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Comment by adamwk | Hacker News Reader

And loading times. I think people already forgot how long you had to wait on loading screens or how many faked loading (moving through a brush while the next area loads) there was on PS4

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PS4 wasnt too terrible but jumping back to PS3... wow I completely forgot how memory starved that machine was. Working on it, we knew at the time but in retro spect it was just horrible.

Small RAM space with the hard CPU/GPU split (so no reallocation) feeding off a slow HDD which is being fed by an even slower Bluray disc, you are sitting around for a while.

PS3 loading times IME were better than the PS4.

Bloodborne when it came out was around 1 minute between deaths.

Did you forget that on the N64, load times were near instantaneous?

The N64 was cartridge based.

If only we could just ship a 256GB NVMe SSD with every game and memory map the entire drive like you could with cartridges back then. Never have loading times again.

Also: I think it got less common on the N64, but games on SNES and NES and other old home consoles routinely accessed static game data, like graphic tiles, directly from the cartridge ROM. Without loading it into system RAM at all.

So there literally were no "loading" times for these assets. This might not even be realistically possible with NAND flash based SSDs, e.g. because of considerations like latency.

Though directly accessing ROM memory would also prevent things like texture block compression I believe.

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