4 ms·

The distorted textures and weird triangle clipping issues are exactly what you'd expect from an unoptimized port to a platform that doesn't support perspective

by ginko 10mo ago

The distorted textures and weird triangle clipping issues are exactly what you'd expect from an unoptimized port to a platform that doesn't support perspective correct texturing or depth testing.

anthk 10mo ago
That was an issue in tons of PSX games.
- vereis 10mo ago
  yeah this is the distinctive ps1 look I think all games look like this, at least polygonal games
  - eru 10mo ago
    You can use lots of tricks to make your PS1 game not look like this. Or at least much less like this.
bluedino 10mo ago
It looks pretty decent but seeing the texture warping and glitching reminds me of why I was team N64
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 10mo ago
  The N64 definitely has the nicer GPU of the two. An N64 with a CD-ROM drive would have been amazing.
  - klipklop 10mo ago
    And a bit more texture memory!
    - president_zippy 10mo ago
      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.
      - redox99 10mo ago
        See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46227453 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46227453
      - indigo945 10mo ago
        The N64's CPU, with pretty much every single game released on the platform, is just sitting there idling along at maybe 30% load tops, and usually less than that. It's a 64 bit CPU, but Nintendo's official SDK doesn't even support doubles or uint64! Of course, Nintendo clearly cared about the CPU a lot for marketing purposes (it's in the console's name), but from a purely technological perspective, it is wasteful. Most of the actual compute is done on the RSP anyway. So, getting a much smaller CPU would have been a big corner to cut, that could have saved enough resources to increase the texture cache to a useful resolution like 128x128 or so. It should be noted, though, that the N64 was designed with multitexturing capabilities, which would have helped with the mushy colors had games actually taken advantage of it (but they didn't, which here again, the Nintendo SDK is to blame for).
        eru 10mo ago
        > It's a 64 bit CPU, [...] Only really in the marketing material. It's a bit like calling a 386 with an arithmetic co-processor an 80 bit machine, when it was still clearly a 32 bit machine by all metrics that matter. However, I agree in general that the N64 CPU sits idle a lot of the time. It's overspecced compared to the rest of the system.
        malucart 10mo ago
        no, it really is a true 64 bit CPU. it's just that that fact is useless and it usually runs in 32 bit mode because games don't need that.
  - greeniskool 10mo ago
    There was actually an unauthorized third-party CD-ROM drive for it, the Bung Doctor V64[1]. It didn't actually expand the available ROM space beyond what was possible with cartidges, but its still interesting in that it was allegedly used by licensed Nintendo devs as a lower-cost alternative to the devkits officially provided to them. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_V64 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_V64
    - mghackerlady 10mo ago
      not allegedly, iirc the turok devs used one
  - president_zippy 10mo ago
