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Architecture of the Playstation

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Re: Architecture of the Playstation

#71

Post by AtlasBarfed »

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…

I think a late-generation ps1 game did have a z-buffer, I don't remember the one though. Blasto maybe?

Re: Architecture of the Playstation

#72

Post by wsc981 »

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…

Tenchu: Stealth Assasins should also be very playable still I think? At least I played it a bit recently on a PS1 emulator on a Raspberry Pi and was fun enough for me (as is Tekken 3).

Re: Architecture of the Playstation

#73

Post by mywittyname »

Tsiklon wrote: post #8
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 find that the PSX (and PS2 to an extent) look better on a legacy CRT TV, the video artifacting while still present does not appear as unsightly as it does on an modern LCD. Perhaps this is down to my nostalgia for the system

Yeah, I don't recall shimmering ever being noticeable during the PSX era, but when I see videos clips of actual PSX hardware, it stands out to the point of being highly distracting.

The shimmer and dithering are not really noticeable on CRTs. Maaaybe if you had a really fancy Trinitron or another of the last-generation ultrasharp flat screen CRT TVs, it would be noticeable, but those weren't mainstream until pretty comfortably into the PS2+ era.

Granted, I was a kid then. If you were a professional artist or something in the 90s, I'm sure you noticed.

Re: Architecture of the Playstation

#74

Post by mywittyname »

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…

The PSX had beautiful 2D graphics. I'm pretty confident that any of the 2D PSX games could be released now without much modification.

Re: Architecture of the Playstation

#75

Post by JohnBooty »

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…

For me it's the gameplay of this generation that didn't age well.

Developers were:

1. grappling with an entirely new dimension of gameplay

2. investing enormous amounts of engineering work into making 3D world run at all on these systems

And it seems to me that the result was that gameplay the gameplay for this generation at least for action-oriented titles, generally was a big step back from the 16-bit era.

There are certainly some early 3D action titles that still shine for me though. The PSX-based entries in the Tekken series and Metal Gear Solid come to mind.

Re: Architecture of the Playstation

#76

Post by korethr »

One can get cycle-accurate hardware emulations of 2nd (Atari), 3rd (NES) and 4th Generations (Genesis) video game consoles for FPGAs now days. I assume this is because the systems are quite simple by today's standards, even in their graphics ASICs, and even the less-simple bits have been around long enough that there's been plenty of opportunity for in-depth study.

Is something like that feasible for 5th Gen systems like the Playstation or have we crossed a threshold of complexity where if you want cycle accurate hardware, it's time to pony up the money to license the IC data from Sony and to have custom chips manufactured?

Re: Architecture of the Playstation

#79

Post by catblast01 »

bluedino wrote: post #62
jerf wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The Sega Naomi arcade system was basically a Dreamcast with more memory. It even used a GD-ROM drive.

Re: Architecture of the Playstation

#80

Post by flipacholas »

hypertele-Xii wrote: post #66
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The lack of floating point unit on the PS1 is commonly misinterpreted, see https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/playstation/#tab-5...
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