If I'll ever hear the news about Doom Eternal being successfully ported to Nintendo DS, I'm gonna be 99.9% sure that was Randy Linden who did it.

@twqzjsidIsndusiakdixisqjeksixi

Жыл бұрын

Well, someone is making Mario Galaxy to DS, a incredible feat by itself. But Doom Eternal would be fantastic.

@elimalinsky7069

Жыл бұрын

One of the most impressive feats of programming happened in 1982 with the release of 1K ZX Chess for the ZX81 home computer. As its name suggests it's a full chess program running on just 1KB of RAM, which includes an AI opponent. In actuality it was even less at around 700 bytes. That's 700 bytes for rudimentary graphics, rule set and all the AI routines to play the game.

@eduardopazhurtado3882

Жыл бұрын

Doom 3 is a safer bet.

@richterdelgan123

Жыл бұрын

On the ps vita

@randallinden

Жыл бұрын

Too kind -- thank you for the confidence and kind words!

How odd. He put two years into this game, using every trick in the programmer's book to make it function on ill-equipped hardware, and it never got used in an official capacity. Nobody else even knew it existed until eighteen years later.

@themadmallard

Жыл бұрын

very odd, but for people with talents that coincide with their interests, its not unusual to imagine those folks have a compulsion to see if they can "figure it out" one way or another, regardless if they ever share it. He seems the type with that profile

@kissmyacidrocks

Жыл бұрын

"A Man May Do an Immense Deal of Good, If He Does Not Care Who Gets the Credit"

@quantumuniversetvinc.6117

Жыл бұрын

Could be that little people cared or heard about it despite his forum posts etc. Sometimes things just go unnoticed. I would totally have been all over this game

@Simone-xe9cw

Жыл бұрын

Not my field of work but when something's too "tailored" for a specific job and uses a lot of tricks to work, it's hardly reusable nor maintainable.

@DasAntiNaziBroetchen

Жыл бұрын

I'm obviously not even half as smart as him, but I have 100+ projects that have never seen the light of day. I can relate. Either I lose interest and forget about it, or I think it's not good enough and then forget about it.

"'Thumb"' is a subset of 'ARM'." Hmm, yes, this makes sense.

the sheer patience of this man to program GAMES using ASSEMBLY language from SCRATCH, I don't think most people understand the excruciating work that entails.

@davidvincent380

Жыл бұрын

Yes that's insane. Games were often made in assembly in the old times (as all Genesis and SNES games for example) but they were nowhere as big and complex as Quake !

@SurriSama

Жыл бұрын

Him and Chris Saywer are legends.

@mark030a

Жыл бұрын

@@SurriSama Let's not forget Rebecca Heineman!

As someone who programs 3D the GBA, this is truly amazing!

@AlexOlsenpang

14 күн бұрын

I love your vids

I really love these 'impossible port' stories

I still remember the demo running like a slideshow on our 100mhz 486.. knowing this is a 16mhz cpu running the whole show so fast is mindblowing even today.

@FamousWolfe

Жыл бұрын

Dude. My family had a Pentium 166mhz with a whopping 16 MEGS of RAM back in 1996-1997 lol. It actually ran Quake at a steady 30fps no sweat. Crazy how big a step up it was from the Intel 486 DX lol.

@lincruste

5 ай бұрын

IIRC, Quake was quite decent on my brother's 486 DX4 100, but I may be mistaken.

@LordDeBahs

5 ай бұрын

it runs good on that cpu with decent graphic card . in software rendiering it will run like ass

@cattysplat

5 ай бұрын

@@LordDeBahs Yeah having an early graphics card made a huge difference and it was mindblowing seeing it in motion at the time being a lucky owner of a 3DFX card. Unfortunately most PC gamers did not have a graphics card because it was new expensive tech and was not standardised, there were like a dozen different companies making graphics cards at the time and often required you to buy a specialised version of the game to run on that manufacturer's card.

I thought quake on Saturn was the impossible port, this is just insane.

@randallinden

Жыл бұрын

Thanks for the compliment -- I appreciate it!

@thew0rstds224

Жыл бұрын

@@randallinden 🍻💪

@kva7922046

Жыл бұрын

@@randallinden Holy shit! You're an artist. Do you think that devs are leaving a lot on the table in terms of optimisation on consoles now? How much more do you think you could get out of the Switch, or early revision Xbox Ones or PS4? What is stopping devs from getting to the metal now? Are there any who are doing it? Would you answer these questions in a long format interview with MVG?

