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by dtx1 1086 days ago
I think back to the Playstation 2-3 or N64 that all took years for developers to fully utilize the capabilities of the hardware. Yet the hardware engineers must have known how to do it long before the software side totally figured it out. After years of SW Development it's still just magic sand to me
2 comments
NotCamelCase 1086 days ago
It's also difficult for both SW teams' and HW teams' visions to converge, even under the same company, such that the product can be put to use to maximize performance and programmability WRT another, already-established product.

Different constraints and challenges on both sides of the aisle give rise to compromises which end up with lowered performance or lowered ease of use. This is one area where great authority over the entire stack lends you lots of leeways, e.g. Apple designing Metal API and the HW for it.

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ReactiveJelly 1086 days ago
I don't know. If the HW engineers knew something, wouldn't Sony or Nintendo have had them lend a hand on 1st-party titles?
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corysama 1086 days ago
I can tell you that for 3rd party titles back in the PS2/N64 days, the HW engineers handed you a spec manual explaining such useful things as "Bit 7 at address 0x70002048 toggle RFTAG mode on the MDEC". This was great when I went to write a VU emulator because no VU debugger was available. But, not so great when trying to figure out how to use the beast effectively. If you google "ps2 sdk docs" you can still find them after a while. If it's a doc with examples of how to do anything, it's from the software team at Sony Europe.

Sony Japan's documentation for how to use a mouse & keyboard on the PS2 was literally just the URL "https://www.usb.org/document-library/usb-20-specification". Eventually, they provided a binary-only keyboard library that everyone complained was buggy, but actually just had documentation that was so brief it was easily misunderstood. After black-box testing it for an hour it was clear it worked fine, just not how anyone would expect it to.

Many years ago I made a tiny stir online by writing a stream-of-consciousness report of the experience of dealing with stuff like this for a decade. https://venturebeat.com/games/what-is-making-games-like-for-...

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