[Music] If you ask me what my favorite title in the Resident Evil franchise is, it's Resident Evil 2. For me, it's one of those sequels that is better than the original in almost every way. Resident Evil 2 follows the story of

Leon Kennedy and Claire Redfield as they attempt to escape Raccoon City during a zombie outbreak. For the game, Capcom wanted Resident Evil to contain more movie elements in both story and atmosphere, and the tension is just at the right level. The enemies that you will encounter are

memorable, and you'll never know what's waiting for you around the corner. [Music] The music by composer Masayoshi Soken is incredible, suspenseful, mysterious, and unnerving. Resident Evil 2 stands as one of the best survival horror games ever made, and it's no

surprise that Capcom remade the game in 2019. Released originally for the Sony PlayStation, the game came on two CDs with two separate characters to play through. As each character has two scenarios, which can be unlocked when you complete the game the first time round.

These scenarios unlock events from the other character's perspective. The game was a smash hit; it sold 380,000 copies during opening weekend and grossed 19 million dollars. The game would also see ports to other systems, notably the Sega Dreamcast, Nintendo GameCube,

and the Nintendo 64. But if there's one port that stands out as truly the most impressive port of the game to various systems, it undoubtedly has to be the Nintendo 64 version. Released almost two years from the original PlayStation 1 version,

Resident Evil 2 on the Nintendo 64 is a technical masterpiece. Somehow, the entire game with both Leon and Claire's gameplay, including full motion video movies, music, and audio, were all compressed down to fit in a 64 megabyte cartridge. This was achieved by Angel Studios, a

team of nine developers with a budget of one million dollars. Two CDs totaling 1.2 gigabytes of data was compressed to fit on a single Nintendo 64 cartridge. The video files in particular have a compression rate of 165 to 1, yet in a vacuum, 

they look perfectly serviceable. It's only when you put them against the PlayStation 1 version that you notice that some sacrifices were made. What's also interesting about the Nintendo 64 is that there's no dedicated video decoding hardware for full motion video.

It was all done in software, unlike the PlayStation 1, which has dedicated movie decoding hardware. The Nintendo 64 has no such thing, but thanks to clever utilization of the RSP and custom micro code meant that full motion video was actually possible on the N64.

Full motion video on the N64 wasn't exclusive to only Resident Evil 2. In fact, Pokemon Puzzle League, which came out before Resident Evil 2, has a 30 second FMV intro which looked as good as anything that you would see on the Sony PlayStation.

In my office, yeah, did you hear me? Eager to prove themselves in this new type of Pokemon battle, Ash and Pikachu raced to Pokemon Puzzle League Village. There it is, Pikachu, are you ready for another new challenge? But Resident Evil 2 was a different

animal we're talking about 15 minutes of full motion video that ran natively on the Playstation 1 at 320 by 240 pixels at 24 bit color uncompressed. This would require about 4 gigabytes with no dedicated decompression hardware, meant that any compressed video format

would require code to be written in software. Furthermore, the developers would only have 24 megabytes of the 64 megabytes allocated for the FMV. The approach was to utilize compression and a technique known as chroma subsampling. This took advantage of perception traits in humans

that we are more susceptible to brightness and contrast changes over color itself. If we consider these four images, the rightmost one has no subsampling. The furthest left has horizontal resolution reduced by a quarter of the original, and bandwidth is also halved at a quick

glance, all four of these images appear to be the same, but a closer look reveals that you can clearly see the artifacting. But on a CRT with continuous moving full motion video images, these imperfections aren't as easily noticeable, and this is what the

developers thought would be a suitable compression technique. With this in mind, a tool to compress the video images was developed, but even with the chroma sub sampling technique, the video size would still end up being too large. The next idea was to reduce the bit rate

but reducing the bit rate meant that the quality of the video would be sub-par. Increasing the bit rate was desired, but it simply exceeded storage requirements. This was not ideal, but thanks to the Nintendo 64 custom hardware and a few tricks up their sleeve

It was one of the earliest consoles to support vectors, and with the Reality Signal Processor custom chip, meant that it could run code in parallel. With this in mind, the resolution of the movies were internally reduced and then scaled back up thanks to some custom microcode.

