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Comment by bluedino | Hacker News Reader

The PSX did not age well.

I noticed this at a friend house, while looking for something in the garage we came across his old system and games. We could not resist taking it back into the house and setting it up.

The first thing I noticed was how long the load times were. And how noisy the machine was when reading and seeking on the discs.

The next thing was the primitive texture mapping. Polygons 'jiggling' and 'sparkling' all over the place. It reminded me of my first attempts at programming 3D graphics in VGA, before realizing what floating point (or fixed point) could do.

We tried re-living some of the classics, and after not even an hour we just shook our heads and went back to what we were originally doing.

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PS1 and N64 visuals have both aged poorly, though I agree, I think the PS1 is the toughest to go back to from a visual perspective. The shimmering polygons that you see on the PlayStation and on the Saturn feels unacceptable by today’s standards and then they are both also notorious for long load times.

The N64 has it’s own set of graphical limitations, but hold up a bit better to the test of time, IMO. At the time I know it was the school yard debate of which looked better and many felt the sharpness of the PS1 was preferred over the softer N64 image.

The N64 is responsible for blur induced headaches, but you don't have time to complain because the game levels load nearly instantly.

Weirdly, I think sharpness is exactly where PS1 games don't hold up. Metal Gear Solid is less off-putting to go back to than Metal Gear Solid 2. The pixely textures and dim lighting give it some atmosphere, where the extra detail in MGS2 just comes off as very plastic now.

I find that the PSX (and PS2 to an extent) look better on a legacy CRT TV, the video artifacting while still present does not appear as unsightly as it does on an modern LCD. Perhaps this is down to my nostalgia for the system

Yeah, I don't recall shimmering ever being noticeable during the PSX era, but when I see videos clips of actual PSX hardware, it stands out to the point of being highly distracting.

The shimmer and dithering are not really noticeable on CRTs. Maaaybe if you had a really fancy Trinitron or another of the last-generation ultrasharp flat screen CRT TVs, it would be noticeable, but those weren't mainstream until pretty comfortably into the PS2+ era.

Granted, I was a kid then. If you were a professional artist or something in the 90s, I'm sure you noticed.

Nah, a lot of things from that era (including filmography) just look better on the era-appropriate display hardware. CRTs have totally different properties and design considerations; trying to display content made for CRT, on LCD, often just presents the worst of both worlds.

Anything that only has analogue out really—it's only games for 360/PS3 and newer that were really designed with LCDs in mind. Anything older is best played on a CRT, although that's impractical for most people and becoming harder with every passing day.

That said, as much as I love playing old games on a CRT, I'm in a PAL region, and in today's world of high-refresh rate screens 50Hz is nausea inducing.

On the other hand, all the graphical glitching you speak of is entirely unique to the system. A whole genre of independent games has risen dedicated to replicating it. We've seen a proliferation of hundreds of "PSX style" horror games in the past few years. YouTube channel Alpha Beta Gamer [1] displays many of them (no commentary).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/c/AlphaBetaGamer/videos

There's also the haunted PS1 demo discs. [1] https://hauntedps1.itch.io/

There's even a Bloodborne demake for PSX. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXcwpNWoR8s

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.” ― Brian Eno

>CD distortion

There is no such thing as CD distortion. Does that make the whole opinion invalid?

Perhaps they mean mp3 distortion? Many CDs were encoded as mp3?

Perhaps lack of distortion? I remember some DJ friends from back in the day saying that CDs sound more "sterile" than vinyl (this was late 90s/early 2000s).

Yeah maybe, but as a composer he should know better than that, no? Or does he rely on his engineers for that?

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.

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...

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.

I don't mind being wrong and I will correct the article if needed. That being said, I'm interested in debating this, what if the PS1's GPU had implemented some sort of sub-pixel precision and edge antialiasing? Do you think the lack of floating-point vertex coordinates would have been noticeable? (I'm assuming the 'jitter' means the sudden jumps when polygons move slowly).

I have no idea :)

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".

