To give an example, you could read 1234 as either 'one thousand and two hundred and four and thirty' or 'four and thirty and two hundred and one thousand'.
Now that I think about it though, I've only seen the latter way used for the year in a date.
Could we even catch up to them at all with the current propulsion technology? Not only did they have decades of head start but they took advantage of a unique planetary alignment that I don't think will come back around anytime soon.
Yes, easily. The alignment doesn't really matter for that. Almost all your speed gain comes from just Jupiter. Saturn is 30% the mass and 2/3 of the orbital velocity, so your gain from Saturn is only 20% of what you can get from Jupiter (and also your potential gain is limited by a minimum approach distance greater than the rings, or you'd hit them.) And the ice giants are slower and smaller yet; Voyager barely gained from Uranus and actually slowed from Neptune since it wasn't routed to gain speed there.
New Horizons achieved 80% of Voyager's velocity with just Jupiter, and it wasn't really trying to optimize for speed, it approached Jupiter only to 10 million km (over 100x greater than the planet's radius.) A probe dedicated to a fast slingshot past Jupiter could easily overtake Voyager. We haven't had any need to try, unless one of the missions to specifically study the heliopause-interstellar area happens. It would still take a while to catch up to Voyager's head start, but it's doable.
The alignment for Voyager was captivating, but it really wasn't as important as people typically think. Jupiter alone can get you anywhere and launch windows for it come every 12 years. If the four-planet alignment hadn't happened then, realistically we would have just done separate Jupiter-Uranus and Jupiter-Neptune missions.
Correct, both of them are really really old, accuracy wise. N64 emulation has improved a lot in the past 4-5 years, but old emulators haven’t caught up
Traditionally, emulators relied heavily on HLE. Low-level efforts are recent and not mature.
The miSTer core for N64 (and ModRetro's M64 core effort by the same person) and Ares N64 support are the only two serious efforts I am aware of. They tend to share compatibility issues, and advance together when understanding of the platform grows.
Obviously this is just a personal judgment, but I believe N64 is currently understood at quite a good level. Most of the docs are on https://n64brew.dev/. Low level efforts are recent for sure, though I'm not sure I would rate them as "not mature". Ares is able to run most of the library (including 64DD) and all the homebrew library with zero per-game configurations or tweaks.
The standards I applied are not some subjective "good level" but bsnes-level. The way Near intended.
The one game I am aware of and keep checking is "Wonder Project J2 - Koruro no Mori no Jozet".
Broken in both Ares and the miSTer core. AIUI nobody knows why it does not work yet, which shows gaps in the understanding of the machine. Otherwise not an issue for me, as I can run it on the actual hardware, which I own.
Note that, in no small way, I do appreciate the efforts. The state of the art of N64 emulation is much better now than just a few years ago. But it sure is not there yet.
I believe there's no way, on today's PC hardware, to emulate a 5th-gen console as accurate as a 4th-gen one. 4th-gen consoles can be emulated with cycle accuracy, 5th-gen cannot.
N64 also happens to be by far the heavier console to emulate in 5th-gen group. The unified memory architecture poses unique challenges for cycle accuracy, given that conflicting accesses by different peripherals are serialized in various ways, causing stalls, and also non deterministic behaviors as the signals cross different clock domains.
So the issue is in part that this level of detail hasn't been fully reverse engineered yet, but that's because there is no rush since the information wouldn't be usable anyway right now in an emulator.
5th gen definitely constitutes a huge jump in complexity. N64 is indeed not easy.
I am hopeful as ModRetro's m64 launches, with a FPGA larger than the one in the miSTer, and there's an associated influx of developers looking at the platform, we'll see renewed energy directed towards understanding the N64.
Unfortunately nowadays id Software doesn't seem to be at the cutting edge of engine technology anymore. Most interesting new developments now come from Unreal Engine as far as I can tell. Like virtual geometry (Nanite) or efficient ray traced direct illumination (MegaLights).
No, they are only using ray traced global illumination, which Unreal Engine already had several years prior (Lumen). They are not second place either, because several other engines also had it before id Tech.
> They ripped our Carmacks texture streaming stuff outta the engine years,ago though
I'm pretty sure they are still using texture streaming. There is no alternative to that.
The id tech 8 engine is a whole lot more performant than the unreal 5 engine and absolutely does what it needs to, fantastically, I would add for the game it was made for.
The PS1 doesn't an FPU but got a version of Quake 2, so it's possible. That said, it was somewhat different from the PC version, so it could be argued that it's not the same game.
I can't speak on Quake, but I was a level designer on the failed effort to port Unreal to PSX.
My understanding from talking to the coders at the time was that Unreal's software renderer was a huge advantage as a starting point. They were able to reuse a lot of the portal rendering stuff as setup on the R3K cpu, but none of the rasterization. That had to go to the graphics core, which was a post setup 2D engine that in addition to the usual sprites, could do tris and quads.
We had a budget of about 3k polygons post clipping, and having two enemies on screen would burn about half of that. The other huge limit is the texture cache was tiny, so we couldn't do lightmaps. Our lightning was baked in at vertex level and it just was what it was.
I imagine the situation with Quake was comparable. The BSP stuff would carry right over, but I can't imagine they got lightmapping proper working at the time. They'd also need some sort of solution for overdraw, as Quake's PVS was a lot more loose than Unreal's portal clipping.
The PS1 version uses a custom engine based on technology built for the game Shadow Master, the previous title by Hammerhead Studios. It was a technical tour de force for the original PlayStation.
They removed all UT games from online stores and added UT 3X which is a free version of UT3 with Epic Online Services baked instead of original ones.
The only way one could legally get UT99 is to buy physical. And it's been like that for many years prior to an event above, which also disabled the server browser after 22 years of running intact.
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