I remember building a MIPS processing from scratch in undergrad. We used SPIM to model it!
We used PentiumPro PCs to run SPIM to write a VAX-subset emulator in MIPS asm. VMs all the way down :P
Architecture of the Playstation
91–100 of 116 posts
Re: Architecture of the Playstation
#92Earlier 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
“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 distort…
>CD distortion
There is no such thing as CD distortion. Does that make the whole opinion invalid?
Re: Architecture of the Playstation
#93This 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?
It is emulated but you can still see a sorting failure here (the gray platform at the bottom left side of the video appears "over" the ground for a bit):
https://youtu.be/Qo-wX5CeDRA?t=340
So it most likely wasn't Blasto.
Re: Architecture of the Playstation
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
“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 distort…
>CD distortion There is no such thing as CD distortion. Does that make the whole opinion invalid?
Perhaps they mean mp3 distortion? Many CDs were encoded as mp3?
Re: Architecture of the Playstation
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
“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 distort…
>CD distortion There is no such thing as CD distortion. Does that make the whole opinion invalid?
Perhaps lack of distortion? I remember some DJ friends from back in the day saying that CDs sound more "sterile" than vinyl (this was late 90s/early 2000s).
Re: Architecture of the Playstation
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
Your citation contradicts itself. The polygon jitter exists for lack of floating point unit. While it's possible to emulate the necessary precision, it's uneconomical without the acceleration provided by a dedicated processing unit. Without floating point, the PSX isn't fast enough to render complex scenes in real-time accurately; Hence the jitter.
Re: Architecture of the Playstation
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
I'm not sure why you think the "Models/textures flicker due to lack of Z-buffering" is not accurate. I mean, sure, models/textures can flicker for other reasons too so technically that can be inaccurate but lack of z-buffer is one of the most common reasons since the majority of 3D games software relied on z sorting polygons that couldn't always be sorted perfectly (static geometry could be preprocessed with, e.g., a BSP tree, but as long as dynamic geometry entered the picture things became much hairier).
Or is it that it isn't a problem of PS1 but a problem of games - which, again sure, this might be true but that'd be the splittiest of hair splitting :-P it is the lack of a hardware feature that drove the games do what they do, so it isn't entirely "blameless".
Re: Architecture of the Playstation
#98Earlier 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.
Indeed, last year i made a 3D platform/adventure game for an MS-DOS game jam[0] and noticed that some people added it to their "PS1-styled" game lists even though it had nothing to do with PS1 :-P (nor i ever had a PS1 myself - i did buy a PS2 though a few years ago but only played a single game on it - i want to figure out a way to modchip or something so i can do some homebrew, though i dont want to mess with the hardware side of things and i hope it'll be eventually supported by FreeDVDBoot instead).
However i think the combination of lack of z-buffer, affine texturing and RGB color output with dithering was kinda unique - or at least very rarely seen elsewhere. You could see several z-buffer-less and affine-only texture mapped games on software rendered PC games, but pretty much all of them were using 8bit palettized modes. Some also used dithering (e.g. Ultima Underworld) though it was very rare.
By the time there were a few games that used RGB colors and software rendering (e.g. Unreal, Heretic 2), PCs were also powerful enough to do perspective correct texturing.
Re: Architecture of the Playstation
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Max Payne ran on a PIII @1GHZ with 128 of RAM
There was a port to the original Xbox, which had only 64 MB of RAM!
Re: Architecture of the Playstation
#100This 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 CPU and RAM in those machines were just incredibly slow by today's standards.
I have a few questions, interspersed with my musings on them.
Based on an initial misreading of the above as the RAM being slow, I mistook your statement to mean that memory latency on a similar order to today's computers was something that you had to fight with. Was it memory latency per-se that made achieving sufficient performance hard?
Per the article, the system had EDO memory, which I discover can deliver a word read in 3 cycles for the first word of a page, and two cycles for subsequent words in the same page -- or 1 cycle for all if it is fast enough. I don't know the details of a MIPS memory access cycle, but by comparison, the 68k takes at least 4 clock cycles to pull a word off the bus. Thus, ISTM that EDO memory could keep a 68k fully supplied with data without resorting to wait states. I would hope that a MIPS processor, being a more modern design, could pull a word off the bus in a singe clock cycle, but on the other hand, I could see Sony possibly using cheaper chips with a tRAC slower than the CPUs clock period to save money.
Or, was the issue less so memory latency per-se, and more a bus utilization problem? In the article, I see that the DMA controller leaves the CPU idle while other devices are using the bus unless the CPU is making use of the scratchpad.
Re-reading your statement, that the CPU and RAM were just slow in general compared to today, I find myself wondering, how did the power of your development workstations compare to the PS1? Were you guys using high-end workstations like NeXT or SGIs, or common PCs of the era, since per the article, the SDK and development board targeted Windows 3.1 and 95?