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Comment by aappleby | Hacker News Reader

Was gamedev between 1980 and 2000ish, can confirm. PS1 had no floating point unit.

This was the cause of the signature jiggly textures that were pervasive in PS1 games

This is a common misconception, but is not the case. For example, look at the Voodoo 1, 2, and 3, which also used fixed point numbers internally but did not suffer from this problem.

The real issue is that the PS1 has no subpixel precision. In other words, it will round a triangle coordinates to the nearest integers.

Likely the reason why they did this is because then you can completely avoid any division and multiplication hardware, with integer start and end coordinates line rasterization can be done completely with addition and comparisons.

Didn’t PS1 also lack perspective corrected texture mapping? That would definitely make textures wobbly. AFAIK they compensated for it simply by using as finely subdivided geometry as possible (which wasn’t very finely, really).

The folk that made Crash Bandicoot were pretty clever. They figured out that the PlayStation could render untextured, shaded triangles a lot faster than textured triangles, so they "textured" the main character with pixel-scale geometry. This in turn saved them enough memory to use a higher resolution frame buffer mode.

https://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/04/making-crash-ba...

It wasn't Pixel scale, more paint by numbers.

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