Of course we know that consoles have little RAM sizes n stuff, even until PS3 with 512MB
The Atari 2600 had a ridiculous amount of 128 bytes.
NES had 2KB
SNES hab 128kb+
I dont really know what they did on SNES in term of programming language but I think it was already C at this point, whereas ATARI was definitely assembler and NES mostly assembler if I'm correct.
and then you have especially the PSone with 2MB system Ram and 1 MB GPU RAM...
How would you even get all that great shit in the RAM and onto the screen with those limitations ? textures and everything...
Are there like in depth interviews or documentation on how coding in the pre PS2 area was done ? =D
I've only coded for the ps2 and the ds. Much of what I coded for the ps2 was an octree based renderer for an f1 racing game in a now defunc outfit so not much knowledge there.
The ds(and gba) on the other hand, have a dedicated 2d engine and a 3d engine. It also has a vram you could use for both engines. On top of that they have an iwram for speedy functions.
They could also support a multitude of gfx and sound formats(all can be compressed) to minimize vram use.
For the ds you have 4mb for code and data but you have a facility to use a filesystem like nitro.
In the ps2 we used cg shaders(at least that's what the sdk they sent me said) as fpr the ds it's direct register access.
Samples for the ds here(opensourced)
www.rel.phatcode.net/index.php?action=contents&item=ProjectsSpace Impakto and Fuzed ds are all ds games that fit inside the 4mb barrier(no external files used).
I cannot put up a ps2 code here because it was a commercial game.