@randallinden

Жыл бұрын

@@kva7922046 I generally believe that there's always more ways to push hardware, as long as you work hard at it. I'd be happy to do a long-form (or even a short one) interview with MVG!

@ihavetubes

Жыл бұрын

@@randallinden You da man

I love how Nintendo's two philosophies contradict eachother. Extremely protective of their property including hardware but using parts so old and off-the-shelf that people can still develop for and hack.

I wrote lots of optimized assembly routines for the ARM7TDMI and had literally no idea about that register bank switching trick to get around the small number of available registers. Fascinating stuff.

Think about how crazy modern games could be if they were developed to run as efficient as possible

@kusayfarhan9943

Жыл бұрын

The only studios that come close squeezing out as much power out of a modern console are, insomniac, Naughty Dog, and Santa Monica Studios. They program as close to metal as possible.

@pelgervampireduck

Жыл бұрын

if all programmers were like this we would be playing Doom Eternal on a Pentium 4 with 1gb of ram and a 256mb graphics card.

@ryno4ever433

Жыл бұрын

It would increase development times and raise costs to the point that it wouldn't work out unless you had a team of master programmers and engineers. On paper though, it would be pretty sick.

@Klaeyy

Жыл бұрын

@@kusayfarhan9943 id Tech is also a contender with their modern doom engines. The games look amazing, run on switch and put out 300-500 fps on ultra with the best hardware

@bwabbel

Жыл бұрын

@@ryno4ever433 i know that it wouldn't be realistic. But it's interesting to think about what todays hardware is actually capable of

GBA is underrated. So many hidden gems on it like RoboCop prototype was released and great ports

@p00pyfarter

Жыл бұрын

lmao the GBA is not underrated

@Mr.Atari2600

Жыл бұрын

GBA sold over 81 million units, making it the 10th most sold system of all-time. it outsold the PSP & is right behind the Xbox 360 & PS3. It's far from underrated.

@HeavyStoneCloud

Жыл бұрын

PS2 is underrated

@dondraper4438

Жыл бұрын

@@Mr.Atari2600 Gameboy Advance was the first time we had proper and I mean proper 20hour+ games on a handheld. Which was also common with the GBA, not just a few lone games but a prevalent theme.

@cormano64

Жыл бұрын

People use the word "underrated" without thinking about what it actually means...

I remember years ago a dude made Quake on GBA using his own "Yeti" engine that was super impressive.

I think we would have seen more attempts at 3D games on GBA if the DS hadn't dropped a mere three years into its lifespan.

@NeoTechni

Жыл бұрын

Imagine if he ported it to DS.

@eyeball226

Жыл бұрын

Wow, was it really such a short gap? The GBA's lifespan feels like an eternity to me due to my age at that point.

@kevboard

Жыл бұрын

@@eyeball226 2001 to 2004 yeah... it felt longer back then

@randallinden

Жыл бұрын

It was a shame that the GBA didn't have as long a lifespan as I had hoped it would -- oh, well. Such is life sometimes.

@kevboard

Жыл бұрын

@@randallinden you bet on the wrong horse! should have done an N-gage port 😜

Going back to 96 and seeing Quake running on a $99 handheld from five years later would blow my literal mind.

FYI, the problem with branching code is pipelining, where the next instruction is loaded into the CPU before the result of the previous is know. This means that you need to halt to processor with every branch, because we don't know what the next instruction is going to be. In modern processors this can be mitigated by prediction, but as the recently discovered Apple M1 vulnerability packman attack has show, this comes with its own risks.

@awilliams1701

Жыл бұрын

I remember I did the self modifying code. I was working on a dos based graphics engine. Mostly 2d, but it had 3d as well. At one point I made it a graphing calculator as well. And it had battleship and a card game. I wanted to make it into an RTS as well, but that never happened. It was using templates and GCC in that era didn't have any debugging support for templates. If I knew that I never would have used them, but it depended on them so much I couldn't justify removing them. Anyway.........I had dozens of functions for drawing bitmaps. solid color 8 bit on 8 bit. Solid color 16 bit on 8 bit. Solid color 24/32 bit on 8 bit. Solid color 16 bit on 16 bit (you get the idea) as well as masked, uniform transparent, and 8 bit alpha channel transparent options. I had a dummy function header to call draw each image depth type, it would then get assigned by the resolution type eliminating at least a few branches. It did help with performance, but it was very minor and you had to draw a lot of small images to even get a 1 FPS difference. Not really worth it for that, but it made organizing them a lot easier.

@VioletGiraffe

Жыл бұрын

I also paid attention to that bit about branching code, since I doubt this old ARM CPU has a long enough pipeline to make it a problem.

