Digital Foundry Retro Discussion [2024]

[Shifty Geezer]

Btw, which accent does he have?

Bit of Australian.

It's amazing that 7+ years on from release, the Amiga was getting fabulous and pioneering games. The video is wrong about the name of 'chunky' pixels though. They were called chunky because the pixels occupied a single chunk of RAM - nothing to do with their 'chunky' appearance, and we use the same 'chunky' format now.

Edit: Grind looks an amazing achievement, another of these examples of making hardware do the impossible.

 

[Cyan]

Bit of Australian.

It's amazing that 7+ years on from release, the Amiga was getting fabulous and pioneering games. The video is wrong about the name of 'chunky' pixels though. They were called chunky because the pixels occupied a single chunk of RAM - nothing to do with their 'chunky' appearance, and we use the same 'chunky' format now.

Edit: Grind looks an amazing achievement, another of these examples of making hardware do the impossible.

probably heard of chunky mode somewhere, or Mode 13h, but it could well be the first time I hear about it. It's not as popular as the Mode 7 of the SNES but still cool.

Grind seems pure wizardry, since it can run on an Amiga 500 at a good framerate. I wonder why at the time anyone came up with an idea to optimise a game like Grind, 'cos when Wolfenstein 3D came out the performance of similar games on Amiga was so abysmal.

This is a testimony of how gaming have really helped MS-DOS and Windows become so successful.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I wonder why at the time anyone came up with an idea to optimise a game like Grind, 'cos when Wolfenstein 3D came out the performance of similar games on Amiga was so abysmal.

It won't be just optimisation but using the hardware in unexpected and not-intended ways. eg. The Copper processor was a four-instruction processor could change the output colour per line, which gives the common rainbow background in a number of Amiga games...



...and allowed for the vertical scrolling of screens as seen in the above multitasking clip swapping between OSes. Those overlapping screens could even be different resolutions. Early Doom-clones took to spamming the Copper to change the colour multiple times per line, but it was only fast enough to do this every 4, maybe even 8, pixels, which is why the images were sooooo chunky. The bitplane graphics were sidelined as the Copper was set to work doing something it was never intended to do.

The developer of Grind has likely investigated how the machine works and found new hacks and cheats to astound.

Curiously it has a vertical aspect to the pixels:

 

[MrSpiggott]

It's important to remember that at the time of Wolfenstein 3D's release, the Amiga chipset was already 7 years old. (A1000 released in July 1985). The system was astonishingly ahead of its time.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Also, devs could and did go right down to the metal to exploit the hardware. The market was far smaller than now, the returns far smaller, but they did it out of passion. Small teams making games for the love of it, digging deep to see what they could do, just expecting their artistic prowess to pay dividends, or even just to see if they could.

There are so many barriers between developers and hardware now, hardware just ages rather than matures. 7 years now means 7 years old and rubbish, whereas up to maybe PS2 era, 7 years meant 7 years learning and improving. And the next 20 years is 20 years mastering and astounding.

 

[Cyan]

Also, devs could and did go right down to the metal to exploit the hardware. The market was far smaller than now, the returns far smaller, but they did it out of passion. Small teams making games for the love of it, digging deep to see what they could do, just expecting their artistic prowess to pay dividends, or even just to see if they could.

There are so many barriers between developers and hardware now, hardware just ages rather than matures. 7 years now means 7 years old and rubbish, whereas up to maybe PS2 era, 7 years meant 7 years learning and improving. And the next 20 years is 20 years mastering and astounding.

there is a video of this guy running Mario 64 at 60fps on the original hardware, which I thought it would be totally impossible, which is an example of this. A guy told me about this video and I was very skeptical, but he was right.

I always believed that the Nintendo 64 was a machine with good looking games but I also thought it couldn't run them with proper framerates. My favourite N64 game, Diddy Kong Racing has a very crappy framerate. Two of my favourite games of the N64, the Castlevania games, run like a slow motion movie.

But this guy managed to get Mario 64 running on the original N64 at a stable 60fps.

 

[TapamN]

I always believed that the Nintendo 64 was a machine with good looking games but I also thought it couldn't run them with proper framerates.

People have been working on optimizing DKR:

Running at 560x420 at a speed similar the original:

 

[Cyan]

People have been working on optimizing DKR:

Running at 560x420 at a speed similar the original:

thanks for sharing the videos. Tbh, I didn't know the scene was trying to improve other N64 games, not only Mario 64. There are many games which would benefit for a treatment like that. The 60fps N64 game I know the most is F-Zero X, the rest of my favourite N64 games run like a slide show.

The improvements of DKR are really good taking into account it isn't recompilation, but not even combining them is enough to really improve the game imho. I've completed the game several times, getting all the balloons -following a Gamefaqs guide- and at a such uneven framerate I don't think I'd improve, nor increasing the base resolution -I've played those games via emulation-.

Can't wait for a recompiled F-Zero X, Diddy Kong Racing, etc, with better framerates maybe all the records can be beaten, specially on F-Zero X.

 

[Cyan]

It won't be just optimisation but using the hardware in unexpected and not-intended ways. eg. The Copper processor was a four-instruction processor could change the output colour per line, which gives the common rainbow background in a number of Amiga games...

