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Man the PS1 texture warping in retrospect was rough.
- Thread starter ItWasMeantToBe19
- Start date
The worst example I've ever seen, though not one you'd normally see, is in Jedi Knight on the PC.
The game uses perspective correct texture mapping even in software mode, however, there's a hidden menu that allows you to change more graphics settings, and one of those settings can enable affine mapping. The game must use really large triangles to make up the stages because (stupidly) trying to play the game like that is one of the only times that a game has made me feel nauseous. It's much worse than that Doom demo and feels like looking at things through a fisheye lens.
It hasn't aged well and as far as emulation is concerned the N64 looks way better emulated. There's no contest at all.
However a lot of issues that the PS1 has like in OPs video are further exaggerated compared to how they looked on CRTs. We've been conditioned with emulation of PS1 for so long that we forget how it looked like running on real hardware(better minus the anti-aliasing benefits)
However a lot of issues that the PS1 has like in OPs video are further exaggerated compared to how they looked on CRTs. We've been conditioned with emulation of PS1 for so long that we forget how it looked like running on real hardware(better minus the anti-aliasing benefits)
Yeah, this. It's a special kind of nostalgia. This is the shit I need to see replicated authentically if we're going to start getting indie 32 bit games.
Texture warping doesn't look good but, like others have said, it's often easier to ignore than blurry graphics.
This really makes me want to play Tenchu again lol. Also holy shit at 90's voice acting, its always so painfully amazing :D.
Just curious, what are the 2 games on 3DO that run at 60 fps? I don't really have any history with that system.
Should be said there's probably no reason the 3DO version couldn't have looked as good as the CD-i if it had utilized the optional MPEG-1 video card. But no 3DO game ever did and the add-on wasn't used for anything except Video CD playback, unlike the CD-i equivalent.
In my honest opinion, the industry adopted polygons a generation too early.
Most PS1 games simply have not aged well... and I say this as an avid retro gamer (who has no trouble "going back in time" for each game I play).
Most PS1 games simply have not aged well... and I say this as an avid retro gamer (who has no trouble "going back in time" for each game I play).
PS1 games still look pretty great IMO. Especially games like Chrono Cross. But of course the strength lies in the dev imagination utilizing pre-rendered backgrounds and 2D sprite based games. Alundra for instance is a gorgeous game that looks amazing when teamed up with an OSSC. 3D still isn't that bad though, even with the wobble.
IMO N64 has aged worse. I can't get it to look good even with my OSSC, it's so blurry... even with the low pass filter off.
As I've been saying, there are hundreds of 2D games on PS1 that hold up beautifully!
We agree. *nods*
In hindsight, it just brings to mind how baffling it is that a mandated and enforced "No 2D policy" was implemented on the PlayStation (for a quite a while). With very few exceptions, the Saturn was superior in the 2D arena... however there was still some noteworthy pixel art present on the PS that was nearly suppressed entirely.
That was only in the US and only for a few years (launch window mostly).
Funny, that the guy who was responsible for this (Bernie Stolar) slightly later became as the president and COO Sega of America :) In 1996.
Also, situation in Europe was quite different (not to mention Japan), no rules at all:
Between that, broken seams, crawling pixels and wobbling stuff, the severe clipping, general low resolution, dithering and my personal favourite: that early fog effect that was calculated on a polygon, rather than pixel basis, resulting in that chequered effect that was very apparent in games like jumping flash and ace combat.
Can't really explain it in few words so here's an example:
yeah it was rough, but eh, it was still awesome back in the day. And Sony winning against Saturn shows they made the right call with 3D.
Can't really explain it in few words so here's an example:
yeah it was rough, but eh, it was still awesome back in the day. And Sony winning against Saturn shows they made the right call with 3D.
idk why people keeps repeating that PS1 games aged the worst. Personally I prefer the texture warping and the crisp look of PS1 games to the look of any other platforms of the time. Especially N64 considering its anti-aliasing making them much blurrier than they should be.
I can't play Tenchu, MGS1, Vagrant Story, the Spyro trilogy and say they aren't beautiful despite being 3D.
I can't play Tenchu, MGS1, Vagrant Story, the Spyro trilogy and say they aren't beautiful despite being 3D.
That is a thing about the 32X, its list of games which are actually only available on 32X is very short. Shadow Squadron is awesome, but there are very few other games on the platform you can't play at all anywhere else. The Jag, however, has a lot of exclusives. They're often incredibly rushed and unfinished feeling, but you can't play them elsewhere!
