speed of computation. NOT attaching fps to hardware is the hard thing, as you need to detach the game state loop and the drawing loop and then synchronize them. Doing that yourself is extremely complicated. Today developers don’t even need to think about that because the whole drawing loop is abstracted away by things like directX/Vulcan and the game engine. But without those tools, fps tied to CPU speed is basically the default.
And in fairness a lot of microcomputers at the time were closed specs. Even on PC for a while you were theoretically aiming at a 4Mhz XT or, at worst, also wanted to account for a 8MHz AT. By the time IBM clones had become... you know, just PCs, a lot of devs either didn't get the memo or chose to ignore it for the reasons you list.
Most of the time "lazy devs" are just "overworked and underfunded devs", but the point is, that didn't start this century.
Also games have gotten way more complicated since the gameboy colour era. I’ve coded a basic 2D physics engine from scratch (literally just circles with soft collisions) and its not just enough to set up the vector math correctly. You can literally make a true to real life physics model (as far as the math of infinitely rigid perfect spheres on a perfectly flat plane goes anyway) and have all sorts of problems crop up because computers aren’t the universe and order of computation is a bitch.
Even the first Dark Souls had game ticks tied to the FPS because consoles had been standardized to 30 FPS for decades.
On the PC port, it was locked to 30 FPS, but a super popular mod unlocked the FPS, and at 60 FPS DoT effects ticked twice as fast, and at even higher FPS could kill you before you had time to react.
At my buddy's house, he had a game called something like 'wings of glory' that was meant for an older clock speed. We were messing with the turbo button and it quickly became unplayable when not in the slower mode.
If you try it again, emulators like dosbox let you slow the game down to be playable. I don’t remember the exact setting but I’ve had to do it on things like Freddy Farkas iirc.
Right. That was common, too. Games were tiny and very expensive, so broken balance was often used to pad out length. And yeah, it got crazy once Americans started popularizing rental and publishers got desperate to make the games less economical to beat without purchasing them.
I did finish Ecco 1 legit, though. Once.
I've tried the last couple of stages a few times. I still don't understand how tween me managed that. Even on a CRT with original hardware and zero lag that's a stupid thing to try to do.
Bigger was better, since a larger game meant they packed in more content. Now the bloat is out of control since all game content is delivered over the Internet.
Bloat is out of control because games are HUGE and you can often trade size for performance if you have enough memory to do so.
Also, memory used to be extremely expensive, especially catridge ROMs. Outside of the Switch this is less of a concern now, that's true, but the tradeoff is you get to have pin-sharp high resolution assets and tons of performance optimizations instead of... you know, just chopping enough frames of animation to fit your sprites in 16 megabits then charge a hundred bucks for the extra-sized cart. You can buy a terabyte of extremely fast storage now for the money it used to cost to buy a single game shipped on a cartridge.
The hard drive I had to wipe from the OS, as I mentioned above was a whole 20 gig. 386-ish era. It seemed so huge when I got it (and so expensive) and by the time that PC was done it was... well, a "wipe to OS to fit stuff in" drive.
But that's not necessarily the point, the more relevant thing is how big things are relative to storage and how cheap it is to upgrade storage. It's true that storage sizes and prices plateaued for a while, so a bunch of people are still running on 1-2 TB while the games got into the hundreds of GB. But still, storage had gotten so proportionately cheap before then, and very fast storage is so overkill now. A 1TB Gen 3 NVMe is 75 bucks, and most games will run fine on it, Sony propaganda notwithstanding.
You can fit loads of x360-ps3 era games in the same space CoD warzone takes. The irony is that, for PC players with lower specs, that’s a lot of wasted storage, since they’ll never use/load the higher res textures.
You can buy a terabyte of extremely fast storage now
That line of thinking is what leads to extreme, unnecessary bloat. “Just buy more storage, brah”
You can absolutely do that. You can also fit 16 frames of the Xbox 360 game into a single frame of the Xbox Series X game.
