Ask HN: Want help figuring out jump jets work in MechWarrior 2 | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Want help figuring out jump jets work in MechWarrior 2

12 pointsPopeDotNinja4 comments

Hi HN,

I used as a QA Engineer for Transmeta, a startup that made low power CPUs for laptops. One of the ways I loved to test our chips was by playing MechWarrior 2. Basically I tried to break the chips using a video game where you run around in a mech (a giant robot with guns) shooting other mechs.

Game play video: https://youtu.be/L0mSdnxM7fc

In the game, some mechs could jump using jump jets. One day I noticed that the jump jets recharged much more slowly on Transmeta chips than they did on our Intel reference chips. The recharge rate on a Transmeta chip was something like 10 or 20% the rate it should have been.

Jump jets being used: https://youtu.be/v1O4WTwjWZ4?t=9m54s

To my knowledge, no one ever figured out why. I'm wondering if someone here happens to have worked on, or can legally share the source code for, MechWarrior 2. I'm curious how the jump jet recharging worked, and whether that might offer some clue as to why the recharging happened so slowly on Transmeta chips!

>transmeta

Wow - now there is a name I haven't heard in a REALLY long time.

I was at Intel when transmeta was still in stealth... and interestingly worked in their CPU benchmark DRG lab where we tested SIMDs on procs and Intel was focused on the Celeron being a <$1,000 that was performant to the gamer crowd... We were worried about transmeta at that time.

We were testing the games that were released on celeron machines against an AMD machine to prove out (subjectively) that a gamer would see performance as better on the Intel platform than AMD such that they woud buy Intel...

Intel actually paid game companies to code to the SIMD instructions in their games specifically to make them faster, and then paid the companies marketing money to promote the games...

Sadly, Transmeta was still too vapor for us to test against...

Ha! I never would have considered the possibility that MechWarrior 2 wasn't slow on Transmeta, and that it was simply fast on Intel! That is interesting. I guess there are all sorts of optimizations one such as Intel could make when sitting on billions of dollars.

An anonymous beta test participant reported that Valve encountered a similar problem before the release of Counter-Strike: Source. Players with a Transmeta CPU could see the bullets flying. The cause had to do with the internal CPU timer.

I'm imagining some sort of Matrix like stuff you could only do with a Transmeta CPU.

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