Hi, I worked on this port. I love to see people still talking about it. Comments: It was a passion project absolutely. We were Nintendo fanboys growing up so getting this project on N64 with a great IP was a dream come true. If I recall correctly, HVQM was not going to cut it for RE2. A cartoon has a limited color space and large areas of solid color. The RE2 FMV was... different. The resolution was based on the number of enemies CURRENTLY in the room. Kill them, leave the room, and come back and it will recalculate (higher). The backgrounds were a fixed size, tuning each to remove as many artifacts in the space given. The background resolution obviously can't change (just upscaled into a larger framebuffer but will look pretty much the same), but the 3D elements could be drawn to look better. MusyX. Mu-sicks. Get it? Not Musey-X. I gotta tell the Factor 5 guys about that one. :) You got a heck of a lot right, there were images I hadn't seen in a loooong time. I'm impressed with the detailed FMV info! Did you interview Todd?!
thank you for reaching out and clarifying! I never spoke to Todd but i would love to as i feel like theres more optimizations that were done that Im not aware of.
@@ModernVintageGamerit's funny i was reminiscing with a friend about how crazy this game was back in 1998 when it came out and how good of a job they did with the remake. I may have to get an n64 copy to compare it myself, its super interesting how they got this to work. If you get additional information mvg you should consider making a follow-up video, it would be great to see more about the n64 port for sure.
It certainly was them proving a point. I remember when they ported doom to n64. At the time it was said that doom could only run of PC. I guess they wanted to push the envelope.
@@astral5228 Yup, I remember their studio I was local to them, and a few years later after EA tanked the SD office (which was in Carlsbad, CA) my brother moved over to what was Angel that was then Rockstar to work on Midnight Club so I'm familiar with what you're talking about. He still is in the industry now as producer for another company after bouncing between a few for some years because how unstable that industry is with mergers and shut downs. I was in too briefly, but chose stability and bailed, did the media for years online and stopped cold after that.
I remember working on the N64 only outfits. This was a lot of work to convert. We got a lot of data / assets from Japan. Not one of us could read the file names.. lol...
I had Alexander Ehrath as a teacher many years ago, and he told us all about the hurdles the team had to go through to get this working. He never said why he was credited as 'The man' though.
leodf1 simple guess, but I’d imagine it simply wasn’t enough. I only have experience with newer, much newer Nintendo SDK’s, and while they have plenty of libraries and tools to get the job done, they’re good all-rounders, and aren’t really that specialised. Using video as an example, they’ll give you something that does a good job of compressing video with a reasonable quality output, but if you want to absolutely maximise on space saving, or have a video that looks damn near perfect, you’ll either want a custom or third party library. And that’s fifteen or so years later.
@Ryan Trenhaile: Yeah, i've heard this was a common problem with porting Japanese games by western companies. You either got no documentation or everything you got was all in Japanese. The dudes who converted R-Type to the C64 back then tried it and all they got was badly readable FAX copies of the documentation and of course all in Japanese. So they just got an actual arcade machine, played it to no end and reverse engineered all the enemy behaviors and completely re-wrote the whole game instead of porting it.
One detail that I feel should have been mentioned was how expensive the larger N64 cartridges were to make, thus making games that used 64MB carts rare. This is much like the development budget given to Angel Studios. Someone at Capcom was super determined to make this port happen.
If I recall correctly, at that time, Capcom wanted to release Resident Evil 0 on the N64 before moving it to the Gamecube. So maybe the N64 port of RE2 was a way for Capcom to test the technologies available and to see the reception of the port.
@@cacomeat7385 That is so true that Capcom had all but abandoned the N64 until very late in its life letting a couple of PlayStation ports on it. I'm glad they were well made ports tho. My guess is that Capcom felt a need to hedge their bets. They hit pay dirt with PlayStation but didn't necessarily want to burn bridges with Nintendo as the big N has always been a force in the portable console market so Capcom probably threw the N64 a bone late in the generation to keep Nintendo on side.
I'm guessing it was actually Nintendo that wanted to show that games didn't have to give anything up to be able to be playable on N64. Just the level of collaboration mentioned at the end of the video point to Nintendo actually being the ones who really wanted this port to happen.
Nintendo wasnt exactly leading the console war and had fewer 3rd party games, yet still never wanted most studios to know how to optimize games for their machine ? Yeah thats sounds like Nintendo all right.
Right. Software Engineer as well. I think we all have our own innovations that make us proud, but something so basic and standalone feels like a masterpiece in comparison.
I'm also a software engineer, and I find learning about these kind of things fascinating. Of course, we rarely have issues like this now, but the creative problem solving can be applied to all kinds of things.
Both PS1 discs have a combined total size of 1,291MB. The N64 port has a total size of 64 MB. To put that into perspective, the N64 version is about 5% the size of the original, while being fairly close to the PS1 original.
@@gokushkameha-ha-ha9344 Nothing. But also the N64 has some features added compared to the PS1 version. The bulk of most ps1 games were their Audio and Video Files, more than the actual games themselves.
Compression takes a lot of resources, especially when people complained about 30 seconds loading time. Uncompressed files while it large, it can loads a lot faster.
@@UltimateAlgorithm also these days people are going to notice comperession a lot more then they would in the 1990s its a trick devs cant get away with anymore. not unless they are doing it in a vaccum and its the first port of the game made.
@Ellis Dee 24MB is 6% of a 400MB hard drive. In order for a 90GB game (common among AAA releases nowadays) to take 6% of your drive, you'd need a 1.5TB drive. Yes, the cost of disk space has gone down, but the size of games relative to the size of harddrives has also radically increased.
The indie game scene is absolutely thriving with passionate developers. Sad to see the state of big studios but there really is no shortage of great games these days.
Very true. Absolutely no one working in video games is passionate at all. Literally zero people with any passion. It’s weird how there is no passion in today’s game developers. They’re always saying how they have no passion and how they actually hate videogames and think gamers are stupid idiots with too much passion. Weird right?
"Dialog audio took a quality hit"... me growing up with N64 games that had voice tracks like "hu, hahah, ououou" and "hey, listen": still pretty impressive
The N64 audio sounded more natural to me in this regard, it feels like a weird dissonance seeing the less than perfect graphics and hearing waaaaay too crisp audio.
I first played RE2 on N64 when I was much younger. And I played a friends copy on PS1 a year later and seriously didn't notice a difference. But you have to understand that back then most people had standard CRT televisions (not the much clearer BVM's and PVM's). So as far as most of us were concerned, N64 looked almost completely identical (even side-by-side) to the PS1 version. In fact, because of N64's more advanced blending techniques, there are parts on an old CRT that actually look superior to the original PS1 port. It was magic. Magic that most people didn't realize was actually inferior until much later when LCD TVs became normal, proper analog conversion setups were affordable and proper emulators came along.
Same the first time I played RE2 was on my older sister's N64 around 6 or 7 years ago but around a year and a bit ago i managed to buy RE2 digitaly for my PS3 and yeah the music is the same amazing as allways but it plays smoother on the Playstaion then it did on the N64 probably due to how it was coded and scaled down to fit on a N64 cartridge
Played the hell out of this port back in the day - Just one bit of trivia: The FMV size limitations were were almost too much even with compression that they resourcefully removed one that is almost unnoticeable in the middle of the game, (SPOILERS)... ...where you meet Annette in the Sewers. "Are you saying he injected the G virus into his own body?" The playstation version has two separate FMVs with that line said by the Claire or Ada voice actor depending on the scenario. The N64 port only features Claire's voice no matter the scenario.
@@BlottaMcTablets Yep, I've seen it. Good video. I got my copy from Blockbuster video, I think they had some exclusivity deal and while it wasn't cheap it was worth it.
To put this accomplishment into perspective on how impressive it was, imagine a studio was given the task to port RDR2 into a PS2 storage size disc, and still be playable from start to finish.
Lol that is not the same. Bro RDR2 is several gaming systems ahead of the ps2. N64 was actually more powerful than the PS1, the cartridge was the only issue. RDR2 would be so dumbed down and would need several PlayStation discs to work.
@@thegamingchef3304 did you even read what I commented? I didn't say to port it on the PS2 lol. I said, 'a PS2 storage size disc' which is a either a single layer or dual layer DVD storage sizes. Basically compressing the shit of RDR2 to around 4 - 8GBs.
@@carl8790If you ported RDR2 to a ps2 storage disc you are essentially porting it to the ps2. This is a dumb comment and the fact it has so many likes without someone calling you out on your stupidity amazes me lol.
Porting MGS4 to Xbox 360 in a single DVD disc. It could ne possible to do it in 2-3 discs compressing audio, bit the game still wouldn't fit in just one disc.
Same with the guy who ported Doom to the SNES he also did witchcraft and the person who ported Doom to the 3DO given their time constraints and resources and it goes to show if given enough time (and money) it can be done albeit with some compromises except for the 3DO I feel bad for that person they were given 10 weeks and had to do it alone
Doom isnt exaclty that amazing considering it uses the super fx chip made for 3d, he did downgrade it a lot also. Is it really amazing if it runs in a window at like 10fps ?
I only had an N64, so I was grateful that they were able to release such a high-profile third-party game on the system. What really struck me, though, was how physically heavy the RE2 cartridge was compared to other N64 games. They crammed all that content in there, and I could feel it.
Nice video, few corrections: So the screen resolution was changed every character cut based on the POSSIBLE number of characters to appear. Only 3D model textures were reduced in size. All other textures other than background compression were same resolution or upscaled for backgrounds. MusyX is pronounce "Musix" not "Musee-X" Fun fact... N64 does not clamp colors when using additive mode (making it useless), so I doubled the brightness for additive textures and used modulate blend :) Also, N64 had a proper Z-Buffer but was a bit sheit on pixel fill, so instead of the PS overdraw, I would analyze all the sprites Z-Values and spit out a Z-Buffer image I could preload into the Z-Buffer on N64 that 3D models would draw against. Thanks for the video!
The time when developers have to be creative. Today: There is nothing we can do, our 50GB updates are necessary to update some clothes and guns in the game.
Creative and extremely skilled. Back then most devs also had to develop their own game engines, which was a massive undertaking, instead of copy-pasting a few elements around in Unreal or Unity. I have the biggest respect for these legends.
That’s only because D2 devs are greedy fucks that will sell you a steak, shove their fingers down your throat and then try to sell the vomit back to you at an increased price
I didn't own a PS back in the 90s, so this game epitomized Resident Evil for me. I have no idea how many times I completed it. I used to get up in the middle of the night when I knew everyone else would be asleep to sneak downstairs and play through it. Trying to find the right volume where I could hear all the dialogue but the licker crashing through the two-way mirror wouldn't wake up my parents was a delicate balancing act. I played through it for the first time in probably 15 years during shutdown, still remembering how to get through every puzzle and where to go for every item. Everything about the game took me back to being thirteen again, down in my old basement and nervous as hell about both the monsters I was confronting, and the idea of being caught up playing games at 2 a.m. on a school night.
I remember getting this game when it was new, and had done zero research on it. It was an impulse buy (and a very expensive one, at that). I thought for sure they would've removed the FMVs and replaced them with stills or something. Totally blew my mind when the ENTIRE game was present!
You forgot to cover that this N64 port has the option to utilize the Expansion Pack and utilizes an additional 4mb of RAM upscaling the resolution game to 480p making this port even sharper than the PS1 version.
@@dianaloayzat4975 no I was just pointing at the fact that the higher output resolution doesn't affect the texture resolution stored on the cartridge. Of course it doesn't - even with more video ram, you can't magically cast texture data out of nowhere. So sharper corners and picture quality - yes, sharper textures in the distance - also possible because with more memory you can mipmap further away. But up close - nope, otherwise they would have to store two versions of the same textures on the cartridge, where storage place was on a premium at the beginning.
