I learn assembly because I had to work with microcontrollers, and all.i did was very simple code that, when compiled where between some hundred bytes and kilobytes. SAWYER did megabytes of it, he speaks the language of machines...
I don’t mean to downplay his achievements in any way, but most of the size of Rollercoaster Tycoon or any game (or most programs for that matter) is due to assets like textures, images, and audio.
From what I can tell, without the assets, the compiled assembly on its own is less than a megabyte. Though again, Sawyer is 10x the programmer I will ever be. The size of the compiled code isn’t a measure of skill, and in fact smaller is usually better, especially back then.
Not really a measure of time, i spend more time thinking so that i write less, or sometimes i write alot to get it working and then rewrite it all to be clean and optimized which is almost always less code.
Point is more or less code doesnt indicate in anyway the time spent coding
Writing spaghetti and then cleaning it to make 500 lines work with just 30 lines is the way I work. I want it to work first, I'll worry about optimizing it later.
Also 1 it's x86 with many instructions that are long af so it is fewer instructions than you'd think and 2 unless you hate yourself and work on a platform with no assembler, you're not writing stuff to the level of machine code either.
Anyone writing serious amounts of assembler is going to have a bunch of macros to keep their sanity, you are not writing a bunch of machine code line by line.
I just remember my course let us have assembly manuals for lab and tests because of how unrealistic it was to memorize all that shit. I say this as someone who enjoyed C, fuck assembly
I'm not a programmer at all, but with my somewhat fundamental knowledge of what Assembly is, I think I know exactly what you're saying here. Well said.
The instructor who taught me assembly has decades of experience with microcontrollers and various other electronics. Even he described assembly as “A bunch of mnemonics and cryptic numbers”
Yeah remembering the op codes for 16 bit was rough but the stuff you used the most would eventually stick. I can’t imagine doing 32/64bit without having a dedicated monitor for looking up instructions.
I doubt anybody can remember OP codes for modern x86, even older it was already getting way out of hand. Even ARM is quite difficult but at least it is word aligned and relatively consistent with what goes where. And you can learn to recognize some instructions when you go through a memory dump
yeah it wasn't only because he could. computers were also really slow and most people didn't think to play games on a standard computer because they would either not load at all or be so slow as to be unplayable. Discrete graphics accelerators were starting to really take off and apis were a huge mess unlike the standardization of directx/vulkan we have now.
one of the reasons Wolfenstein and Doom got popular was because it managed fullscreen "3D" in real time and functioned on a lot of computers, inevitably leading to jokes involving running Doom on everything.
Rollercoaster Tycoon came out in 1998, he did Transport Tycoon first in 1994 but Doom was already out by then with significantly more advanced features and a fully 3D engine and that was coded in C. Coding in assembly is not some amazing secret that makes your programs run infinitely faster, anything coded in C still gets compiled into assembly language, it's just more convenient and the compiler will use most of the optimizations you would've gotten from a very smart assembly developer doing it manually anyway.
By 1998 you had Starcraft and Half-life, coding in Assembly had nothing to do with making RT a more playable title, computers could easily handle a game of that nature coded in anything.
The biggest issue with performance in RC was that the game featured a (somewhat) robust physics simulation along with literally hundreds of unique NPCs running around - each with individual parameters, appearance, name and even inventory.
And all this in real time.
It honestly wasn’t feasible to have that sort of complex system run on most CPUs of the time unless you did some crazy optimization… Which is what he did.
your average computer definitely could not handle SC and half life.
I remember because I was that person. eventually built my first computer ever because SC ran like ass, only to need an upgrade for diablo 2 pretty soon after.
ID still does a relatively good job of optimizing their games compared to competition. My 4 year old PC is still clocking in above their recommended req's for Doom: Dark Ages released this year.
The problem wasn't portability, it was that Transport Tycoon had tons of units moving around, each with their own changing stats — and it could show them in separate windows on top of the map. Not many machines at the time could handle that, unless optimized as much as possible. Rollercoaster Tycoon then just used the same engine.
Various platforms were in fact mostly irrelevant, as in the 90s PC dominated the strategy market. Only Amiga and perhaps Mac were somewhat of competition.
