/vr/ - Retro Games

No, it was pure unfiltered butthurt at Sony. Not quite as pathetic as their revenge fling with Philips but still a major example of cutting off their nose to spite their face

Probably not financially, but I'm glad I didn't have to sit through a ton of loading screens.

>>4433841
>So was it a good decision by Nintendo to stick to cartridges for the fifth generation?
Yes. Mario 64 and the Zelda games would not have been nearly as well remembered with a loading screen every 10 minutes.

I love carts, loading times are annoying and most games used all that CD storage capability to include FMVs, rarely the games needed the CD storage size unless they were RPGs (which again, mostly filled data with videos).
I understand the shortcomings of carts, I understand they are more expensive and have less storage, but often, I think I'd rather not have FMVs and forget about loading screens.
It's nice that the N64 was the last major console to use carts.

>>4433841
For Nintendo, yes. They owned the manufacturing plants where the cartridges were produced, had developers pay additional royalties to help cover the cost, etc. Basically, Nintendo heavily profited off of each game licensed, manufactured and sold. It was a great deal for them. A lot of people like >>4433856
have this retarded belief that Nintendo used cartridges to "spite Sony", as if a bunch of people at some company give a fuck about a retarded corporate rivalry. No, they stuck with cartridges because it allowed them complete control over the production of games from start to finish, thus yielding the most profit.

Devs... not so much. Development costs were already high due to Nintendo's somewhat draconian policies, but they had to pay for the additional cost of using expensive cartridges as well. This one of the main reasons so many developers jumped ship once the competition began using CDs -- the cost to develop on Nintendo's platform was just too high.

With that being said, I personally love that the N64 used the cartridge format. They look better, last longer, and have a nice aesthetic to them. Contrary to what most people believe, the amount of storage that N64 cartridges possessed was more than adequate for most games. The real issue was music, as you couldn't fit tons of CD quality music on them. As a result, it forced developers to be creative. This lead to use of techniques like 2D sprites in Mario Kart mixed with 3D environments, as it helped save space. You see this same kind of thing in a lot of other games too. Some people hate this aesthetic, I love it, and it probably would never have happened if Nintendo had used CDs.

Also, the cartridge format allowed for expandability. While it was underutilized, it had the potential to allow for features like what was seen with the Super FX and Mode 7 chips on the SNES, or the additional of modems, real-time clocks, etc.

>>4433841
No because it dethroned them from being number 1 in the console wars. They've been struggling ever since.

>>4433864
Now imagine how could these games have been without the storage limitations, a zelda game with better quality textures and real music.

>>4434002
The cart's not the limitation when it comes to textures on the N64.
The problem is the 4kb texture cache and how the N64 is forced to use it.

>>4433871
Sprites for the racers in Mario Kart is to save on computational resources, not ROM size.

>>4433871

Also they made piracy pretty much impossible which for any company is an added bonus even if that "each pirate copy = one lost sale" is complete bullshit.

Chris Seavor has mentioned that Conker would have been impossible on a disc-based system

>>4434002
>better quality textures
Better? The PS1 and Saturn both had lesser-quality textures than the N64.

>>4433987
>struggling ever since
>their stock has risen 85% just this year
>one share is over $480

>>4433841
This is what lead to Sony taking the lead and building their Playstation empire. Worst move Nintendo ever made.

Y'all complain about loading times, you guys must have 0 patience.

>>4433841
PS1 hardware+price was unbeatable.
If Nintendo want to share the market they must sell something
Different.

>>4434049
The 4KB cache on the N64 essentially limits your texture size to 32x32px, many games on other systems like the PS1 regularly do 64x64px, maybe up to 256x256 if the game had VRAM to spare. To simulate "larger" textures on the N64 you'd have to waste precious polygons and split your texture down to 32x32 and map them across different polygons.

Low-res textures = Low quality textures

>>4433841
Think about how expensive this game was, what $70 in 1996?!? Holy Shit what does that inflation equal to now?! Were games more expensive back then? Thoughts..?

