In Diddy Kong Racing, muting the music and sound effects does not merely set their volume to 0, but actually stops processing them internally. This has a minuscule, but measurable effect on the game's performance, very slightly reducing in-game lag.
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Same in Terraria - if you cause enough sound events you can significantly lag the game, and muting it removes the lag! MappyGaming on yt illustrates this brilliantly
I played it to completion as a kid. I'm really hoping it comes to Switch (or Switch 2) like the other Rare games so my 43 year old self can be embarrassed at how bad I've become at gaming!
Regretfully I never quite got 100%. I can't remember the full difficulty flow of that game, but I was definitely up to the last parts. If I remember right there was apparently a way to unlock the clock man as a playable character. Well I never got him.
Makes sense. As the N64 has no dedicated audio processor unlike it's rivals the PS1 and Sega Saturn, that task is split between the CPU and Reality Signal Processor (RSP), where it has to fight for resources with the graphic pipeline, CPU and the RDRAM that's already constrained by stalls & latency.
Low Gamer IQ: doesn't recognise DKR music because never played it
Medium Gamer IQ: recognises DKR music
High Gamer IQ: doesn't recognise DKR music because only played it with music muted to avoid any performance impact
Not all of them. From what I can gather, Any% finds this to be beneficial while 100% generally doesn't. The lag has very complex effects on the game's zippers, which can slow them down or speed them up depending on the circumstances, hence the differences. Thank you very much for your inquiry!
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Thanks!
anyway supper also responded to me https://bsky.app/profile/mariobrothblog.bsky.social/post/3lffqjtzlhc2s
Thanks to both of you!
Medium Gamer IQ: recognises DKR music
High Gamer IQ: doesn't recognise DKR music because only played it with music muted to avoid any performance impact