ALL N64 games are BLURRY. that is the only reason i hated this sytem BUT i love cartridge based systems! and there was not a single capcom game on here from fighting like x-men vs. street fighter or street fighter alpha series
Check the UA-cam channel "GameHut", it's by Jon Burton of Traveller's Tales/Tt Games. They made a lot of things back then to get games working, and he even explains the techniques they used on that channel.
I would go so far as to say this is the most impressive port of a game of all time. The fact that it's shot-for-shot identical, with no missing content, with extra content added in, and the only sacrifice is graphical downgrades that are only noticable in side-by-side comparisons to the original? My god that's impressive.
Developers back then: "Gotta fit a gig of data on 64MB, and has to work beginning to end at retail, with a million budget? Pfft, lol k" Devs now: "We're finally releasing after two years of delays and going over budget by almost double. There's a 30GB install with a 70GB day one patch. Its really a beta version 0.96 but our publisher threatened to sell our kids if we delayed again so here's an 80% functional game that we'll incrementally patch out major crashes once a month until the playerbase disappears entirely in six months."
Developers used to get paid reasonably and been given time and care to produce a quality product. It's right-wing policies that have forced developers to do more with less, and this is the result. If you earn less than you would on unemployment, that's a problem with corporations paying slave-wages for back-breaking work. Skilled labor vs. unskilled labor is its own cruel thesis.
Angel studios pushed the n64 to the limit. The n64 Evangelion game was also noteworthy in this regard. Angel and Factor 5 did amazing stuff for the console. Things were more... daring in those days. True revolutionary devs.
@@DrumEagle well at the time (99) it was pretty rare to hear audio both voiceovers and music on the n64 so crisp; this game has lots of it. Its has good quality fullscreen fmv too but not as much as the puzzle pokémon game. There are constant mini fmv on the hud when characters talk and show emotions which resembles the cartoon a whole bunch. They managed to capture it precisely and sometimes there are several appearing onscreen at the same time. Not that impressive when compared to its fmv counterparts on the pokémon game which are as MVG said fullscreen but great nonetheless. Given more time (or tools?), Bandai could surely put some action sequences from the tv series on the cart for sure. Good and weird game, go check it.
I feel like a lot of those optimizations were only possible because of the way CRT TVs would hide the graphical imperfections. Today's high-resolution TVs are not anywhere as forgiving, unfortunately.
the good thing about CRT was that the pixels blur into each other and create a pleasant picture. But flatscreens have super sharp pixels so artifacts would be seen emediately. Now we start to achive better looking images throught the new super sampling DLSS technology that eliminates artifacts, but 20 years later lol D;
I still have my copy, it's impressive how they've managed to put the whole game inside a N64 cartridge; a work of art. What I liked the most on this version was the 3D analog option, no more tank controls.
@ken parvu some a hole has a unopened greatest hits version of res 2 on ps1 for $1,900. If there's an unopened res 2 game original out there for ps1 I bet Paul Logan would buy it for a million. Like he did with a unlimited charizard card
It's less impressive when you realize that each disc only held 370MB of data, and a huge portion of that was completely redundant. All of it could have fit on a single disc easily, but selling it as a 2-CD game was a brilliant marketing move. Pressing an additional disc made the customer think they were getting double the bang for their buck when they actually were not, and it cost barely any extra to manufacture. Capcom is by far not the only company who used this cheap trick back in those days.
@@shellshock24classicgames61 There's a significant difference between 1.2GB and ~500MB. That was my only point. Now that you mention laziness, it was pretty lazy of MVG to not take 2 minutes and check out the size of the data on each disc and account for the vast majority being redundant. That stood out as a glaring mistake in an otherwise great video.
@@djhenyo its k bro your opinion is still valid no need to trash MVG relax we all have opinions have a drink of water and breath we're all valid here 👍
To confirm, yes it had custom hardware, I forget actual details but it contained double the storage but even with double the storage on the cartridge, it was still under half the storage used for the original game on playstation so still alot of magic happening here.
Seeing what the developers managed to achieved with such limitations is simply incredible.
3 роки тому+15
Developers back then did so much to compensate the lack of hardware. They did so many ingenious trick and figured out so many crazy ways to improve quality while not sacrificing performance. Nowadays many games waste resources. I know, games being this complexes as they are don't help, but some devs just release the games as they are and don't give a crap about optimization, compression.
FACT:Angel Studios also made a N64 baseball game entitled Ken Griffey Jr. Slugfest & mere weeks after that game was released Angel Studios announced that they would no longer make sports games in order for them to focus on making RE264.
I don’t know if anyone had mentioned this yet, but Angel Studios is also responsible for the CGI effects in the VR-inspired 90s movie, “The Lawnmower Man.”
Alexander Ehrath Dude Thanks For being part of that team, Do you Have a Favorite Project That You got to work On during your time there? Huge Fan of The Midnight Club series And Smuglers Run
The interesting thing is the loading screens with the opening doors were actually NOT even necessary but they kept them in the game for cosmetic reasons because it's quite a iconic thing for Resident Evil. So it was decided to keep it, even thou the N64 would have been perfectly able to do such transitions without any loading times & loading screens, unlike the CD-ROM based PS1 and Saturn.
Not just cosmetic reasons. Originally the door sequence was left out of the game. Playtesters said they *missed* the old animation, so they were added back in, even though it wasn't necessary.
In the PC version you could click away the door opening sequence, possibly also on the Dreamcast version. These are the best versions ever released, unfortunately also the rarest.
"What happened..?" Says Leon. Having just survived a near death experience with a runaway tanker, the city around him burning down, and, oh, dead people running around trying to chomp his ass cheeks off. Gotta love those 90's computer game scripts and acting. No ballsing about.
what a boss... torn up, bitten, and transforming... he can still maintain being the station's Captn. Obvious... i wanna see that this man get a promotion.
I recently acquired this port simply because it is so technically impressive. I hadn't played RE2 since way back in 1998 on PS1. For my recent play through, I decided to play it on N64 on a CRT with the 4MB ram expansion. The higher resolution player models look fantastic on a CRT and I loved playing this version of the game. Truly an amazing port.
This was the version I played as a lad and it was the only RE2 I knew until I was later able to play the other versions, the sound quality is only a small compromise, don't remember it being a problem back then, but I wish he would of said something about the RAM expansion.
The N64 port was the way I played this game as a kid. When you look at them side by side it's a huge difference in video quality, but on a CRT that difference was barely noticeable. I did notice the particularly bad voice clips back then, but most games on N64 had no voice acting at all so the fact it was a little subpar was completely overshadowed by the fact it was there at all.
That kind of voice acting won't get a pass on AAA games today. It will be mocked to oblivion by players and critics. Surely if that released today, it would become a meme.
@@UltimateAlgorithm The Final Fantasy games still do. They have shit localization voice direction, at least for the English versions. FFVII Remake wasn't too bad in some spots, but that's not saying much, with all that excessive Japanese grunting bullshit undermining the acting.
@@RippahRooJizah i grew up with the n64 My friend had a PlayStation and I would come to his house to play re1 but when I seen re2 is coming out on n64 I was so hype Re2 became my favorite resident evil game in the series
@Kalina Ann Despite your opinion of only the 3rd MK installation being good, let me remind you that Mortal Monday when the first MK came out sold more copies than pretty much any other game in that generation. Also, MK II basically doubled the sales with twice the content. MK3 lacked a lot of characters and was basically exiled by the MK community, in which Midway updated it to Ultimate MK3 which added another good 5 or 6 characters like Scorpion.
This is the version I grew up playing. I only had an N64 and I played hours upon hours. Completing both scenarios for both characters and unlocking all the weapons. It was a big part of my childhood in the 90s. Used to take it with me whenever my family took us on vacation so I can play in the hotel on down days.
My cousins and i had to turn the music off or play something happy instead. Scariest game that ive ever played. I'd pause at every corner, dreading to move forward. The music set the tone and atmosphere. Excellent game.
Dammm i used to play Re2 back on the days but neverrrr at nigth😂😅, and to be honest im afraid to play the remake😂😂😂 i cant deal with the remake its to scary😂😂😂😂
I always thought it was impressive that Tony Hawk got ported to the N64 but hated the looping music and missing tracks. Seems like they could have fit the whole sound track if they had used more of these tricks.
@@RetrOrigin Mono and 32 khZ samplerate save over 50% and are, for N64 players, not really noticable. I mean, when you bought a console, just like today (console vs real gaming rig), you knew you have always a low(er)-fi device. PC in 1999: 2.500$. Console: 399$?
@Andrew Mitchell Of course. What I mean is that a lot of people think it might be a hardware limitation or something (and it is, but not of the console but the storage format). Today you can play via SD card games on SNES with CD quality soundtracks and FMV. Of course, some consoles do make it easier with built in hardware specifically for video and stuff (like the PS1).
Andrew Mitchell The market wasn't as big as it is today, and Nintendo was already deeply rooted. Also many parents were against video games. Basically, it was too soon.
@Andrew Mitchell Optical discs as a storage media would've made little difference success-wise in console. The key to success would be aggressive marketing as well as developer & publisher support. Sony nailed it on that front.
Yeah when I emulate my back up I’ve had some of the tricks revealed like somehow I rendered it settings to native and the game was suddenly in a tiny lil like 300 pixel window and it made me realize they must have shrunk it all down and used some sort of soft upscale now I know it was the vector chip. Love your content and your emulators mate! Cheers 🍻
Gotta love uncompressed audio. I wonder how long before they'll stop compressing video too. It's only storage space, right? It's so cheap. Who cares if one game takes up half a hard disk?
@@benjamincrew1949 Hasn't the use of video gone down in the last years because a lot is done in engine? Video is still an option for low end specs that can not handle that smoothly but I feel like it will go down even more in the future.
@@wynard A lot can be done in engine now then before, but video is still used fairly often. Uncompressed audio isn't going to sound any different except maybe to extreme audiophiles and even then is probably more a placebo effect. Uncompressed textures can take a good amount of space too but at least that may be slightly more justifiable as resolutions increase.
You forgot to mention that a lot of data was duplicated on both CDs such as backgrounds, scenario data, extras, etc.. the final number would be closer to 900 MBs. That still doesn't take away from the amazing work and compression that was used to fit this into 64 MBs.
It was amazing when it was released. When i played the game on the store a psx owner was there. He said that a mini cd must be in the cartrige, that was really funny to hear.
When this came out I already had some very good notion about the "size" of a program, and knowing that the PS1 version used more the 1GB of data trough 2 CDs and that the biggest N64 cart was only 64MB just blew my mind. It amazed me back then, I remember researching the web, digging for some information until I got some notion about how it was done. Time has passed and it still remains a barely believable port. Amazing!
this information wasnt available when the games released. u couldnt have "searched the web" and had a complete understanding of how they did this at the time. nice try poser
@@Gimilli when the game came out there wasn't any information about the port itself. But there was plenty of information already about PS1 development and N64 development. By doing research on both systems I've came to realize the difference and came to understand what possible methods could have been used in order to achieve those impressive results. I've came to realize that by my own thought and understanding, and not because I've seen it written and explained somewhere. But being this stupid, you don't really deserve this answer. I'm giving it just for the sake of other readers.
This is a perfect overview for me. I've always tried telling my friends that the PS1 game was squeezed into a cart... Now there is a technical reference that I can recommend to my buddies!
Omg! When I first beheld Resident Evil 2 for PlayStation; I freaked because it was well done; you literally felt deep genuine fear against umbrella’s ferocious zombies and oooh you’d literally be scared to play at night, or in a dark setting.
If you as a developer use binaural microphones during sound recording, you can do that with just Stereo. No fancy 5.1 setup needed. If you want to know how those microphones look like, just go Twitch, Category: ASMR and see random girls licking those super expensive things for cringe.
When PC gamers can’t play a game with the performance they want: time to build a new PC When you want to fit a game that uses 2 CDs on a 64MB cart for N64. Highly skilled Devs: Challenge accepted.