> Or is it that it isn't a problem of PS1 but a problem of games

Yes, this is what I wanted to emphasize.

My intent wasn't to say that the 'lack of z-buffering' statement was incorrect (it's still true), but that there's a fundamental issue behind it, the visible/hidden surface determination, and now it depends on the developer's implementation. I believe this is overlooked on non-technical sites.

With this, I just wanted to make it more informative for the reader. I don't think the question is if the PS1 has a z-buffer or not. Sure, z-buffering is a solution, but there's the reasoning behind it that I wanted to transmit it to the reader.

Anyway, that's just my opinion.

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

> The PSX did not age well.

Most games didn't aged well, however some of them are still impressive today considering the limitations:

- Chrono Cross: almost no loading times after the initial one.

- Crash Bandicoot: the graphics are still very charming, and there is almost no graphics 'jigling'.

- Valkyrie Profile: one of my favorite RPGs of all the time, and thanks to its 2D graphics and huge sprites it is still very good looking even today.

- Tekken 3: Very detailed character models and I think it runs at 60 FPS? Even if it doesn't, it is still impressive.

> - Tekken 3: Very detailed character models and I think it runs at 60 FPS? Even if it doesn't, it is still impressive.

It does, at least on NTSC. On the PlayStation Mini or whatever they called it, they packed a 50FPS PAL version of the game - and as near as I ever figured out, it was because the MT chip inside of it couldn't emulate Tekken 3 at 60FPS.

Tenchu: Stealth Assasins should also be very playable still I think? At least I played it a bit recently on a PS1 emulator on a Raspberry Pi and was fun enough for me (as is Tekken 3).

The PSX had beautiful 2D graphics. I'm pretty confident that any of the 2D PSX games could be released now without much modification.

I remember watching commercials for the PS1 at the time, as a member of their target audience, and I was generally underwhelmed. Even at the time, 10fps footage on TV didn't impress me and didn't compel me to want to buy one. In my opinion, it really didn't have enough power to be a 3D system. Excellent 2D system, though.

The first system that I feel like had enough power to be a 3D system without being completely terrible was the Dreamcast. It had enough power that you could target 60fps and even if you missed it, get close enough, and have enough power to draw recognizable environments and make things that could at least hide the fact they weren't made out of huge polygons, with a bit of artistry. It wasn't near obligatory to spend multiple refreshes' worth of time on a single frame to put up a competitive-looking frame. I played quite a few games on that and it was rare to see slideshows. All the 3D I've played prior to that still feels clunky to me, but playing the Dreamcast feels primitive, but workable.

>> All the 3D I've played prior to that still feels clunky to me, but playing the Dreamcast feels primitive, but workable.

The Dreamcast was probably the first system I played where a 3D game looked just as it did in the arcade.

The Sega Naomi arcade system was basically a Dreamcast with more memory. It even used a GD-ROM drive.

It's worth revisiting some of your favourites in an emulator - these days PSX emulators can do perspective correct texturing to fix the jiggling and warping, which combined with internal upscaling makes games which were badly affected by those shimmering textures feel much more "solid".

Here's the first track in Ridge Racer Type 4, for example, which looks so much nicer without the track and wall textures wobbling about:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDJpmP9jfeA&t=204s

Edit: the original version, for comparison:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fk30NbG2Hx8&t=102

Except for the pixely UI elements, upscaled Ridge Racer could pass for a launch PS2 title.

And draw distance.

True, if it were a ps2 title the level would start out like that, and then suddenly open up to show off how much better they can do outdoor environments now.

I bet you played it on a modern display. Contemporary TVs tended to hide a lot of those limitations.

For me it's the gameplay of this generation that didn't age well.

Developers were:

1. grappling with an entirely new dimension of gameplay

2. investing enormous amounts of engineering work into making 3D world run at all on these systems

And it seems to me that the result was that gameplay the gameplay for this generation at least for action-oriented titles, generally was a big step back from the 16-bit era.

There are certainly some early 3D action titles that still shine for me though. The PSX-based entries in the Tekken series and Metal Gear Solid come to mind.

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