Since the N64 could handle the DOOM engine so well, could it also handle Build?

2 hours ago, Individualised said:

This is a pretty big simplification of how things are and also not necessarily true. Saying Switch 1 is similar to a 2015 smartphone is a stretch too even if it's accurate in a lot of ways, it's certainly much more powerful. In fact, given the Switch's size and price point, the Switch is probably as powerful as Nintendo could have gotten.

Mmm, it's more powerful in some ways, but keep in mind this is still a system that in handheld mode is capping itself to 720p, generally 30 FPS, and even under those conditions there are still games that will run the battery dead in 2-3 hours.

Battery tech is increasingly the weak point, but the point that I was trying to make is that the main guts of the Switch (nVidia's Tegra X1) was indeed 2015 hardware - which is right in line with Nintendo going at least a couple years behind the curve, since the Switch came out in 2017, and this is actually surprisingly "recent" for Nintendo in terms of how old the hardware is. In most systems they've done, it's been at least 3-5 years old.

2 hours ago, MugMonster said:

huh, I thought the SNES was the best console of the 16-bit generation?  I feel like the GBA was also somewhat impressive by handheld standards (sure the Sega Nomad beat it to the punch, but the Nomad also wasn't very energy efficient)

The SNES PPU was custom, but the CPU - the 65C816 - was introduced in 1985 and was also the CPU used in the Apple IIGS. So by the time the SNES came out, we're talking 5+ year-old tech at that point. Its main competitor, the Motorola 68000, was even older - late 1980.

As for the GBA, it's also a case where it's really the graphics side of the chip that's impressive. The processor is an ARM7TDMI; it was publicly out in 1994, so it was seven years old before that device even released. It wasn't even the first game system to use it - the Sega Dreamcast used it as the audio processor, and the PS2 used it as a security chip.

Other than IBM compatibles home computers and consoles at the time almost always used older processor designs, this was not something exclusive to Nintendo. When these processors came out isn't really relevant at all, you even mention it yourself that the 68k as used in the Mega Drive and Neo Geo is from the early 80s.

I'd also argue the GBA's graphics capabilities were pretty outdated for the time. It's pretty clear that the GBA's graphical system is heavily influenced by the SNES's and it makes sense when you consider that the GBA specifications were first created for Project Atlantis in the mid-90s. It took years for it to come to production because back then the system would have been massive and with very poor battery life, so they waited until it was possible to make a more power efficient system which ended up becoming the GBA. Given the GBA's form factor it is probably as powerful as technically feasible for 2001.

// N64 was doomed from the start with the limited cart space/ RAM or ROM and how the guts of the gear  wear built to a specific demanding design and build quality with DEVkits few and far between and hard to work with... from what ive gathered.. the expansion pack is a nice hideous growth of a foresight bandaid.. but still the thing lacks the oomph to pull of things without serious compromise... Like i dont know, no music apart from the title screen... duke with the stereo broken...

On 9/21/2023 at 3:48 PM, TasAcri said:

 

Since it's a full 3D engine i assumed it wasn't.

nope... still a 2.5 D BSP rendered environment... just with bells whistles and tittys...

26 minutes ago, Individualised said:

Other than IBM compatibles home computers and consoles at the time almost always used older processor designs, this was not something exclusive to Nintendo. When these processors came out isn't really relevant at all, you even mention it yourself that the 68k as used in the Mega Drive and Neo Geo is from the early 80s.

 

I'd also argue the GBA's graphics capabilities were pretty outdated for the time. It's pretty clear that the GBA's graphical system is heavily influenced by the SNES's and it makes sense when you consider that the GBA specifications were first created for Project Atlantis in the mid-90s. It took years for it to come to production because back then the system would have been massive and with very poor battery life, so they waited until it was possible to make a more power efficient system which ended up becoming the GBA. Given the GBA's form factor it is probably as powerful as technically feasible for 2001.

Yes, and of course, it had great battery life as a result of the evolution of tech in those intervening years - but Nintendo didn't really have to care too much, they had no competitors in that space. Sega bowed out around then and began making games for their system, the Neo-Geo Pocket was on its last legs and never really took off, the WonderSwan never even left Japan IIRC. Pretty much everyone ceded that space to Nintendo until the PSP came out a few years later, but by then Nintendo had an answer in the DS and we all know which strategy won that war.

It's really the handhelds that have been Nintendo's safe haven. For every major success like the Wii, they have also put out major bombs like the Virtual Boy, 64DD, and Wii U, but they've always had a Game Boy, a DS, a 3DS to lean on and weather the storm, until the Switch successfully merged the two sides well.