I lower the quality settings like turn off AA, lower the resolution turn off all the unneeded visual effects post processing effects and when you messed enough with the game you can also try to Overclock a little your GPU too, despite what most think, not all PC gamers have the money to go buy new PC, not everyone is like the ones posting vids on youtube of what new gpu they bought recently and such, I expect my gpus last me from 4-6 years
@@LyamOfficial This. My PC is around 9 years old by now. Sure some changes were made like the inclusion of an SSD or an exchange of the standard graphics card that was in back than. But it's mostly still the same PC and it did run most games very well (I never cared if they weren't on fullest graphics settings if it was just not possible with my specs). It's only by now I see games that I won't be able to run without extremly upgrading my hardware (or completly building a whole new PC). And I would love if game developers would use more time to compress their games. Why is it that we have for example 1TB of storage but in the end it's only enough for 10 games or maybe even less because you always need some extra space for possible DLCs and patches? Do they really need 100GB or could they compress stuff without us players even really noticing? Why do we need such big day 1 patches? (This was always painful as someone who grew up in a smaller German town that had no good internet connection for a very long time. Back than downloading like 10GBs was like a task for a whole day or maybe even two and sadly I know some people that still have no access to better internet.)
@@TitanKaempfer it took you back then 2 days to download 10gb of stuff? how baller of you, for me it took more than that, I remember back a long time ago
@@LyamOfficial I mean, yes. I know there were (and still are) people having slower internet. Thing still is, it hadn't even access to better internet until 6 years ago or so. I had to wait until 2014 before even thinking about being able to watch a video on anything higher than 360p (or 480p if I had the time to preload it... Until it was removed in favour of the HTML5 player) and this was only possible if my family weren't doing a lot of things in the internet. Sadly the German political parties always have digitalization as a big point in their party programs but they're almost doing little to nothing. Even the internet provider companies are not really doing their job very well. One of the biggest providers here is promising that we'll get 5G everywhere, but we have yet to even cover the whole country with a cellular network. You can't even leave a town for like a meter without losing any phone and internet connection. (And even in some villages I visited it's really bad were you might only make a call via mobile phone if you get a lucky day) :/ But yeah, that's far from the original point of the discussion nor the topic of the video. xD
Resident Evil 2 is one of only three N64 games I know of with surface-mount chips. The others are Ogre Battle 64 and Morita Shogi 64. I think it's particularly interesting since all are 3rd party titles and one of those chips is a custom CIC security chip from Nintendo. It's like Nintendo went out of their way to make this version of a CIC for them! Strangely, it's just a 6102 or 6102A and not even one of the alternate CICs. Of course, Angel Studios operated more like a Nintendo 2nd party studio back then. The chips are marked copyright 1996 with 1997, 1999, and 2000 production codes. I've never looked inside a 64DD or any of the capture or Smart Media cartridges for it but I wonder if these special CIC packages were intended for it.
It's probably the same silicon, just a different packaging step. Not too expensive in large volume, and it probably saved them money on the PCB assembly for the cart.
depends on the ICs used, but many chip families are available in both DIP and SMT packages. It is interesting that a developer would choose surface mount with the added complication... or its possible that Nintendo had a stock of CICs in both packages available?
@@userPrehistoricman Yeah, but they have CIC NUS6102 and CIC NUS6102A with production dates from 1997, 1999, and 2000, so they had to have made several batches. Wonder what the minimum quantity was for each chip.
I’ve never beaten this version but it’s always interested me. I like that you can change the blood color to Blue or Green, that’s something that has always been funny to me And the inclusion of the EX files that add a little bit more backstory to the game and foreshadow the at the time upcoming RE0 which was going to be an N64 game. The exclusive costumes were also a welcome change and in my opinion are better than the costumes in the other versions.
I agree generally speaking, but today there's an expectation of such high realism that there's just not as many short-cuts you can take. People want TRUE 4K and what-not and eventually it gets to a point where there's just no real way around the massive sizes, even once compressed.
I blame the publishers. The industry is now ruled by some bad people, mega corporations who try to do everything cheaper than it should be, faster than it should be, while working the devs into nervous breakdowns and early retirement. It has become a giant racket rather than an entertainment industry, not even the movie business is as unconcerned with quality and experience
Not only are games orders of magnitude more complex today, the reason for large day 1 patches are most of the time not the developers' fault. Publishers rush development studios under very tight deadlines to the point where developers are working on the game until the night before release. The large patch sizes are an optimization trick due to hardware limitations on the HardDrive access speed. Developers create duplicate files for assets for various scenarios so that the harddrive doesn't have to move the read head far away. Hence, you get very large patches. Next gen should reduce patch sizes significantly with SSDs.
@@MrSlowestD16 I want a true or native port for Windows games that stems from console games. The "ports" feel like you emulate a Windows game on Wine.. "It runs"...
@@MrSlowestD16 I don't think it's coming from the customers, otherwise we'd see a lot more high fps console titles. I think this generation is going to see a lot of innovative upscaling techniques, and some titles are going to run assets at 8K down the road.
Maybe it's only me, but I think developers back then deserve so much credit. Not that the game devs know deserver less, but still they had tremendous challenges.
@@magicjohnson3121 Sure there were some. Not going to deny that, but I am not looking at this system through nostalgia goggles. I was a full-grown tax-paying adult when I got one. The truly great titles were too few and far in between, I see it simple as that. So agree to disagree, but kind of agree.
MusyX uses less than 1%, per active voice. So if you're playing something with many instruments at once and combine with sfx, it still adds up to a significant chunk of cpu / rsp. This isn't an issue with MusyX, but rather with Nintendos fascination with software audio solutions.
Nintendo was so proud about their new powerful processor and it was in fact quite powerful at time. However after everything needed to run it could only push a fraction of the polys the PlayStation could do and IMO was a huge oversight on their part.
@@jlewwis1995 why focus on consumer pcs? I mean, the 6x86 was on the market, as were amd things. The power pc was faster as well. There were faster mips cpus than the one on the n64. The alpha was definitely faster. The strongarm was far more powerful. Etc etc
@@ezg8448 I honestly think the reason Nintendo fucked up on audio is that they were too scared to meet another Sony. Nintendo can't make audio chips, Sony made the best... Nintendo got fucked the day they betrayed Sony.
And still to this day, Nintendo continues to get these "impossible ports" on their systems thanks to really damn reliable third parties, like Panic Button, Feral Interactive, and Saber.
When I got this game for PS I played it for 8 hours the first night and 6 hours the second night beating In obviously 14 hours. I took one day off put it back in and played 6 hours and then only 2 hours the next day taking 6 hours less to complete with everything so fresh in my brain. Love this game.
Oh I always wondered this. Code itself is easy to get into anything, it's just a text file at the end of the day, but the aasets? I always wondered how the hell they managed to get the FMVs in there, how the hell does the music sound so perfect, how did they manage to get both scenarios in a 64mb cartridge when PS1 required to discs? It's nuts.
@@tralphstreet Music is easy. MP3 compression crunches music down nicely. That's why it's become so ubiquitous. It's been used in several N64 titles, including Conker's BFD to squeeze all of the voice lines in.
@@orlandoalessandrini2505 Chris Redfield's original voice actor passed away too in a car crash in Japan in 2000, he also voiced Richter in Castlevania Symphony of the Night.
two decades later, compression becomes a factor again with the PS% gaining dedicated compression hardware and new codecs like Kraken entering the scene. Will be interesting to see how games turn out over the next generation
AV1 should be used for video especially if it's implemented in hardware, which it may not be for the next gen consoles. Kraken looks okay but I have doubts about a proprietary solution, the only results I see online are essentially propaganda with misleading benchmarks. I'd always pick the best-suited FOSS solution, at rough glance that appears to be zstd in the general case but I'm not an expert.
Absolutely, we're getting fast storage and super high res textures along with tons of new techniques for upscaling/downscaling. Meanwhile some lazy devs are still sticking to 30 fps.
And because of that we end up with lazy developers who can't optimize code very well(WWE games on Switch), or we end up with tons of bugs, and they have to rush out day one, and/or week one patches.
@@CommodoreFan64 Yeah, back then you had to get it right cause you couldn't simply patch hundreds of thousands of cartridges on shelves across stores nationwide.
You mean talented corner cutters who can use all that added space and the added hard drives annoyingly MS started putting in their systems to release unfinished buggy stuff to willing guinea pigs paying full price for day one patches and other problems to patch later. Back in the day, and hell more or less still on Nintendo since they're cheap on internal storage forces it, you basically have to get it right or your project is fouled up. Truly talented developers can make a game that works out of the box and hit a street date, lazy talented ones take the fix it later mentality.
@@CommodoreFan64 Don't blame the devs 100%, blame the publishers for extremely demanding schedules, poor working conditions and most of all being more interested in making as much money as possible and not the best product. Devs do cut corners but there's enormous pressure and competition, plus at the end of the day, people keep buying AND pre-ordering buggy, poorly optimized and non-quality assured games even though there are so many examples of botched releases over the years. I personally have a ton of games but I haven't pre-ordered or bought a game on Day 1 in about 10 years or more simply because you don't know what you're gonna get. Like this new Horizon Zero Dawn PC port which is full of issues.
vintage gaming hardware is one of the most fascinating topics for me. instant subscription, MVG! \m/ can't wait to catch up on all this content to get up to date
When I played this when it came out on my n64 I was old enough to realize that this shouldn't work but not old enough to understand why. Definitely one of my favorite games.
Impressive! When i played this game the first time I was 13 or 14. I didn't gave a f*** how this was realised at this time, because later at 16 years old I still did not know what an overhead projector was. Now think about how dumb I was back then.
@@Michael-ql9fo lol not dumb to not understand some things buddy, I'm sure you have deep knowledge on a bunch of subjects, this just wasn't one of them and that's totally fine!
Nintendo using carts in 1996: falling behind the curve. Nintendo using switch game cards in 2020: on track to become the best selling Nintendo console of all time. Anyhow it was a tech marvel to see RE2 on the n64 back then. Thanks for the video
Flash memory has become incredibly cheap as of recent years due to mass manufacturing of micro sd cards for everyone's smart phones. It is now optical disks and traditional hard drives which are the biggest slowdowns to gaming and computing, however they are still dirt cheap to manufacture so not going away until flash memory is literally cheaper.
Nintendo: How long has it been since Sega launched Model 2 arcade boards with full texture mapping? 3 years boss. How long has it been since Sony launched a machine with about 700kb of RAM you can use for textures? Nearly 2 years boss. Alright lads, let's give our brand new machine 4kb of texture memory. Good idea boss.
@@t0biascze644 People that call it cache in the N64 are seemingly unaware that it is indeed correctly referred to as texture memory. 'TMEM' in technical documents. It was a manually managed tiny piece of memory. You're welcome.
Just imagine the gamers back during the original 2 who had no idea of Mr X's existence in the game. Most would finish the game and just put the other disc in and start a new game instead of loading Scenario B. They missed out on the best scenario of the game.
I’m pretty sure IGN did this when the remake came out and then complained it was “the same game but with Claire instead”. Then proceeded to get roasted online because they released a review without playing scenario B
Me. Played through as Claire first, without a memory card (PS1) so knew nothing about scenario B. Don't know why I didn't cop it, but just went to Leon 🤷🏻♂️
@@boothbyaw exactly 😀 console was never switched off. And what's more... I was living in a shared house while in college, with 4 other guys. Yes, I'm that old!!! Each of us got a time slot on the PS1 and TV - It lasted from Sunday evening until Thurs evening
I loved RE2 on the N64, even though I played it way after it came out.. it was a perfect game to finally play during J term where the campus was mostly empty and I just had to go to a track practice once a day, but just ate, laid in bed, and played this scary ass 64 game for those couple weeks.. it was really great! I’ve heard how amazing it was that they got this port to work, which I never even considered how complicated it was before that.. and your video has helped me appreciate it much more! Nice work!