@MicroChirp

Жыл бұрын

Prediction is exsctly what made Quake run better with high end CPUs of its time

@matthewtymaja3760

12 күн бұрын

Programming the ARM in the mid-90s, I tended to count a branch as ‘3 instructions’ in terms of timing, and memory load/store as 2; the pipeline was 3 instructions in total back them, and unrolling loops etc made a huge difference! Delving into x86 later in the 90s, I managed to build a software renderer that did 16-20fps at 640x480, fully texture mapped, all degrees of freedom, on a 486. Those were simpler times (also quite fun working around the lack of registers on a 486, disabling interrupts for portions of each scanline to hijack certain registers!)

watching this type of video makes me feel that we live in a parallel universe and MVG is fetching this unreleased ports from a worm hole portal, and we got stucked with 2D run to the mill GBA games on our childhood

@legros731

Жыл бұрын

Lol the 2D game are way better look better and are way more fun than a shitty port of quake Still impressive but the real question is why even bother doing this

@HiDefHDMusic

Жыл бұрын

@@legros731 to prove you can, duh

@Duomaxwell02M

Жыл бұрын

@@HiDefHDMusic I'm a retro gamer, and Randy Linden's work is one of the reasons I modded my GBA to have an IPS screen and continue to play games in it. Between the GBA ports of Doom/Doom 2, Max Payne and experimental stuff like this and the Tomb Raider port, makes it worth it to be a retro gamer. No need to deal with stupid microtransactions/season passes too.

@DogsRNice

Жыл бұрын

@@legros731 why bother making a garbage comment

@legros731

Жыл бұрын

@@DogsRNice why are you responding if it's a garbage comment clown This demo is a waste of time it impressive for a GBA game but it look like shit and surely play the same And 2d game still look good today and play well can't say the same for early 3d game Now go play with yourself elsewhere clown

Didn’t know anything about this port existing, but as soon as I heard “Randy Linden” I knew it’d be interesting and a technical marvel.

@randallinden

Жыл бұрын

Too kind!!! Thank you for the compliments and kind words!

@mi-nk

Жыл бұрын

@@randallinden your stuff is always super impressive!

@seamistseamist

Жыл бұрын

@@randallinden Your account was created literally today, june thirteenth.

@josephscottadams39

Жыл бұрын

@@seamistseamist MVG is that influential!

@seamistseamist

Жыл бұрын

@@josephscottadams39 I'm trying to say that it's probably fake.

Hopefully someone gets to pick up all the code and stuff from Linden and actually makes an entire port of QUAKE for GBA. This is too good to leave alone.

Randal Linden is a genius, and also seems like a humble chap and all round good guy. Some very interesting interviews with him on KZread.

@randallinden

Жыл бұрын

Thanks for the very kind words -- I appreciate it!

@seamistseamist

Жыл бұрын

@@randallinden That account was created the same day this video was updated.

@TheAlStewartArchives

Жыл бұрын

@@randallinden You are most welcome Randal!

That's some clever coding, optimising code like that to really make use of the hardware is an overlooked skill these days with game engines and faster processors. I'm impressed by the textures and lighting in there, the GBA wasn't designed to do that.

Such an interesting port. Randy Linden is really great for porting Quake to the GBA.

Being a developer, I can only say: wow. Just wow. This is a truly a work of art. Master developers like Linden are an extremely rare breed. Very few modern devs are able to write code like this nowadays. Where you have to make use of every CPU cycle, register and bit of memory. Sadly, it was a bit too late for this port. Compare that to many modern programs, often written using gargantuan multi-layered frameworks which have absolutely zero respect for resource usage. Often the only thing developers of those programs care about is to write their programs faster, not better. And that's not really their fault, because that's pretty much how most software development works nowadays. Companies aren't willing to spend money on developer time for code optimization and most users don't care either as modern hardware can often compensate the performance impact of bloated code.

@josephscottadams39

Жыл бұрын

Your right. No company is willing to spend the amount of time it takes to optimize down to the metal. It's a money game. Only smart people doing this on their own time with no time pressures can pull this stuff off these days.

I've attempted software rendering on Virtual Boy using carefully hand-crafted assembly, but the CPU-VRAM interface is the performance bottleneck and it can't work with any reasonable frame rate. Even running just a triangle rasterizer from the cache and managing all variables in the CPU registers, I was only able to fill about half the image area before running into overtime.

