wish i could play a pirated copy of the ghost of tsushima game
Architecture of the Playstation
21–30 of 116 posts
Re: Architecture of the Playstation
#22This is a great overview. I don't remember having to put in padding instructions to prevent the pipeline issues mentioned here; maybe we just never ran into that. (I wrote pretty much all the R3000 code for Crash 1 and just do not recall problems like that coming up.) To us the elephant in the room limitation of PS1 is not mentioned here as far as I could tell from a quick read-through: it had no Z-buffer. This meant…
The layout of this article seems unique, and in one of the sub-sections I think they did go into the Z-axis ordering a bit:
> Moving on, the ordering table puts the burden on the developer/program to show the geometry in the right order. In some cases, the calculations implemented rely on too many approximations to gain performance. This may result in flickering or occluded surfaces that should have been displayed.
Re: Architecture of the Playstation
#23This is a great overview. I don't remember having to put in padding instructions to prevent the pipeline issues mentioned here; maybe we just never ran into that. (I wrote pretty much all the R3000 code for Crash 1 and just do not recall problems like that coming up.) To us the elephant in the room limitation of PS1 is not mentioned here as far as I could tell from a quick read-through: it had no Z-buffer. This meant…
Comments like this are the reason I keep coming back to HN, thanks!
Re: Architecture of the Playstation
#24This is a great overview. I don't remember having to put in padding instructions to prevent the pipeline issues mentioned here; maybe we just never ran into that. (I wrote pretty much all the R3000 code for Crash 1 and just do not recall problems like that coming up.) To us the elephant in the room limitation of PS1 is not mentioned here as far as I could tell from a quick read-through: it had no Z-buffer. This meant…
Thanks for your great comment.
> This meant that you either had to do heroic pre-computation (sort polygons ahead of time)
Much more detail on this is available in this amazing series of blog posts:
https://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/02/making-crash-ba...
Re: Architecture of the Playstation
#25Truly excellent information, but the "tabs" that you have to click in order to read the next part is positively the worst UX I have ever seen on a static website.
The tabs were made to prevent the user from scrolling indefinitely if he/she is not interested in one section in particular. This only appears in desktop (not mobile). I'm not a web dev though, so I don't mind switching to a better pattern. Do you know a better one?
FWIW I thought they were well implemented, though unique.
I think the difficulty for some readers (myself included) is that they are non-standard/different from how every other web page works.
I actually quite liked them, kind of like an extended aside.
Re: Architecture of the Playstation
#26The PSX did not age well. I noticed this at a friend house, while looking for something in the garage we came across his old system and games. We could not resist taking it back into the house and setting it up. The first thing I noticed was how long the load times were. And how noisy the machine was when reading and seeking on the discs. The next thing was the primitive texture mapping. Polygons 'jiggling' and 'spar…
On the other hand, all the graphical glitching you speak of is entirely unique to the system. A whole genre of independent games has risen dedicated to replicating it. We've seen a proliferation of hundreds of "PSX style" horror games in the past few years. YouTube channel Alpha Beta Gamer [1] displays many of them (no commentary). [1] https://www.youtube.com/c/AlphaBetaGamer/videos
There's also the haunted PS1 demo discs.
[1] https://hauntedps1.itch.io/
Re: Architecture of the Playstation
#27The PSX did not age well. I noticed this at a friend house, while looking for something in the garage we came across his old system and games. We could not resist taking it back into the house and setting it up. The first thing I noticed was how long the load times were. And how noisy the machine was when reading and seeking on the discs. The next thing was the primitive texture mapping. Polygons 'jiggling' and 'spar…
On the other hand, all the graphical glitching you speak of is entirely unique to the system. A whole genre of independent games has risen dedicated to replicating it. We've seen a proliferation of hundreds of "PSX style" horror games in the past few years. YouTube channel Alpha Beta Gamer [1] displays many of them (no commentary). [1] https://www.youtube.com/c/AlphaBetaGamer/videos
There's even a Bloodborne demake for PSX. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXcwpNWoR8s
Re: Architecture of the Playstation
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Legend. I've heard the original GOAL code is floating around somewhere online. Is there any chance Sony ever releases it into the public domain? I notice another game today on here using ClojureScript. Apart from a lack of tooling / engine, is Lisp better suited for gamedev?
One could endlessly debate the merits of Lisp dialects for game development, but at least in the Crash era it was a big win for us. Naughty Dog migrated away from Lisp in the PS3 era, I believe. (I was long gone by then.) It was very powerful to be able to write code for critters and other animated objects in GOOL/GOAL because it was both conceptually simple and compiled into tiny amounts of code, which mattered a lo…
I've not heard of GOAL before - do you have a link to any references or articles about it?
Re: Architecture of the Playstation
#29> During the development of the PlayStation, MIPS was offering the R3000A series of processors. The TMPR5900 (the MIPS chip developed by Toshiba to power the PS2) was sufficiently complex to develop that we developed a cycle-accurate simulator so Sony (and a few game developers) could start development before hardware was available. However emulation isn't always the best approach: the PS2 (at least the first edition…
The first gen of PS3 included a PS2 on board.
Re: Architecture of the Playstation
#30Oh what an amazing feeling seeing one of my articles here. Let me share you a bit of history about this one: - A year ago, an old version of this article got shared in hn ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22932134 ) and since then, google started positioning my site in their search results, and many forums started noticing the site. Yay! - Fast forward, I graduated from uni, continued working on more articles in…
> CD-ROM sub-channels traditionally store metadata, mostly to guide the drive. These aren’t user accessible and conventional readers rarely allow to manually write over them.
Maybe early CD-ROM drives couldn't read the side-channel data, but all drives (readers and burners) after a certain generation can read raw 2448 byte (2352 byte raw sector data + 96 byte subchannel data) sectors. I think Plextor drives might have been the first to support it?
> 5-stage pipeline: Up to five instructions can be executed simultaneously
Although technically correct, that's a bit misleading IMO. The instruction execution is overlapping, but you can still execute at most 1 instruction per cycle (each stage of the pipeline can only execute one instruction at a time). You need a super-scalar pipeline design to do more than 1 instruction per cycle.