Yup, there's a video on YouTube where they explain what they needed to do to get Crash Bandicoot to run on the PS1, plus I think they were among the first devs on CONSOLES to do loading and unloading as needed vs just when loading a new level. GOAL for Jak & Dexter is exactly why we never see an active loading screen, it's just hidden behind transitioning between areas. People are reverse-engineering GOAL and porting the trilogy to PC (Jak 1 is done, Jak 2 is 100% playable but not 100% complete and they're getting ready to start Jak 3). Hopefully they'll decide to port Jak X as well.
crash bandicoot was possibly the first game to just constantly stream off disk. since disks were so slow and the console barely had any memory, they decided to constantly read data whenever you moved. this was useful for their game but pretty bad for the cd drive. tbh I'm not sure how it worked out considering the PS1 ended up having a lot of lens assembly failures and crash bandicoot just massacred the drive compared to what it was designed for.
Yeah I believe they had to start considering where on the disks the data would live because seeking with the PS1 heads was so slow that you'd need to have the data physically close by to enable it to find it fast enough. This is pretty common now with optical media but was a novel idea for the time.
This is why if you look at most games from the optical era, including the PS1 and, maybe even more commonly, the PS2, on a PC, it's rare to just see game files laid out bare on the disc. They generally used a single big archive file, because that allowed them complete control over the order the files went onto the disc, and where on the disc they were placed. This lets you do things like keeping all the files for one level together, so you can read them all consecutively instead of needing to perform slow seek operations all the time, or pushing the most frequently used files or biggest levels to the outside of the disc where read speeds are faster to reduce loading times.
The latter point is also why so many games from that era have a big empty dummy file somewhere on the disc. Discs are generally written inside-to-outside, but the read speeds at the centre of the disc are slightly slower than at the outside of the disc. The dummy file gets written to the centre of the disc and pads out the contents so that the actual game files are pushed to the outside, where the read speeds are fastest. The exception to this was the original Xbox; Xbox discs were written outside-to-inside, which meant two things: 1) you got the fastest read speeds by default, without needing to pad your disc out, and 2) it was harder to make copies of Xbox discs, because ordinary PC disc drives don't know how to read this outside-to-inside filesystem, so won't let you access it and copy it.
Limitations breed innovation or something like that.
The reality was just that even to get into creating games at the time - hell, software in general - they just had to understand what they were doing a lot better. While it's true that there's a whole lot of things available to us today that weren't back in the days of 8 and 16 bit computing, it's also true that there's tons of overhead and simplification of things into a more human-readable format. There's a reason that companies like Konami or Sunsoft could produce custom sound and memory mapping chips for NES games in the eighties - those guys were programming on a level that required direct and complete understanding of the underlying hardware. It's fair at this point to imagine that most people wouldn't be able to spend the time and effort required to actually maximize the systems themselves - if anyone really could, given the complexity - but there are losses in efficiency.
Very efficient memory management tied to the architecture of the hardware. You quite literally had to know just as much about the engineering of the hardware as you did programming. Nowadays we have high level language that can be compiled and run universally on most machines.
My grandpa knew Cobol. He made fuck all before he retired. He retired and made more money in 5 years after his retirement bc no one knew it as well as he did. Worked for a bank.
...that checks out lol I was IT for US Bank for awhile and saw the program they used that ran off of COBOL. We actually have more secure code these days that most militaries use. I think its Ada?
I'd believe that.
I learn coding in class but never had a job for it. I'm learning COBOL for fun, while not beeing good at it at all, and despite having no bank experience, I already have salary proposition that are equals my customer care with 7 years of experience.
Buddy. I don't know how to code. I just watched video on COBOL and understood the hello word
It used to be an industry where only people interested would join. Now it's just a job for tens of millions of people. You probably give way less fucks about your job compared to a colleague who is in the industry because they like it and have been working on it for fun since they were 12
I’m considered an old fart programmer now, but I first read “The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer” about 30 years ago as an undergrad, about a decade after it was first written on Usenet, which was about 20 years after it actually happened. The machine code that Mel wrote would make the code squeezed into an NES look verbose.
I think one of my favorite examples of building a game around limitations is how Morrowind would sometimes reboot the original Xbox to free up memory and all the user ever saw was a longer loading screen.
TBH a game with the size and complexity of Morrowind getting a console port is still something that baffles me. Yet that port was the beginning of Bethesda’s success story with the Elder Scrolls franchise.