View attachment 11295

...and allowed for the vertical scrolling of screens as seen in the above multitasking clip swapping between OSes. Those overlapping screens could even be different resolutions. Early Doom-clones took to spamming the Copper to change the colour multiple times per line, but it was only fast enough to do this every 4, maybe even 8, pixels, which is why the images were sooooo chunky. The bitplane graphics were sidelined as the Copper was set to work doing something it was never intended to do.

The developer of Grind has likely investigated how the machine works and found new hacks and cheats to astound.

Curiously it has a vertical aspect to the pixels:

this video shared from @Davros in a different thread. go deep in what killed the Amiga, from the 7 minutes mark on.

 

[Liandry]

Maybe my question should be in other thread, but I think it could be also here. Some days ago I learned what original Xbox could be modified with twice RAM amout. It could be increased from 64 MB to 128 MB. After that upgrade some games (maybe all) could run in 720p.
1) Do I understand correct what this is true 720p?
2) How that could be possible, I mean this is not only increase in frame buffers resolution but also increase in pixel fillrate and texel fillrate.
3) Does stat mean what Xbox was more powerful than many thought?
4) Does that mean what this unused power could've been used for more better effects if resolution would've been the same but with 128 MB of RAM?
5) Does that mean what Xbox could've render more advanced effects with 64 MB of RAM?
Please guys, give some answers if anyone can. Let's start that disscusion. I think this is very interesting.

 

[Davros]

I'll try to answer a few of your questions (keep in mind I know bugger all about the xbox)
having more memory doesnt make it more powerful it just means it has more memory.
not sure how fill rates are increased by more memory fill rates are dependant on the gpu and memory bandwidth
any benefit to games from more ram would only happen if it had more ram from day 1 as the games were all coded for 64mb
If I add more memory to my P.C either ram or vram I generally dont get better effects and these games are coded to work with varying amounts of memory.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Discussion on this already:

An original Xbox can do Doom 3 at 720p natively with extra RAM

Just for fun. How much longer would a simple RAM increase have extended the Xbox's lifespan? What would a 512MB of RAM look like with an original Xbox with only 128mb could run Doom 3 at native 720p with no developer optimization.

forum.beyond3d.com

Don't know if it goes to explain how the RAM helped.

 

[eastmen]

Discussion on this already:

An original Xbox can do Doom 3 at 720p natively with extra RAM

Just for fun. How much longer would a simple RAM increase have extended the Xbox's lifespan? What would a 512MB of RAM look like with an original Xbox with only 128mb could run Doom 3 at native 720p with no developer optimization.

forum.beyond3d.com

Don't know if it goes to explain how the RAM helped.

additional ram allowed more assets into system ram so tis not waiting on the hard drive or disc to stream in new data?

 

[Riddlewire]

I'm not sure how the memory controller was configured in NV2A.
The lanes were already on the board for the additional 64MB.
Does that mean that Xbox would have been operating with a 256bit memory bus if they had used the full 128MB? I think it's been stated many times that NV2A was bandwidth limited in nearly all scenarios. Doubling the available bandwidth certainly could have improved performance and/or resolution.

 

[function]

Xbox had a 128-bit memory bus, so increasing memory wouldn't have changed bandwidth.

IIRC, Xbox used DDR200, while DDR266 and DDR333 were available (but more expensive), so more bandwidth was possible but obviously not deemed worth the cost.

 

[Davros]

There was also ddr400 (don't know if it was available at the time)
ps: did the xbox really only have 64mb when i had a pc that used ddr I'm pretty sure I had 2gb of it maybe 4gb

 

[function]

There was also ddr400 (don't know if it was available at the time)
ps: did the xbox really only have 64mb when i had a pc that used ddr I'm pretty sure I had 2gb of it maybe 4gb

I ended up with 4GB of DDR400 on my Socket 939 Opteron - total overkill but it felt 1337!

Initially DDR was more for high performance stuff like GPUs, with SDRAM covering desktop main memory. So kind of like GDDR vs DDR these days.

Xbox launched between the arrival of GForce 3 (early 2001) and GForce 4 (early 2002). GeForce 3 was 64MB, GeForce 4 was a mix of 64 and 128 MB parts. GeForce 3 products ran memory between 200 and 250mhz, GeForce 4 had memory between 222 and 325.

128MB of DDR 233 would have been lovely for Xbox, but only a handful of games would have made good use of so much memory, load times may have suffered for games that used all that memory (Xbox didn't have proper installs), and lawd only knows how much deeper in the debt hole MS would have been.

 

[Davros]

128MB of DDR 233 would have been lovely for Xbox,

To be clear your talking total memory not vram ?

 

[function]

To be clear your talking total memory not vram ?

Xbox had a fully unified memory pool, so there was no real distinction much like modern consoles.

128MB would have been more than 3x total PS2 memory so somewhat overkill, but would have allowed some amazing PC ports back in 2004 / 2005 and Halo 2 could have been even more impressive.

 

[Davros]

Thanks, like I said earlier I know bugger all about consoles, they were forbidden in my religion....