Not him. But it doesn't really make it any more or less general purpose vs CISC. Its just a different way of going about it. RISC is better for high level development while CISC is better at low-level development. Modern RISC designs are more CISC-like nowadays anyways with their piles of SIMD instructions added on top. Conversely modern CISC designs also take pages from RISC' book with reduced instruction set cores and CISC-like execution units
Would it be possible to remake a game like Super Mario 64 on the SNES...
James Powell
Xavier Hernandez
This was the pinnacle of 3d on 16-bit machine. Wot if you had $30,000 to blow on hardware? This was it. Mario would have been six conjoined cubes floating through space. You can daydream all you want. Nothing resembling SuperMario64 would have been possible on any 16-bit machine.
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Xavier Young
Absolutely not possible. Most of a sound card is analog parts designed to oscillate at a program-defined frequency in order to emit waveforms, which does not help you with 3d polygon rendering.
Adam Phillips
Game audio hardware has basically always been digital. The SNES was a pretty typical example of the approach used from the early '80s to the early '00s, with a simple general purpose CPU (Motorola 6800-compatible) driving a (quite powerful, for the time) Sony DSP. The only actual analog audio component is a 16-bit 32kHz stereo PCM DAC.
Brody Anderson
The SNES audio chip was quite a bit more sophisticated than a simple DSP/General processing unit IIRC. it had its own firmware as well
Mason Carter
Prepare to have your mind blown then because it is indeed possible to offload calculations to it in some fashion. See archive.fo
With enough programming autism, super mario 64 would indeed be possible on the SNES. Why has no one done this yet?
Nathan Watson
That's interesting, I didn't know that was the case. So old sound cards were basically microcontrollers with a DAC attached?
John Jackson
Not just old sound cards, but new, and by extension cheap, ones too.
Julian Miller
I guess that has to be the case, otherwise the CPU would have to manage sending stuff to the sound card at 96kHz or whatever sampling frequency the audio uses.
Connor Russell
That is exactly what we do now. Modern soundcards (since the mid-2000s) don't have DSP offload anymore. They just slurp up PCM bitstream from RAM/CPU and pour it into the DAC.
This is part of the reason for a MASSIVE downgrade in PC game audio from its peak at Aureal 3D 2 in the late '90s, tumbling down to the termination of EAX 5 & DS3D with Windows Vista, abandoning us since then to a swamp of gamedevs incompetently reinventing the wheel for software game audio in every game, sometimes slightly assisted by middleware like FMOD & Miles.
Things have very slowly picked up since then, due to middleware vendors gradually realizing how wholly unacceptable their shit is in the VR era, but even the best VR games still haven't caught up to where we were in 1998.