What's amazing is that it had only 2 MB of RAM, that's at least 2000 times less than a cheap phone has today. In fact, that's less than a moderate quality mobile phone photo as stored on disk.
Playstation Architecture: A Practical Analysis
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Re: Playstation Architecture: A Practical Analysis
#12For anyone interested how it was developing for the original PSX (and therefore under hardware constraints) How Crash Bandicoot Hacked The Original Playstation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izxXGuVL21o Immensely interesting video! "Old" hardware makes me feel so humble regarding what we have now. Hardware limitations back then really pushed developers towards novel approaches and solutions.
Those war stories videos are very interesting and impressive. But I’m personally glad I’ve never been asked to program a video game in assembler using a trackball and no keyboard.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/first-kirby-game-was-created-with...
Re: Playstation Architecture: A Practical Analysis
#13For anyone interested how it was developing for the original PSX (and therefore under hardware constraints) How Crash Bandicoot Hacked The Original Playstation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izxXGuVL21o Immensely interesting video! "Old" hardware makes me feel so humble regarding what we have now. Hardware limitations back then really pushed developers towards novel approaches and solutions.
Those war stories videos are very interesting and impressive. But I’m personally glad I’ve never been asked to program a video game in assembler using a trackball and no keyboard. https://www.pcmag.com/news/first-kirby-game-was-created-with...
Agreed, on both counts. I've seen some other War Stories videos and they're pretty good. It's interesting to see some perspectives from people involved other than developers (although they can be a bit hyperbolic/dramatic at times). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQ3iqq49Ew8
Re: Playstation Architecture: A Practical Analysis
#14What's amazing is that it had only 2 MB of RAM, that's at least 2000 times less than a cheap phone has today. In fact, that's less than a moderate quality mobile phone photo as stored on disk.
2000 times more than a ZX81.
Re: Playstation Architecture: A Practical Analysis
#15Spyro looked a lot better without the textures IMO
Spyro without textures and only gourand shading looks like every mobile game from 2009-2019.
From the examples it looks like the textures in Spyro were mostly about hiding all the ugliness around the edges from the straight gourand shader output, aside from the characters.
Re: Playstation Architecture: A Practical Analysis
#16What's amazing is that it had only 2 MB of RAM, that's at least 2000 times less than a cheap phone has today. In fact, that's less than a moderate quality mobile phone photo as stored on disk.
I think these programmers were forced to understand their subject matter much better than today.
Say for (a silly) example you want the first 10 000 digits of Pi. It's pretty easy to just store that today. But back then you didn't just have to know what Pi is, you had to have the smallest program to calculate it that you can think of.
Would be interesting to hear too how Tekken 3's coders managed to work with 2 MB of RAM.
Re: Playstation Architecture: A Practical Analysis
#17Re: Playstation Architecture: A Practical Analysis
#18Another great article about PSX architecture, with regards to the DOOM port specifically: http://fabiensanglard.net/doom_psx/index.html I highly recommend the series about various ports of Another World on the same website as well.
Unfortunately there's no writeup or such about it, but I worked on a doomed (ha!) project to port Unreal 1 to PSX. I was doing level design at the time. The programmers did manage to get a functioning renderer up. It was limited to more simple geometry than the PC software renderer could handle at the time, but still worked enough you could have made a game on it, had other things not gone wrong with the project. If you search for "Unreal PSX" you'll find some work by a couple diehard retro unreal fans to try to finish up some of the partially completed content.
Re: Playstation Architecture: A Practical Analysis
#19Another great article about PSX architecture, with regards to the DOOM port specifically: http://fabiensanglard.net/doom_psx/index.html I highly recommend the series about various ports of Another World on the same website as well.
Thanks!
Re: Playstation Architecture: A Practical Analysis
#20For anyone interested how it was developing for the original PSX (and therefore under hardware constraints) How Crash Bandicoot Hacked The Original Playstation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izxXGuVL21o Immensely interesting video! "Old" hardware makes me feel so humble regarding what we have now. Hardware limitations back then really pushed developers towards novel approaches and solutions.
On the same note, I discovered this[1] yesterday. An explanation of why things looked a warped in PS1 games. The explanation actually blew my mind. I had heard the term zbuffer before but didn't really know what it did.