The thing is, Checkered Flag, if it could be altered to run like two to four times faster and with something like the fixed handling of that fan patch which exists, probably would be a good game. I want to like that game, but the framerate is just SO low that you can't, and the "the longer you hold down the button the more you turn" system does not work well. Fix those two things and you'd have a solid Virtua Racing clone. (If it had had some kind of high score save system it'd have been far better too, there is so little to that game as it is since there's no best time saving, no timetables, not much of a campaign, etc...)
As for Club Drive, while it is very odd and sadly has absolutely no AI opposition at all, bah, I like that game! It feels a bit like a proto-San Francisco Rush, and Rush is one of my favorite racing games ever. Oh, and the framerate, while low, is much higher than Checkered Flag too. Same with the controls, the idea of "you turn faster if you press the diagonals" thing was a pretty good idea.
This is a quite subjective thing, but for me it depends on both the game and the framerate. N64 framerates I can handle, most of the time, but once you get into the barely or sub double digit framerates of the Super FX, that S3 ViRGE card our first PC with a 3d card in it came with, or as I say above games like Checkered Flag, yeah, it's too low for me to enjoy. Club Drive manages to just barely sty at a playable framerate though, and I-War or the FPSes (I don't have JagDoom or AvP yet, but it's clear they runs fine from videos) are better than that. Or Iron Soldier, sure that game has a low framerate, but they compensate by making the game a slow-paced mech game so it works.
The Jag has too many hardware problems for me to say it's even better than the 3DO for sure overall due to all of the design flaws in the thing, but games that push it well show that it definitely has a higher ceiling than 3DO, I think... which makes sense, it does have what twice the CPU speed?
Sure, agreed.
Sure. The PS1 and Saturn are both certainly quite accomplished at 2d, much more so than the 3DO. I haven't gotten Jag Rayman yet because of how expensive it is and how I don't exactly love Rayman 1 (due to how crushingly hard it is), but hearing about things like how Jag Rayman doesn't have the sometimes super-frustrating slipping-physics system kind of sounds like a positive... heh.
Super Burnout shows off what the Jag can do pretty well too -- that is a very impressive Super Scaler-style game.
Well, if you mean "playable" as in "playable non-FMV games" then you're probably mostly right, but that is a caveat worth mentioning. I think that dismissing the FMV or nongame informational / image discs is a mistake though, the CD-i is VERY good at those kinds of games, again dramatically better than any console for quite a few years. I am not an FMV game fan though, so I don't exactly love the CD-i, but I don't regret getting one either... it's an interesting thing for sure. But as for those games, a few games show that it was possible to get games running decently well -- Lucky Luke is a nice looking platformer for example, which uses the digital video card for something other than video. The game is zoomed in way too much which makes gameplay tough, but visually it's good. The Apprentice is nice looking too, and plays alright. (I got both Zelda sidescrollers and mostly have enjoyed them, too... the graphics are alright, with nice backgrounds and sprite art, and gameplay can be fun, if grindey.) I remember you playing Micro Machines in that CD-i video of yours, but I skipped that one and got the one that runs well instead -- Accelerator. It's a very late release with issues, but does show that it is at least possible to run a scrolling racing game on that system at an acceptable framerate, even if only one game managed it.
You're right. That is disappointing, the 3DO would have been better off if they had supported the VCD card to give it much better video playback. That's why I have not bought a VCD card for my 3DO, while I do have one for the Saturn, and I got a CD-i with the DVC built in.
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I love this shit. Sure, some of it is nostalgia but I loved the effect. RE spiders were enhanced by it.
man where were these in the 2019 remake? and the crows and moths.
I couldn't even stand it at the time. I never owned a PS1, but I had an N64, and whenever I went to my friend's house and played something on his PS1 I thought it looked like shit.
Hmm, well...I think it's subjective to a point. N64 frame-rates are low but I think MOST games remain quite playable. The issue with 3DO and Jag is that many of its games dip into the single digits which I feel is a bridge too far. S3 Virge is a good comparison - I captured from one of those in my Shadows of the Empire video recently.
I'm not suggesting that every game on those systems runs poorly, rather, that it's a common occurrence. I don't like thinking of systems as aging poorly, though, and only mentioned this in response to the topic. That's not really my way of looking at this.