Sometimes people forget how much bigger a 4K target is compared to a 720p image, so I added a bit of a visual aid below. Those two screenshots are to scale, displayed at the native resolutions of their respective platforms. Just keep in mind that the big one is from a 1440p 21:9 monitor, so on a 4K TV the picture would have two of those stacked on top of each other.
It's good that this is smaller, because If you squint you can also notice the Xbox 360 game is extremely blurry and looks like it's in black and white. That's because it is. The 360 had 512megs of ram, to share between the CPU and the GPU. The Xbox Series X has 16 gigs, so 32 times more, and it's running a cool 300 times faster. 360 games were compressing textures within an inch of their lives to fit them into that tiny slab of memory, stripping color data among other things.
Computers are not magic. If you want to draw 15 million pixels of a wall and not have it look like soup you need data for each of those pixels. If you want that data to fit in less space you have to either spend resources compressing and decompressing it or you need more storage to put it in. Or you can draw it procedurally, I guess, but then you're back to the performance problem.
On the other thing, it's not "just buy more storage, brah", it's that storage has to ramp linearly with memory. If you are trying to build huge worlds running at hundreds of frames and streaming data at gigabytes per second out of a SSD you're going to need to put those assets somewhere. The problem isn't (just) that games are big, it's that the ability to move those big assets has grown a bit faster than the ability to make cheaper, faster storage for the same price.
Games aren't big because developers are lazy, they're big because physics and engineering are hard and not every piece of technology improves at the same rate. But hey, on the plus side, storage HAS gotten cheaper. By the end of its life the PS3 was shipping 500 GB. The PS5 and Xbox Series ship 32 times more ram but only 1.5 to 2x more storage because storage is where everybody is skimping to contain costs. That's not commensurate with the increase of visual fidelity or asset size, but at least you can add more for relatively little money, especially on PC.
EDIT: Sorry, this client didn't like the picture going in. Link to an example below from a random image hosting site. Follow it at your peril, I make no claims about its safety. https://ibb.co/Ss7RfzW
The smallest standard for CDs was 63 minutes and 550-ish MB. For most of the life of the medium you'd mostly get the 74 min, 650MB one. The stretch 700 and up standards were fairly late-day. I tend to default to 500 in my head because it was a decent way to figure out how many discs you'd need to store a few gigs of data back in the day, though, not because I spent more time with the 63 min CDs.
The smallest standard for CDs was 63 minutes and 550-ish MB
I think I came along around 2 years after burners were commercially available, so I never saw that. And the 700 MB discs came along very shortly later. So I never had a concept of a 550 MB CD (btw you said 500 MB). This is the first I’ve heard of it.
It did exist, I promise. But again, I just default to 500 because it was such common shorthand to think about it in terms of needing two discs to store a gig. And to this day I still have 650 CDs laying around, even when 700MB ones were available they were both around at once.
I think some of the mismatch may also be that you're thinking about it in terms of storage only (i.e. CD-Rs) because of your age and I'm probably a bit older and was mostly talking about them as read-only media. It was years between the first CDs in the late 80s and writers being widespread at all, assuming whatever game or application that came in a single CD was going to take 500 meg-ish to duplicate or install was, again, pretty useful.
In any case, this is obsolete trivia. The point is we went from games being tens of megs to hundreds of megs overnight, and we were all extremely pleased about it.
You are half right. I am misremembering 63min being the original standard of the red book audio CD, that was 650 already, although apparently 63 min CDs were used for audio mastering at some point? Info about that is sparse. As a side note, man, modern search engines suuuck.
Anyway, 63min/550MB was the low capacity standard of the CD-R instead.
And also this, from a eBay auction selling a box and labelling them "incredibly rare", which apparently is accurate. I came just shy of digging through my pile of old CDs to see if I have any left. I may still do that next time I have them on hand.
