| [Web] GetBoinged reviews Amiga Games Pocket Pak #2 | ANN.lu |
| Posted on 14-May-2003 05:12 GMT by GetBoinged | 65 comments
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GetBoinged reviews Amiga Games Pocket Pak #2
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| GetBoinged reviews Amiga Games Pocket Pak #2 : Comment 56 of 65 | ANN.lu |
| Posted by Lando on 15-May-2003 15:53 GMT | In reply to Comment 55 (corpse):
>The PSX has 650(700)meg of media to play with
No, it has 650 Megs of STORAGE. Suppose I stuck a 80GB hard drive in a vanilla A1200, would it be more powerful than a 2.4Ghz p4 with a 1gig drive? Really the size of storage is irrelevant in this discussion. What we're talking about is the ability of a PDA to play host to a decent quality game, not reams of FMV and CDDA music.
>, with games like those on the
>PSX it means we can be very sloppy about compressing our data and leave it as
>raw data.
This is really irrelevant. Think about it. The Playstation has 2MB of RAM* At any given time, in any given scene, the Playstation only has access to the 512k or so textures in VRAM. It can only draw what it has in VRAM. A PSX game is usually running in 2 frames, is it really going to access the CD mid-render, load more textures and carry on rendering?
If you have MGS for PS1, load in the first level, take out the CD. Does the game stop? No. Was it streaming in data? No. Everything in each scene of MGS is held in memory, until the next load. You go to the lift and, hey, it loads in some more data.
Now try ridge racer. Start a game, and start racing. Take the CD out. The music stops, that's all. Same with Rage Racer, same with pretty much any PSC game I can thing of actually.
*(plus a meg of VRAM, half or more of which (depending on resolution) is used as front/back buffers leaving you around 512k for textures and CLUTS (PS1 games usually use 64x64 pixel 4-bit textures and store the CLUT in VRAM along with the texture itself).)
>This raw data is ready for use and requires no extra CPU time to get
>it into a workable form so all we need to do is keep the DMA controller
>grabbing 2mb chunks as they're needed and everythings sweet.
Where are you going to put this 2MB you just streamed from CD? You overwrite what's already there? So you overwrite data already in RAM and leave the screen black for 5 or six seconds until you loaded your next set of data? And remember that this 2MB main RAM also contains your executable which is usually around the 1MB mark.
>Now pitch that against a PDA with media of around the 16mb range(unless you're
>prepared to pay insane prices), we're tight on space
Compared to PSOne we're positively overflowing with space. Really, just stick to small textures if you're that tight on space. PS1 games use 64*64 4-bit textures for the most part, as it happens to fit exactly in the texture cache and it is only 2k (uncompressed, which is how it's stored in VRAM). You know how many 2k textures you could fit in a 16MB machine, assuming you reserve yourself 8MB or so for game code, meshes and so on? Over 4 million.
>here so we can either compress raw data and use extra cpu time and memory
>(which we don't really have) decompressing it or make smaller, less flashy but
>addictive games suitable for a pda,
Fine. I'm all for making simple, addictive games, I just don't like listening to people moaning about hardware limitations when much more has been accomplished on much less. If a developer wanted to take the time and invest the money into producing a triple-A product for PDA's along the lines of Metal Gear Solid then there is absolutely no reason why this could not be done. |
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