@zakazany1945

Жыл бұрын

Virtual Boy 🤮

@ArneChristianRosenfeldt

Жыл бұрын

that is a thing I never understood with PC graphics cards either. The CPU can just fire and forget the data. Even if the PPU only uses every 4th cycle to write to memory, this should be still faster than a loop on a CPU. If we happen to write two bytes into the same word, the PPU can just collect the two. Maybe you tried to read from VRAM? You don't need to do this in the middle of a span. Sadly ARM TDMI has no out of order operation. Would really help if you could write 8 bit pixel pairs where 0 is defined as transparent and the PPU does the read modify write cycle internally. Yeah, but Nintendo only wanted 2d on that system.

Back when a dev couldn't rely on hardware to pick up the slack in programming efficiency. Stuff like this and Roller coaster tycoon will always be impressive 👍

@user-yg4kj2mf1p

Жыл бұрын

As I said above, you shouldn't exploit programming tricks or rely on timing on today's consoles. All consoles after the PS3 and Xbox 360 aren't static hardware (for example they have "pro" versions) and future hardware and OS versions will not be able to replicate every quirk perfectly, let alone timings.

@bltzcstrnx

Жыл бұрын

Back then game developers were programmers. Nowadays 80% of the team are artist.

@johntrevy1

Жыл бұрын

@@bltzcstrnx Especially with most devs using established engines.

@lpfan4491

Жыл бұрын

@@user-yg4kj2mf1p Sure, but simple self-optimization is still ignored way too often and some games are made worse for absolutely stupid reasons.(Such as making mobile games half as fast on intended hardware by including bloated anti-emulator code.) It is still a valid thing to look up to people who actually know what they are doing in their version of the given field.

@SomeRandomPiggo

5 ай бұрын

@@user-yg4kj2mf1p Not all optimizations are unsafe like that, there are plenty that are just good design like Quake's BSP for collisions and PVS for working out what the player can see at one time. The majority of modern software prioritizes getting something to the level of "working" without actually making it spend CPU and GPU cycles effectively

Crazy how you can get used to news like this. Always have to remember all the work behind the scenes...

Just wanna say thanks for making some of the best content on this site, your videos have gotten me into retro games again.

Programmers like Randy Linden are freakin' rock stars in our eyes! The unsung masters that chill behind the curtain. Wordsmiths and mathematicians... Crafting and abstracting beautiful works of art... We salute you!

@randallinden

Жыл бұрын

Thanks so much -- I appreciate your very kind words and thoughts!

@TwinOpinion

Жыл бұрын

​@@randallinden We love your work, sir! What you've done for software, video game preservation, and emulation is simply staggering!

@randallinden

Жыл бұрын

@@TwinOpinion Again, thank you for the kudos and appreciation -- I'm honoured to have had an impact on technology throughout my career.

@seamistseamist

Жыл бұрын

@@randallinden Account created today, most likely a fake.

I've learned in the last 15 years that homebrew communities can really pull some amazing stuff. This is incredible work.

An impressive port engineered by an impressive mind.

Every time I see a video like this, it makes me wonder what modern hardware would be capable of with this level of optimization.

@nickwallette6201

Жыл бұрын

Well, I would say mostly: Platform exclusives, late in the system’s life cycle.

@bltzcstrnx

Жыл бұрын

Modern games are made by artists not programmers, so there's that. Also in modern systems, programmers no longer have direct access to the hardware. So we wouldn't see these kinds of hardware level optimisation in recent years.

@nine1690

Жыл бұрын

Exactly, it literally cannot happen. Similar to the advent of operating systems for PCs, consoles too gained operating systems. In both situations it obfuscated the hardware from the end user, allowing for simpler use (in the case of PCs) and less talented developer requirements. Additionally, hardware specs increased so rapidly that unless you were doing an ambitious port (like Witcher 3 to the Switch) and weren’t a completely incompetent moron then it was a safe bet your software ported over without much change. Really the last time I can think of that hardware played a genuine role in game dev was the PS3, which was an insanely powerful console that no one knew how utilize.

@bltzcstrnx

Жыл бұрын

@@nine1690 modern "obfuscation," or abstraction to be more precise, is not done to make things simpler. It is to better have seperation of concerns among internal systems. This is needed in modern OS because they need to have better resource sharing management and security requirements. Old ways of direct hardware no longer suitable for modern development because of this. No abstraction means that a resource can only be used by exactly one program. Not to mention people nowadays are very sensitive in terms of device security. Running a software that have full access to your hardware is a security nightmare. The simpler part is just a by product of this since now you can hide more complicated routines under an API. This will in turn call another API that usually abstracting another routine and so on. Edit: other thing to note is that modern hardwares are very complex. Having developer to manually manage all of this complexity is just too much. There are no comparison in terms of complexity between GameBoy hardware and current modern console/PC hardware. Even the boot up process is far more complex than entire GBA hardware.