>>4433871
>No, they stuck with cartridges because it allowed them complete control over the production of games from start to finish, thus yielding the most profit.
Wasn't anti-piracy another major reason? Like the mini-dvd's on the GCN.

>>4434375
According to google the answer is...
> $70 in the year 1996 is equivalent to $109.21 in 2017, a difference of $39.21 over 21 years.

>>4434379
And also not paying royalties to Sony

>>4434384
Yea that's a lot, especially when you're a kid in the 90s, no job yet.

>>4434375
>>4434384
Yeah but that doesn't take into account the fact that everything else was a fuckton cheaper and people had more money.

>>4434395
Ahh guess you're right, it all evens out, the 90s was a different world, innocent times, 9/11 ushered in a new shitty era.

>>4434375
Some of that was because Nintendo's main ROM chip manufacturing plant got destroyed by a tsunami, so prices wound up being significantly higher than they expected.

>>4434395
I wan to say the regular cost of games were $50 but even this TRU ad from 1996 shows games ranging from $60-$70.

But damn, $20 for a 1st party controller, those were the days.

>>4434395
Objectively wrong. Real wages have remained the same.

>>4434416
>Objectively wrong. Real wages have remained the same.
Right... which is why people had more money back then. Are you retarded? Are you too young to remember when gas was a dollar a gallon?

>>4434413
I'd say the actual games might have been slightly more expensive, but like you said, controllers were cheaper, accessories were cheaper, (most) consoles were cheaper, etc. And again, when you only pay 5 bucks to fill up your tank and 3 dollars for a trip to McDonald's, that extra $10 for a game doesn't hurt as much. Man, shit is so expensive these days.

>>4434428
All good points, yes alot of other things besides video games were just cheaper. I do remember $1 a gallon gas, 50 cents can of soda, 75 cents for 20oz of soda out of soda machines.

>>4434428
Controllers alone, fucking hell. I get they add a ton more bells and whistles to them now but take the Nintendo Switch Pro Controller... $70?! Fuck that.

>>4434440
Yeah man, those were the days. I remember my local grocery store had a vending machine where you could buy soda for 25 cents.

>>4434449
I remember that too, good times indeed.

>>4434445
Near me they have them for $80... 80 fucking dollars. I could literally go buy an older console and like 5 awesome games for that price. Shit isn't even close to being worth it.

>>4434449
Yup and actually named brand. Coke Pepsi ect.

>>4434261
It's not that games with loading times are automatically bad, of course not, but between having loading times and not having them, what do you prefer?

>>4434423

I remember back in 1999 this one gas station by me would offer gas for 49 cents a gallon on Sundays. It's hard to imagine filling up a car for about 5 dollars.

>>4433841
Yes. I love plastic shit.

I love cartridges but at the time they couldn't compete with CDs.

It was a good call. 64MB is plenty of room for the sorts of games being made in the 90s. No load times is and was huge.

>>4434561
Except companies tried to use the smallest size possible to save on the manufacturing costs

>>4433841
Only shit developers needed CD storage.

>>4434261
I agree. They act like whiny babies over it.

>>4434342
>The 4KB cache on the N64 essentially limits your texture size to 32x32px
That’s with mipmaps which the other consoles didn’t support. Normal color depth textures could be 64x64, but if you compromised on color depth like Goldeneye did you could fit 128x64.

>PS1 regularly do 64x64px, maybe up to 256x256
PS1 never does 256x256 in practice due to memory bandwidth limitations, except in 2D environments.

>To simulate "larger" textures on the N64 you'd have to waste precious polygons and split your texture down to 32x32 and map them across different polygons.
You pretty much have to do the same thing on PS1 due to its lack of perspective correction, except you have to be even more aggressive with subdividing than you do on N64.

>>4434598
What was even the point of mipmapping in 240p, most people couldn't even fucking tell.

>>4434604
I disagree, you can definitely tell shimmering / aliasing on distant textures without mipmaps even on low-res.

Why'd they do it? Silicon Graphics (makers of the N64's GPU) were obsessed with eliminating jaggies at any cost.

