Comment by AnIdiotOnTheNet
5 years ago
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.
5 years ago
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.
[0] https://bad-sector.itch.io/post-apocalyptic-petra
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".
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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.
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