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Architecture of the Playstation

copetti.org

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Re: Architecture of the Playstation

#31

Post by msk-lywenn »

saw-lau wrote: post #28
dmbaggett wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The OpenGOAL project is very active at reimplementing the GOAL compiler and infrastructure of Jak 1.

https://blog.jakspeedruns.com/opengoal-project-update-septem...

Re: Architecture of the Playstation

#32

Post by e12e »

saw-lau wrote: post #28
dmbaggett wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Looks like GOOL was an early interpreted(?) lisp/scheme, and GOAL was a later complier/compiled version?

GOOL: https://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/03/12/making-crash-ba...

GOAL: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Oriented_Assembly_Lisp

https://github.com/water111/jak-project

Re: Architecture of the Playstation

#34

Post by m45t3r »

bluedino wrote: post #4

The 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…

> The PSX did not age well.

Most games didn't aged well, however some of them are still impressive today considering the limitations:

- Chrono Cross: almost no loading times after the initial one.

- Crash Bandicoot: the graphics are still very charming, and there is almost no graphics 'jigling'.

- Valkyrie Profile: one of my favorite RPGs of all the time, and thanks to its 2D graphics and huge sprites it is still very good looking even today.

- Tekken 3: Very detailed character models and I think it runs at 60 FPS? Even if it doesn't, it is still impressive.

Re: Architecture of the Playstation

#35

Post by bluedino »

etempleton wrote: post #14
bluedino wrote: post #4

The 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…

PS1 and N64 visuals have both aged poorly, though I agree, I think the PS1 is the toughest to go back to from a visual perspective. The shimmering polygons that you see on the PlayStation and on the Saturn feels unacceptable by today’s standards and then they are both also notorious for long load times. The N64 has it’s own set of graphical limitations, but hold up a bit better to the test of time, IMO. At the time I…

The N64 is responsible for blur induced headaches, but you don't have time to complain because the game levels load nearly instantly.

Re: Architecture of the Playstation

#36

Post by gumby »

TwoBit wrote: post #29
gumby wrote: post #7

> 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.

Fun to know, thanks. I was out of the "biz" by then.

Re: Architecture of the Playstation

#37

Post by Narishma »

bluedino wrote: post #4

The 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…

I bet you played it on a modern display. Contemporary TVs tended to hide a lot of those limitations.

Re: Architecture of the Playstation

#38

Post by chondl »

dmbaggett wrote: post #9

This 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…

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.

Re: Architecture of the Playstation

#39

Post by david-cako »

This is an awesome article! It covers a lot of ground in a way that makes sense for people that aren't game developers or system-level engineers. I love the tabbed sections and the model viewers too.

It looks like the author, Rodrigo, has done similar articles for a bunch of other consoles which is incredible.

https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/

Re: Architecture of the Playstation

#40

Post by andai »

hypertele-Xii wrote: post #13
bluedino wrote: post #4

The 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

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.” ― Brian Eno
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