The Story of Quake on the Game Boy Advance | MVG 

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

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.

Doom 3 is a safer bet.

On the ps vita

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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 !

Him and Chris Saywer are legends.

@@SurriSama Let's not forget Rebecca Heineman!

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.

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

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

@@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.

Thanks for the compliment -- I appreciate it!

@@randallinden 🍻💪

@@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?

@@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!

@@randallinden You da man

I love your vids

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.

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.

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.

@@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

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

Virtual Boy 🤮

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.

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.

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.

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

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!)

Imagine if he ported it to DS.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

@@legros731 to prove you can, duh

@@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.

@@legros731 why bother making a garbage comment

@@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

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

@@randallinden your stuff is always super impressive!

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

@@seamistseamist MVG is that influential!

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

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

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

@@randallinden You are most welcome Randal!

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

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

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

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

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.

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

@@bltzcstrnx Especially with most devs using established engines.

@@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.

@@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

lmao the GBA is not underrated

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.

PS2 is underrated

@@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.

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

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

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.

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.

@@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.

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.

You are too kind -- thank you so much!

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

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

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

But instead we chose HR departments and diversity quotas

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

@@josedorsaith5261 certified gamer moment

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

@@josedorsaith5261 what?

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!

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

The account is real actually, false alarm.

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

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

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.

@@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.

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.

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

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

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.

@@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.

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.

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

@@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).

@@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.

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!

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

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

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.

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

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

@@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

@@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.

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

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