As a CS student, I can only dream to be as good of a coder as Randy Linden. I don't do a lot of coding in my free time due to other hobbies and I'm increasingly interested in theoretical CS, but he def inspires me to improve my coding skills!

@mysteryencoder9997

Жыл бұрын

You def want to do it as a hobby, traditional education isn't enough and gives you the core concepts as it's meant to, it's really having a passion for this stuff that takes you to the level of Randy.

Randy Linden did the impossible several times. Randy is one of a kind and a legend.

@randallinden

Жыл бұрын

You are too kind -- thank you so much!

@seamistseamist

Жыл бұрын

@@randallinden Account created today, most likely a fake.

@mortenera2294

Жыл бұрын

@@seamistseamist Stop already, goddamnit. I'm tired of seeing you call him a fake

@seamistseamist

Жыл бұрын

@@mortenera2294 I already apologized in multiple comments, now in this one, sorry.

Imagine an alternate reality where people with programming talent like this were hired as optimization specialists across the gaming industry, like wizards called in to finalize game engines. Imagine the performance; imagine how much more we could be doing with what we already have.

@josedorsaith5261

Жыл бұрын

But instead we chose HR departments and diversity quotas

@NicholasBrakespear

Жыл бұрын

@@josedorsaith5261 And unnecessary new shading techniques when core gameplay and physics haven't been polished.

@adc_ax

Жыл бұрын

@@josedorsaith5261 certified gamer moment

@alexanderfreeman

Жыл бұрын

@@josedorsaith5261 HR departments are incredibly important. For instance, they're a place employees who've been harassed can turn to for help.

@adamboye89

Жыл бұрын

@@josedorsaith5261 what?

oh my gods it's been years since I've heard the name LikSang Why do you make me feel so old

really cool! Thanks MVG for taking the time to share these amazing stories with us. Watching your video over breakfast before I start work. Great start to my day

These are the kinds of stories I enjoy hearing about. Keeps me motivated when i get stuck on something.

Fascinating as always! Thanks for covering this! 😊

Could watch videos on Quake ports all day. Always an interesting subject

That was nice of Randy to give you all of this info. These impossible port videos are my favorite series of yours.

That Linden kid knows his onions.

These are my favorite videos you’ve been doing, particularly since I’ve been porting my own 3d engine to the pico system lately. I’m no where near Randy’s level of optimization and the rp2040 is a more powerful chip, but it’s inspiring to see these accomplishments.

I've never watched your videos before but this was randomly suggested to me and I have to say, great content. It was really interesting and you broke it down in a way that me, who has no knowledge of how hardware or even software works, could understand. Great video I look forward to more of these impossible ports

Thank you MVG. All these behind the scene stories you make gives us nerds a great insight on how games were developed. Awesome job and much love from Australia. We want more XD

Amazing that this was a one man project that wasn't ever finished, I love these crazy ambitious ports.

@randallinden

Жыл бұрын

Thanks for the kind words and compliments -- Technically, I didn't do it all by myself -- Aardappel made the levels, Karsten Koch and another guy did the music and I had modelers create the 3D models.

Sublime stuff Don't forget to check out Cyboid, which uses many quirks of Randy's Quake engine. Runs incredibly well even on shitty 10 y/o ARM hardware.

@randallinden

Жыл бұрын

Thanks for the compliments and kind words -- I appreciate it and, yes, Cyboid is available on Amazon's AppStore if you're curious to see how the game finally turned out.

@seamistseamist

Жыл бұрын

@@randallinden Your account was created today, refer to my other reply to you on Grongy's comment.

@bichwattefaq

Жыл бұрын

I think you mean 20-year-old ARM hardware. Shitty 10-year-old ARM hardware is like an iPhone 4S

@seamistseamist

Жыл бұрын

The account is real actually, false alarm.

The amount of depth you do for these videos MVG. My fucking man. You got Randy’s notes and everything

Loved the episode. I always enjoy these deep dives that talk a bit about the architecture of the system and the strange use cases of that architecture for optimization. Really inspiring for a current CS student.

Appreciation for carefully crafted assembly language is always welcome to learn about, and Linden deserves that appreciation for his coding.

If it ever finished and released to retail back then, this would, undoubtedly, be the most graphically intensive official game on the GBA. Though, I wonder if a homebrew group would try to port Quake to the GBA again. I mean, considering freaking Tomb Raider got a GBA port, it would be amazing to see.