>>4433841
No, it was the biggest mistake. They lost Square because of it. If N64 had CDROM drive, Square would have made games only for N64 and they would not have lost Jap market and many third supports.

>>4434597
>>4434261
>>4434261
>>4434597
If I wanted load times, I'd play games on my PC. N64 was a unique experience. Playstation was like the PC's retarded cousin.

>>4434657
>Jap market
Whoa, what a huge important demographic full of young consumers.

>>4433841
I think they should have released the N64 in 1995 as is, and then launch the DD sooner like in 1998 while also pushing it much harder than they did. Maybe go as far as to ration carts after the DD launches so devs/publishers are forced to move to CDs except for rare exceptions.

>>4433871
>As a result, it forced developers to be creative. This lead to use of techniques like 2D sprites in Mario Kart mixed with 3D environments, as it helped save space.

That takes up way more space than a basic model

>MUH LOAD TIMES

Even back then I didn't find them severe enough to hinder the experience. Most of the good games did a good job masking or minimizing them that it was a non-issue

>>4434408
Memory prices on the whole were high in the late 90s.

>>4434989
Didn't certain Namco games have OG pacman during loading screens?

Say it with me. Say it loud!

296 N64 games vs 2000+ PS1 games

>>4434406
>90s
>innocent times
>he thinks the entire world is America
No I'd rather not relive my country in the 90s.

>>4433841
Considering how loud the GameCube disk drive was, it was better in N64 days.

>N64 didn't have load times

Especially because N64 couldn't have the levity of loading uncompressed data that meant more stuff had to be uncompressed which required load times, whether you noticed them or were being distracted by something else.

>>4435090
Still much faster than a CD, Tim.

>>4435090
Not every game used compression. Of those that did, some used real-time decompression like MP3, so no additional loads.

How many N64 games actually have load times? Wipeout 64, Quake 2 and what else?

>>4434476
I prefer extraordinarily long load times to I can bask in my nice looking entertainment center I paid too much for and avoid playing bad games that are utterly incomprehensible, though I won't admit it.

>>4435246
I think Majora's Mask had short load times disguised as the screen fading in and out.

>>4434989
Some older CD games had annoyingly loading times like Road Rash but most if not every playstation game from 1997 onward had very short loading times that were barely a little longer than loading from a cartridge. Personally, I think they are both viable options for the 5th gen but I just like to pop in a cartridge and power it on instead of opening a disc tray, putting a disc in it, closing the tray and then pressing play to finally boot the disc. Not that it's that much additional work though.

>>4435306
That's just the RAM being cleared and new assets getting dumped into it. It's fast but not instant.

>>4435318
>most if not every playstation game from 1997 onward had very short loading times that were barely a little longer than loading from a cartridge

>>4435318
>most if not every playstation game from 1997 onward had very short loading times that were barely a little longer than loading from a cartridge
Pray tell what some of these games were?

>>4434294
PS1 had generally worse hardware though. We all know this

>>4435481
true but it had nearly all of the decent software, aside from Nintendo's first party games.

>>4434046
and naugty dog said crash would be impossible on a cart. It's bullshit. Maybe they'd have to change some shit but it'd be the exact same game.

I think FFVII could have been released on it, just don't put any FMV and have an episodic release, it would have taken just two cartridges.

>>4437137
Conker wouldn't have ever been possible on PS1 without downgrades, while Crash would have worked on N64 perfectly on a large 32-64 MB cartridge. I suppose the problem is that in 1996 when Crash was being made there were no large N64 cartridges yet.

>>4437146
What are you talking about? Crash would fit on an original N64 cart no problem. There's only like 3 environment palettes and the game is short as fuck.

>>4437171
Not so sure about that. Crash's game engine uses an absolutely insane pre-computed depth-buffer for every single frame of Crash walking down every single level. That's a LOT of data that has to be stored somewhere.

>>4437146
FF VII would not have been possible on a N64 at all, it's why Square switched to the PS1 early in the game's development.

>>4437180
I agree. Naughty Dog had some insanely talented programmers. Of course, so did Rare for that matter.

