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Architecture of the Playstation

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Re: Architecture of the Playstation

#51

Post by jerf »

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 remember watching commercials for the PS1 at the time, as a member of their target audience, and I was generally underwhelmed. Even at the time, 10fps footage on TV didn't impress me and didn't compel me to want to buy one. In my opinion, it really didn't have enough power to be a 3D system. Excellent 2D system, though.

The first system that I feel like had enough power to be a 3D system without being completely terrible was the Dreamcast. It had enough power that you could target 60fps and even if you missed it, get close enough, and have enough power to draw recognizable environments and make things that could at least hide the fact they weren't made out of huge polygons, with a bit of artistry. It wasn't near obligatory to spend multiple refreshes' worth of time on a single frame to put up a competitive-looking frame. I played quite a few games on that and it was rare to see slideshows. All the 3D I've played prior to that still feels clunky to me, but playing the Dreamcast feels primitive, but workable.

Re: Architecture of the Playstation

#52

Post by insin »

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…

It's worth revisiting some of your favourites in an emulator - these days PSX emulators can do perspective correct texturing to fix the jiggling and warping, which combined with internal upscaling makes games which were badly affected by those shimmering textures feel much more "solid".

Here's the first track in Ridge Racer Type 4, for example, which looks so much nicer without the track and wall textures wobbling about:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDJpmP9jfeA&t=204s

Edit: the original version, for comparison:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fk30NbG2Hx8&t=102

Re: Architecture of the Playstation

#53

Post by eropple »

m45t3r wrote: post #34
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 ver…

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

It does, at least on NTSC. On the PlayStation Mini or whatever they called it, they packed a 50FPS PAL version of the game - and as near as I ever figured out, it was because the MT chip inside of it couldn't emulate Tekken 3 at 60FPS.

Re: Architecture of the Playstation

#54

Post by paulmd »

flipacholas wrote: post #20
4ad wrote: post #17

Truly 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?

Having a page consists of a series of "tabs" is not a very good pattern because it's not at all intuitive what is going to change (and it's only going to be part of the page) when you actually click it.

Would rather just have a table of contents with items and sub-items.

Re: Architecture of the Playstation

#55

Post by NikolaeVarius »

Synaesthesia wrote: post #46

It’s always blown me away that the PS1 had a 33mhz chip and 2MB RAM. I know it’s a specialised machine, but still. I think by modern standards though it’s very evident in most games, with the draw distance being so low.

The CPU lives on, in space.

Re: Architecture of the Playstation

#56

Post by djhworld »

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…

> The other thing to note is that to make a truly high-performance game for PS1 you had to completely ditch Sony's sanctioned C APIs -- something they said would cause your game to get banned, but which we did anyway.

Fascinating! Was this because Sony didn't bother checking, or they saw the performance you were getting and just let it slide?

Re: Architecture of the Playstation

#57

Post by dehrmann »

Synaesthesia wrote: post #46

It’s always blown me away that the PS1 had a 33mhz chip and 2MB RAM. I know it’s a specialised machine, but still. I think by modern standards though it’s very evident in most games, with the draw distance being so low.

It's a flawed comparison, but those specs seem a lot worse than PC specs at the time. The Playstation also didn't cost $2,000.

Re: Architecture of the Playstation

#58

Post by eric__cartman »

Synaesthesia wrote: post #46

It’s always blown me away that the PS1 had a 33mhz chip and 2MB RAM. I know it’s a specialised machine, but still. I think by modern standards though it’s very evident in most games, with the draw distance being so low.

Well, the Nintendo Wii has 88MB of memory and a 730MHz single core PowerPC 750CL cpu. And yet games like Super Mario Galaxy or Skyward Sword are quite impressive considering the limited hardware.

The Last of Us for the PS3 never fails to leave in awe, Naughty Dog did some serious black magic to get those results out of the hardware they were targeting.

It's really amazing how much can be done when talented developers target specific hardware.

Re: Architecture of the Playstation

#59

Post by dmbaggett »

djhworld wrote: post #56
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…

> The other thing to note is that to make a truly high-performance game for PS1 you had to completely ditch Sony's sanctioned C APIs -- something they said would cause your game to get banned, but which we did anyway. Fascinating! Was this because Sony didn't bother checking, or they saw the performance you were getting and just let it slide?

I recall that they mandated use of the C APIs to easily support future PS2 backward compatibility. I think what they ended up doing was just embedding a PS1 into the PS2, so use of the C APIs never mattered. Which was good, because by the time PS2 was out, lots of PS1 games had shipped that used the bare metal hardware, circumventing the APIs.

The problem was there was just no way to make a fast C API for things like polygon rendering, because as soon as you touched RAM (the stack) you were looking at many cycles of delay per instruction.

Re: Architecture of the Playstation

#60

Post by anthk »

eric__cartman wrote: post #58
Synaesthesia wrote: post #46

It’s always blown me away that the PS1 had a 33mhz chip and 2MB RAM. I know it’s a specialised machine, but still. I think by modern standards though it’s very evident in most games, with the draw distance being so low.

Well, the Nintendo Wii has 88MB of memory and a 730MHz single core PowerPC 750CL cpu. And yet games like Super Mario Galaxy or Skyward Sword are quite impressive considering the limited hardware. The Last of Us for the PS3 never fails to leave in awe, Naughty Dog did some serious black magic to get those results out of the hardware they were targeting. It's really amazing how much can be done when talented developers…

>Well, the Nintendo Wii has 88MB of memory and a 730MHz single core PowerPC 750CL cpu. And yet games like Super Mario Galaxy or Skyward Sword are quite impressive considering the limited hardware.

Max Payne ran on a PIII @1GHZ with 128 of RAM (not a bg step over 88MB considering W98SE could use about 32MB) and the graphics were on par to Mario Galaxy if not better.

>The Last of Us for the PS3 never fails to leave in awe, Naughty Dog did some serious black magic to get those results out of the hardware they were targeting.

It's really amazing how much can be done when talented developers target specific hardware.

Textures, textures, textures. Max Payne had amazing textures, so did most console games from Konami and such. Yet, a lot of UE1 based games had so blurry-ish and shitty textures they indeed look worse than a Game Cube game.

I am not talking about the texture size, but the quality of the artwork.

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