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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday February 02 2020, @09:52PM   Printer-friendly
from the blast-from-the-past dept.

Video: How Myst's designers stuffed an entire universe onto a single CD-ROM:

Although the passage of time serves to make the past seem sweeter in recollection than it might have been in the moment, it's impossible to deny that there was something special about the gaming landscape of the 1990s. Every year in that decade brought a torrent of titles that were destined to become classics—including the often-imitated-but-ultimately-inimitible Myst.

Myst came to market in 1993, which was a banner year in PC gaming—1993 also brought us X-Wing, Doom, Syndicate, and Day of the Tentacle, among others. It's fascinating that Myst happened the same year that Doom launched, too—both games attempted to simulate reality, but with vastly different approaches. Doom was a hard and fast shotgun blast to the face, visceral and intense, aiming to capture the feeling of hunting (and being hunted by) demons in close sci-fi corridors; Myst was a love letter to mystery and exploration at its purest.

A few months back, Ars caught up with Myst developer Rand Miller (who co-created the game with his brother Robyn Miller) at the Cyan offices in Washington state to ask about the process of bringing the haunting island world to life. Myst's visuals lived at the cutting edge of what interactive CD-ROM technology could deliver at the beginning of the multimedia age, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, fitting the breadth of the Millers' vision onto CD-ROM didn't happen without some challenges.


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  • (Score: 2) by jasassin on Monday February 03 2020, @08:07AM (3 children)

    by jasassin (3566) <jasassin@gmail.com> on Monday February 03 2020, @08:07AM (#953066) Homepage Journal

    We are supposedly getting a transformation of gaming in the next couple of years since the next-gen consoles will switch from using HDDs directly to PCIe 4.0 SSDs. Obviously a massive increase in IOPS, as well as multi-GB/s read speeds.

    Have you seen these [userbenchmark.com] bad boys? Fastest SSD in the world! I wish they would use those to push some limits.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 03 2020, @01:25PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 03 2020, @01:25PM (#953100)

    Waiting for 2nd gen.

    Terrible consistency
    The range of scores (95th - 5th percentile) for the Intel 900P Optane NVMe PCIe 280GB is 224%. This is a particularly wide range which indicates that the Intel 900P Optane NVMe PCIe 280GB performs inconsistently under varying real world conditions.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 04 2020, @03:49AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 04 2020, @03:49AM (#953412)

      Maybe because the bottleneck is now more due to other stuff? Just a look at the SSDs from other vendors using different tech (e.g. V-NAND, 3D TLC NAND) shows the same "terrible consistency" stuff (for example- tenth place: https://ssd.userbenchmark.com/SpeedTest/497261/Samsung-SSD-970-PRO-1TB [userbenchmark.com] ).

      If the lower end of the scores is still high enough then I wouldn't be concerned. Especially if it's mostly due to the limitations of the hardware that it was testing poorly on.

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Tuesday February 04 2020, @03:56AM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday February 04 2020, @03:56AM (#953415) Journal

    XPoint/Optane hasn't really lived up to the post-NAND/storage class memory hype. It does come in #1 in your link, but I think the main benefit has been performance at lower queue depths [legitreviews.com].

    Cost per bit is too high, and consoles will probably be including 1 TB SSDs.

    That said, if you can keep your OS and most applications on 280 GB or one of the smaller options, maybe it makes sense. But there are NAND SSDs with faster sequential R/W speeds. Intel 900P Optane NVMe PCIe 280GB ($405) is listed as 1.768 GB/s write speed, with the Gigabyte Aorus NVMe PCIe M.2 1TB ($230) at 3.234 GB/s.

    I am interested to see how future SCMs stack up. I'd like to see something closer to non-volatile DRAM.

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