I mean, the demo for Rollercoaster Tycoon (Mr. “Hand coded in assembly” there) bricked our Windows 98 machine when i installed it as a kid. My dad was pissed: we had to reformat the harddrive, reinstall windows, all that.
Oh, that's a whole other subject. "Old games were so polished and fully finished". Meanwhile, half of the planet was either playing games squished down, in slow motion or both. And most of them didn't even know.
It's not as simple as that, either. May people think all games ran 15% slower. Many games did have some retiming somewhere, but it was definitely not great and people didn't complain because with no internet, they often didn't realize what was going on.
I remember reading an early-2000s book on game dev. It did mention that some game (I want to say one of the Unreal games, but I can't recall for sure) had to code their level loading in assembler because it was taking upwards of 10 minutes in C++.
Yeah, I definitely think the OP has super rose-colored glasses on. The free shareware was pretty awesome, though. I had one called "80 mega-hits" or something like that with a ton of games (many of which my poor old PC couldn't run).
I do think that optimization has slacked off more as hardware prices generally trended down. Disk space I don't so much mind, but memory and CPU are still expensive.
This is one of those things where I'm not sure what people mean when they say it.
There are bugs that affect performance, and yeah, we're generally more likely to see bugs fro several reasons now. But there's also games just being heavy. We're not in a cycle where the top of the line hardware just maxes out many games, because... well, we're doing real time path-tracing, we have monitors that go up to 400 Hz and resolutions up to 4K. The times of "set it to Ultra and forget about it" with a 1080 are gone and not coming back for a really long time. Plus everything has to scale wider now, because on the other end we have actual handhelds now, which is nuts.
So yeah, I'm not sure which one people are complaining about these days. I'll say that if you can play a game in a handheld PC and then crank it up to look like an offline rendered path traced movie that's way more thought to scalability than older games ever had, but maybe that's a slightly different conversation.
The “free shareware” thing is kind of back. I’ve been noticing more and more games producing demos; check out Steam Next fest, for example.
I also remember playing a ton of games from a CD. I had a Mac at the time, but it was “dos compatible”, which meant it had a 486 in addition to the Mac processor at the time, so you could switch over into dos, though you could only allocate half the ram to it.
We ended up installing Windows 95 to play a lot of the games, which ran great on the available 4 MB of RAM.
I once deleted the operating system just to fit a single game into my hard drive, booted from floppy while I was playing it and reversed the process when I was finished.
I remember doing this Battle of Britain and TIE Fighter! Man, memories.
That and it easily running on Linux, either naively or though Proton, is why I haven't touched any AAA in like... at least 5 years? Maybe closer to 10.
groomerwojak.jpg: "I groomed a teen fan of mine, and when she came forward I made her to write an apology, also I spent my Patreon money on a sexdoll, and my code is spaghetti."
"We barely managed to make a functioning game with premade assets, and our popularity was so dependent on Pokémon not performing well, our fanbase is a toxic cesspool as a result, who can't express the love to the game without actively dissing Nintendo."
"I'm a bigoted con artist who rebrands every time they get busted for his crappy horror game."
"Optimization? We are already using low-poly assets!"
"The assets in our pixelart games are very unaligned, and we use high-resolution fonts because no one makes bitmap fonts anymore."
Why are you twisting things around? It’s Nintendo fans that won’t shut up about plagiarism to the point that the The Pokémon Company told everyone that they know, stop sending emails about it.
If you donate money to develop a vaccine against something, much of that money will go towards the salaries of researchers to pay for their work. Some of them may buy sex dolls, dildos, satisfyers or chastity belts with some of that money, because they have rightfully earned it, and the money you paid was still used to develop that vaccine.
I mean nobody said all indie devs were great, i just think that if you want to find examples of good game development today you’re largely going to find the stars are indie, not triple A
But only for today. The concept of triple A didn’t really exist back then, and at least one of the “then” game devs was totally indie for the game he made
startrek.website
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