Hey buddy! Yeah, I never played RE2 on 64 but just got it recently and was blown away at what an amazing port it is. After watching this it seems even more amazing now. So when’s your review coming? 😜
@@megamob5834 I love hearing from you, my man :) I’m definitely committed to getting through RE series, on multiple platforms, over the years in the month of October 🎃 👻 I’m really excited for the next 16bit review, I’m finally going for a monumental title… doing my best to let this beauty shine, Donkey Kong Country… and here’s a secret, I may or may not use skits to link to DKC2 and DKC3. Let’s just put these beasts of vids on the channel. The amazing thing, I’ve already learned or noticed 3 things I haven’t before… and I’ve beaten the game a few times before, I LOVE these deep dives
@@MarMaxGaming awesome, can’t wait man. I think the majority of your viewers also love the deep dive approach you have for your reviews and a good skit is always more than welcome! :-)
I've literally watched this video about 5 times the the past 6 months. I'm sorta obsessed with video compression, so this is really fascinating. I also have this random hobby of taking videos I record and recompressing them into different codecs, resolutions, bitrates...
I'd never heard of that channel, so when I looked it up I thought to myself, "Didn't one of the developers of many of these games start a channel already talking in-depth about these 'Impossible' things?" That channel, of course, being Game Hut. So I went to Game Hut and, lo and behold, both channels are the same dev! Thanks for inadvertently bringing that to my attention! I'd already loved Game Hut, but kind of fell away from it as the upload frequency was rather low. Now I have a whole new channel, with videos about other games, too!
@@pickleshanks I believe gamehut will be related to only things he's worked on, where as coding secrets will be things other people might have worked on as well. "Heres how they did it" type of thing.
17R3W - Yeah. I watched his latest Game Hut video which explains that, which let me realize the channels were related. I’m seriously happy about this serendipitous discovery!
The 64 GB limit gave them a reason to be innovative. "Clever" requires time. Time is money to a developer. There is no monetary penalty for shipping out gigs of textures. They have a captured audience who will pay for the same game every year or 2.
That, and the smooth transitions on loading the next scene. The doors weren't truely needed on the N64, but they kept them on for the sake of suspension. They could kept them away save some valuable space for some extras or better textures. That, and how they kept some minigames in the cart as well, like Tofu, the policeman and Ada's side missions as unlockables. Pretty amazing port indeed.
@@RetroArcadeGuy the policeman and Ada's side missions are not in the N64. It was only Hunk and Tofu. Trust me. I've played the guts out of that version of RE2.
@@jeremyrafuse5330 Oh you are right, I meant the policeman as Hunk. Tofu and Hunk are there, maybe I mistook a mission were you play as Ada Wong then. Also, let alone extra costumes and features not present even on next gen consoles of its time.
@@RetroArcadeGuy yeah you still have your side quests in the main mission. Claire's scenario, you had to use Sherry and dodge zombies puking on you or dogs. Obviously with Leon, it's Ada.
Corrections :
10:22 - HQVM when it should be HVQM
10:33 - The SpongeBob episiode I referenced was 11 minutes not 30 minutes.
Where can I find the n64 example of spongebob? I looked couldnt find it
Like a video of it. Not the rom
Is that a quarantine beard?
@@Metaphor9696 yes...wait you can see me?
@@nightmarezer0507 Not sure if you're joking,
but I'm pretty sure they are referring to MVGs beard.
Hi, I worked on this port. I love to see people still talking about it.
Comments:
It was a passion project absolutely. We were Nintendo fanboys growing up so getting this project on N64 with a great IP was a dream come true.
If I recall correctly, HVQM was not going to cut it for RE2. A cartoon has a limited color space and large areas of solid color. The RE2 FMV was... different.
The resolution was based on the number of enemies CURRENTLY in the room. Kill them, leave the room, and come back and it will recalculate (higher). The backgrounds were a fixed size, tuning each to remove as many artifacts in the space given. The background resolution obviously can't change (just upscaled into a larger framebuffer but will look pretty much the same), but the 3D elements could be drawn to look better.
MusyX. Mu-sicks. Get it? Not Musey-X. I gotta tell the Factor 5 guys about that one. :)
You got a heck of a lot right, there were images I hadn't seen in a loooong time. I'm impressed with the detailed FMV info! Did you interview Todd?!
Thank you for your service to make this port possible, a true masterpiece and a technical miracle
thank you for reaching out and clarifying! I never spoke to Todd but i would love to as i feel like theres more optimizations that were done that Im not aware of.
@@ModernVintageGamerit's funny i was reminiscing with a friend about how crazy this game was back in 1998 when it came out and how good of a job they did with the remake. I may have to get an n64 copy to compare it myself, its super interesting how they got this to work. If you get additional information mvg you should consider making a follow-up video, it would be great to see more about the n64 port for sure.
Thanks for helping make such a big part of my childhood! RE2 on N64 was amazing.
its my favorite version of the game.
This seems more like a passion project than a normal job. Someone REALLY wanted RE2 to be playable on the N64.
I hope they got *PAYED*
One million split between a 9 person dev team over a two year span, with taxes that’s about $50,000 a year, not bad for game devs in the 90s.
@@jcwalker722 Wasn't the milion the budget for the game port?
@@etienneditolve1567 that's exactly what he's talking about...
It certainly was them proving a point. I remember when they ported doom to n64. At the time it was said that doom could only run of PC. I guess they wanted to push the envelope.
Games back then: I'll reduce this 1.5 GB game to 64 MB
Games now: please delete more games so I can update and add more gun skins
Too true lol.
So true. Imagine that kind of ingenuity and problem solving in today's world? No limitations has hurt gaming imo
imagine the much bigger MW playerbase if you didn't have to sacrifice so much space for it.
Agreed! Games back then were not that advanced, no GB, no DLC, no expansions, no annoying system updates
Game industry doesn't pay talent well enough. In the west, a lot of the talented developers have moved on, especially lower level ones.
I feel they should legitimatly teach this in digital programing and software engineering classes. This was a jaw dropping feat from the devs
Angel Studios would later be acquired by Rockstar as Rockstar San Diego. They also led development of the RAGE engine.
San Diego, not San Francisco
they're also the people behind Midnight Club, Smuggler's Run and RDR
Yeah, San Diego.
I don't know much about game developers, but that sounds like a fascinating story!
Ahh yes, San Diego.... A whale's vagina.
@@astral5228 Yup, I remember their studio I was local to them, and a few years later after EA tanked the SD office (which was in Carlsbad, CA) my brother moved over to what was Angel that was then Rockstar to work on Midnight Club so I'm familiar with what you're talking about. He still is in the industry now as producer for another company after bouncing between a few for some years because how unstable that industry is with mergers and shut downs. I was in too briefly, but chose stability and bailed, did the media for years online and stopped cold after that.
I remember working on the N64 only outfits. This was a lot of work to convert. We got a lot of data / assets from Japan. Not one of us could read the file names.. lol...
Please tell more! Very interesting!
I had Alexander Ehrath as a teacher many years ago, and he told us all about the hurdles the team had to go through to get this working. He never said why he was credited as 'The man' though.
How about answering his question about why you wrote your own codec instead of using the HQVM that was already included in the SDK.
leodf1 simple guess, but I’d imagine it simply wasn’t enough.
I only have experience with newer, much newer Nintendo SDK’s, and while they have plenty of libraries and tools to get the job done, they’re good all-rounders, and aren’t really that specialised.
Using video as an example, they’ll give you something that does a good job of compressing video with a reasonable quality output, but if you want to absolutely maximise on space saving, or have a video that looks damn near perfect, you’ll either want a custom or third party library.
And that’s fifteen or so years later.
@Ryan Trenhaile: Yeah, i've heard this was a common problem with porting Japanese games by western companies. You either got no documentation or everything you got was all in Japanese. The dudes who converted R-Type to the C64 back then tried it and all they got was badly readable FAX copies of the documentation and of course all in Japanese. So they just got an actual arcade machine, played it to no end and reverse engineered all the enemy behaviors and completely re-wrote the whole game instead of porting it.
One detail that I feel should have been mentioned was how expensive the larger N64 cartridges were to make, thus making games that used 64MB carts rare. This is much like the development budget given to Angel Studios. Someone at Capcom was super determined to make this port happen.
Capcom didn't release a lot of games on the N64, I guess they wanted the few that did make it to be excellent
If I recall correctly, at that time, Capcom wanted to release Resident Evil 0 on the N64 before moving it to the Gamecube. So maybe the N64 port of RE2 was a way for Capcom to test the technologies available and to see the reception of the port.
@@cacomeat7385 That is so true that Capcom had all but abandoned the N64 until very late in its life letting a couple of PlayStation ports on it. I'm glad they were well made ports tho. My guess is that Capcom felt a need to hedge their bets. They hit pay dirt with PlayStation but didn't necessarily want to burn bridges with Nintendo as the big N has always been a force in the portable console market so Capcom probably threw the N64 a bone late in the generation to keep Nintendo on side.
I'm guessing it was actually Nintendo that wanted to show that games didn't have to give anything up to be able to be playable on N64. Just the level of collaboration mentioned at the end of the video point to Nintendo actually being the ones who really wanted this port to happen.
Nintendo wasnt exactly leading the console war and had fewer 3rd party games, yet still never wanted most studios to know how to optimize games for their machine ? Yeah thats sounds like Nintendo all right.
As a software engineer, sometimes I just wish I could be there at the game studio during projects like these. It must've been an insane experience.
You would go literally insane
Right. Software Engineer as well. I think we all have our own innovations that make us proud, but something so basic and standalone feels like a masterpiece in comparison.
Look at all the old devs
They are all a little crazy
I'm also a software engineer, and I find learning about these kind of things fascinating. Of course, we rarely have issues like this now, but the creative problem solving can be applied to all kinds of things.
@@driverjb09 if you think there are no issues like these nowadays you are not a software engineer at all.
Both PS1 discs have a combined total size of 1,291MB.
The N64 port has a total size of 64 MB.
To put that into perspective, the N64 version is about 5% the size of the original, while being fairly close to the PS1 original.
FKn insane when you think about it.
So what content was cut?
@@gokushkameha-ha-ha9344 Nothing. But also the N64 has some features added compared to the PS1 version. The bulk of most ps1 games were their Audio and Video Files, more than the actual games themselves.
@@gokushkameha-ha-ha9344 none
@@gokushkameha-ha-ha9344 every other frame in the video sequences.
These guys: *compress 4GB of FMV into 24Mb*
Modern developers: "What's compression?"
XSX/PS5 devs: *furiously takes notes*
Compression takes a lot of resources, especially when people complained about 30 seconds loading time. Uncompressed files while it large, it can loads a lot faster.
@@UltimateAlgorithm also these days people are going to notice comperession a lot more then they would in the 1990s its a trick devs cant get away with anymore. not unless they are doing it in a vaccum and its the first port of the game made.
@Ellis Dee 24MB is 6% of a 400MB hard drive. In order for a 90GB game (common among AAA releases nowadays) to take 6% of your drive, you'd need a 1.5TB drive. Yes, the cost of disk space has gone down, but the size of games relative to the size of harddrives has also radically increased.
@@thewewguy8t88 People, today, are making whole video games that take up less space than a single new map in Call of Duty.
2020 COD Developers: We managed to squeeze the game into 200GB.
212GB*
And counting
its propably largest video game i have ever seen. but ya know kids wanted battle royal so we needed to take the dump on our hdd.
@@coldtea7 FPS and COD games are cancer
you know, i thought you were joking and i had a good laugh. now that i've googled it, i'm frightened.
Imagine the kind of games we could get today if they had the same passion as the people who did this port.
*E.A.* -wouldn't exist- would still have a good reputation and retro gaming wouldn't have gone mainstream.