@mortenera2294

Жыл бұрын

Hey, let's not exaggerate now. It's only two levels + Lara's mansion

I was waiting for a video as soon as I seen this. Good job!

Been binge watching some of your videos recently and I'm really enjoying them. I love how you combine the historical aspect with fairly in-depth explanations of what was happening behind the curtains in the code and hardware. Most other retro game youtubers are like, "here's an unopened game I got from ebay. It has a cool manual and stuff. Thanks for watching and see you next time."

I wonder what documentation Linden read to achieve this. I don't think a normal human being would be reasonably able to create a robust engine like this without previous knowledge of how this could be achieved in a simple hardware like the GBA.

@supermaster2012

Жыл бұрын

The official ARM Corporation manual for the CPU and a basic scientific method to discover things such as timings of the non-SoC components and instruction cycle costs. It's by no means a small feat but it's not incomprehensible either, the guy simply had a huge amount of patience and persistence, which is usually all that's needed to achieve anything in life. A lot of the niche information was also available already in the hombrew community, mostly from romhacking groups, it simply wasn't all collected in one friendly wiki, but the knowledge was out there for anyone willing to sit down and grind through pages and pages of obscure forum posts.

@luzten

Жыл бұрын

In the 80's, 90's and early 2000's programmers were very creative, smart and skillful, something nowadays is more hard to find.

@totalermist

Жыл бұрын

@@luzten It still exists, but it isn't valued anymore and hence less visible. Back then, hardware was expensive and developers were cheap. Today, it's the other way around so it simply doesn't make sense to have a developer sit down for two years to optimise the ever living crap out of their code when "good enough" actually gets projects finished. There's also another factor - online capabilities. Back in the 90s, console games were shipping as-is - no after the fact updates, bug fixes, or performance improvements. So code would *have* to be as good and as bug free as possible. Today, you can ship a beta version just to make the deadline and have a 50gb day-1 patch and no one even bats an eye anymore (which I find sad).

@FamousWolfe

Жыл бұрын

@@totalermist Back in the day, most game development companies weren't publicly traded either and didn't have shareholders to appease. This meant that game developers could really pour their hearts & souls into a game and make it really shine, rather than be forced to work on yet another fucking sequel of a game series that's been milked into oblivion because it represents less risk than trying something new. Not to mention the fact that hardware limitations really forced game devs to get creative, which I find is sorely lacking these days. Also yeah, 50gb day-1 patches really piss me off, that's why I don't preorder games and I usually wait at least 6 months until after a game's been released before I buy because that's when I consider the game "truly finished" lol.

The Saturn version was already impresseive, but this one surely rocks !! Great video dude :D

The opening seconds of that lovely music of your video is so NICE!

Great video. This is just incredibly cool. I don't know if you have ever interviewed Randy Linden on the channel, but that would be amazing.

Awesome video, very cool port/explanation

Carmack would even respect this

I'm not a fan of consoles, but I love the geeky exploration of the good old times. I wish there was a similar channel dedicated to PC games.

Good job with the in-depth technical explanation for how this was accomplished, great video!

@randallinden

Жыл бұрын

MVG and I spoke for over an hour going over the technical tricks and techniques I used in the prototype -- it was a great conversation that I wish he had recorded!

@seamistseamist

Жыл бұрын

@@randallinden Account created today, most likely a fake.

Great video! That engine is amazing! Im not the best programmer but ive been battling with a slow engine on nes to push the graphics and elements as much as possible, Im learning using look up tables to bypass math like multiplication is always great, and finding other tricks to lower the amount of a huge function running multiple times in a frame really helps too.

He should develop ports for switch, this guy really knows how to make ports. That’s very impressive, too bad it was never released

@thetechconspiracy2

Жыл бұрын

The problem with modern games is that they are designed to run on a specific engine such as Unity or Unreal, and rewriting the entire game to be optimized for the weaker hardware of the Switch would cost way too much money for not much in return. Older games like Doom and Quake were a lot simpler, to where it is feasible for an individual or small team to rebuild the engine from scratch, optimized for the hardware specific to that console, taking advantage of the custom video and sound hardware offered by the system. That isn't to say that there isn't anywhere a Switch port could be optimized (I'm sure if developers wanted to they could find plenty of ways to optimize fairly easily), but the fact is the Switch is flat out less powerful than the PS4/Xbox One, and the money that it would take to optimize the game to run on a custom engine (especially written in assembly, if Nintendo even lets you use it nowadays) won't be made back in sales, especially if the port is released years after the original release, ESPECIALLY when compared to the next-gen platforms.

