That disregards the massive advancement in technology, hindsight, tooling and theory they can make use of now. There is a world of difference there even with the same hardware. So not comparable imo, it wasn’t for a lack of effort on Nintendo’s part.
A substantial part of the optimisation was simply not compiling as a debug target. There were plenty of oversights by Nintendo devs (not to discredit all they’ve accomplished here). And most tooling for this Kaze developed himself (because who else develops for the N64?).
It’s mostly the result of a couple really clever and passionate people actually taking it apart to a very low level. Nintendo could have absolutely done most of these optimisations themselves, they don’t really rely on many newly discovered techniques or anything. Still, they had deadlines of course, which Kaze & Co. don’t.
That disregards the massive advancement in technology, hindsight, tooling and theory they can make use of now. There is a world of difference there even with the same hardware. So not comparable imo, it wasn’t for a lack of effort on Nintendo’s part.
A substantial part of the optimisation was simply not compiling as a debug target. There were plenty of oversights by Nintendo devs (not to discredit all they’ve accomplished here). And most tooling for this Kaze developed himself (because who else develops for the N64?).
It’s mostly the result of a couple really clever and passionate people actually taking it apart to a very low level. Nintendo could have absolutely done most of these optimisations themselves, they don’t really rely on many newly discovered techniques or anything. Still, they had deadlines of course, which Kaze & Co. don’t.