Why did the ps1 suffer from weird video jaggies?

But look at the N64 expansion pack. Plenty of idiots figured that out. Playstation could have done that. And when the price was right they could have sold the PSX with a RAM card already installed leaving newer users free not to worry about it and older users would just have to read a small manual saying, open cover, put card in, replace cover, enjoy.

 

I always remember the PSX for having 1 pixel "seams" that seperated polygons so that you'd always need to paint a similar color background to hide them. I think this was caused because the system used to draw polygons on screen had a rounding persision issue.

 

I remember hearing about this somewhere.. I think on these forums.

Something about the mathematic calculations or integers or it might've been the use of triangular polygons.

Heck, I don't know. What you said sounds familiar, though.

 

The Sega Saturn used Quads instead of triangles where a quad was a square, and the polygon was just a 3-sided triangle. It is much harder to program quads, even doing the math for it on paper can be hard for most people. This crippled Saturn's developer attraction. Although with quads, you get cleaner 3D, take a look at Panzer Dragoon Saga, where it looks a lot better compared to most PSX games.
Sony and N64 used triangles, but the N64 used ZBuffering and first generation anti-aliasing capabilities. But due to the limited RAM (4MB for the whole system), the technology was crippled.

Another thing is that most PSX games used texture wrapping. This created a lot of clipping when up close and why you saw textures bend up or down as it came closer to the camera. The 33mhz CPU & GPU were fully capable of 3D, just without a good texture mapper instruction set & lack of Z-buffering/filtering.

 

madhatter256...words of wisdom..

 

Take Crash Bandicoot series for instance. 1,2,3 and CTR still look great today!.

Not only Naughy Dog did a great job using gourad shading, but the game is free from texture warping and other problems.

 

Yeah they do! I remember 3 being praised for it's water effects as well.

 

I don't think the Saturn's notorious programming difficulty stems from its choice of primitive. It's much more to do with the complex and convoluted system architecture.

I think we can assume that all 3D engines are hard for most people on paper.

Quads don't inherently provide "cleaner" 3D. What the engine does with a 4-sided primitive has no bearing on resolution or anti-aliasing.

Texture wrapping is a standard feature of almost any 3D engine. Again, it's not the technique that caused the issues - it's the implementation within the limits of the Playstation's hardware.

Disclaimer: I'm not qualified to talk with assurance on the above, so any genuine experts are welcome to tear down everything I've posted.

 

I'm not an expert either but this is interesting..

 

Playstation had issues with polygon seams/warping since the hardware had no floating point unit. This issue can be see in the DS which has some of the newer hw features like z-buffer & AA. Yet it still has warping since there is no hw floating point. (floating point is simply the .01 of 1.01)

Also someone brough up tekken being on a HDD in arcades. All namco system 11/12 boards used rom chips (i owned a few of them plus have seen all the tekken boards).

 

I'd like to see someone other than The Scribe talk about this with some authority.

 

Yes, but if i remember right the game itself (Tekken 3) was on the rom boards and just the stage backgrounds were stored on disk. Like i said though, i could be wrong

 

THIS.

That's what I was recalling in my previous post.

Of course, I still don't know the full of it, though The Scribe and others have contributed tremedously.

 

@Trenton_net + 1080Peter
i think you guys are correct, iirc the psx only supported integer texture coordinates and even worse i think only integer screen space vertices (subbie would probably know for sure). another big side effect of this is it can cause polygons to have jagged motion, ie poly edges and textures won't move as smoothly and can jump around a bit (like texture warp it's most noticable when close to the camera). i think this was worse than the lack of any z-buffer, aa/filtering, or perspective correctness. mainly because the psx could have accepted and used these values in some fixed point format rather than just having you throw the factional parts away, and it probably would not have had a very large impact on performance by comparison.

regarding the quads, as you guys probably already know the psx and saturn both had texture warp due to their affine texturing (non-perspective correct). the psx rendered textured quads as 2 separately textured triangles, and with affine mapping the warp from both of them together at certain angles can clash which will cause it to be more noticeable. if i had to guess i would say the saturn may have had a different warping effect due to how it rendered quads (maybe less noticeable?). so there could be some truth behind that statement from the scribe. maybe someone who is familiar with how the saturn works internally can comment on that one

 

lol..the N64's secret of "antialiasing" was blurring to sheer death and sometimes even beyond of that.

take a PSone and hook it via antenna signal to an old drifted 80s tv and you will get about the same result.

 

good point Tatsujin...apart from that, we don't have to forget the CRAPPY SOUND almost all games got on N64...

for the audio, CD is CD

 

The PC Engine CD-ROM2 upgrade was a exception to the rule.

 

I absolutely LOVE upgrade peripherals. 64DD, BSX, GBPlayer, MEGA CD, every single one of them made the console manlier in an official way!

 

yeah..to my very pleasure, it was the only system ever in history of whole mankind that could relish the great success of its several add-ons.

 

Well, yeah, it only supports integer texture coordinates, but then what'd you expect from a chip designed in 1994 with a maximum texture size of 256x256 (which was probably not used all too often). The GTE (the chip that conveniently did all the 3D math) indeed did not do floating point math, but fixed point, where a fraction is 'implied' in a 32-bit integer by implicitly shifting the decimal point. I'm not sure how much bits the GTE devoted to fraction, but it definitely wasn't just integers. In fact, the Saturn's DSP was used in the same way as it had no real FPU either.
Also, it is worth noting that every PC 3D game used fixed point until, I think, the first Quake game used the FPU for that.

And madhatter & Alchy: the 'warping' is indeed due to the hardware not using perspective-correct texture mapping, which I think requires a single DIV per pixel, rather, it uses an approximation which 'warps' the textures up close or at certain angles of view.