    That "expansion pak" RDRAM upgrade was designed to give the N64DD enough buffer space so devs could continue using about 4MB of RAM for everything else, so I can't imagine how expensive the N64 would have been if they had to ship it with 8MB of RDRAM to maintain the same standard of visual quality and a 2X CD-ROM drive. Then again, the good games would have been $50 instead of $70, and there would have been a lot more developers willing to pay $0.20 per unit to ship games than $20 per unit for the common 12MB and 16MB ROM chips. However, I don't know if Ocarina of Time or Majora's Mask would have worked as well without that ability to load entire scenes in < 500ms. Diddy Kong Racing and Indiana Jones & The Infernal Machine relied on the ability to stream data from the cartridge in real time to smoothly transition between scenes/areas. DKR only used it in the overworld AFAIK, but it was still impressive. Not saying you're wrong, just that I'm glad things turned out the way they did because Ocarina and Majora's Mask likely could not have been done on a Saturn or PS1 beefed up with the N64's GPU. I could be wrong, and some experienced romhackers could conjure up enough clever optimizations to make a faithful PS1 port of Ocarina of Time that doesn't have noticeable load times, but it would have been the result of years of research with no deadline pressure. I admit I'm just speculating, but not in a presumptuous and baseless way.
- krispyfi 10mo ago
  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?
  - mpyne 10mo ago
    They are certainly sometimes a key part of the retro look that makes things nostalgic. But even during the PSX era I found it distracting and annoying to look at so I can't say I have any nostalgia for it even now in the way I do for N64-style low-poly 3-D games or good pixel art.
  - nmz 10mo ago
    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 with its storage would've been the perfect vehicle for Visual Novels, but that still is not popular anywhere but Japan. Even with realism, ports to dreamcast were better overall and considering the latest port of Final Fantasy Tactics does not emulate any of its PS1 limitations, I don't think a lot of people strive/like the aesthetic.
    - eru 10mo ago
      > [...] and I imagine the PS1 with its storage would've been the perfect vehicle for Visual Novels, but that still is not popular anywhere but Japan. I guess you can pretend that the JRPG or Resident Evil are Visual Novels with some action game play (or turn based combat) thrown in?
      - nmz 10mo ago
        That's what I do with sons of liberty
    - 10mo ago
- segmondy 10mo ago
  psx is r3000, n64 is r4300 a much faster and capable cpu.
- mghackerlady 10mo ago
  Personally I'd take it over the N64s muddy textures, the playstations wobbly but I can at least make out what something's supposed to be
LarsDu88 10mo ago
John carmack complained about this same issue for the Playstation DOOM port: page 337 https://fabiensanglard.net/b/gebbdoom.pdf https://fabiensanglard.net/b/gebbdoom.pdf Playstation rendered with affine texturing which made it impossible to get perspective correct rendering without hacks. The porting team ultimately did a very interesting hack where they would use polygons to render 1 pixel wide strips effectively simulating how non-hardware (that is CPU-based/integer) acclerated rendering was done on the PC.
- jml7c5 10mo ago
  That link gives a 403 for me, presumably because fabiensanglard.net disabled hotlinking. For others who run into the same problem, the file can be accessed via https://fabiensanglard.net/gebbdoom/index.html#:~:text=High%2DRes%20PDF%20is%20here%2E https://fabiensanglard.net/gebbdoom/index.html#:~:text=High%... . (I've highlighted the link to click.)