The indie game scene is absolutely thriving with passionate developers. Sad to see the state of big studios but there really is no shortage of great games these days.
Very true. Absolutely no one working in video games is passionate at all. Literally zero people with any passion. It’s weird how there is no passion in today’s game developers. They’re always saying how they have no passion and how they actually hate videogames and think gamers are stupid idiots with too much passion. Weird right?
Now it’s all cosmetics or worse pay to win
@@hajzoom4278unless these Indie guys are making there own game engines most games are shit these days
"It's just a port, shouldn't be too much work."
2 years later: *Has invented MP4 video compression*
Mpeg 4 was released before this port.
@@abark I'm pretty sure it was being used as a metaphor.
abark Woosh
@@manformerlypigbukkit Yes, I admit zoomer humor meme comments go right over my head
Pig Bukkit don’t say that.
I can only imagine how many sleepless nights the devs had to endure to port two CDs worth of content into a 64mb cartridge
Now that's what I call a port!
sickening skills
Um its like 500 Mb's not 64
iTheGeek Take your own advice I said Mb
@@Bewefau dude...
"Dialog audio took a quality hit"... me growing up with N64 games that had voice tracks like "hu, hahah, ououou" and "hey, listen": still pretty impressive
It wasn't that bad, almost warmer than the PS1 version.
@@HappyBeezerStudios That's what I thought. You can hear the compression on the tail end of the words, but overall it sounds warmer.
The compression must've hit the highs more.
The N64 audio sounded more natural to me in this regard, it feels like a weird dissonance seeing the less than perfect graphics and hearing waaaaay too crisp audio.
banjo: ooo eh ooo eh ay!
I first played RE2 on N64 when I was much younger. And I played a friends copy on PS1 a year later and seriously didn't notice a difference. But you have to understand that back then most people had standard CRT televisions (not the much clearer BVM's and PVM's). So as far as most of us were concerned, N64 looked almost completely identical (even side-by-side) to the PS1 version. In fact, because of N64's more advanced blending techniques, there are parts on an old CRT that actually look superior to the original PS1 port. It was magic. Magic that most people didn't realize was actually inferior until much later when LCD TVs became normal, proper analog conversion setups were affordable and proper emulators came along.
plus load times....ps1 was a brutal system then and now because of that
Same the first time I played RE2 was on my older sister's N64 around 6 or 7 years ago but around a year and a bit ago i managed to buy RE2 digitaly for my PS3 and yeah the music is the same amazing as allways but it plays smoother on the Playstaion then it did on the N64 probably due to how it was coded and scaled down to fit on a N64 cartridge
@@The_Blue_Otaku 6-7 years ago, 2016?? How does your sister have a N64 + RE2.. Respect.
@@serebbi It was her ex-boyfriend's he also had an NES also it was around 2015/2016
@@The_Blue_OtakuSuch a man should have never become an ex loool. You shoulda stopped your sister
Played the hell out of this port back in the day - Just one bit of trivia: The FMV size limitations were were almost too much even with compression that they resourcefully removed one that is almost unnoticeable in the middle of the game, (SPOILERS)...
...where you meet Annette in the Sewers. "Are you saying he injected the G virus into his own body?" The playstation version has two separate FMVs
with that line said by the Claire or Ada voice actor depending on the scenario. The N64 port only features Claire's voice no matter the scenario.
I picked this out back in the day, but shout out to the immortal Lotus Prince for reminding me in his RE2 version comparison video.
@@BlottaMcTablets Yep, I've seen it. Good video. I got my copy from Blockbuster video, I think they had some exclusivity deal and while it wasn't cheap it was worth it.
Yep. I noticed this myself when I first played this version. For the longest, I thought I was imagining it.
Oh that's funny. I always noticed that too but never gave it much thought.
The game wasn't that long. How many times did you replay it?
To put this accomplishment into perspective on how impressive it was, imagine a studio was given the task to port RDR2 into a PS2 storage size disc, and still be playable from start to finish.
Lol that is not the same. Bro RDR2 is several gaming systems ahead of the ps2. N64 was actually more powerful than the PS1, the cartridge was the only issue. RDR2 would be so dumbed down and would need several PlayStation discs to work.
@@thegamingchef3304 did you even read what I commented? I didn't say to port it on the PS2 lol. I said, 'a PS2 storage size disc' which is a either a single layer or dual layer DVD storage sizes. Basically compressing the shit of RDR2 to around 4 - 8GBs.
@@carl8790If you ported RDR2 to a ps2 storage disc you are essentially porting it to the ps2. This is a dumb comment and the fact it has so many likes without someone calling you out on your stupidity amazes me lol.
Porting MGS4 to Xbox 360 in a single DVD disc. It could ne possible to do it in 2-3 discs compressing audio, bit the game still wouldn't fit in just one disc.
@@thegamingchef3304 get wrecked
What Angel Studios (now Rockstar San Diego) did with this game to port it to the N64 is nothing short of witchcraft! A very impressive port!
Same with the guy who ported Doom to the SNES he also did witchcraft and the person who ported Doom to the 3DO given their time constraints and resources and it goes to show if given enough time (and money) it can be done albeit with some compromises except for the 3DO I feel bad for that person they were given 10 weeks and had to do it alone
Doom isnt exaclty that amazing considering it uses the super fx chip made for 3d, he did downgrade it a lot also. Is it really amazing if it runs in a window at like 10fps ?
They were the Panic Button for the 90s!
@@Beetlejuice_Sam Red Dead Revolver
I only had an N64, so I was grateful that they were able to release such a high-profile third-party game on the system. What really struck me, though, was how physically heavy the RE2 cartridge was compared to other N64 games. They crammed all that content in there, and I could feel it.
"Sorry but it looks like your high audio quality dialogue party has been... cancelled"
I kind of like the compressed sound, makes it sound more retro
"what happuund?"
@Balakeh "there was this....*incident*...involving cartridges...for a console"
@@BenWillock I agree, the PSX audio is so dry it's distracting. The muffled N64 voices feel like they fit the space better.
@@jasonblalock4429 Don't try to justify that.
Nice video, few corrections:
So the screen resolution was changed every character cut based on the POSSIBLE number of characters to appear.
Only 3D model textures were reduced in size. All other textures other than background compression were same resolution or upscaled for backgrounds.
MusyX is pronounce "Musix" not "Musee-X"
Fun fact... N64 does not clamp colors when using additive mode (making it useless), so I doubled the brightness for additive textures and used modulate blend :)
Also, N64 had a proper Z-Buffer but was a bit sheit on pixel fill, so instead of the PS overdraw, I would analyze all the sprites Z-Values and spit out a Z-Buffer image I could preload into the Z-Buffer on N64 that 3D models would draw against.
Thanks for the video!
Awesome work on that port, thank you very much.
Factor 5 or Angel Studios ?
@@houssamassila6274 Angel Studios did the port, but we borrowed Chris Huelsbeck from Factor 5 to do half of the music conversions to MusyX
@@inventorwithadd Awesome! You are a hero sir. I hope you realise that.
HERE COMES THE VERY PORTER HIMSELF!
The time when developers have to be creative.
Today: There is nothing we can do, our 50GB updates are necessary to update some clothes and guns in the game.
Creative and extremely skilled. Back then most devs also had to develop their own game engines, which was a massive undertaking, instead of copy-pasting a few elements around in Unreal or Unity. I have the biggest respect for these legends.
@@MrZoolook 50GB update to break* one reticle
Destiny 2 effectively uninstalled two of the game's expansions to add a new one without expanding the game's file size.
That’s only because D2 devs are greedy fucks that will sell you a steak, shove their fingers down your throat and then try to sell the vomit back to you at an increased price
That's because we aren't dealing with the limitations of the past so it isn't necessary and most are trying to achieve the best visuals possible.
It was crazy to attempt it...and even more bonkers that they succeeded. The reduction in file size is mind-blowing.
About 80 percent of the original file was removed through compression. Amazing
I didn't own a PS back in the 90s, so this game epitomized Resident Evil for me. I have no idea how many times I completed it. I used to get up in the middle of the night when I knew everyone else would be asleep to sneak downstairs and play through it. Trying to find the right volume where I could hear all the dialogue but the licker crashing through the two-way mirror wouldn't wake up my parents was a delicate balancing act.
I played through it for the first time in probably 15 years during shutdown, still remembering how to get through every puzzle and where to go for every item. Everything about the game took me back to being thirteen again, down in my old basement and nervous as hell about both the monsters I was confronting, and the idea of being caught up playing games at 2 a.m. on a school night.
Kinda same memories for me. I've missed those moments more than being able to express
Damn you parents had some good hearing if you were in the basement playing the game and they were upstairs asleep.
That's fun, thanks for sharing
Did you ever get caught? Lol
@overclockeador but yet I bet they were secretly playing them in their closets themselves.
Building up the beard for a DollarShaveClub sponsor?
It the free one wipe charlies that he really wants.
Looking good
dollar rip off club. Safety razor ftw
@@tyler6644 dollar shave club ain't a ripoff rofl. Good razors for a good price.
Exigentable how much were you payed to say that
I remember getting this game when it was new, and had done zero research on it. It was an impulse buy (and a very expensive one, at that). I thought for sure they would've removed the FMVs and replaced them with stills or something. Totally blew my mind when the ENTIRE game was present!
I was wondering who Angel Studios was. They became Rockstar San Diego.
That explains a lot.
Makes a lot of sense! And I thought they became Pied Piper!
But I thought Rockstar was bad at compression?
@@chikipichi5280 why do you think so?
@@chikipichi5280 Since when?
@@chikipichi5280 Well GTA V in PS3 is 17GBs
You forgot to cover that this N64 port has the option to utilize the Expansion Pack and utilizes an additional 4mb of RAM upscaling the resolution game to 480p making this port even sharper than the PS1 version.
The image resolution - yes, but FMV and texture resolution - definetly not. In practice you had a high res picture with blurry ingredients 😂
@@Ashitaka0815 so you were playing a video in 140p.
@@dianaloayzat4975 no I was just pointing at the fact that the higher output resolution doesn't affect the texture resolution stored on the cartridge. Of course it doesn't - even with more video ram, you can't magically cast texture data out of nowhere. So sharper corners and picture quality - yes, sharper textures in the distance - also possible because with more memory you can mipmap further away. But up close - nope, otherwise they would have to store two versions of the same textures on the cartridge, where storage place was on a premium at the beginning.
Download and burn resident evil 2 and play in a real ps1
ALL N64 games are BLURRY. that is the only reason i hated this sytem BUT i love cartridge based systems! and there was not a single capcom game on here from fighting like x-men vs. street fighter or street fighter alpha series
The N64 had a lot of programming wizards working on its' games.
Check the UA-cam channel "GameHut", it's by Jon Burton of Traveller's Tales/Tt Games. They made a lot of things back then to get games working, and he even explains the techniques they used on that channel.
except for superman 64
I would go so far as to say this is the most impressive port of a game of all time. The fact that it's shot-for-shot identical, with no missing content, with extra content added in, and the only sacrifice is graphical downgrades that are only noticable in side-by-side comparisons to the original? My god that's impressive.
Developers back then: "Gotta fit a gig of data on 64MB, and has to work beginning to end at retail, with a million budget? Pfft, lol k"
Devs now: "We're finally releasing after two years of delays and going over budget by almost double. There's a 30GB install with a 70GB day one patch. Its really a beta version 0.96 but our publisher threatened to sell our kids if we delayed again so here's an 80% functional game that we'll incrementally patch out major crashes once a month until the playerbase disappears entirely in six months."
@Harry Beaver did they? Other than indie devs, big devs/publishers seem to be run on hard line neoliberal lines; firmly a center right construct.
TLoU2
Holy shit that's so true 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Developers used to get paid reasonably and been given time and care to produce a quality product. It's right-wing policies that have forced developers to do more with less, and this is the result.
