I love a pre-Claude article
PlayStation Architecture
31–40 of 71 posts
Re: PlayStation Architecture
#32These articles are always excellent. PS1 games do not hold up so good, but PS2 games uprezzed to 1440p-4k are basically perfect imo.
They hold up pretty well when you play them as they were originally supposed to: on a CRT if you can or using emulators' CRT filters if you can't. Trying to play them at very high resolutions on crisp LCD displays is the worst way to go IMO.
What I find truly ironic is how CRT shaders work best on a 4k display with good HDR performance.
4k lets you scale the image and insert scanlines without scaling artifacts and with enough extra pixels to make the scanlines feel properly soft.
HDR lets the shader compensate for the brightness lost to the CRT filter without desaturating the color.
Re: PlayStation Architecture
#33Hey all, I posted this as I'm currently working on a PS1-related project that I hope to release soon.
Does anyone have recommendations for a PS1 web/js/wasm emulator? PCSX-Redux [0] has been great on desktop, and DuckStation [1] as well.
I found a few js/emscripten efforts, but if anyone has a rec, I'd appreciate it. Thanks!
Re: PlayStation Architecture
#34There are memory regions that are mapped to the same physical memory - https://psx-spx.consoledev.net/memorymap/ I worked on the Metal Gear Solid port from PSX to PC, and Konami programmers chose a wild trick to store how the "C4" bomb was planted - either on the wall, or on the ground. Essentially the pointer pointed to the same physical memory address, but if it was planted on the wall (or on the ground, I forgot)…
Usually, that kind of stunt nowadays is done by using the lowest significant bits and masking them off when dereferencing the pointer, trading off for a higher alignment (so 4 bits gives you 16-byte alignment). The PS1 also happens to have RAM aliasing, because there's not enough RAM to cover the entire decoding window for the RAM. I don't know the details, but I've seen PS1 executables setting their stack pointer to…
You can see this on many consoles, iirc it basically just boils down to some address pins not being connected anywhere, so whatever the pins are set to doesn't matter as they're just out in the air so to say.
Re: PlayStation Architecture
#35These articles are always excellent. PS1 games do not hold up so good, but PS2 games uprezzed to 1440p-4k are basically perfect imo.
They hold up pretty well when you play them as they were originally supposed to: on a CRT if you can or using emulators' CRT filters if you can't. Trying to play them at very high resolutions on crisp LCD displays is the worst way to go IMO.
The PS1 didn't even have perpsective corrected texture mapping, some titles handled that manually to make it look less shit but not all titles did so.
The evolution of graphics was brutal in the 90s and early 00s, but somewhere around the PS3's appearance it slowed down since lighting models were becoming "good enough" on the PS3 for not being annoyingly bad and asset creation costs became the limiting factor rather than hardware.
Re: PlayStation Architecture
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
They hold up pretty well when you play them as they were originally supposed to: on a CRT if you can or using emulators' CRT filters if you can't. Trying to play them at very high resolutions on crisp LCD displays is the worst way to go IMO.
It's interesting how different it is from the N64, which was seemingly designed to produce perfectly correct pixels even though no player would own displays that could really show the difference. I guess that's what you get when you let SGI design the GPU.
It probably had to do more with the evolution of chipset manufacturing and transistor counts (and costs).
The ps1 was released 1.5 years before the N64, the 3dfx voodoo chip is as capable as the n64 (maybe more so considering memory available), but I guess both Nintendo and Sony did opt for a bit more cost-efficient designs to make a profit on their consoles.
Looking at the release dates, the progression of capability is quite matched.
1994 dec 3 ps1 1995 nov 6 3dfx voodoo 1996 jun 23 n64 1998 nov 27 dc 2000 mar 4 ps2
Re: PlayStation Architecture
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Usually, that kind of stunt nowadays is done by using the lowest significant bits and masking them off when dereferencing the pointer, trading off for a higher alignment (so 4 bits gives you 16-byte alignment). The PS1 also happens to have RAM aliasing, because there's not enough RAM to cover the entire decoding window for the RAM. I don't know the details, but I've seen PS1 executables setting their stack pointer to…
You can see this on many consoles, iirc it basically just boils down to some address pins not being connected anywhere, so whatever the pins are set to doesn't matter as they're just out in the air so to say.
You could do that on PC too, if you mmap() one given block of memory at multiple locations. I think that's how PS1 emulators handle mirroring (it's been a long time since I took a peek at the innards of DuckStation).
Re: PlayStation Architecture
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is quite amazing to me to see the specs and what developers managed to squeeze out of that!
Yes an entire generation of games running on a mere 2MB of RAM and 1MB of VRAM. The crazy thing too was how much a step up PS2 was compared to PS1 in terms of available compute and sheer horsepower. But even that wasn't enough for a sandbox game like GTA 3 to run without a lot of clever tricks [1] [1] https://youtu.be/cIbCxbrBCys?si=cLMr4-7ubGD4fNWi
Interesting video, we also made a PS2 game with streaming and fragmentation was definetly the worst part (as we also used Renderware) and funnily enough iirc the release version also had a built-in defragmentation system to move memory around (an annoying thing to do in C++ projects that weren't prepared for that from the start).
Re: PlayStation Architecture
#39What a beautifully designed website. Everything is thoughtfully set-up and well placed. A great example of a well curated digital garden. It feels well kept and very human crafted.
Re: PlayStation Architecture
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
> PS1 games do not hold up so good Eeh ... speak for yourself. PS1 did mark the dawn of the 3D era for home consoles. There are lots of people who are into the low poly 3D models with the characteristic PS1 "wobble". Sure a lot of it may be nostalgia but it does have its charm and I can say it's grown a lot on me over time. Especially once I learned about the PS1's unique hardware limitations. If my social media feed…
I had the N64. It did not wobble. Seeing a Playstation in action with its wobble was so weird.
N64 didn't have the wobble, but it definitely had the blur.