Yeah, almost all RSP code used was written by SGI/Nintendo and used as shipped in the SDK. For a long time emulators simply high level emulated the RSP code based on the hash of the RSP binary and accepted that a few games like Rogue Squadron simply wouldn't run.
I bet whoever worked at factor 5 in the RSP department would have some good war stories to tell.
The original devs were in a time crunch in the 90s with the limited experience they had for 3d games. It's possible that they were aware of the bug but said "eh, it's playable" and launched it.
> What was the atmosphere like during the final days of coding? I think there was a lot of panicking going on. But it was still very organised, there was lots of people working very hard. I think it was quite laid back at the very end, not many bugs, gameplay was sorted out on time. One of the programmers had quite a hard time of it – two of them decided not to make games anymore because of Mario 64. Not because they didn’t enjoy it, but because they’d burnt themselves out.
https://pixelatron.com/blog/the-making-of-super-mario-64-ful...
That does not sound culturally Japanese to me.
Basically a very, very early programmable GPU, but you were writing actual firmware for it, rather than writing the kind of high level shader functions that would come a decade+ later.
(1) 2KiB for RISCV, because immediate offsets are 12bits signed, and the upper end of the address space is usually not mapped to RAM. That is, 4KiB are possible with RISCV if you control the memory map.
Even on systems with MMUs, it's very common that the kernel won't let you map RAM at address zero for several reasons. And the sizes are being talked about are about the size of a single page.