81–90 of 116 posts
Obligatory mention of Kaze, who has spent the past several years optimizing Mario64 using a variety of interesting methods. Worth a watch if your interests are at the intersection of vintage gaming and programming. https://www.youtube.com/@KazeN64
I wonder what someone who has PS1 knowledge equivalent to Kaze's N64 knowledge could do on that console---perhaps using Mario 32 as the benchmark.
(Mario 32 = Mario 64 on PS1.)
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Would SDRAM have been faster and cheaper? Why did they pick RAMBUS?
I think the main reason is that when they architected it, RDRAM seemed like the better choice based on price and bandwidth at that time, and they underestimated the performance issues it would cause (RDRAM has amazing bandwidth but atrocious latency). By the time the N64 launched, SDRAM was better and cheaper, and they considered it was too late to make the switch. Allegedly SGI wanted to make changes but Nintendo re…
OK, I also just read that basically Nintendo bet on ram bandwidth, but ignored latency.
A more general lesson: Nintendo bet on cutting edge, speculative technology with RDRAM, instead of concentrating on 'Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology'.
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The whole thing about the texture cache being the worst design decision in the N64 just gets parroted so much, but nobody can cogently explain which corner should have been cut instead to fit the budget.
You could have saved a lot of money by using CDs instead of cartridges. If you sell games for roughly the same amount as before (or even a bit cheaper), you have extra surplus you can use to subsidise the cost of the console a bit. Effectively, you'd be cutting a corner on worse load times, I guess? Keep in mind that the above ignores questions of piracy. I don't know what the actual impact of a CD based solution wou…
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CRT's smoothed out the image a little bit. Also, the screens were much smaller back in the day.
> Also, the screens were much smaller back in the day. Not if you watch the video on your phone or iPad or laptop! Actually, even most desktop pc monitors aren't bigger than people's TVs back then. (Of course, TVs now are bigger than TVs back then. And desktop pc monitors are bigger than desktop pc monitors back then.)
In the end if you reescaled the emulator window down to 320x240 or 640x480 with a 25% scanline filter on LCD's or a 50% in CRT, the result would be pretty close to what teenagers saw in late 90's.
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> Also, the screens were much smaller back in the day. Not if you watch the video on your phone or iPad or laptop! Actually, even most desktop pc monitors aren't bigger than people's TVs back then. (Of course, TVs now are bigger than TVs back then. And desktop pc monitors are bigger than desktop pc monitors back then.)
The 14" Nokia TV from my old bedroom disagreed a little :) In the end if you reescaled the emulator window down to 320x240 or 640x480 with a 25% scanline filter on LCD's or a 50% in CRT, the result would be pretty close to what teenagers saw in late 90's.
Though I suspect for interactive use, CRTs might have had better latency?
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You could have saved a lot of money by using CDs instead of cartridges. If you sell games for roughly the same amount as before (or even a bit cheaper), you have extra surplus you can use to subsidise the cost of the console a bit. Effectively, you'd be cutting a corner on worse load times, I guess? Keep in mind that the above ignores questions of piracy. I don't know what the actual impact of a CD based solution wou…
imho, Nintendo had a hard enough time with preventing piracy and unlicensed games with the NES and SNES and saw the PS1 got modded within a year, even with the special black coated discs to hide the tracks. There wasn’t a lot of optical/compact disc copy protection magic at the time and, cd-rs and writers started getting popular quickly as well. ps1 in 1994, n64 in 1996, backwards Dreamcast GD-ROMs and beginnings of…
> Nintendo had a hard enough time with preventing piracy and unlicensed games with the NES and SNES [...]
Yes, so I'm not sure that the cartridge drawbacks bought them that much in terms of piracy protection?
I agree that the PS1 had more piracy, but I'm not sure that actually diminished its success?
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The PS1's GPU does not support perspective correction at all; it doesn't even receive homogeneous 3D vertex coordinates, instead operating entirely in 2D screen space and leaving both 3D transformations and Z-sorting to the CPU [1]. While it is possible to perform perspective correct rendering in software, doing so in practice is extremely slow and the few games that pull it off are only able to do so by optimizing f…
It's funny that the PS1 got so famous for 3d games, when its 'GPU' was entirely 2d. I guess the main thing the console brought to the table that made 3d (more) feasible was that the CPU had a multiplication instruction?
Also, even though it didn't handle truly 3D transformations, the rasterizer was built for pumping out texture mapped, Gouraud shaded triangles at an impressive clip for the time. That's not nothing for 3D, compared to an unaccelerated frame buffer or the sprite/tile approach of consoles past.
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I had the opposite reaction. As someone who was on team PSX, the wobbly jank is pleasingly nostalgic. Didn't someone say that the limitations and artifacts of the obsolete media of the past become the sought-after aesthetics of the future?
This is all subjective so I suppose I should add an IMO, Even back then many games were preferable on the N64 like megaman legends, what the PS1 offered that was superior was storage, which allowed for more music and FMVs, and also allowed for voice acting and probably why MGS is still talked about to this day, my guess is the lack of detail helps immersion the same way you would read a novel, and I imagine the PS1 w…
Huh, I generally see megaman legends cited as an example where the PSX version looks better due to the crisper textures.
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It looks pretty decent but seeing the texture warping and glitching reminds me of why I was team N64
I had the opposite reaction. As someone who was on team PSX, the wobbly jank is pleasingly nostalgic. Didn't someone say that the limitations and artifacts of the obsolete media of the past become the sought-after aesthetics of the future?
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The PS1's GPU does not support perspective correction at all; it doesn't even receive homogeneous 3D vertex coordinates, instead operating entirely in 2D screen space and leaving both 3D transformations and Z-sorting to the CPU [1]. While it is possible to perform perspective correct rendering in software, doing so in practice is extremely slow and the few games that pull it off are only able to do so by optimizing f…
It's funny that the PS1 got so famous for 3d games, when its 'GPU' was entirely 2d. I guess the main thing the console brought to the table that made 3d (more) feasible was that the CPU had a multiplication instruction?
If you have some basic familiarity with C, you can see both the GTE and the Z bucket sorting of GPU commands in action in the cube example I linked in the parent comment.
[1]: https://psx-spx.consoledev.net/geometrytransformationengineg...