>>4437183
IIRC Crash 1 is ~32 MB with all the junk data removed. But the largest N64 carts in 1996 were like 8 MB.

I read some contemporary Usenet posts from the late 90s talking about various details such as the water textures in Crash 3 that weren't possible at all on a N64.

>>4437187
>various details such as the water textures in Crash 3 that weren't possible at all on a N64.
N64's GPU can literally do everything the PS1's GPU can do and then some. The ONLY exception is that additive blending is bugged on N64's GPU which in practice meant it was almost never used.

If the water textures in Crash 3 rely heavily on additive blending (I don't know I haven't had a good look) then you might have a point. Otherwise that's bullshit.

I think in both cases, the Saturn and N64 had designs that were too ambitious for period technology to handle properly.

>>4433841
It cut back on loading, which was the marketing point back in the day. Were you even alive when 64 came out? How do you not remember this?

>>4433841

for a consumer's perspective, yes. For a business perpective, no.

Yes. Cartridges are superior to discs.

>>4435318
Mkt trilogy had load times in battle.

>>4437453
it was because Nintendo is notoriously afraid of pirating. but I actually liked the cartridges always better. playing a game with loading sequences seems kinda cheap to me, like playing a pc game. and n64 games looked a lot better than ps games, although they had a fraction of the disk space. perfect dark was only 30mb, imagine that!

>>4435306
Ocarina of time had that too

>>4437453
It is because the manufacturing license agreement of cartridge was Nintendo’s vested-interest structure since Nes era. It’s a kind of black box and they didn’t want to lose it.

>>4433841
No, they lost a ton of third party support over it and they're still suffering the effects of it today.

>>4433841
For everything gained by keeping cartridges, something was lost. People hated the decision at the time, but if they went with discs there's no telling what could have happened. I feel like the 64DD would have made up for this a little if it didn't fail so badly.

>>4438773
>n64 games looked a lot better than ps games

I honestly thought you were shit talking until i Googled up some reference images. Damn, Ninty didn't do to bad compared to some of the PSX titles.

>>4438773
N64 looked better than ps1? Who are you? Ray Charles!? The n64 had weaker graphics and much worse sound

>>4440102
Also bear in mind how PS1 games always had textures shifting around in motion because they didn't have a functional z buffer.

>>4440110
I thought the z-buffer problem was why polygons kept clipping through each other. Did that cause the texture warping too? I always thought it was something else doing that.

>>4440110
>>4440118
It's the non-standard affine texture mapping that causes the shimmering, nothing to do with the lack of a z-buffer.

>>4435067
>he thinks anyone cares about a country outside of God's view

>>4440104
The Reality Co-processor runs circles around the Emotion Engine.

>>4435067
what country

>>4440104
>The n64 had weaker graphics and much worse sound
Lmao imagine actually being this fucking stupid. One look at the specs will tell you that N64 blows the PS1 out of the fucking water. N64 had a 93.75mhz CPU and could push up to 1 million polys per second compared to the PS1's pathetic 33.8mhz processor and theoretical 180k polys. You would, literally, have to be mentally retarded not to understand how much more powerful the N64 was.

And before you start preaching bullshit about "cartridge format", it didn't make one shit of difference. CD format was superior for storing high quality audio, which was the PS1's only advantage, but a normal game had no problem fitting on even the smallest N64 cart. Not to mention, without the cartridge format, games like Ocarina of Time and Conker's Bad Fur Day wouldn't have been possible because they used special cartridge-only streaming techniques to quickly render large environments. There is nothing on the PS1 which can even approach the visual fidelity of the aforementioned games, let alone even more impressive titles like Perfect Dark, Majora's Mask, etc. Hell, the PS1 would implode trying to run even Super Mario 64.

Educate yourself fool.

>>4440102
They didn't do "to bad" because the N64 is literally 3 times more powerful than the PS1.

>>4434984
No it doesn't. If it were something like a sprite fighter with a huge roster and lots of fighters with extremely detailed animations then maybe, but in the case of something like MK64, a few simplistic sprites is way more space-efficient than models which need lots of textures.