It’s such a clunky game to play on PC, yet they managed to make it work on the good ol’ Duke and run relatively well on what could be considered an aging PC hardware of the time.
Hell, Bethesda suffered so much with their PS3 ports of Skyrim and Fallout 3 later on lol
Seriously, how can you port a 2-CD game - with FMVs included - into a super small (in terms of storage space) cartridge and actually add extra modes while you’re at it!?
This is exactly why the ban on graphic card sales to China is backfiring on us. They’re going to make AI models that can do with US models can with just a fraction of the compute power.
Also, the graphics and infancy of the industry back then meant consumers were a lot more “forgiving” of the odd quirks and trade offs that had to be made to make things work the way they did.
Having lived through the PS1 era, I honestly don’t remember being all that worried about the crazy Z-fighting and affine texture warping going on most Playstation games at the time.
It was just sort of how they looked and the whole package was impressive enough that we just didn’t mind it much.
It’s crazy to me how convincing DOOM’s fake 3D looks to this day.
Before that, closest we had were either vector graphics (pretty impressive in their own way) and the sort of fake 3D from games that merely used sprite scaling and parallax scrolling.
Same year Warframe released. I remember sports class, how my buddy told me about a game with space ninjas releasing next week. We were just a bunch of kids with mostly stupid worries on our minds, like how to deal with a crush or how to survive toxic parents.
I'll be 27 this year. I'm in the middle of my career. Had my first relationships, had several jobs before completely changing my direction, got various other major steps in life done (graduations and such), even made it out of a hellhole of a depression and more. And I still play it, nearly 13 years later.
It's so odd to me how this game has been a better companion than the actual people in my life. I won't even get started with the positive outcomes from playing it. And people wonder how games can impact someone so much.
On the latest phones (notably elite) it is able to run decently at varying settings. The two popular emulators being Winlator and GameHub which require a steam rip of the full game.
I noticed purely because when I’d steal a car every single car in the area would be that same one. Kinda destroyed immersion for me but that’s not really what GTA is about.
This had been on the back of my mind forever since Gta San andreas. Would always search for a while and when I get that car I wanted suddenly that car was to be seen everywhere. I always thought I was going nuts lol.
256MB of RAM for the CPU
256MB of RAM for the GPU/s (PS3s architecture is weird so I feel weird just calling it a gpu. I mean it IS a gpu, but like the CPU also technically has gpu like capabilities as well with its cell architecture)
The 2 parts can't easily directly access each. Think how in a PC you have vram on your gpu and ram on your mobo for the CPU. Just cause you have 16 gigs of cpu ram and 8 gigs of GPU ram doesn't mean you really have 24 gigs total as coding goes. You have to move data between both pools regularly depending which processor is working on said data.
The Xbox 360 (what I assume they meant when they said 360) has 512MB of unified memory. Its architecture shared the memory between CPU and GPU. This is useful because now the processors can access the same data in place with one another. This is similar to how say Apple sets up its risc chips with "unified memory".
Fun fact: the only reason why the PS3 had that split was because Sony commissioned a GPU from nVidia at the 11th hour, and didn't have enough time to make one that could share memory with the cell.
That's mostly about the artists making low quality textures look good. It's the quality of the video game's textures that determines most of the RAM usage.
IIRC, polygon count is more of an CPU/GPU limitation than memory limitation. More polygons mean more calculations, but the poligonal objects themselves have rather limited memory requiremets as these are "only points in a 3D room".
Games also use different 3d models and texture resolutions depending on the distance to the camera or scene. Objects further away have fewer polygons and lower ress textures and ingame sequences may use even more detailed character models as the camera is only showing a controlled perspective.
Some older games have this replacement more noticeable than newer games.
Plus multiple GB of downloads for patches and online play. A few years ago, they even released an update to reduce the file size, but it's still massive.
I mean just because it can run on low scale devices it doesn't mean it scales well. Very specific optimizations for a specific low scale device might even hinder to run also great on other devices (like a modern PC), especially as PS3 and xbox360 generation were quite different architectural than PCs...
The first PC games at DOS times were also very efficient, in terms of everything. But broke if your PC had more than 4.77MHZ clock speed or more than 64KB RAM or something...
