Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Architecture of the Playstation

copetti.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 116 posts

Re: Architecture of the Playstation

#61

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

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

I'm not sure it is unique. The problem with the PSX is the lack of a z buffer and affine texturing. Those certainly weren't unique limitations in the 90s.

Re: Architecture of the Playstation

#62

Post by bluedino »

jerf wrote: post #51
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 te…

>> All the 3D I've played prior to that still feels clunky to me, but playing the Dreamcast feels primitive, but workable.

The Dreamcast was probably the first system I played where a 3D game looked just as it did in the arcade.

Re: Architecture of the Playstation

#63

Post by flipacholas »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #42
flipacholas wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Table of contents (made of links to sections) at the top?

I experimented a bit with a ToC wikipedia-style but the results didn't fit very well with the rest of the design. I'll try to allocate more time in the future to focus on the design.

Re: Architecture of the Playstation

#64

Post by flipacholas »

david-cako wrote: post #39

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/

Thanks for sharing! The next one will be about the PS3!

Re: Architecture of the Playstation

#65

Post by flipacholas »

ranma42 wrote: post #30
flipacholas wrote: post #15

Oh 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 hav…

> Although technically correct, that's a bit misleading IMO.

I Agree. My issue is that the other consoles also have a pipelined CPU and I'm trying not to copy-paste the same long explanation from other articles every time. So I included a link next to the PS1's pipeline description. I will try to reword it though. Thanks!

Re: Architecture of the Playstation

#66

Post by hypertele-Xii »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #61
hypertele-Xii wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm not sure it is unique. The problem with the PSX is the lack of a z buffer and affine texturing. Those certainly weren't unique limitations in the 90s.

It also has that strange polygon jitter for lack of floating point, and no texture filtering.

Re: Architecture of the Playstation

#67

Post by andai »

NikolaeVarius wrote: post #55
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

#68

Post by andai »

flipacholas wrote: post #63
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Table of contents (made of links to sections) at the top?

I experimented a bit with a ToC wikipedia-style but the results didn't fit very well with the rest of the design. I'll try to allocate more time in the future to focus on the design.

Oh, many years ago I wrote a script to automatically generate a Wikipedia style ToC based on the semantic structure of an article.

I will find it when I get home and reply to this comment.

Re: Architecture of the Playstation

#69

Post by flipacholas »

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…

The Nintendo Wii case is an interesting one, because instead of introducing a completely new architecture, both CPU (Broadway) and GPU (GX) come from well-known Gamecube hardware (Gekko and Flipper). So I presume the existing toolkit and game's codebase were easily ported. Thus, more time could be spent in improving the quality of the game.

Re: Architecture of the Playstation

#70

Post by flipacholas »

andai wrote: post #68
flipacholas wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I experimented a bit with a ToC wikipedia-style but the results didn't fit very well with the rest of the design. I'll try to allocate more time in the future to focus on the design.

Oh, many years ago I wrote a script to automatically generate a Wikipedia style ToC based on the semantic structure of an article. I will find it when I get home and reply to this comment.

Ah don't worry about that, I use Hugo which has a ToC generator. My problem is regarding the style (CSS) which I need to spend more time to make it blend better with the rest of the site. Thanks anyway!
Post reply on HN