Doesn’t seem like an official release, but really cool either way. Time to dig in and see what I got wrong in my 2015 reverse engineering[1] of the data format!
[1] https://phoboslab.org/log/2015/04/reverse-engineering-wipeou...
[1] https://phoboslab.org/log/2015/04/reverse-engineering-wipeou...
Last year I decided to finally break out of the browser and get into actual PS1 homebrew. Unfortunately the state of the scene wasn't, and to some extent still isn't, that great: most homebrew games are still made using what's basically a modded version of the original Psy-Q SDK, which is rather limited in many ways. I started contributing to an open-source PS1 SDK instead [1] by first adding a dynamic linker, then revamping the build system entirely and now building a custom high efficiency FMV playback library (totally not inspired by pl_mpeg of course) that combines the hardware accelerated MJPEG-like decoder with the GPU's alpha blending capabilities. I'm also working with a few other people on reverse engineering one of the most famous PS1-based arcade systems, the Konami System 573.
It's a shame the PS1 isn't receiving the attention other consoles are getting in the homebrew scene. The hardware is architecturally simple yet powerful [2], but I guess nobody wants to fiddle with 120mm polycarbonate circles anymore.
[1] https://github.com/Lameguy64/PSn00bSDK [2] https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/playstation
And from a developer perspective, it's not all that constraining enough to be interesting. It's just low-res and slow. The architectural simplicity works against it. There's not all that much to do by cleverly arranging tiles and sprites or banging hardware registers like on the earlier 2D consoles. And nobody is really going to be impressed by any 3d lighting or animation wizardry that's still going to fall short of what even the N64 can do. The PS1 dominated its market at the time, but that market just moved on to the newer generations rather than capturing much nostalgia.
I also disagree that there isn't "much to do", many popular games remain exclusives to the PSX and this is reflected in the prices they fetch:
It's why, amusingly, the PS1 game that is probably the most highly regarded today is a 2D game (Symphony of the Night).
3D games just age like milk and people have no interest in old ones.
That said, I do feel the mix of 2D sprites and basic 3D that many of the JRPGs (like Xenogears) went for did age well and works best at that resolution, without texture filtering.
I love your comment on your original post.. it was like you were tempting fate. I'm actually surprised the source wasn't leaked the day after you finished your code. That's the sort of annoying thing that reality always throws at me.
"I wonder how big the original WipEout sorurce is. It's quite sad that probably nobody will ever see it again, considering that it now belongs to Sony."