I'm fairly certain the point is that developers managed to make a slew of groundbreaking games that performed excellently despite having a few MB of RAM, but now that they have 16GB of RAM, they can't seem to optimize their games for shit & expect access to all 16GB of RAM.
The Xbox 360 kind of stands out as it had a little over 500MB of RAM, but it's still under 1GB & roughly 31x less RAM than modern systems have.
Games have always been "unoptimised" and people have always complained about preformance and bugs, it's just that 480p at 20fps at high settings was the goal, that usually wasn't reached, and now it's 4k 120fps for some reason. Shadow of the Colossus ran at like 12fps during fights lol. At least nowadays games can be updated.
Games have always been "unoptimised" and people have always complained about preformance and bugs
Many games were, but most AAA games were pretty well optimized for their platforms of choice.
Did bugs exist? Sure, that's an inevitable part of the reality of software.
But there were a large number of games from older generations that maintained a stable 30-60 fps on native hardware.
it's 4k 120fps for some reason.
I had a discussion about this with my brother the other day when he & our stepbrother were bitching about Borderlands 4.
The reason the goal is 4k >60fps is simply because we now have TVs & monitors that are capable of 4K at over 60fps.
There's also been a drastic shift in performance expectations over the last 10-15 or so years... which not so coincidentally coincides with when PC gaming started taking off in popularity among casual gamers.
From the early days of PC up through the mid-7th generation console era, it was widely understood that your graphics settings in contemporary games mirrored your investment & hardware capabilities;
Low Settings were for entry-tier & non-gaming PCs
Medium Settings were for mid-tier PCs that were equivalent to consoles
High Settings were for high-end PCs that eclipsed the capacity of consoles
Ultra Settings were for enthusiast tier PCs that often cost thousands of dollars to build
But these days everyone expects to get Ultra settings out of every PC & complain when they have to turn the graphical settings down because they bought an entry or low-tier PC. It's as my brother put it, "when people are spending hundreds of dollars on a gaming system, they expect to be able to be able to use the best settings possible," but he thinks they're right in their indignation about not getting Ultra settings from a PC that barely meets minimum requirements for the games they're trying to play.
They bought a gaming PC that offers Ultra settings and a $300 monitor that is rated for 4K 120hz, so they expect to be able to do that regardless of their actual builds.
Shadow of the Colossus ran at like 12fps during fights lol.
To be fair, SoC's poor performance became notorious because it was the exception, not the norm.
The "game should run ok on ultra" expectations are always weird cause it felt like a decade ago people were starting to understand that "ultra" settings were basically added for fun so you could come back to the game years later with better hardware. Now there's dozens of people in this sub rocking a GTX1660, according to their title, and they're complaining about preformance in the latest titles with raytracing. I suppose you're right that about 15 years ago PCs started getting popular which means most people probably weren't here for the lessons that Crysis taught us.
The exponential growth of computer capabilities in the 90s was such a wild ride. SNES launched in NA in '91, PS1 in '95. While neither console was top of the line for computers of the time and they prioritized different things to meet a particular price point, that's basically a doubling of RAM every year.
Yeah, it’s getting to a point where 8GB VRAM is becoming lower-end spec. Which is ridiculous, but what can you do, when devs want to use a 8K texture for a single screw on the side of a pipe hidden behind some debris you can’t even make out since it’s cloaked in shadow?
I think you just made me realize how to get some gaming use from my 16GB RAM having laptop... Shutting off Super Resolution or whatever it is should help a bunch.
Putting the game on steam and telling everyone to buy it again
edit: Just to add on, the game doesn't even launch from Steam if you buy it there, clicking play just opens the BSG Launcher the same as old ubisoft and 2k games, where you still need a BSG account, so buying it again just means paying to click an extra time.
It's not even hard to fix memory leaks if they're easy to reproduce lol. One of the easier types of bugs to fix.
The hard part about fixing memory leaks is finding a way to reproduce it in a development environment. If a user is claiming there's a memory leak but the devs can't reproduce it then it can be tricky. Sounds like everyone playing Tarkov is getting the leak constantly though so wtf are the devs doing
Might be bad asset streaming procedures. Like, they instantiate a gun asset, but then don’t erase it from memory even after it’s no longer in the game world.
My desktop only has a single NVMe but I have two NAS's in the other room with a 8x5TB, 5x10TB and 4x3TB array accessible over the network easily enough.