However, Nintendo in a way has more competition than ever via Smartphones. The fast evolution cycle of them means they need to lean hard on what they do well and their franchises, because even when the Switch 2 comes out, it's going to have guts from a device from a year or two ago in all likelihood - the fact devs are seeing it behind closed doors means that the hardware is pretty much finalized. It will literally be dated the moment it comes out, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing - especially if the price point is enticing, given that it will almost certainly be no more expensive than a low-mid-range smartphone.

21 hours ago, MugMonster said:

 

 

huh, I thought the SNES was the best console of the 16-bit generation?  I feel like the GBA was also somewhat impressive by handheld standards (sure the Sega Nomad beat it to the punch, but the Nomad also wasn't very energy efficient)

Super Nintendo's processor was quite lackluster when compared to the competition. For example, Sega Genesis/Mega Drive used a Motorolla 68000 CPU that clocked at about 7.6 or so megahertz. In comparison, SNES's processor only clocked at about 3.58 megahertz, and would drop even further during the gameplay. 

While it did boast superior audio and graphics (personally, I've never liked SNES's muddied down audio samples. Give me FM Synth any time of the day), it was severely chastised by the CPU. You can see that in comparison, SNES suffered from severe FPS drops, while Genesis/Mega Drive barely came across any frame rate issues. 

Sega's "blast processing" campaign wasn't just a made up term for sole marketing purposes :P it did actually have a superior processor.

21 minutes ago, Amaruψ said:

Sega's "blast processing" campaign wasn't just a made up term for sole marketing purposes :P

It was, it had nothing to do with the raw power of the system. It came from a marketing executive who got a bit too excited when hearing someone describe an obscure DMA trick on the system (which was never used in any retail games) as being able to "blast" data into the DACs:

Quote

Sadly I have to take responsibility for that ghastly phrase. Marty Franz [Sega technical director] discovered that you could do this nifty trick with the display system by hooking the scan line interrupt and firing off a DMA at just the right time. The result was that you could effectively jam data onto the graphics chip while the scan line was being drawn – which meant you could drive the DAC's with 8 bits per pixel. Assuming you could get the timing just right you could draw 256 color static images. There were all kinds of subtleties to the timing and the trick didn't work reliably on all iterations of the hardware but you could do it and it was cool as heck.

So during the runup to the western launch of Sega-CD the PR guys interviewed me about what made the platform interesting from a technical standpoint and somewhere in there I mentioned the fact that you could just "blast data into the DAC's" Well they loved the word 'blast' and the next thing I knew Blast Processing was born. Oy.

 

-Scot Bayless

Clock rate also doesn't really mean anything when comparing processors from different architectures (the 65816 core inside the 5A22 in the SNES can do a lot more per clock cycle than the 68k in the Mega Drive) but yes generally the Mega Drive has an edge in raw power I believe.

28 minutes ago, Amaruψ said:

 

Super Nintendo's processor was quite lackluster when compared to the competition. For example, Sega Genesis/Mega Drive used a Motorolla 68000 CPU that clocked at about 7.6 or so megahertz. In comparison, SNES's processor only clocked at about 3.58 megahertz, and would drop even further during the gameplay. 

 

While it did boast superior audio and graphics (personally, I've never liked SNES's muddied down audio samples. Give me FM Synth any time of the day), it was severely chastised by the CPU. You can see that in comparison, SNES suffered from severe FPS drops, while Genesis/Mega Drive barely came across any frame rate issues. 

 

Sega's "blast processing" campaign wasn't just a made up term for sole marketing purposes :P it did actually have a superior processor.

In most of the benchmarks I've seen, the MD does come out ahead (mostly for memory bandwidth reasons if I remember, the Mhz difference is not really relevant since it's two entirely different architectures) but a lot of SNES games were kneecapped by Nintendo providing two types of ROM, one of which was cheaper but clocked about 33% slower, and this bottlenecks the CPU. Most chose the cheaper option, which, thanks to Nintendo wanting to squeeze their third parties just a little bit more, gave the system a reputation as being slow.

2 hours ago, Ragu said:

In most of the benchmarks I've seen, the MD does come out ahead (mostly for memory bandwidth reasons if I remember, the Mhz difference is not really relevant since it's two entirely different architectures) but a lot of SNES games were kneecapped by Nintendo providing two types of ROM, one of which was cheaper but clocked about 33% slower, and this bottlenecks the CPU. Most chose the cheaper option, which, thanks to Nintendo wanting to squeeze their third parties just a little bit more, gave the system a reputation as being slow.

