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| Acmlm's Board - I3 Archive - General Emulation - Mario 64 - Rendering to Infinity |
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stardust4ever Bronto Burt                 Since: 10-27-06 From: Northern LA Last post: 6355 days Last view: 6311 days |
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| I was just wondering:
The original Nintendo 64 console was limited to 4 Mb of RAM. Despite that some later games overcame a lot of limitations, truth be told that on Mario 64, most objects, with the notable exception of terrains, red coins, and stars, disappear when Mario gets further away from them. This is especially problematic while attemptimg the "100 coins" star in Bob-omb land, as when Mario flies through the air, the coin rings do not apear until Mario is very close to them, at at this point, I am typically not at the optimium orientation to pick them up. The expansion pak upgraded the RAM on the 64 to 8 megs, but that did little to prevent items from "vanishing". Although later games such as Donkey Kong 64 worked around this limitation by fading objects, the problem still remains. I really had given this a lot of thought because at one time as I was making (big) 1152x864 pixel screenshots of various areas, such as the metal cap "beneath the waterfall" level, the detail on the textures (even at great distances) was incredibly exquisit, but items such as the one up box were totally missing. Since most newer video cards have far more RAM than is nessesary (in fact enough to render perhaps every single area in the whole game all at once), I was wondering if there was a way for an emulator to load all of the items in a level when you first enter an area, and to keep them loaded until you leave, using the limits of the video hardware rather than succum to the limited memory of the N64. In other words, still be able to draw objects even if Mario is very far away??? I use Mario as an example, but in theory this could really could apply to any N64 or PS1 game. Extremely old (~10yrs) PC games that are runnable under XP do not exibit this behavior, so why do N64 games have to be limited to 4 Mb??? (edited by stardust4ever on 11-02-06 04:46 PM) |
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HyperHacker Star Mario Finally being paid to code in VB! If only I still enjoyed that. <_< Wii #7182 6487 4198 1828     Since: 11-18-05 From: Canada, w00t! My computer's specs, if anyone gives a damn. STOP TRUNCATING THIS >8^( Last post: 6285 days Last view: 6285 days |
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| To answer your last question, those games were designed on a platform in which memory and processing power increases steadily over time, whereas N64 games were designed on a platform in which these are fixed, save for the Expansion Pak. | |||
FreeDOS + Giant Red Koopa Legion: freedos = fritos  Since: 11-17-05 From: Seattle Last post: 6284 days Last view: 6284 days |
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| You'd have to modify the game in order to take advantage of more memory -- probably a much harder task than said.
I wonder how much RAM you could give the N64 and be addressable; the official expansion only went to 8MB, but the MIPS64 arch (which N64 is based on) could do up to 16EiB |
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HyperHacker Star Mario Finally being paid to code in VB! If only I still enjoyed that. <_< Wii #7182 6487 4198 1828 Since: 11-18-05 From: Canada, w00t! My computer's specs, if anyone gives a damn. STOP TRUNCATING THIS >8^( Last post: 6285 days Last view: 6285 days |
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I think up to 12 or even 16MB might be addressable. I think I once saw a third-party Expansion Pak that claimed to add (or bring it up to) 12MB. Of course this'd be almost completely useless since no game would use more than 8MB, though it could be useful for homebrew/hacking.  |
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Cellar Dweller + Red Koopa   Since: 11-18-05 From: Arkansas Last post: 6294 days Last view: 6285 days |
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| The reason stuff disappears from the screen has less to do with the limited memory than limited 3D acceleration. During the design of the game, the programmers figure out how much stuff can be on screen without slowing the game down. They then decide how close to the camera objects must be in order to be drawn.
As others have pointed out, console games are designed for fixed hardware. Therefore, the designers had no reason program the game to use more hardware power than provided by the console. |
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Ailure Mr. Shine I just want peace...  Since: 11-17-05 From: Sweden Last post: 6285 days Last view: 6284 days |
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Originally posted by Cellar Dweller +Tell that to Rareware. 
(they squeezed so much out of the hardware in perfect dark that heavy lag during multiplayer is quite common. :/) (edited by /hda1/lure on 11-10-06 05:22 AM) |
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