On my part I'm really proud that I was able to do a global-hack where I kept the fixed-point coordinates sub-pixel precision, so our PC port did not “tremble” or “shake” like others to come. As we couldn't do shit about having the original mod-music working, we relied on couple of then popular MGS web-sites and “stole” from them the whole music piece, and other things which came as an audio “pre-rendered” form, and then played them directly from our game. Then I had something to find all places where these pointers were used and mask them out when they had to be read, but kept the 24-bit highest bit in there (okay, it's a bit like tagging I've learned much later when I did some Common Lisp). It's possible that we might've messed up some of the AI tweaks, but no one complained, and we were young and did not care. To work on Windows we had to ensure that we don't go above the 16mb (and the exe starts from 4MB), we also had all overlays for the game compiled-in rather than doing the swapping as the game did, but we had plenty of space even then to fit. This was used for example to indicate whether the C4 bomb was planted on the ground, or on the wall instead of keeping a booblean/bit flag for it. The game used a tricky pointer hack, basically on the PSX accessing a pointer with the highest-24-bit set means read it from the CPU cache, otherwise not (or maybe the other way around). Since our port was more or less “wrap” the PSX libs as PC, we didn't have to change too much, just on the surface - a bit like patching here and there. So 600kb+100kb, leaves you about 1.0mb for objects, “scenerio” files to be loaded, etc. Each character would have a “main” like function that accepted (int argc, const char argv) and handled the arguments from there (these were directly from the TCL scripts). TCL-like language was used to script the game, the radio, traps/objects in the game, etc. so/.dylib/.dll files that knew about the main part. The main part would declare entry-points to be reached, and the “swapped” overlay were like many. About 600kb were a main/shared/common part, and if I'm not mistaken 100kb or a bit more were swapped (the overlay). Game used overlays for the executable part. We were never given their internal sound mixer, but the popular metal gear tune was “mod”-like with very short samples - all of this + game effects was fitting in a 512kb audio buffer (adpcm). If models were skinned they would've required all the colors used anywhere on the body, and would produce other unpleasant effects (different sampling frequency, especially on the shoulders, etc.) Konami's character modeling is top-notch. As such it was possible to use very little colors per texture (16) and use palettes (which is a very small “texture” in the graphics memory). Some textures were covering only the front part of the body, others arms, etc. Models were not “skinned” as it was popular in the day. I worked on the port of MGS to PC back in 1999-2000. Malkia on J| parent | favorite | on: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM
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