by ginko 10mo ago

The distorted textures and weird triangle clipping issues are exactly what you'd expect from an unoptimized port to a platform that doesn't support perspective correct texturing or depth testing.

anthk 10mo ago

That was an issue in tons of PSX games.

vereis 10mo ago
yeah this is the distinctive ps1 look I think all games look like this, at least polygonal games
- eru 10mo ago
  You can use lots of tricks to make your PS1 game not look like this. Or at least much less like this.

bluedino 10mo ago

It looks pretty decent but seeing the texture warping and glitching reminds me of why I was team N64

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 10mo ago
The N64 definitely has the nicer GPU of the two. An N64 with a CD-ROM drive would have been amazing.
- klipklop 10mo ago
  And a bit more texture memory!
  - president_zippy 10mo ago
    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.
    - redox99 10mo ago
      See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46227453 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46227453
    - indigo945 10mo ago
      The N64's CPU, with pretty much every single game released on the platform, is just sitting there idling along at maybe 30% load tops, and usually less than that. It's a 64 bit CPU, but Nintendo's official SDK doesn't even support doubles or uint64! Of course, Nintendo clearly cared about the CPU a lot for marketing purposes (it's in the console's name), but from a purely technological perspective, it is wasteful. Most of the actual compute is done on the RSP anyway. So, getting a much smaller CPU would have been a big corner to cut, that could have saved enough resources to increase the texture cache to a useful resolution like 128x128 or so. It should be noted, though, that the N64 was designed with multitexturing capabilities, which would have helped with the mushy colors had games actually taken advantage of it (but they didn't, which here again, the Nintendo SDK is to blame for).
      - eru 10mo ago
        > It's a 64 bit CPU, [...] Only really in the marketing material. It's a bit like calling a 386 with an arithmetic co-processor an 80 bit machine, when it was still clearly a 32 bit machine by all metrics that matter. However, I agree in general that the N64 CPU sits idle a lot of the time. It's overspecced compared to the rest of the system.
        malucart 10mo ago
        no, it really is a true 64 bit CPU. it's just that that fact is useless and it usually runs in 32 bit mode because games don't need that.
- greeniskool 10mo ago
  There was actually an unauthorized third-party CD-ROM drive for it, the Bung Doctor V64[1]. It didn't actually expand the available ROM space beyond what was possible with cartidges, but its still interesting in that it was allegedly used by licensed Nintendo devs as a lower-cost alternative to the devkits officially provided to them. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_V64 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_V64
  - mghackerlady 10mo ago
    not allegedly, iirc the turok devs used one
- president_zippy 10mo ago
  That "expansion pak" RDRAM upgrade was designed to give the N64DD enough buffer space so devs could continue using about 4MB of RAM for everything else, so I can't imagine how expensive the N64 would have been if they had to ship it with 8MB of RDRAM to maintain the same standard of visual quality and a 2X CD-ROM drive. Then again, the good games would have been $50 instead of $70, and there would have been a lot more developers willing to pay $0.20 per unit to ship games than $20 per unit for the common 12MB and 16MB ROM chips. However, I don't know if Ocarina of Time or Majora's Mask would have worked as well without that ability to load entire scenes in < 500ms. Diddy Kong Racing and Indiana Jones & The Infernal Machine relied on the ability to stream data from the cartridge in real time to smoothly transition between scenes/areas. DKR only used it in the overworld AFAIK, but it was still impressive. Not saying you're wrong, just that I'm glad things turned out the way they did because Ocarina and Majora's Mask likely could not have been done on a Saturn or PS1 beefed up with the N64's GPU. I could be wrong, and some experienced romhackers could conjure up enough clever optimizations to make a faithful PS1 port of Ocarina of Time that doesn't have noticeable load times, but it would have been the result of years of research with no deadline pressure. I admit I'm just speculating, but not in a presumptuous and baseless way.
krispyfi 10mo ago
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?
- mpyne 10mo ago
  They are certainly sometimes a key part of the retro look that makes things nostalgic. But even during the PSX era I found it distracting and annoying to look at so I can't say I have any nostalgia for it even now in the way I do for N64-style low-poly 3-D games or good pixel art.
- nmz 10mo ago
  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 with its storage would've been the perfect vehicle for Visual Novels, but that still is not popular anywhere but Japan. Even with realism, ports to dreamcast were better overall and considering the latest port of Final Fantasy Tactics does not emulate any of its PS1 limitations, I don't think a lot of people strive/like the aesthetic.
  - eru 10mo ago
    > [...] and I imagine the PS1 with its storage would've been the perfect vehicle for Visual Novels, but that still is not popular anywhere but Japan. I guess you can pretend that the JRPG or Resident Evil are Visual Novels with some action game play (or turn based combat) thrown in?
    - nmz 10mo ago
      That's what I do with sons of liberty
  - 10mo ago
segmondy 10mo ago
psx is r3000, n64 is r4300 a much faster and capable cpu.
mghackerlady 10mo ago
Personally I'd take it over the N64s muddy textures, the playstations wobbly but I can at least make out what something's supposed to be

LarsDu88 10mo ago

John carmack complained about this same issue for the Playstation DOOM port: page 337 https://fabiensanglard.net/b/gebbdoom.pdf https://fabiensanglard.net/b/gebbdoom.pdf Playstation rendered with affine texturing which made it impossible to get perspective correct rendering without hacks. The porting team ultimately did a very interesting hack where they would use polygons to render 1 pixel wide strips effectively simulating how non-hardware (that is CPU-based/integer) acclerated rendering was done on the PC.

jml7c5 10mo ago
That link gives a 403 for me, presumably because fabiensanglard.net disabled hotlinking. For others who run into the same problem, the file can be accessed via https://fabiensanglard.net/gebbdoom/index.html#:~:text=High%2DRes%20PDF%20is%20here%2E https://fabiensanglard.net/gebbdoom/index.html#:~:text=High%... . (I've highlighted the link to click.)