PS1 ROMs are like 3x as big as N64 ROMs. Doesn't more data typically require more processing power? If a machine can handle a 1gb game, I don't see why a 300mb game would give it trouble?
Why is N64 harder to emulate than PS1?
PS1 ROMs are like 3x as big as N64 ROMs. Doesn't more data typically require more processing power? If a machine can handle a 1gb game, I don't see why a 300mb game would give it trouble?
N64 is a much more powerful system. Its CPU is three times as fast as PS1's. Its GPU can actually do perspective-correct texture transformations and as much as /vr/ likes to b***h about the size of its texture cache, it's two times larger than PS1's. More data doesn't inherently mean more processing power is necessary as long as you only access small chunks of that data at a time. It's not like PS1 games play every music track or FMV file that's stored on the disc at the same time. Playing 7 different tracks one after another takes exactly as much processing power as playing the exact same track 7 times over, but those 7 tracks obviously take 7 times as much space.
>Doesn't more data typically require more processing power?
Not so much that it requires more processing power, but more that it requires more memory if you want to keep more shit loaded into, well, memory. The N64 had a fair bit of memory, but it wasn't entirely easy to work with.
N64 had very fast loading with the cartridge setup, it really took the blink of an eye to load up a full level for a fully 3D shooter game like Goldeneye 64, whereas for a system like PSX or Saturn, you had to wait for the thing to load stuff from the disc for a game which is a fraction as complex.
The cartridge media at the time can not hold all that much content though, 8mb was a common size, which is certainly something you can make a good game with, but relatively speaking it's an extreme bottleneck considering what a revolution discs were at the time, offering you hundreds and hundreds of megabytes on cheap physical media.
If you wanted to, you could make a game for PC or/and console which was on CD, and not just one CD, it could be multiple CDs, two, three, even more. You could have a game which was well over a gigabyte of content, and only a part of that would make up a recorded sound track and voice acting, you'd have plenty of space for all kinds of levels, characters, graphics, etc, etc. Again also, CDs were very cheap.
The largest N64 cartridges held 64mb, which was an upgrade, but it's still a far cry from what a CD could do, and these cartridges were a lot more expensive to make, ergo more expensive for consumers to buy.
>N64 is a much more powerful system. Its CPU is three times as fast as PS1's. Its GPU can actually do perspective-correct texture transformations
Those are all nice things, genuinely, but many devs did not get the best possible use out of the CPU or the memory.
>the size of its texture cache, it's two times larger than PS1's.
It's not nearly as bad, but this is a bit like arguing how the Atari Jaguar was totally 64bit.
There are Sega CD games that are bigger than 3DS games.
It's not the game's size, it's the console hardware. N64 is some moronic ass architecture that was based off of workstation tech never meant for video games. On top of this, the people working on N64 emulation are too up their ass about plugin-based solutions and don't want to start from scratch using modern emulation techniques/standards. This is why N64 decompilations see way faster progress and far better results, same with the Mister core, they aren't built around duct taping shit onto a moldy sandwich.
>plugin-based solutions
how is this bad exactly? duckstation got rid of plugins and broke backward support with older systems, meanwhile epsxe works on fricking everything
PS1 emulation was like this after psx_author disappeared without open sourcing his code. Went on for years, dealing with pcsx and epsxe plugin bullshit. Duckstation murdered plugins though, and now we are free of plugins.
Imagine how bad snes emulation would be today if byuu insisted on plugins lol.
what did byuu have anything to do with zsnes?
> Duckstation murdered plugins though, and now we are free of plugins.
Xebra and Mednafen got rid of plug-ins years before DuckStation existed, all that did was provide a better UI.
>Xebra and Mednafen got rid of plug-ins years before DuckStation existed, all that did was provide a better UI.
No UI | No English UI == no emulator for 9,999/10,000 people.
>what did byuu have anything to do with zsnes?
Snes9x and bsnes supplanted zsnes. Both are superior except for the UI and Christmas theme comfiness, or if you are playing on 15+ year old hardware.
> No UI
Mednaffe. Anyway, the main point being made still stands, it wasn’t DuckStation that got rid of plug-ins.
(OP)
Having less data may actually require MORE processing to be done to turn that data into something presentable. For example, consider Resident Evil 2 for the N64. It uses (I think) heavier compression algorithms to squish down as much as possible of the original game's data so it'll fit into a Nintendo cartridge - which means that every time you play the game, that compression has to be reversed to recover the original data for display or playback or whatever. (Of course they surely removed a lot of information in addition to merely compressing stuff more, but regardless, I expect that the N64 CPU has to spend a lot of extra time working to decompress stuff in that game that the PSX CPU didn't need to spend.)
Or consider CD audio versus MIDI-style music that uses instrument samples and some kind of encoding of a musical score. The PSX could just read raw audio data right off a CD and feed it to the sound hardware directly, while the N64 had to read its little instrument samples and musical score and then spend time mixing the samples together to recreate the intended music. Less data means more processing, again.
>If a machine can handle a 1gb game, I don't see why a 300mb game would give it trouble?
If your butthole can dump out a pound of shit, that means I should be able to frick your ass no problem, right?
Don't listen to all these fools. Yes, of course PS1 emulation is more complicated than N64. But there was a much greater interest in PS1 emulation, and that's why you saw it being overtaken
>Yes, of course PS1 emulation is more complicated than N64.
No, the PS1 is really simple hardware compared to the N64.
Plugins are overstated as being behind the remaining issues with N64 emulation. The Ares N64 core doesn't use plugins, unless you count it using the ParaLLEl Vulkan renderer a plugin, since that's how it functions in the other emulators that can also use it. The issues that remain are almost all timing related, and that's a core rather than plugin issue.
Also just the usual issues of people not knowing how to properly set up emulators.
The better N64 emulator's like Ares that use parallel don't even need setting up, a game either works or it doesn't.
I'm thinking about people who don't even get that far, they use crap like VBA or stable Dolphin or PJ641.6 and then complain that emulation for those consoles sucks.
To be fair, project64 1.6 WAS the best for a really fricking long time. It was like 7 or 8 years after it's release before Mupen finally caught up with it and even surpassed it in some ways (except in ease of use, that is) and zilmar was forced to actually release a public update, which itself had regressions that took a while to fix. And even then they were all still using the same old plugins they'd been using for ages, and those didn't get surpassed until much later still. So yeah, until 2017 or so you'd be forgiven if you thought little had changed since 2008.
Yep. Even on regular-ass Mupen64plus, as long as you're using the ParaLLEl plugins, the vast majority of games will work fine with no need to fiddle with much of anything. Not perfect, mind you, but fine enough to be playable and able to be completed. This is not taking into account shit like input lag, which is a whole other can of worms, only whether the game actually functions and doesn't have any graphical errors or sudden crashing and such.
Really, it's only Project64 at this point that is still a shit show in this regard, and it wouldn't surprise me if it's still the reason people think N64 emulation is still as shit as it's ever been. It can use the ParaLLEl plugins, but they don't come with it, and neither does it come with the best audio plugin, something that Mupen hasn't had to deal with since forever ago. And the latest development versions are broken beyond belief. Just terrible.
No one liked the N64 so there is not much interest in emulating it.
N has 64 while PS got only 1, tardchama
N64 is based on an obsolete Silicon Graphics work station so it's difficult, resource intensive to emulate to accurate hardware detail.
There are no games worth playing on the nshittyfour so nobody really bothered