>>4434379
>>4434386
Yes and yes. Nintendo has always had a hard on for anti-piracy, so I'm sure it crossed their minds when deciding to stick with the cartridge format. And yeah, that's part of why they produced their own cartridges, no royalties paid out for the CD format. Anyone who thinks Nintendo fucked up during the 5th gen doesn't understand their business practices or the basics of economics. In reality, they probably made more money than Sony did on the PS1. Part of the reason they decided not to go with a disc assembly is because they added an additional $150 onto the cost of production. So whereas Sony probably lost money on every console until well into the PS1's life cycle, the N64 was hugely profitable on every unit sold from day 1.

>>4434971
>complaining about load times
>PC's retarded cousin
>Seething Nintendrone confirmed
Load times were literally not a big deal. It took very little time.

>>4440102
>Mortal Kombat 4
Mortal Kombat Gold on Dreamcast blows them both out of the water.

>>4437186
>IIRC Crash 1 is ~32 MB with all the junk data removed. But the largest N64 carts in 1996 were like 8 MB.
Nope, the smallest N64 cart is 32mb, the largest being 524mb. N64 could have run Crash no problem. The only reason Crash was so "advanced" is because they had to use a ton of retarded tricks and workarounds to even get the game running on the PS1's terrible hardware. SM64, a launch title, was far more impressive.

>>4440571
Wow, a 6th gen console with 5x the computing power has a game that looks better than 5th gen consoles... you must have thought about that one real hard, Jethro.

>>4440568
>It took very little time.
LOL
good one faggot

>>4440568
Sad thing is, he's not wrong. PS1 was filled to the brim with hackjob PC ports and sold itself partially as a multimedia machine. The long ass load times were there too. Kind of funny, it really was like the PC's retarded cousin.

The terrible audio quality was my biggest gripe with n64.

Could high quality audio be patched onto a rom and then used on an everdrive?

>>4440571
>Bringing up a Dreamcast between a N64 + PSX battle

>>4440572
I think you are a little confused by the mutiple incarnation sof bits and bytes. The maximum cartridge size for the N64 was 67 megabyte.

>>4440572
I think you are a little confused by the mutiple incarnations of bits and bytes. The maximum cartridge size for the N64 was 67 megabyte.

>>4435448
Soul Reaver?

>>4440646
Technically the N64 is a 6th gen console since it's not a 32 bit console, while the Dreamcast is a 7th gen console, since it's not a 64 bit console.

>>4437180
Yes, but the N64 had z buffering, so you wouldn't need that level of visibility data to get a solid framerate. There's a fair amount of good texturing going on, so the magic would have been more in getting that compression right for each unique texture

>>4440824
Generations have to do with when the console was released, not their power you numbskull. By that logic the Wii is 6th gen

>>4440881
>Yes, but the N64 had z buffering, so you wouldn't need that level of visibility data to get a solid framerate
No no, you've got it backwards. The problem with calculating the z-buffer in real-time is that it hits the memory bandwidth hard as fuck and can negatively impact on framerates. Arguably that's one of the main reasons why slowdowns happen in N64 games.

Crash pre-computing the depth buffer wasn't just to improve image quality on PS1 but also to speed things up dramatically, cause the console itself didn't have to calculate jackshit.

>There's a fair amount of good texturing going on, so the magic would have been more in getting that compression right for each unique texture
Assuming you have a big enough cartridge you won't have to do compression. The challenge would be in the artists properly ensuring that large textures are split up into smaller pieces appropriately the way the N64's GPU likes it. At least you wouldn't have to use mipmapping in a Crash port.

>>4440596
>The terrible audio quality was my biggest gripe with n64.
???

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YRGbfufHG8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Y0RwyI8j8k
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNCedOIvoZo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuQSKUTe89g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvPjJdqbSc8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tCpGyaG0Q8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KojdPb_aP4k
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTl0ky4DcHA

>>4434395
Adjust for inflation and the majority of prices back then are relatively the same as today.

>>4441464
No they aren't. Everything was a lot cheaper back then, yet minimum wage and average income was mostly the same.