If you earn less than you would on unemployment, that's a problem with corporations paying slave-wages for back-breaking work. Skilled labor vs. unskilled labor is its own cruel thesis.
@@SeppelSquirrel spot on.
Angel studios pushed the n64 to the limit. The n64 Evangelion game was also noteworthy in this regard.
Angel and Factor 5 did amazing stuff for the console. Things were more... daring in those days. True revolutionary devs.
They still exist btw, just under a different name
Can you tell more about that Evangelion game? Why is it so impressive?
@@DrumEagle well at the time (99) it was pretty rare to hear audio both voiceovers and music on the n64 so crisp; this game has lots of it. Its has good quality fullscreen fmv too but not as much as the puzzle pokémon game. There are constant mini fmv on the hud when characters talk and show emotions which resembles the cartoon a whole bunch. They managed to capture it precisely and sometimes there are several appearing onscreen at the same time. Not that impressive when compared to its fmv counterparts on the pokémon game which are as MVG said fullscreen but great nonetheless. Given more time (or tools?), Bandai could surely put some action sequences from the tv series on the cart for sure. Good and weird game, go check it.
This still happens, it’s known as Nintendo Switch compared to the other Hd consoles
I feel like a lot of those optimizations were only possible because of the way CRT TVs would hide the graphical imperfections. Today's high-resolution TVs are not anywhere as forgiving, unfortunately.
the good thing about CRT was that the pixels blur into each other and create a pleasant picture. But flatscreens have super sharp pixels so artifacts would be seen emediately. Now we start to achive better looking images throught the new super sampling DLSS technology that eliminates artifacts, but 20 years later lol D;
that is exactly what i am saying.
gotta love that "hardware" anti aliasing.
CRT's are the way to play the 5th generation by far. I keep a CRT in my garage just to play N64 and PSX on.
I'm playing it in HD using Hyperkin active HDMI connectors... looks good. plays good. you are very wrong.
I still have my copy, it's impressive how they've managed to put the whole game inside a N64 cartridge; a work of art.
What I liked the most on this version was the 3D analog option, no more tank controls.
That's why I loved that version the best. so much smoother than tank controls
I'd like to see them put it on an Atari 2600 cartridge now.... :)
@ken parvu some a hole has a unopened greatest hits version of res 2 on ps1 for $1,900. If there's an unopened res 2 game original out there for ps1 I bet Paul Logan would buy it for a million. Like he did with a unlimited charizard card
I’m impressed by this port. I think this is the most impressive port you’ve shown so far.
It's less impressive when you realize that each disc only held 370MB of data, and a huge portion of that was completely redundant. All of it could have fit on a single disc easily, but selling it as a 2-CD game was a brilliant marketing move. Pressing an additional disc made the customer think they were getting double the bang for their buck when they actually were not, and it cost barely any extra to manufacture. Capcom is by far not the only company who used this cheap trick back in those days.
@@djhenyo lol this doesn't diminish the accomplishment in any way it just proves capcoms always been lazy and a money grub company
@@shellshock24classicgames61 There's a significant difference between 1.2GB and ~500MB. That was my only point. Now that you mention laziness, it was pretty lazy of MVG to not take 2 minutes and check out the size of the data on each disc and account for the vast majority being redundant. That stood out as a glaring mistake in an otherwise great video.
@@djhenyo Its still a 10x reduction in size even if they fit the entire thing on one CD. It's still quite impressive.
@@djhenyo its k bro your opinion is still valid no need to trash MVG relax we all have opinions have a drink of water and breath we're all valid here 👍
Cartridges with magic (and possibly custom hardware) inside are fascinating to me.
To confirm, yes it had custom hardware, I forget actual details but it contained double the storage but even with double the storage on the cartridge, it was still under half the storage used for the original game on playstation so still alot of magic happening here.
@@Bloowashere well loads of data is duplicated across the PSX version (each CD has 99% the same roomcut.bin etc)
Seeing what the developers managed to achieved with such limitations is simply incredible.
Developers back then did so much to compensate the lack of hardware. They did so many ingenious trick and figured out so many crazy ways to improve quality while not sacrificing performance.
Nowadays many games waste resources. I know, games being this complexes as they are don't help, but some devs just release the games as they are and don't give a crap about optimization, compression.
With 'nary a loot box in sight...
@@jrr7031 Yep you payed your dues for the game and got a complete game.
It's like throwing a Master Mechanic in a junkyard & asking him to build you a running car.
Just give him a little time.
meanwhile, whatsapp on my phone is a 500mb app. a goddamn messenger app. lazy ass devs stopped caring about optimization
Me: "Hmm, where is Angel Studios now?"
Wikipedia: *Angel Studios redirects here, Rockstar San Diego*
Me: "...huh."
uuuhhuh
The same studio who brought you the Red Dead games and RAGE, the engine used in all rockstar games since 2006
Yeah, and they also made the original Midnight Club for PS2
FACT:Angel Studios also made a N64 baseball game entitled Ken Griffey Jr. Slugfest & mere weeks after that game was released Angel Studios announced that they would no longer make sports games in order for them to focus on making RE264.
I don’t know if anyone had mentioned this yet, but Angel Studios is also responsible for the CGI effects in the VR-inspired 90s movie, “The Lawnmower Man.”
... And Sega Mr bones and the Peter Gabriel frog video which won them an MTV award. We had it in our conference room.
Alexander Ehrath Were you a part of Angel Studios?
@@T-MAX_X-H for a long time, yes.
Alexander Ehrath Awesome! Loved the RE2 port and Lawnmower Man CGI the most from your studio!
Alexander Ehrath Dude Thanks For being part of that team, Do you Have a Favorite Project That You got to work On during your time there? Huge Fan of The Midnight Club series And Smuglers Run
The interesting thing is the loading screens with the opening doors were actually NOT even necessary but they kept them in the game for cosmetic reasons because it's quite a iconic thing for Resident Evil. So it was decided to keep it, even thou the N64 would have been perfectly able to do such transitions without any loading times & loading screens, unlike the CD-ROM based PS1 and Saturn.
Not just cosmetic reasons. Originally the door sequence was left out of the game. Playtesters said they *missed* the old animation, so they were added back in, even though it wasn't necessary.
@@SpearM3064 that's a Cosmetic reason
@@SpearM3064 bruh that's a cosmetic reason
In the PC version you could click away the door opening sequence, possibly also on the Dreamcast version. These are the best versions ever released, unfortunately also the rarest.
"Leon... sorry... but, it looks like your party has been cancelled."
Dying, holding in his own guts and he feels he has to apologize to the rookie that they can't throw him a party.. he must be Canadian.
"What happened..?"
Says Leon. Having just survived a near death experience with a runaway tanker, the city around him burning down, and, oh, dead people running around trying to chomp his ass cheeks off.
Gotta love those 90's computer game scripts and acting. No ballsing about.
what a boss... torn up, bitten, and transforming... he can still maintain being the station's Captn. Obvious... i wanna see that this man get a promotion.
To be honest, the sound in the n64 version seemed more fitting with the environment in my opinion
F
This is my favorite version of RE2, It just blew my mind soooo much when this had the cutscenes on N64
I recently acquired this port simply because it is so technically impressive. I hadn't played RE2 since way back in 1998 on PS1. For my recent play through, I decided to play it on N64 on a CRT with the 4MB ram expansion. The higher resolution player models look fantastic on a CRT and I loved playing this version of the game. Truly an amazing port.
This was the version I played as a lad and it was the only RE2 I knew until I was later able to play the other versions, the sound quality is only a small compromise, don't remember it being a problem back then, but I wish he would of said something about the RAM expansion.
The N64 port was the way I played this game as a kid. When you look at them side by side it's a huge difference in video quality, but on a CRT that difference was barely noticeable. I did notice the particularly bad voice clips back then, but most games on N64 had no voice acting at all so the fact it was a little subpar was completely overshadowed by the fact it was there at all.
With the 64, the one upside is that there was way less jaggies on the character models.
"Looks like your party, been canceled"
"What happened????"
Leon, you miss all those zombies you ran by earlier???
Lol
But thats exactly why he's asking what happened...
That kind of voice acting won't get a pass on AAA games today. It will be mocked to oblivion by players and critics. Surely if that released today, it would become a meme.
The dialog was full of cheesy charm in re games. Now everything is Soo serious.
@@UltimateAlgorithm The Final Fantasy games still do. They have shit localization voice direction, at least for the English versions. FFVII Remake wasn't too bad in some spots, but that's not saying much, with all that excessive Japanese grunting bullshit undermining the acting.
This was the only way I experienced Resident Evil 2 and I loved it.
Same here!!!!
Awww, it's okay. *Pats your head* We still love you all the same.
@@RippahRooJizah i grew up with the n64
My friend had a PlayStation and I would come to his house to play re1 but when I seen re2 is coming out on n64 I was so hype
Re2 became my favorite resident evil game in the series
@Kalina Ann Despite your opinion of only the 3rd MK installation being good, let me remind you that Mortal Monday when the first MK came out sold more copies than pretty much any other game in that generation. Also, MK II basically doubled the sales with twice the content. MK3 lacked a lot of characters and was basically exiled by the MK community, in which Midway updated it to Ultimate MK3 which added another good 5 or 6 characters like Scorpion.
This is the version I grew up playing. I only had an N64 and I played hours upon hours. Completing both scenarios for both characters and unlocking all the weapons. It was a big part of my childhood in the 90s. Used to take it with me whenever my family took us on vacation so I can play in the hotel on down days.
Nostalgic music. Remembering playing this as a kid up to midnight. Good times. Thanks for the video btw didn't know this port.
Did you play the remake?
I got goosebumps ....
My cousins and i had to turn the music off or play something happy instead. Scariest game that ive ever played.
I'd pause at every corner, dreading to move forward.
The music set the tone and atmosphere. Excellent game.
It’s the version I had.
I owned an N64 and a Playstation. To this day I have no clue why I got the N64 version.
Dammm i used to play Re2 back on the days but neverrrr at nigth😂😅, and to be honest im afraid to play the remake😂😂😂 i cant deal with the remake its to scary😂😂😂😂
I always thought it was impressive that Tony Hawk got ported to the N64 but hated the looping music and missing tracks. Seems like they could have fit the whole sound track if they had used more of these tricks.
Compressing music/audio is very different than compressing video. The hit in quality would have been quite a lot more noticeable.
Tony Hawk uses licensed music, which is much harder to play as midi
@@r033cx hahhaha
@@RetrOrigin Mono and 32 khZ samplerate save over 50% and are, for N64 players, not really noticable. I mean, when you bought a console, just like today (console vs real gaming rig), you knew you have always a low(er)-fi device. PC in 1999: 2.500$. Console: 399$?
@@Zedek Back when consoles had a reason to exist.
Excluding portable consoles like the Switch and such.
I remember my friends telling me often N64 couldn't run FMV when comparing PS and N64. Then RE2 came out. Good old friendly console war days.
Even the Genesis and SNES can do FMV lol. It's all about storage.
@Andrew Mitchell Of course. What I mean is that a lot of people think it might be a hardware limitation or something (and it is, but not of the console but the storage format). Today you can play via SD card games on SNES with CD quality soundtracks and FMV.
Of course, some consoles do make it easier with built in hardware specifically for video and stuff (like the PS1).
Andrew Mitchell The market wasn't as big as it is today, and Nintendo was already deeply rooted.
Also many parents were against video games.
Basically, it was too soon.
@Andrew Mitchell Optical discs as a storage media would've made little difference success-wise in console. The key to success would be aggressive marketing as well as developer & publisher support. Sony nailed it on that front.
@@xmaverickhunterkx GBA also
Everything about this impressive. I’ve done digital illustrations larger than the entire Resident Evil 2 game file! Thank you for sharing this video!
Another impressive port: Alone in the Dark on Gameboy Color.