Theoretically this would make a difference in some cases, but in practice faster ROM speed just means faster data access. If the bottleneck is the CPU being starved of data, this will definitely improve it, but if the CPU has to crunch a lot of stuff that has nothing to do with ROM, the speed will still suffer.

So basically, while it will certainly make it faster, it is not going to work miracles, and there are still plenty of ways that a game could slow down that faster ROM won't solve.

On 10/10/2023 at 1:12 AM, LoatharMDPhD said:

N64 was doomed from the start with the limited cart space...no music apart from the title screen

I don't think that's accurate at all. GoldenEye 007 featured individual tracks for every level so I don't think it has anything to do with cartridge space. PlayStation Doom doesn't feature music like the PC original either, and some of the same people who worked on that port were also responsible for Doom 64. It makes sense that D64 has the same tone and ambient soundtrack that the PlayStation version does, even though they're not the same game

On 10/10/2023 at 3:12 AM, LoatharMDPhD said:

no music apart from the title screen...

Banjo-Kazooie has more than 200 different music tracks, counting all different variations of each track.

Sequenced/midi music doesn't need much space. That's how games had music for decades, before CDs took over.

Duke Nukem 64 not having music was 100% the developer's choice. It had nothing to do with "limited space".

4 hours ago, Boaby Kenobi said:

 

I don't think that's accurate at all. GoldenEye 007 featured individual tracks for every level so I don't think it has anything to do with cartridge space. PlayStation Doom doesn't feature music like the PC original either, and some of the same people who worked on that port were also responsible for Doom 64. It makes sense that D64 has the same tone and ambient soundtrack that the PlayStation version does, even though they're not the same game

Ambient music is still music so this doesn't make sense.

4 hours ago, TasAcri said:

 

Banjo-Kazooie has more than 200 different music tracks, counting all different variations of each track.

 

Sequenced/midi music doesn't need much space. That's how games had music for decades, before CDs took over.

 

Duke Nukem 64 not having music was 100% the developer's choice. It had nothing to do with "limited space".

Without being familiar I can't say to the specifics but a lack of music could absolutely be to do with a cartridge space limitation depending on how much free space was left on the cartridge. The fact that another game has over 200 music tracks is completely irrelevant as it's a completely different game that will allocate its assets in ROM completely differently.

Dunno, i feel like the "limited cart space" argument is thrown automatically when something is missing from any N64 game. We always assume that's the only reason and it's like the default response even when we have no sources. Maybe it's true in most cases but it's not unlikely that something else might be the reason. Like time constrains, technical reasons similar to Jaguar DOOM, artistic reasons or priority reasons.

Anyway, i don't remember this being a thing during the 8/16bit era of cartridges. Real instrument samples? Sure. Voice acting? Sure. But midi music? I never heard of it being an issue with limited space. It's made to be able to fit in limited spaces.

3 hours ago, TasAcri said:

Dunno, i feel like the "limited cart space" argument is thrown automatically when something is missing from any N64 game. We always assume that's the only reason and it's like the default response even when we have no sources. Maybe it's true in most cases but it's not unlikely that something else might be the reason. Like time constrains, technical reasons similar to Jaguar DOOM, artistic reasons or priority reasons.

 

Anyway, i don't remember this being a thing during the 8/16bit era of cartridges. Real instrument samples? Sure. Voice acting? Sure. But midi music? I never heard of it being an issue with limited space. It's made to be able to fit in limited spaces.

Well, it depends on the system. Genesis/Megadrive, for example, was FM synth, so "music" was really just instructions telling the chips what to output, but any samples to be played via the DAC had to be stored in the ROM, so the music literally needed nothing more than sequence data if you only stuck to the YM2612 and SN76489 and used no samples (though most games did for stuff like drums, for example).

SNES, on the other hand, had no generative hardware and was completely a sample-based system, so every instrument used needed not only to be stored on the cartridge ROM, it also needed to fit into the SPC700's limited RAM (64 KB if memory serves), which is why a lot of samples are very short stuff that loops well and anything that plays long sounds more compressed (though a few games did use clever tricks to stream audio, like Tales of Phantasia). The PS1 sound hardware is actually an evolution of this system.

The N64, on the other hand, had no dedicated sound hardware, it was entirely mixed in software. It could be done by the CPU itself or the Reality Coprocessor, supported 16-bit stereo sound at up to 48 KHz, and generally used ADPCM samples (though some games, like Conker's Bad Fur Day, are actually MP3!), but since there was no dedicated hardware, it also took up processing time. Each mixed channel meant roughly 1% of the CPU time, so in theory you top out at about 100 channels - but of course, the game wouldn't be doing anything else then.