Just look at RE2 on the n64 compared to the PSX and you'll see just how cucked of a manlet machine the PSX was.

>>4441502
Just look at how much better SM64 looks than even the latest games on the PS1 and you'll see how cucked of a manlet machine the PS1 was. What a fucking piece of shit, god damn.

>>4441517
Yet everyone at my school was convinced the n64 was garbage.
If only they knew how bad things really were

>>4433841
In the short term it was a great idea for Nintendo. They got paid to make cartridges for 3rd parties, but third parties hated it. Nintendo only created carts in allotments of 200,000. So if you thought you could only sell 380,000 units you had to buy 400,000 units and end up with 20,000 extra.

>>4434976

DD was shit concept from the gate and failed in Japan and should have never been attempted.

>>4441502
>>4441517
Even though the N64 was more powerful doesn't mean the PS1 was bad. There are plenty of graphically impressive games on PS1. In some ways the machine punched above its own weight.

The best thing about PS1 is that Sony made it an easy and simple development platform, so MOST developers could get something good out of it. There was none of the "manage 9 processors" bullshit like Saturn, or the tiny cartridge space and "walking on thin ice" bullshit memory architecture like N64.

>>4441659
Notice how most people who promote it think it is a CD-ROM. They don't even know what they are talking about.

>>4435052

controlled quality control and development vs shovelware free for all

>>4440226
Russia

>>4433841
It made the games age better due to no loading times and less cutscenes.

>>4441884
The games also age better since you don't have to worry about scratched disks. There's nothing worse than buying a used game that looks fine, but has one scratch that makes playing past a certain point impossible.

>>4441660
Yeah, nah, the PS1 was straight up garbage. The best looking games on PS1 are SNES-tier 2D games like Alundra that any system could have pulled off. When you get into actual 3D territory, there are very, very few games which don't look like absolute dogshit. Aside from having shit specs out of the gate, it also lacked any filtering capability, perspective correction, etc., so it was unable to even produce a stable 3D image, thus the diarrhea textures and polygonal jitter. It was, in every way, a shitty machine from a design standpoint. When you say most devs were able to get something "good" out of it, what you really mean is that amateur devs with little to no experience making games were able to pull off something mildly acceptable to the general public, because people had low standards and were impressed by anything with polygons. When you look at the N64, it isn't even funny how much more you could squeeze out of it given the right developer. All that the simplicity of the PS1's design led to was a huge library of really fucking horrible games, which is one reason that Nintendo, literally, made the N64 difficult to develop for such that it would weed out amateur devs and bring higher quality games to the forefront. And it worked, given that the N64 has some of the best remembered/influential games of all time, and the PS1, outside of a few JRPGs and platformers (both of which did nothing to advance gameplay or graphics in the industry whatsoever), stews in mediocrity.

>>4434046
>what is Conker Live and Reloaded

>>4433841
Not financially, which pushed away third parties, but it was a good technical decision, because the loading times used to be horrible.

>>4434657
>They lost Square because of it.
>They lost Japan
Boo fucking hoo. Muh JRPGs. FF1000 doesn't make me pick a console.
Sony didn't win the 5th gen because of Square, they won because it was cheaper than the saturn, easy to pirate, everyone was in awe of CD consoles, and the N64 launched late. Square alone did not make the play station one of the best selling consoles ever.

>>4441719
For the motherland!

Lol No. It was one of the reasons why they lost to the psx.

>>4433987
Anon, Nintendo isn't by any means the behemoth that it was during the 8-16 bits eras, but their current situation hardly counts as "struggling".

>>4442119

FF7 was console seller. I like the 64, but if you ignore that the JRPG were a selling point in that frame of time you are being delusional

>>4442053
Was made for an XBox, which had fuckloads more ram compared to the PS1, and has a 12x speed dvd drive, where the PS1 has a 2x speed drive.

I suppose cartridges made the N64 stand out instead of bein seen as just a PS1 competitor. Who knows though, since Nintendo had a longer history maybe theirs may've been seen as the main cd based console.

>>4441719
You preferred being communist?