@FamousWolfe

Жыл бұрын

@@thetechconspiracy2 Sad but true, it would basically be a hobby project and nothing more. Still, I can't help but wonder how much more the Switch would be capable of if the homebrew scene were really able to take advantage of the Switch's hardware without Nintendo summoning their Litigious Lawyers to the field in attack mode lol. Guess we'll find out once Nintendo moves on and the Switch is officially EOL'd.

@lpfan4491

Жыл бұрын

Honestly, I'd like to see someone push similar limits of the Wiiu. It's a pretty similar beast to the Switch powerwise and actually has more potential features to integrate(With basically every major gamefeature of the Switch being reproducable on it too. Wii-motes can substitute for the Joycons to a certain degree). It would be nice to finally smash the stereotype of "Wiiu fundamentally sucks so bad" when the only real downside it has is that it doesn't have handheld-mode.

Nice! I was hoping someone would cover this :D Great vid!

This is not only a technical achievement, but a form of art. A triumph of human mind. Too bad NDS and PSP could easily handle Quake or Quake 2 ports but never got official releases.

Guess it goes to show that over time as more management got involved and more deadlines got thrown at programmers the more bloated the code gets, given enough time and only the pressure of just wanting to make it work look how lean the code gets to create this. Maybe we'll see this more and more given how much more powerful hardware is getting

For _many_ years, I argued against 3D games or sections on GBA as merely being trickery; you can't actually do 3D, you can only do force perspective psuedo 3D that only looks good when not in motion. Seeing stuff like this back then would have totally changed my mind.

@FamousWolfe

Жыл бұрын

If you think about it, 3D videogames themselves are just mere trickery. They're basically fooling your eyes into thinking you're in a 3D environment when all you're really doing is just staring at pixels on a screen lol.

@pretzelboi64

Жыл бұрын

@@FamousWolfe What do you think the brain is doing? The cones and rods in your eyes are laid flat in the retina. Your own brain is just staring at a 2D image of the world and infers depth through neural processing.

Incredible! Congrats for this amazing video… i love to see theese insane acomplishments

Amazing the work you put into these videos. Great you give credit to someone almost none of us know, but now we do, thanks to you. Great Video.

This looks insane, looks like something that should be on a DS or PSP

A potential to cover in a future impossible port? Quake 2 on the atari falcon 030, a whole play list of development progress here kzread.info/head/PLNs6Jw4V4vlvafSs0H3Ww_M5nMm10m0UM I know the falcon isn’t too well known but still fascinating to see how far the hardware can be pushed with proper platform specific coding

Please host podcasts featuring legends such as Randy!

mindblowing stuff. there's mad genius people out there doing amazing work, props to MVG as well for shining a light on them

Randy Linden is seriously waaay up there in terms of programming legends.

Love these. Great stories.

What an incredible port, holy heck! It would have been awesome if you could have included some of your conversation with Randy in this video, or even made a separate video (for Patreon maybe?) showing the full interview. I would love to hear the two of you discussing the intricacies of the process; given your high level of knowledge and ability to ask pertinent questions, and Randy's deep knowledge of the engine and the insane techniques he used to make this happen, I'm sure it would have been an extremely illuminating discussion.

@randallinden

Жыл бұрын

Maybe one day MVG will do an interview -- I'd be happy to talk his ear off for hours if he'd let me!

@seamistseamist

Жыл бұрын

@@randallinden Account created today, most likely a fake.

This level of dedication, skill and optimization are practically extinct in the modern era when it comes to commercially released games. So sad knowing such a huge percentage of games released on every platform could've been way better..

aw man. really nice video but I was hoping to get a short interview with the dude - the maniac - the god - who did this

@randallinden

Жыл бұрын

I'm certainly up for an official interview if MVG wants to do one someday!

@seamistseamist

Жыл бұрын

@@randallinden Account created today, most likely a fake.

With insane stuff like this, sometimes I wonder what could've been if the GBA lasted a couple more years before it was replaced by the NDS, but I guess Nintendo had no other choice to stay competitive, especially considering that the PSP was also looming over the horizon at the time.

Love these types of video, would love to see you look into some other impossible ports. I’ve always been fascinated by the Lair engine on Wii.

Great video man, i love the fact that big brains mix gaming and experiment in such fashion!

one thing I don't understand, why is the armor amount constantly changing ? is it some kind of debug value ?

@GraveUypo

Жыл бұрын

yes, it's frames per second with one decimal displayed.

Wow....and I thought Saturn quake by lobotomy was insane!

I thought that ROM City Rampage was a fascinating push of old hardware, but this... is _something else entirely._ Just incredible.