Club Drive is interesting as, if you drive near an object, the frame-rate can drop to roughly 1-2 fps.
JagDoom is great but capped at 20fps and often drops below. AvP is pretty choppy in the 10-15fps range. Playable but not smooth.
The thing is - people complain about Perfect Dark on N64, which is one of the slowest games on the system, but Perfect Dark still runs smoother than your average 3DO or Jag game by a wide margin too.
Yep, I have Super Burnout as well and it looks and plays like a dream. One of the best and smoothest games on Jag. Atari Karts also runs great. There's definitely games that hold up on the Jag.
Rayman Jag is a very recent pick-up as I got a good price on it. I'm a HUGE fan of the original, though, so I never had issues playing it. The Jag version is really neat as it's very different from the others in many ways. It's a much easier game which may appeal. It's a great version, no doubt, for that reason alone. It just has technical limitations such as reduced parallax and, honestly, a poor soundtrack.
As someone that spent way too much time playing CD-i last year, and yeah, I agree that its video capabilities were amazing. It's a neat relic of a very different time.
The non-FMV games, though, tend to be rather poor technically. Lucky Luke looks fine, right? But it runs at 20fps - which is abysmal for a 2D platformer. It's not unplayable, mind you, but it's a bad look for a system that was sold for so much (not that it was focused entirely on gaming, of course).
The Apprentice is THE best looking and playing game on CD-i by a landslide. I can agree with that.
CD-i is a fascinating machine, though.
Yes, I recently picked up a boxed copy of this. It's a neat game that looks really impressive for the system. It's also rather confusing and not great to play but I can appreciate what they were trying to do!
The PS1's defects are another thing that IMO complicates the question of which cables the system and game designers intended people to use on the system. My actual PS1 is hooked up using RGB, but with emulation I've been messing about with shaders that simulate the low resolution that composite cables would carry, and although it makes things blurry it makes the defects less noticeable.
That's especially true of a hardware feature: dithering. PS1 dithering always looked terrible when hooked up via RGB cables but it probably did improve the apparent colour depth over composite. I suppose it bothered me less back in the day because even 3dfx cards would dither, and I don't remember complaining... much.
That's especially true of a hardware feature: dithering. PS1 dithering always looked terrible when hooked up via RGB cables but it probably did improve the apparent colour depth over composite. I suppose it bothered me less back in the day because even 3dfx cards would dither, and I don't remember complaining... much.
Dithering was, overall, a minor issue compared to wobbling textures, jittering vertexes and visible seams.
And yes those consoles' visuals (defects and all) were meant for CRT TVs so might not have been as pronounced as one might think when playing on a emulator and HD TV.
EDIT:
About the use of dithering on PS1 there is this interesting video:
Speaking of which does anybody know if there is any channel specialized in filming games from that generation directly from a CRT TV?
I've seen that Gaming Palooza Empire on YT has recently uploaded a few of such videos for N64 games.
Mario Kart 64 (not as technically accomplished as Diddy Kong Racing but the art direction is better IMO):
Super Mario 64:
F-Zero X:
Star Wars Episode 1 Racer:
Doom 64 (it's great that this game is finally being acknowledge officially):
Extreme-G 2:
And yes those consoles' visuals (defects and all) were meant for CRT TVs so might not have been as pronounced as one might think when playing on a emulator and HD TV.
EDIT:
About the use of dithering on PS1 there is this interesting video:
Speaking of which does anybody know if there is any channel specialized in filming games from that generation directly from a CRT TV?
I've seen that Gaming Palooza Empire on YT has recently uploaded a few of such videos for N64 games.
Mario Kart 64 (not as technically accomplished as Diddy Kong Racing but the art direction is better IMO):
Super Mario 64:
F-Zero X:
Star Wars Episode 1 Racer:
Doom 64 (it's great that this game is finally being acknowledge officially):
Extreme-G 2:
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Yeah, that SotE video gave me some bad memories of trying to play 3d games on that poor thing... for example I have a strong memory of playing the Wipeout XL demo on that card, or trying to; framerates were at best in the mid single digits. The ViRGE was the world's first 3D decelerator indeed. When I got a 3DFX card some time later it was really incredible.