A more practical amount would be 15-25. And of course, since it too is sample-based, that means all samples must be stored on the cartridge - and naturally, the higher quality the sample, the more space it takes up.

Things no longer had to be bitcrushed to fit into tiny amounts of RAM, but the capacity of the cartridge was still very much a deciding factor, and if all your other game data (code, models, textures, etc.) took up most of the space, you very well could (and likely would) compromise on the audio first before anything else.

7 hours ago, Individualised said:

Ambient music is still music so this doesn't make sense

I'm aware of that. It's wasn't me who claimed that Doom 64 has "no music apart from the title screen"

Doom 64 has a very memorable soundtrack. It's not in the same style as PC Doom obviously but it's still there. I don't know how anyone could think it doesn't feature any music at all

17 hours ago, TasAcri said:

Dunno, i feel like the "limited cart space" argument is thrown automatically when something is missing from any N64 game. We always assume that's the only reason and it's like the default response even when we have no sources. Maybe it's true in most cases but it's not unlikely that something else might be the reason. Like time constrains, technical reasons similar to Jaguar DOOM, artistic reasons or priority reasons.

 

Anyway, i don't remember this being a thing during the 8/16bit era of cartridges. Real instrument samples? Sure. Voice acting? Sure. But midi music? I never heard of it being an issue with limited space. It's made to be able to fit in limited spaces.

MIDI and sequenced formats in general are not the same thing - MIDI is just an example of a sequenced format. In fact MIDI is actually quite bloated so it was rarely used outside of PC games (even PC Doom doesn't actually use MIDI though it does support them for modding purposes - the actual IWADs use MUS)

13 hours ago, TasAcri said:

 

Duke Nukem 64 not having music was 100% the developer's choice. It had nothing to do with "limited space".

// twin analog sticks of shame upon the Devs... I had to buy the Cursed Randy Version to hear LJ's mix...

8 hours ago, TasAcri said:

Dunno, i feel like the "limited cart space" argument is thrown automatically when something is missing from any N64 game. We always assume that's the only reason and it's like the default response even when we have no sources.

initial size of a N64 Cartridge... 4MB...

then they introduced... 8MB...

and then in a stroke of genius... they let loose a 16 MB version..

that still wasn't enough, so some games used the latest 32MB  units for ROM storage...

but then... Like Todd Said... 16 times more.... 16 times the bloat...and just like Todd said before, thats also a lie.... {64MB MAX} and that's how Conquer had music and all fit in the same package as diddykong racing...

Initial size was 8 MB. The few games that use a 4 MB cart were later releases. 

2 hours ago, LoatharMDPhD said:

but then... Like Todd Said... 16 times more.... 16 times the bloat...and just like Todd said before, thats also a lie.... {64MB MAX} and that's how Conquer had music and all fit in the same package as diddykong racing...

Physical N64 package size, yes. Actual capacity, nowhere near it. Diddy Kong Racing was a 16 MB ROM, so Conker had literally 4x the space.

17 hours ago, TasAcri said:

Dunno, i feel like the "limited cart space" argument is thrown automatically when something is missing from any N64 game. We always assume that's the only reason and it's like the default response even when we have no sources. Maybe it's true in most cases but it's not unlikely that something else might be the reason. Like time constrains, technical reasons similar to Jaguar DOOM, artistic reasons or priority reasons.

 

Anyway, i don't remember this being a thing during the 8/16bit era of cartridges. Real instrument samples? Sure. Voice acting? Sure. But midi music? I never heard of it being an issue with limited space. It's made to be able to fit in limited spaces. 

I generally get that feeling as well.  Of course don't lose sight that when a CD based console has to strip things it's all about the RAM limitations that cartridges are able to work around.  Ultimately in the era in question it's not that uncommon for the CD capacity to just be a gimmick.  It's easy to fill up a disc if you want, and there's certainly been good uses of those features, but I think that benefit is grossly overstated.  Cartridges being very expensive compared to CDs was definitely an issue though, and often times claims of space limitations are simply cost optimization.  There are probably a lot of cases where those limits could have been worked around with more development time too like you say.

That said it definitely is also an easy excuse when games designed for CD got ported to the N64.  Besides the reasons Dark Pulse mentioned, I wouldn't be surprised if some cuts were simply because developing an alternate sound track or whatever was not in the porting budget.  Obviously wouldn't apply to Duke Nukem though.