That is absolutely nuts and Linden is a programing wizard. An Einstein of coding.

For a system Nintendo swore wasn't made for 3D, the GBA certainly did get a lot of 3D polygonal games.

@SomeOrangeCat

Жыл бұрын

Well just look at the ZX Spectrum. Sir Clive absolutely did NOT have games in mind when he developed it, yet it has one of the largest gaming libraries of any home computer ever made.

There are programmers at Nintendo that couldnt even begin to do what this guy did.. Talk about a Magnum Opus

Lmao I love that the original forest of illusion upload had a comment predicting that you'd make this exact video, really interested to see how it was accomplished

Great video , glad to see you back . Hope your move went well 👌👌👌

Unbelievable Randy must be one of the best coders in the world

@randallinden

Жыл бұрын

Thank you for the kind words -- I appreciate it!

@roocrew86

Жыл бұрын

@@randallinden thank you for your games. I wish you worked on my fav system the sega saturn. I think you could have got the best out of it

@randallinden

Жыл бұрын

@@roocrew86 Thanks, Brett -- I appreciate your sentiment and almost worked on the Saturn! As things turned out, my only experience with Sega hardware was on the Dreamcast.

@roocrew86

Жыл бұрын

@@randallinden your bleemcast emulator is also amazing and I still use it today! 😃

@randallinden

Жыл бұрын

@@roocrew86 Thanks for the support -- I appreciate it and I'm glad you're enjoying bleemcast!

I'd love if you did a video like this on Asterix and Obelix XXL for GBA which was a full 3D platformer on the GBA! I'd love to see how it was able to pull of PS1 level graphics on the GBA. Great video!

@CreativeWM_Personal

Жыл бұрын

It makes me want to know what those guys could do with actual PS1 hardware

I love these looks into technical achievements in gaming history. Great work from Lyndon. Thanks MVG for telling this story.

@randallinden

Жыл бұрын

An extra thanks to MVG for pointing me to Forest of Illusion who released the prototype -- without both of them no one would know about the project!

@seamistseamist

Жыл бұрын

​@@randallinden Account created today, most likely a fake.

Sweet that this was made at the time. Kind of sad it never saw the light of day but also kind of fun that we're finding out about it now at least. Also cool video.

This is a next level gba port. It's a shame the gba was on the decline when he finished the engine.

What a mad man! Would have loved this as as kid!

This dude sounds like an absolute wizard. It takes serious skill to make your game metamorphic.

These videos have always rocked but are a Godsend nowadays. Thank you for the enjoyable diversions.

Hey MVG, Randal Linden is in the comments somewhere ..., Keep an eye out for him, I would love to hear an interview of him on your channel by you.

@randallinden

Жыл бұрын

I'm available any time that MVG wants to do an interview -- he knows how to reach me!

Linde is a god! His example is what I keep saying: We need better software. We have plenty of hardware power now, and I feel that software is not optimized anymore. The use of generic code is the norm.

@goob8945

Жыл бұрын

This is why the mass adoption of unreal engine 5 makes me slightly sad, we won’t get as much bespoke project-specific wonder-code 😵‍💫😂

@TheNomanSoul

Жыл бұрын

@@goob8945 So true. And even the look and feel is the same. The art work is getting generic with photometry and character creation tools like meta humans.

@aliengenie8896

Жыл бұрын

To be fair, this isn't the olden days where handwritten assembly can beat a good compiler (and even if it can, the amount of work it would take to beat a compiler by an appreciable amount would be GARGANTUAN). A lot of tricks like this only work when the hardware is absolutely uniform across all units. Good luck doing this with a PC game where there are hundreds of different combinations of CPUs/GPUs that could be used with your games, some of which have yet to even be designed. Generic code is the norm nowadays for a reason.

@TheNomanSoul

Жыл бұрын

@@aliengenie8896 I was referring to consoles. And fixed hardware platform.

@travisgatlin536

Жыл бұрын

Agreed. High level languages are absolutely necessary for lots of things, but most of those languages are built upon one massive sandwich of abstraction layers. I can only imagine what modern hardware could do if they utilized practices like those described in the video.

It’s just amazing that a handheld like the GBA manages to make ports of FPS games. Looking at Quake on the GBA is indeed one amazing achievement here. Even Doom,Wolfenstein and Serious Sam came into this. The GBA is amazing.

At the end of the video you say that you had fun making this and I reckon it shows. The whole way through you seemed really enthused to be telling this story. And what a story! It's like something out of cyberpunk with programmers, giant corporations, hardware being pushed to its limits... assembly to interface the human with the machine!