Comment by chondl
5 years ago
Reverse engineering the assembly code required to drive the Geometry Transformation Engine efficiently from the compiled output of the C libraries is to this day one of my favorite technical puzzles I've worked on in my career.
I remember sitting in a meeting with our technical contact at Sony's headquarters in San Mateo where he basically asked without asking if we were using the C libraries. From the way he asked the question it was clear that the correct answer was "No, not using the libraries" since otherwise our game wouldn't be performant. At the same time we both knew we couldn't say that explicitly since that would violate Sony's contracts.
> Reverse engineering the assembly code
Well of course you were using the libraries! Just like you were using the documentation. Exactly like you were using the documentation, in fact. The fact that neither got jumped to as executable code is clearly immaterial.
I assume you only had a disassembler to work with, at the time?