>>4434261

I still have ptsd from the medal of honor allied assault loading times

>>4433871
>The real issue was music, as you couldn't fit tons of CD quality music on them
Neither did the PS1 or Saturn, which is why both have excellent sound chips on top of their CDs. The N64 has neither because the only good soundchip Nintendo ever had came from Sony.
http://psf.joshw.info/

>>4433841
For them, I guess. CDs were a meme at the time and games didn't need them. Name one game from that generation that utilized CD storage without relying on shitty, unnecessary FMVs and "CD quality" music.

>>4434027
Dumping a rom is pretty easy, even back then.

>>4435067
>tfw from Australia and also feel nostalgic for the 90s
Fuck your shitstain CUNTry

>>4444763
>can't fit CD quality audio on a CD
Are you literally retarded?

>>4444763
Wtf did I just read?

>>4445651
>Wtf did I just read?
The words of a rambling autist whose opinion should be duly discarded.

>>4445501
>Name one game from that generation that utilized CD storage without relying on shitty, unnecessary FMVs and "CD quality" music.
Bingo. The PS1 and Saturn didn't need discs to fit the actual games on them, they needed them for shitty FMV cutscenes and music. People shit on the N64's lack of a dedicated sound chip, but the music always sounded fucking great to me.Devs had the choice of whether to devote more system power to computing graphics or audio, so it was actually possible to produce better audio quality on the N64 than either of the other consoles, it's just that most devs (and rightfully so) devoted more computational resources to rendering quality graphics rather than audio. Yet, games like Zelda still have music that is better and more memorable than anything on other consoles. I guarantee most N64 owners can still hum Song of Storms or Zelda's Lullaby 20 years later, yet you'd be hard pressed to find any regular person that remembers a single damn track from any PS1 or Saturn game.

Also, I hate this perception that the PS1 and Saturn had this amazing sound quality to begin with... they didn't. Go play fucking Diablo, it's one of the most ear-stabbing pieces of shit ever made. Plenty of games sounded like total ass because the devs didn't give a fuck about utilizing the hardware correctly.

>>4445657
Thanks for clearing that up.

http://www.fultonsoft.com/an-interview-with-the-playstation-museum/
>What was the most common problem that developers had?

>...Third would be optimizing data access. Actually, I’m not sure this strictly fits the question, because this was really a problem that developers in general simply avoided addressing at all.
>Considering that the PS only had 3.5mb of RAM total, it really shouldn’t ever have taken more than about 12 seconds to load anything from the CD. Sure, it might take more time to process that data in some fashion but the actual data read time shouldn’t be much more than about 12 seconds since that’s how long it would take to fill up 3.5mb of RAM at the 300 kps “double-speed” rate.
>The recommended method of getting data off the CD was to simply read raw sectors. We had tools that allowed you to put your data together and figure out the sector offset for any given item, but doing all this was a lot of extra work for the programmer.
>It was much easier to use the available standard C library functions for file reading, but it was extremely inefficient since there was no caching for the file system. For example, reading two small 2 kilobyte files could take several seconds because of the need to seek back and forth between the disc’s ISO directory info and the actual data. Now multiply that idea by the amount of time needed to fill up the machine with all the data for a game level.
>Ultimately, the slower method was an order of magnitude more convenient and therefore used in many projects until “it’s too late to change now!” I lobbied for changes to the library to add some basic caching for the ISO directory data, but it never happened. It was my impression that the guys at SCEI were disinclined to spend time trying to “fix” a problem that was caused mainly by game developers not doing things the optimal way. The other problem was that it would have taken a reasonable chunk of memory to do it right.

TL:DR Lazy devs were the cause of long loading screens.

>>4445674
Is there something wrong with the Diablo on Playstation (other than running at the wrong resolution, which makes pre-rendered games look bad because it destroys the illusion)? The PC game has absolutely sick sound design and music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0O4WbfgesfY

I agree about the supposed superiority of the PSX being nonsense though. There are great sounding PSX games, but I've also heard weak sounding shit. Does anything on the system blow F-Zero X or OoT away? Certainly not.