That would handle this resolution scaling with an almost zero performance hit. The color space conversion after the code was decompressed back to RGB for the Nintendo 64 frame buffer was also rewritten to make use of the Reality Signal Processor. And thanks to Nintendo 64's unique

architecture, meant that the RGB data was simply rendered directly to the frame buffer without any memory or caching. But even with these tricks, the movie files still decompressed way too slow. With most avenues exhausted, the developers decided to compress the movie by skipping every other frame and interpolate them.

This effectively halved the movie frame rate to 15 frames per second, but to compensate, a trick was used that would utilize the RSP to swap in a new frame to simulate a triple buffering effect. This trick would essentially apply a new frame and average it out with the

current frame, which would simulate the feeling of motion without noticing. If you pause the video during certain frames, you can clearly see the average frame between the new one that's decompressed and the current one that's in the frame buffer. This trick was done with some

clever microcode. With the frame rate reduced in half, meant that the output file was also halved. All these techniques applied would be enough for the video file to fit in the 24 megabytes of space. The developers reduced down all textures to be more friendly

with the Nintendo 64's 4 kilobytes of texture cache you can see this with a very clear comparison between the PlayStation 1 version. The game itself also has had some changes, notably the resolution during gameplay. The game will bounce around in resolution internally

and if we run the game through emulation you can notice that the resolution is changing on each scene that we load. Many people believe that the resolution is actually dynamic based on the number of enemies on the screen at one time, but this is in fact not true.

All backgrounds are simple textures that are loaded in the game and during scenes where there are more zombies on screen, this means that we won't be as focused on the backgrounds as much and they are usually reduced in size internally. Now the Nintendo 64

will scale all textures at the same level, but this is why some backgrounds appear blurrier than others. Once again, this technique of reducing some background sizes and not others was simply done to save space. Speech in the game has also taken a hit, which has been compressed significantly

over the original PlayStation 1 version. "Leon, sorry, but it looks like your party has been canceled." "Leon, sorry, but it looks like your party has been canceled." "What happened?" Like the movie files, there is a lot of speech in the game and this would have accounted for a

significant reduction in size. Porting over the PlayStation 1's amazing soundtrack would have been a massive challenge. The Nintendo 64 lacks a dedicated audio chip, leaving the task to the RSP which, although is highly programmable, meant that the developers would need to

write their own sound engine or find one. Fortunately, Factor 5's Musee X sound engine was the one that was ultimately used. Musee X is known as the tool that would bridge the gap between CD audio and MIDI, and it was perfectly suited for the game.

Musee X could be used as a normal synth during development, so the musician didn't need to know anything about code. They could just use a Windows PC to compose their audio, but the Musee X sound module would be converted over to the Nintendo 64 with

the audio sound itself, and the result was very impressive, with no noticeable reduction in quality over the PlayStation 1. [Music] Musee X was also extremely optimized on the N64, on average utilizing less than one percent of the CPU and less than one percent of the RSP in

most cases. One question that's always remained for me is about the full motion video we mentioned previously that Pokémon Puzzle League used. FMV in its intro sequence, this codec came with the Nintendo SDK in 1998 and was known as HQVM. This was released

before Resident Evil 2, and recently I've seen some examples of a full 30-minute cartoon episode which runs on a 32 megabyte ROM. If we do some simple math, surely this codec would have been suitable for Resident Evil 2, yet the developers chose to design their

own codec instead. If anyone who was a part of Angel Studios knows more, please feel free to reach out. Ultimately, Resident Evil 2 on the Nintendo 64 was successful thanks to clever compression and decoding techniques and taking advantage of Nintendo's 64's custom

architecture, but they also had lots of help from Nintendo themselves. You see, very few companies actually get to design custom microcode, let alone have access to a development kit. Nintendo was always very secretive about their microcode, but Angel Studios, with Nintendo's blessing, were able to do just that.

And they also got the green light to partner and work with Factor 5 on Musix. In the end, Resident Evil 2 on the Nintendo 64 is an amazing port that shows what can be achieved with the right optimization and development. It surely goes down

as another impossible port, but I want to hear your thoughts in the comments below. What do you think about Resident Evil 2 on the N64? I'd be very interested to hear what you guys have to say. Well, guys, we are going to leave it here

for this video. Thank you so much for watching. If you liked it, leave me a thumbs up and I'll catch you guys in the next video. Bye for now. [Music] You

How did Resident Evil 2 manage to fit on a single Nintendo 64 Cart ? | MVG

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