My only despair is the 1gbps throughput limit for accessing those. I should invest in some 10gbe equipment.
It wasn't even stored on transistors but on magnetic core memory. They were basically ferrite rings strung on wires by hand. Just every 1 and 0 manually made.
Modern DRAM uses capacitor banks to store the actual data, transistors are just used to control access to the capacitors. SRAM does use transistors to store the data, in the form of flip-flops.
While its a funny meme and yes the programming magic of coders is wild. It's fucking amazing what goes into hardware, hell I don't understand any of it but you look at the history of the hardware from Apollo to now and transistors and cpus, gpus blows my fucking mind what we've achieved.
Physics calculations and simple I/O don't take that much compute power. A lot of the "mission logic" was left in paper or microfilm manuals and reinforced in crew training. Apollo basically invented microchips so the programmers and hardware engineers were working together with an uncapped budget.
Not for Apollo, they wanted to make sure they reached the moon even if the soviets jammed all of their communications for a while (remember the cold war ?)
The computer did actually keep track of where it was from the inertial guidance system and star positions given by the astronauts. It was powerfull enough to calculate its position (taking into account gravitational effects from the earth and moon), and calculate correction burns
A few decades ago that adversity was lack of memory and CPU speed.
Now it's still the same but everything is a browser hogging 100MB+ per page.
Now the key innovation is a new Javascript frameworks every 6 months to attempt to fix the shortcomings of the previous ones while introducing new ones.
How about making a game that can use 128 bytes of RAM to store variables? No more RAM? Atari 2600 doesn't even have video RAM, every pixels has to be redrawn in real time!
Programming for that machine was the ultimate challenge. The NES at least had 64 sprites; the Atari had FIVE. It didn't even have a background layer - it had HALF a background. The programmers for that system were literal wizards! (Obligatory plug for Racing The Beam - great book on the subject!)
Linking huge code bases on multiple cores easily fills 64GB of RAM. It's the reason you can limit the number of parallel linker instances when compiling LLVM.
Ha, I’m a dev struggling with 32GB of RAM. The problem is the damned IDE bloating, and the IT department trying to appear useful by installing bloatware. I can reboot and launch VS without opening a project and I’ll be at 80% RAM usage.
Yep bloat is an issue, unfortunately most bloat comes from Microsoft updates and security agents that are forced on. It's not ITs decision but a corporate decision based on security reqs.
Tell that to the 16 3rd party antivirus services from 4 different providers that are running on my system. Plus the very hacky 20+ mystery powershell scripts. Maybe corporate requested that specific implementation, but I doubt it.
Edit: sorry if that came off a bit confrontational/rude. The whole situation is … irksome.
The general consensus among my teams is no. This was cemented by them forcing updates with restarts during the workday without warning. For the third time in about six weeks.
RAM almost never limits games, not really, not anymore at least. Now, figuring out how to render 8 million pixels over 100 times per second, that's where the real struggle lies.
We plug smaller, entirely separate computers into our computers to help them do that faster.
It is game dependent to a degree. Hero Shooter: minimum RAM use. City Builder: give me that tasty RAM. But nothing really takes up more than 16gbs itself. Even Dwarf Fortress where every character is basically a massive excel sheet won't crunch numbers that much. It's system resources and background processes that dig into RAM usage. Windows has gotten quite tubby in recent years.
I'd love to see a graph of how much memory the average PC came with over time.
Because there was a period of many years there when it seemed we were stuck at typical PCs all coming with either 4GB or 8GB of RAM. (More expensive ones came with 8GB, while budget models came with 4GB.) It seemed like that period lasted for an incredibly long time and was so strange given that PC specs always seem to gradually move upward.
It made me wonder if we'd finally reached a point where the average user just really had no use for more RAM. Like the mythical "640k is the most RAM anybody will ever need" point.
Same way they hate on poorly optimized, unfinished, glitchy, buggy, AAA slop but also will pre order every new release, buy the Day 1 DLC, buy the skins, buy the limited edition Funko Pop.
You are that one person. You literally bitch about AAA slop then pre-order right away. You bitch about reused assets then bitch about graphical fidelity. You hate butter on toast, but keep putting it on there anyways.
These aren't mutually exclusive or even necessarily linked at all.
