Plus it was a huge game, full of secrets, without being overwhelming. (In 1997, directly controlling a character with one stick was not an obviously correct choice - some games had 'tank' controls where one stick rotated the character/camera and the other went forwards and backwards! Imagine how much that used to suck) You barely needed to touch the camera, and the stick responded very intuitively to what's on the (very low res) screen. My first memory was that it was the first 3D platform game that didn't suck - they designed platforming challenges that worked without the player feeling like they'd been screwed over by the camera. This story just remained in my head and comes up because the idea of optimizing down to this level just wrinkles my brain! :) I also recall during the first Tesla AI talk that when designing their computer they focused on how many pJ each instruction burned. He was obsessed with extreme power efficiency. Whenever he used to go to a hotel he would measure the power efficiency of the lightbulbs and actually replace them with more efficient bulbs. I'm sure many will think its a silly idea but it came from this story I once read about the co-founder/CTO of Tesla: JB Straubel. We really benefited in so many ways thanks to the reduction from 350nm to modern nodes.

I don't think those Cheapo tools on Amazon can go lower than 1 watt. Now what if you manage to run the game on bare metal? How low can you take the power consumption then? maybe 1W? Maybe less? I've thought about how to even measure this. Plenty of opportunity to bring the clock rate down. The Raspberry Pi Zero is less than 5 watts I believe? And thats a 1 Ghz processor with accelerated GPU.

Actual usage may vary depending on the game. The original N64 uses 19 watts(as printed on its power supply) to run a 93.75 Mhz processor.

Super mario 64 pc download reddit