Alone in the dark ( new nightmare)ps1 ♥️
RE1 on GBC was also kinda of an achievement though it was never released. The builds found on internet looks still impressive.
Lmao facts
the genius of this channel to go into technical details like this. bravo
Always wanted to know how this game was ported. It just felt impossible
Same in all honesty but there leaves the other impossible port and that's mega man 64 "legends"
@@CecilTheDarkKnight234 Maybe they get a video too
Yeah when I emulate my back up I’ve had some of the tricks revealed like somehow I rendered it settings to native and the game was suddenly in a tiny lil like 300 pixel window and it made me realize they must have shrunk it all down and used some sort of soft upscale now I know it was the vector chip. Love your content and your emulators mate! Cheers 🍻
I miss these days when they cared about compression
Rockstar: *”What’s that you say, you want a 30GB update to our 150GB base game?”*
And optimization.
Gotta love uncompressed audio. I wonder how long before they'll stop compressing video too. It's only storage space, right? It's so cheap. Who cares if one game takes up half a hard disk?
@@benjamincrew1949 Hasn't the use of video gone down in the last years because a lot is done in engine? Video is still an option for low end specs that can not handle that smoothly but I feel like it will go down even more in the future.
@@wynard A lot can be done in engine now then before, but video is still used fairly often. Uncompressed audio isn't going to sound any different except maybe to extreme audiophiles and even then is probably more a placebo effect. Uncompressed textures can take a good amount of space too but at least that may be slightly more justifiable as resolutions increase.
You forgot to mention that a lot of data was duplicated on both CDs such as backgrounds, scenario data, extras, etc.. the final number would be closer to 900 MBs.
That still doesn't take away from the amazing work and compression that was used to fit this into 64 MBs.
It was amazing when it was released. When i played the game on the store a psx owner was there. He said that a mini cd must be in the cartrige, that was really funny to hear.
The score for the main hall in RE 2 is my favorite video game music of all time. It's absolutely INCREDIBLE.
When this came out I already had some very good notion about the "size" of a program, and knowing that the PS1 version used more the 1GB of data trough 2 CDs and that the biggest N64 cart was only 64MB just blew my mind. It amazed me back then, I remember researching the web, digging for some information until I got some notion about how it was done. Time has passed and it still remains a barely believable port. Amazing!
this information wasnt available when the games released. u couldnt have "searched the web" and had a complete understanding of how they did this at the time. nice try poser
@@Gimilli my real name and real face are up in my profile. Look who's poser here.
@@Gimilli when the game came out there wasn't any information about the port itself. But there was plenty of information already about PS1 development and N64 development. By doing research on both systems I've came to realize the difference and came to understand what possible methods could have been used in order to achieve those impressive results. I've came to realize that by my own thought and understanding, and not because I've seen it written and explained somewhere. But being this stupid, you don't really deserve this answer. I'm giving it just for the sake of other readers.
This is a perfect overview for me. I've always tried telling my friends that the PS1 game was squeezed into a cart... Now there is a technical reference that I can recommend to my buddies!
That cartridge was HEAVY. Easily outweighed other carts I had. I remember Donkey Kong 64 was heavier than others, too, but not as much.
Omg! When I first beheld Resident Evil 2 for PlayStation; I freaked because it was well done; you literally felt deep genuine fear against umbrella’s ferocious zombies and oooh you’d literally be scared to play at night, or in a dark setting.
I concur.
I still remember playing this game on the PC, with headset on, full volume, in the dark. I could swear I can hear zombies moaning behind me.
Remake it in ue5
@@PMswe : Well, those headsets were not as chunky as the new ones, though. But that immersive experience...
Yep headphones is the best way to play. You hear things more clearly
No it’s just me
If you as a developer use binaural microphones during sound recording, you can do that with just Stereo. No fancy 5.1 setup needed.
If you want to know how those microphones look like, just go Twitch, Category: ASMR and see random girls licking those super expensive things for cringe.
When PC gamers can’t play a game with the performance they want: time to build a new PC
When you want to fit a game that uses 2 CDs on a 64MB cart for N64. Highly skilled Devs: Challenge accepted.
I lower the quality settings like turn off AA, lower the resolution turn off all the unneeded visual effects post processing effects and when you messed enough with the game you can also try to Overclock a little your GPU too, despite what most think, not all PC gamers have the money to go buy new PC, not everyone is like the ones posting vids on youtube of what new gpu they bought recently and such, I expect my gpus last me from 4-6 years
@@LyamOfficial This. My PC is around 9 years old by now. Sure some changes were made like the inclusion of an SSD or an exchange of the standard graphics card that was in back than. But it's mostly still the same PC and it did run most games very well (I never cared if they weren't on fullest graphics settings if it was just not possible with my specs). It's only by now I see games that I won't be able to run without extremly upgrading my hardware (or completly building a whole new PC).
And I would love if game developers would use more time to compress their games. Why is it that we have for example 1TB of storage but in the end it's only enough for 10 games or maybe even less because you always need some extra space for possible DLCs and patches? Do they really need 100GB or could they compress stuff without us players even really noticing? Why do we need such big day 1 patches? (This was always painful as someone who grew up in a smaller German town that had no good internet connection for a very long time. Back than downloading like 10GBs was like a task for a whole day or maybe even two and sadly I know some people that still have no access to better internet.)
@@TitanKaempfer it took you back then 2 days to download 10gb of stuff? how baller of you, for me it took more than that, I remember back a long time ago
@@LyamOfficial I mean, yes. I know there were (and still are) people having slower internet. Thing still is, it hadn't even access to better internet until 6 years ago or so.
I had to wait until 2014 before even thinking about being able to watch a video on anything higher than 360p (or 480p if I had the time to preload it... Until it was removed in favour of the HTML5 player) and this was only possible if my family weren't doing a lot of things in the internet.
Sadly the German political parties always have digitalization as a big point in their party programs but they're almost doing little to nothing. Even the internet provider companies are not really doing their job very well. One of the biggest providers here is promising that we'll get 5G everywhere, but we have yet to even cover the whole country with a cellular network. You can't even leave a town for like a meter without losing any phone and internet connection. (And even in some villages I visited it's really bad were you might only make a call via mobile phone if you get a lucky day) :/
But yeah, that's far from the original point of the discussion nor the topic of the video. xD
@@TitanKaempfer Performance>graphics
Resident Evil 2 is one of only three N64 games I know of with surface-mount chips. The others are Ogre Battle 64 and Morita Shogi 64.
I think it's particularly interesting since all are 3rd party titles and one of those chips is a custom CIC security chip from Nintendo. It's like Nintendo went out of their way to make this version of a CIC for them! Strangely, it's just a 6102 or 6102A and not even one of the alternate CICs.
Of course, Angel Studios operated more like a Nintendo 2nd party studio back then. The chips are marked copyright 1996 with 1997, 1999, and 2000 production codes. I've never looked inside a 64DD or any of the capture or Smart Media cartridges for it but I wonder if these special CIC packages were intended for it.
It's probably the same silicon, just a different packaging step. Not too expensive in large volume, and it probably saved them money on the PCB assembly for the cart.
depends on the ICs used, but many chip families are available in both DIP and SMT packages. It is interesting that a developer would choose surface mount with the added complication... or its possible that Nintendo had a stock of CICs in both packages available?
And.... I have all three in in collection Bwahhh ha ha ha (Sorta evil laugh)
@@userPrehistoricman Yeah, but they have CIC NUS6102 and CIC NUS6102A with production dates from 1997, 1999, and 2000, so they had to have made several batches. Wonder what the minimum quantity was for each chip.
@@AndyHope970 Yeah, for off the shelf components it makes very little difference but the custom chips make it a bit more curious.
I’ve never beaten this version but it’s always interested me. I like that you can change the blood color to Blue or Green, that’s something that has always been funny to me And the inclusion of the EX files that add a little bit more backstory to the game and foreshadow the at the time upcoming RE0 which was going to be an N64 game. The exclusive costumes were also a welcome change and in my opinion are better than the costumes in the other versions.
Developers today: Well, guess you have to download an additional 50 GB. Meh.
@starshipeleven öhm they have 32gb cardridges... It's not because of the memory, it's because of the shitty Tegra chip😂
@@paulmueller100x troll
@@renatoramos8834?
@@paulmueller100x the switch cardridges can fit 64 gigabyte worth of space now, for a while actually
Developers were so much better when they had to deal with reduced resources... think about today... 250GB Day1 Patch.. not as unusal...
I agree generally speaking, but today there's an expectation of such high realism that there's just not as many short-cuts you can take. People want TRUE 4K and what-not and eventually it gets to a point where there's just no real way around the massive sizes, even once compressed.
I blame the publishers. The industry is now ruled by some bad people, mega corporations who try to do everything cheaper than it should be, faster than it should be, while working the devs into nervous breakdowns and early retirement. It has become a giant racket rather than an entertainment industry, not even the movie business is as unconcerned with quality and experience
Not only are games orders of magnitude more complex today, the reason for large day 1 patches are most of the time not the developers' fault. Publishers rush development studios under very tight deadlines to the point where developers are working on the game until the night before release. The large patch sizes are an optimization trick due to hardware limitations on the HardDrive access speed. Developers create duplicate files for assets for various scenarios so that the harddrive doesn't have to move the read head far away. Hence, you get very large patches. Next gen should reduce patch sizes significantly with SSDs.
@@MrSlowestD16 I want a true or native port for Windows games that stems from console games. The "ports" feel like you emulate a Windows game on Wine.. "It runs"...
@@MrSlowestD16 I don't think it's coming from the customers, otherwise we'd see a lot more high fps console titles. I think this generation is going to see a lot of innovative upscaling techniques, and some titles are going to run assets at 8K down the road.
Maybe it's only me, but I think developers back then deserve so much credit. Not that the game devs know deserver less, but still they had tremendous challenges.
This is such an outstandingly good video. Kept me captivated from beginning to end
I rented this game when I had a 64, I was totally blown away by it. It is in the shortlist of really good N64 games.
There were a ton of (really good) n64 games
Lots of good n64 games
@@magicjohnson3121 Sure there were some. Not going to deny that, but I am not looking at this system through nostalgia goggles. I was a full-grown tax-paying adult when I got one. The truly great titles were too few and far in between, I see it simple as that. So agree to disagree, but kind of agree.
@@justthisguy1948 A ton is an absolute overstatement. There weren't even a ton of games FOR the system.
@@ALCPEREZ some of the best games of all time came out on 64 it probably had more than even PlayStation did
MusyX uses less than 1%, per active voice. So if you're playing something with many instruments at once and combine with sfx, it still adds up to a significant chunk of cpu / rsp. This isn't an issue with MusyX, but rather with Nintendos fascination with software audio solutions.
Nintendo was so proud about their new powerful processor and it was in fact quite powerful at time.
However after everything needed to run it could only push a fraction of the polys the PlayStation could do and IMO was a huge oversight on their part.
@@ezg8448 Powerful for a console, maybe. Pretty long in the tooth for a general purpose CPU.
@@jsrodman what other CPUs were around for consumer pcs around the time of the n64s release? I only know about the OG pentiums :p
@@jlewwis1995 why focus on consumer pcs? I mean, the 6x86 was on the market, as were amd things. The power pc was faster as well. There were faster mips cpus than the one on the n64. The alpha was definitely faster. The strongarm was far more powerful. Etc etc
@@ezg8448 I honestly think the reason Nintendo fucked up on audio is that they were too scared to meet another Sony.
Nintendo can't make audio chips, Sony made the best... Nintendo got fucked the day they betrayed Sony.
And still to this day, Nintendo continues to get these "impossible ports" on their systems thanks to really damn reliable third parties, like Panic Button, Feral Interactive, and Saber.
HanimeYT thank god for PlayStation moving gaming forward
Witcher 3 the wild hunt
@@ralphtaylor7448 just depends on how you look at it. Nintendo has its own niche in the industry.
