3 ms·
Love these "tiny" 128x128 textures when meanwhile, anyone doing development for the contemporaneous Nintendo 64 gets something like 44x44@16bpp color, or 64x64@
by dietrichepp 5y ago
Love these "tiny" 128x128 textures when meanwhile, anyone doing development for the contemporaneous Nintendo 64 gets something like 44x44@16bpp color, or 64x64@8bpp grayscale. The maximum texture size is 4 KB with some major caveats (e.g. it drops to 2 KB if you use indexed color).
The N64 is, in a lot of ways, on paper, a more powerful system than the PS1. Better CPU, depth buffer / Z test, perspective-correct texturing, antialiasing, subpixel precision, etc. And yet the PS1 completely dominated the N64 in the marketplace and in terms of longetivity--a big part of that how cheap it is to manufacture CDs. And so people lovingly remember PS1-style graphics, but there isn't as much of a resurgence of N64-style graphics.
Another cute thing to note about PS1 is how it renders dark clouds on-screen. You might be familiar with the "add" blend mode for things like lens flares. Well, the PS1 also had a subtract blend mode, which has some unusual effects... basically, anything partially obscured by a dark cloud gets darker but also more colorful.
- yumaikas 5y agoIt's funny how the particular constraints of a system can matter in different ways the designers didn't have a solid handle on at first.
- thesuitonym 5y agoAt the time, I hated how ugly PS1 games looked, and wished they were nice and smooth like N64. now I realize that N64 textures weren't smooth, they were blurry.
- Grazester 5y agoThe textures were blurry along with the images itself due to its poor digital to analog converter. The latter can be addressed with HDMI mod boards now available for the N64.
- salamandersauce 5y agoSquare Enix still has new copies of the PS1 version of Final Fantasy 9 on their web store. They used to have more PS1 FF titles but I guess they finally stopped printing them sometime in the last couple years. I doubt Nintendo made an N64 cart post 2003. CDs are just so dirt cheap to print that it made sense to keep printing big seller 20 years on. PS1 rendering also has a bit more charm than N64 with its affine texture warping. N64 was just blurry.