Well, the N64 did release like two and a half years after the 3DO and Jaguar, which puts it as close to the Dreamcast as the 3DO. So I would expect better performance, and you get it. I agree, most N64 games are totally playable. As for low-framerate N64 games, for me it depends on the game -- I found Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness totally playable in High-Res mode and indeed played through the whole game that way, and Aidyn Chronicles is slow paced enough to also be fine in Hi-Res despite the low framerate... but that is not the case for Turok 2, I can't play that in high res due to the low framerate, it's a much bigger problem in a FPS. I also never use high res mode in Excitebike 64 partially because it looks amazing enough in regular resolution, but also because the framerate hit and letterboxing in hi-res mode are distracting. It does not run smoothly like it does in regular resolution and that makes the game harder to play.
As for Club Drive, that is true but most of the time it maintains a playable framerate; the framerate difference between Club Drive and Checkered Flag is noticeable. And I like the level designs and controls, and the vaguely SF Rush-ish style. I get why Club Drive is considered to be a joke but kind of like it anyway. It would be better with AI cars to race against instead of just time though... oh well. At least it saves your best times!
And that's what frustrates me about Jaguatr homebrew, almost all of it are just Atari ST games which do nothing to use the Jag's power... but given how much of a mess the thing is design-wise I can undersnd why homebrew devs stay away from 3d and such, it'd be really hard to do. So, ST or Amiga-tier visuals on something capable of more it is. Oh well. (Some of those ports are cool anyway, I have Jeff Minter Classics and it's one of my most played Jaguar games...)
Rayman 1 is such a crushingly hard game, I've never gotten past Band Land; that's where I quit on that ultra-hard game when I bought it back in the late '90s. The graphics are great but it's way too hard for its own good. I haven't really gone back in a long time and maybe I should, but maybe I should wait until I get the apparently slightly easier Jag version...
Anyway, isn't the rumor that Jag Rayman was probably finished some time earlier, then it was put on the shelf while they made the enhanced PS1 port? That would explain why, even though the PS1 version released slightly before the Jaguar one, the game as you say has some stuff added to the PS1 - more parallax layers, sliding physics, and such. I'd guess it's more likely that those are things added to the PS1 than removed from the Jag, but don't know for sure of course.
The Apprentice is definitely a good game, but I honestly do also find the CD-i Zelda sidescrollers good. They aren't great, but are nowhere near as terrible as people say. Visually though, as I said the graphics are nice with fully painted backgrounds in each area, but each area is only a few screens long so areas are limited in size. Also the complaint about how it can be hard to see what is a platform and what isn't is accurate. Also it's very cool to have a Zelda game where you can actually play as Zelda!
As for Lucky Luke, I didn't know it was 20fps but that makes sense. Still, managing animation and sprites that nice on the CD-i is impressive for the platform... but that's what you get when a video/image-focused device has games shoehorned into it.
I don't have Skyhammer but will get it eventually, it's high on my list of Jag games I want. But going by videos, it's very impressive that it manages to run a textured 3d world on the Jag, but it's so pixelated, and the draw distance is horrible! It's really impressive for the platform but I kind of like the flat-shaded look of a Cybermorph or I-War better... and also, as good as Skyhammer looks for textured 3d, does it match up to Blade Force on 3DO?
Thank God they dropped "squiggle vision" after the first season of Home Movies, that shit makes it hard to rewatch. Just awful."Can you remember when did you first started having these thoughts about warping textures?"
Yeah, makes you wonder what PS1 games could have looked like if they didn't have to waste so many polygons in comparison to the N64.
Wrong. N64 aged far worse. Blurry as fuck is worse than the texture warping.
Indeed.
Lack of Z-buffering would still be a problem, but it certainly would have allowed quite big larger polygons for many surfaces.
Thank God they didn't put these on the RE2 Remake. Big, hairy, slimy HD Spiders is the worst.
Yup. For me, playing N64 back then feels like playing a videogames without putting my glasses on.
I got dizzy very fast.
Couldn't agree more. I never even owned a PS1 and I get a nostalgia hard on for it. Although played it a lot at friend's places at the time.
In Perfect Dark . I certainly remember the hi res option tanking the framerate big time. I could always see the difference when I went from mine to my friend's house
Doesn't just a res increase on an n64 emulator fix the blurring?
It never looks quite right to me. The games are designed for 320x240 with the unique AA of N64. If you disable the blur rather than AA, games look sharp and clean on real hardware.
Same. The warping textures >>> blurry image. Often times too that PS1 games managed to put art style first thus making the games look beautiful.