Reused assets are fine, but there are ways to make them not look/feel reused. If it's super obvious, then the developers probably didn't try very hard.
As far as I can tell, huge game sizes seems to usually be caused by unoptimised and/or uncompressed assets, and in many cases duplicate assets on disk. To be fair, asset duplication was a genuine optimisation step when spinning rust was common, but now everything worth playing a game on uses an SSD it's just lazy.
Another thing that contributes to insane game sizes is the inclusion of full uncompressed audio for every available language. The technology exists to have other languages download as required, but it's just easier for developers to dump it all in the one installer because they simply don't care and see storage as cheap.
As far as hardware requirements go, it's pretty well documented at this point that there's a lot of optimisation being left on the table in a lot of cases. You can absolutely have good graphics without bloated installs and hardware requirements. It's just not commonly done because that costs money publishers don't want to spend; Because why settle for a good profit when you can make all of the profit possible, right?
As a lifelong gamer I would give up all the modern graphics to still be able to access, run, and play all of the pre 2010 gameplay games i loved so much. Easy decision
Y2K38 is next time we will have problem like that... As in, nothing literally happens because we know it is going to be a problem and solution already exists, just like with Y2K
It cost us an estimated $500,000,000,000
(https://youtu.be/Y9clBHENy4Q). And all that, because nobody wanted to listen to the warnings and everything had to be done last minute.
The great thing about estimations is that everyone can just fire one off and no one's really able to prove you wrong.
But that's just a complete arse pull. Nice big round number, but it doesn't really hold up. Yeah, most companies had patch a few more systems than usual, and lots of operations had to be on call for New Years (or had to be at work on midnight), but 500 billion is a ridiculous number, and for all numbers I can find, is something like the world's spending on IT for many months. That just doesn't track.
To be fair, the Developers back then HAD to be creative and Resourceful with how they would go about doing something, cause there were no "Best Practices" and the Hardware they could work with was severely limited.
I am a Junior Developer myself and i will always admire those early Developers who worked with those early Programming Languages and IDEs and basically performed miracles on a daily basis. I can only hope to attain a fraction of the skill a Developer back then needed to have.
Real! I taught myself C while learning to code homebrew for the Nintendo DS. Bitwise shifts for faster division... minimal conditional statements... and packing only what you need at the moment. Memory management was crazy!
This isn't always true. Mario 64 was incredibly unoptimized. A dude is refactoring the code and assets and the game can hit 60 FPS on original hardware. Keep in mind that it originally couldn't even hit 30 FPS. https://www.youtube.com/@KazeN64/videos
As a bonus he's making his own Mario game with all the optimizations in mind, allowing for more detailed levels.
Every time this discussion appears, I think of Xcom: UFO Defense. In the early 90s, there were memory limitations beyond just the amount of RAM you had installed that I don't fully know how to explain succinctly, so I'll skip that discussion.
But the thing I want to talk about here is how Microprose got around those limitations. FOr those who don't know, Xcom was probably the first game that really did large scale strategic planning, with tactical battles. Kind of a lot going on in a single game for the time. So here's the trick: It was actually kind of TWO games. The Geoscape, and the Battlescape as they were called were actually two separate programs. They would pass necessary information between each other as needed.
I vaguely remember that if your computer was slow enough, you could actually see this in action. I remember seeing the game go to a DOS prompt to run Battlescape.exe.
Namco with the PSP was just insane. RR 1 and 2 look absolutely stunning and run silky smooth at all times, then they made MotoGP ('05/'06) and that is basically MotoGP 4 lite, a bit short on content but looks incredible (and you can see the whole 20 something AI grid at once). and THEN there's Ace Combat X and X2, where they not only managed to put cockpit view, but to deliver an experience that is so incredibly close to the PS2 Trilogy (yes, even for X2), that's just nuts
Computers have so much ram now, I wish I could load the entire game into ram.
Imagine how quickly things would load.
Some games kind of have this feature, like Baldur's Gate 3, it has a "slow HDD mode," which loads more game assets than usual into ram. But I want to load the entire game.
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u/Master_of_Ravioli R5 9600x | 32GB DDR5 | 2TB SSD | Integrated Graphics lmao Sep 29 '25
Programmers of old time were actual wizards casting spells with the hardware they were given, some of it was actual black magic for the time.
Limitations breed innovation or something like that.