Recently 3 people who worked on conkers bad fur day posted a developers commentary on youtube. They talk about the making of the game and the work environment at rare while playing the game. What's interesting in the first video one of the developers in the first part mentions starting at the 2:18 mark mentioned the reason that donkey kong 64 used the expansion pak was the original version would randomly crash and they couldn't find a solution for it but found when using the expansion pak the game would function completely fine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgtAXCaSlpk Anyone have any idea what would cause the game to crash randomly without the extra 4mb?
It's pretty obvious. They had a bug somewhere which resulted in something needing more memory, maybe for just a short time, and when it failed to allocate the memory it would crash. And it sounds like they didn't have time to find it and fix it so they just made it require the expansion pak and shipped. If this is true, someone could hack DK64 to remove the code that prevents you from playing it without the expansion ram and then attempt, perhaps with a debugging emulator, to fix the bug and fix it.
interesting tidbits of information in those vids. None of the rare teams shared code between each other because they were in competition
this is true. Banjo-Tooie and Conker's Bad Fur day ran just fine w/o the expansion pak, albeit on an improved version of the same engine.
I think you misunderstood. The different development teams didn't interact, but the most of the Tooie team was the Kazooie team and they built off the same files. That's pretty obvious if you ever cracked the ROMs open. There were shared resource libraries though, like 'rarezip', which effectively is a custom zlib wrapper and variable additional data (filesizes, etc.). I'll have to poke DK64 sometime to see what's going on. Watch it be tied to something stupid like periodic CIC testing...