@@ralphtaylor7448 only PC and nintendo moves forward
OS. Temli naa the switch is just an afterthought dedicated to children
When I got this game for PS I played it for 8 hours the first night and 6 hours the second night beating In obviously 14 hours. I took one day off put it back in and played 6 hours and then only 2 hours the next day taking 6 hours less to complete with everything so fresh in my brain. Love this game.
Honestly, looking back, i don't think i noticed much of a difference when I was 13/14, but seeing it now it kind of boggles my mind how they did it.
Only on a budget of $1 million? These guys were criminally underpaid
@MultiTarded- Now they just shove the data into a recompiler and call it a day.
@MultiTarded That depends on the contract... and contracts where VERY different back then compared to today.
MVG: "How Did X Happen?"
Me: I don't know, and I never wondered, but I'm damn sure watching to find out.
The answer: "MISTAKES WERE MADE"
"Thanks to some clever tricks!"
Oh I always wondered this. Code itself is easy to get into anything, it's just a text file at the end of the day, but the aasets? I always wondered how the hell they managed to get the FMVs in there, how the hell does the music sound so perfect, how did they manage to get both scenarios in a 64mb cartridge when PS1 required to discs? It's nuts.
@@tralphstreet Music is easy. MP3 compression crunches music down nicely. That's why it's become so ubiquitous. It's been used in several N64 titles, including Conker's BFD to squeeze all of the voice lines in.
This one in particular has been a mechanical mystery all my life.
If they re-released this exact game today, it would be a 10 gb download
100*
@@marcowulliampopirers2216 1000*
Excluding the day 1 patch...
RIP Paul Haddad, Leon's original voice actor.
@Andrew Mitchell Throat and brain cancer, he died about 3 or 4 months back, you should google him, may he rest in peace.
@@Talos2kX omg that's so horrible.
@@orlandoalessandrini2505 Chris Redfield's original voice actor passed away too in a car crash in Japan in 2000, he also voiced Richter in Castlevania Symphony of the Night.
@@Talos2kX damn
two decades later, compression becomes a factor again with the PS% gaining dedicated compression hardware and new codecs like Kraken entering the scene. Will be interesting to see how games turn out over the next generation
had to look at my keyboard
AV1 should be used for video especially if it's implemented in hardware, which it may not be for the next gen consoles. Kraken looks okay but I have doubts about a proprietary solution, the only results I see online are essentially propaganda with misleading benchmarks. I'd always pick the best-suited FOSS solution, at rough glance that appears to be zstd in the general case but I'm not an expert.
Absolutely, we're getting fast storage and super high res textures along with tons of new techniques for upscaling/downscaling. Meanwhile some lazy devs are still sticking to 30 fps.
@@Ironclad17 *lazy gamers
@@Ironclad17 Build a computer.
This takes me back man ... 1998 my mom brought me this I was suprised as hell it was available on the 64
It also was the only RE at that Time with Cheat Codes :-O
The part that creeped me out was the part where the gun shop owner dies. And the licker first appearance when I was in my early teens in the 90s.
Now I feel bad for always skipping the intro.
why
@@xnet-pvzok728 The effort that went into it.
NINTENDO: Compressing and Reducing resolutions from unmemorable times.
haha
Because of talented developers! Devs these days have way more freedom and way fewer hardware constraints.
And because of that we end up with lazy developers who can't optimize code very well(WWE games on Switch), or we end up with tons of bugs, and they have to rush out day one, and/or week one patches.
@@CommodoreFan64 Yeah, back then you had to get it right cause you couldn't simply patch hundreds of thousands of cartridges on shelves across stores nationwide.
You mean talented corner cutters who can use all that added space and the added hard drives annoyingly MS started putting in their systems to release unfinished buggy stuff to willing guinea pigs paying full price for day one patches and other problems to patch later. Back in the day, and hell more or less still on Nintendo since they're cheap on internal storage forces it, you basically have to get it right or your project is fouled up. Truly talented developers can make a game that works out of the box and hit a street date, lazy talented ones take the fix it later mentality.
@@CommodoreFan64 Don't blame the devs 100%, blame the publishers for extremely demanding schedules, poor working conditions and most of all being more interested in making as much money as possible and not the best product. Devs do cut corners but there's enormous pressure and competition, plus at the end of the day, people keep buying AND pre-ordering buggy, poorly optimized and non-quality assured games even though there are so many examples of botched releases over the years. I personally have a ton of games but I haven't pre-ordered or bought a game on Day 1 in about 10 years or more simply because you don't know what you're gonna get. Like this new Horizon Zero Dawn PC port which is full of issues.
Much less freedom these days, thanks to management.
vintage gaming hardware is one of the most fascinating topics for me. instant subscription, MVG! \m/ can't wait to catch up on all this content to get up to date
When I played this when it came out on my n64 I was old enough to realize that this shouldn't work but not old enough to understand why. Definitely one of my favorite games.
Impressive! When i played this game the first time I was 13 or 14. I didn't gave a f*** how this was realised at this time, because later at 16 years old I still did not know what an overhead projector was. Now think about how dumb I was back then.
@@Michael-ql9fo lol not dumb to not understand some things buddy, I'm sure you have deep knowledge on a bunch of subjects, this just wasn't one of them and that's totally fine!
Nintendo using carts in 1996: falling behind the curve. Nintendo using switch game cards in 2020: on track to become the best selling Nintendo console of all time. Anyhow it was a tech marvel to see RE2 on the n64 back then. Thanks for the video
Just to add on, Nintendo Switch got a port of Doom 2016 on to that game card and it runs smooth! Panic Button surely did magic on that port.
Flash memory has become incredibly cheap as of recent years due to mass manufacturing of micro sd cards for everyone's smart phones. It is now optical disks and traditional hard drives which are the biggest slowdowns to gaming and computing, however they are still dirt cheap to manufacture so not going away until flash memory is literally cheaper.
@referral madness Best-selling Nintendo console, he said.
because the switch carts have storage equivalency to a 4mb cartridge for n64. 16gb of flash is dirt cheap and plenty for most games.
Totally different tech, the ones used on the N64 were actual rom carts, much more expensive to produce, and much smaller storage capacity.
Nintendo: How long has it been since Sega launched Model 2 arcade boards with full texture mapping? 3 years boss. How long has it been since Sony launched a machine with about 700kb of RAM you can use for textures? Nearly 2 years boss. Alright lads, let's give our brand new machine 4kb of texture memory. Good idea boss.
It had 4KB of Texture *CACHE* not texture *MEMORY*
PSX had only 2KB of texture cache, even less than N64
@@t0biascze644 People that call it cache in the N64 are seemingly unaware that it is indeed correctly referred to as texture memory. 'TMEM' in technical documents. It was a manually managed tiny piece of memory. You're welcome.
That is freaking amazing.. Damn that was informative and fun to listen to!
I no longer have to choose between watching MVG or watching SpongeBob as of this Monday.
Why would you have to choose? Watch MVG an Throw that SpongeBob crap in the trash where it belongs.
MrMario2011 If it’s the modern spongebob,then i agree
@@AnarickTheDevil MVG is great, but he has nothing on spongebob.
@@AnarickTheDevil Well, obviously YOU wouldn’t have to choose, but I know it’d be a tough choice for me and a lot of others.
Just imagine the gamers back during the original 2 who had no idea of Mr X's existence in the game. Most would finish the game and just put the other disc in and start a new game instead of loading Scenario B. They missed out on the best scenario of the game.
I’m pretty sure IGN did this when the remake came out and then complained it was “the same game but with Claire instead”. Then proceeded to get roasted online because they released a review without playing scenario B
Me. Played through as Claire first, without a memory card (PS1) so knew nothing about scenario B. Don't know why I didn't cop it, but just went to Leon 🤷🏻♂️
@@craigmachinburg8038 hahaha what, didn't got that back then. IGN gets even more laughable right now, oh gosh how can they even exist anymore?
@@obskure_ie how did you play it without a memory card? Did you complete it in one sitting or just never turn the console off?
@@boothbyaw exactly 😀 console was never switched off. And what's more... I was living in a shared house while in college, with 4 other guys. Yes, I'm that old!!! Each of us got a time slot on the PS1 and TV - It lasted from Sunday evening until Thurs evening
I loved RE2 on the N64, even though I played it way after it came out.. it was a perfect game to finally play during J term where the campus was mostly empty and I just had to go to a track practice once a day, but just ate, laid in bed, and played this scary ass 64 game for those couple weeks.. it was really great! I’ve heard how amazing it was that they got this port to work, which I never even considered how complicated it was before that.. and your video has helped me appreciate it much more! Nice work!
Hey buddy! Yeah, I never played RE2 on 64 but just got it recently and was blown away at what an amazing port it is. After watching this it seems even more amazing now. So when’s your review coming? 😜
@@megamob5834 I love hearing from you, my man
:) I’m definitely committed to getting through RE series, on multiple platforms, over the years in the month of October 🎃 👻
I’m really excited for the next 16bit review, I’m finally going for a monumental title… doing my best to let this beauty shine, Donkey Kong Country… and here’s a secret, I may or may not use skits to link to DKC2 and DKC3. Let’s just put these beasts of vids on the channel. The amazing thing, I’ve already learned or noticed 3 things I haven’t before… and I’ve beaten the game a few times before, I LOVE these deep dives
@@MarMaxGaming awesome, can’t wait man. I think the majority of your viewers also love the deep dive approach you have for your reviews and a good skit is always more than welcome! :-)
I've literally watched this video about 5 times the the past 6 months. I'm sorta obsessed with video compression, so this is really fascinating. I also have this random hobby of taking videos I record and recompressing them into different codecs, resolutions, bitrates...
Talking about "impossible" that channel Coding Secrets is unbelievable!
Big fan of that myself
love that channel
I'd never heard of that channel, so when I looked it up I thought to myself, "Didn't one of the developers of many of these games start a channel already talking in-depth about these 'Impossible' things?" That channel, of course, being Game Hut. So I went to Game Hut and, lo and behold, both channels are the same dev! Thanks for inadvertently bringing that to my attention! I'd already loved Game Hut, but kind of fell away from it as the upload frequency was rather low. Now I have a whole new channel, with videos about other games, too!
@@pickleshanks
I believe gamehut will be related to only things he's worked on, where as coding secrets will be things other people might have worked on as well. "Heres how they did it" type of thing.
17R3W - Yeah. I watched his latest Game Hut video which explains that, which let me realize the channels were related. I’m seriously happy about this serendipitous discovery!
The new Call of duty needs to take account of some "clever compression"
The 64 GB limit gave them a reason to be innovative. "Clever" requires time. Time is money to a developer. There is no monetary penalty for shipping out gigs of textures. They have a captured audience who will pay for the same game every year or 2.
Sword Thain shutup
My first experience with RE2 was the N64, so I have a soft spot for that version
That, and the smooth transitions on loading the next scene. The doors weren't truely needed on the N64, but they kept them on for the sake of suspension. They could kept them away save some valuable space for some extras or better textures. That, and how they kept some minigames in the cart as well, like Tofu, the policeman and Ada's side missions as unlockables.
Pretty amazing port indeed.
@@RetroArcadeGuy the policeman and Ada's side missions are not in the N64. It was only Hunk and Tofu. Trust me. I've played the guts out of that version of RE2.
@@jeremyrafuse5330 Oh you are right, I meant the policeman as Hunk. Tofu and Hunk are there, maybe I mistook a mission were you play as Ada Wong then. Also, let alone extra costumes and features not present even on next gen consoles of its time.
@@RetroArcadeGuy yeah you still have your side quests in the main mission. Claire's scenario, you had to use Sherry and dodge zombies puking on you or dogs. Obviously with Leon, it's Ada.
*It's not surprising that a system powerful enough to run games like Shadow Man and Body Harvest can also run Resident Evil 2*