Why the limitations of the N64 and PS1 mattered

one of the main reasons why I love talking about video games from the PlayStation 1 Nintendo 64 and Sega set in the era is the way developers would overcome challenges based on the hardware that they were working with and this is definitely a lost art form in 2024 when we take a look at the Xbox and the PlayStation for all intents and purposes the hardware is almost identical in terms of architecture and in turn when we look at the video games themselves other than a few differences in resolution frame rate and some postprocessing effects the games are onetoone identical but you'll notice over on the Nintendo switch with a completely different architecture many ports from the Xbox or Playstation tend to suffer in terms of their performance now of course there are always exceptions to this when it comes to the impossible ports including The Witcher 3 Doom Eternal Wolfenstein and a couple of others but undoubtedly the best Nintendo switch experiences are the ones that were built exclusively for the hardware in mind but this concept is not new if you go back to the days of the PlayStation and the Nintendo 64 developers would have to be creative to overcome specific challenges but the question is why aren't both PlayStation 1 and Nintendo 64 capable of Fast 3D well of course the answer is yes but underneath the covers both systems in terms of architecture are very different and the way that they handle 3D in turn is also very different and many games were built exclusively for the Target platform and this is why I believe so strongly that we got some of the very best games during that era thanks to the limitations of the hardware and the way the developers would overcome them the Sony PlayStation of course was Sony's very first system and their immediate jump into the world of 3D and it was very successful it comes standard with Just 2 MB of memory on board but also contained 1 mbyte of dedicated video memory or vram it's main feature of course is the CD based technology which could hold approximately 660 MB of code and data on a single disc this meant of course that games could be larger in scope with a vast library of assets textures sound being loaded in as needed and to overcome these small memory limitations of the PlayStation developers would often hide loading screens during transitions in the game for example in Resident Evil the current scene is unloaded and a new scene is loading from disc as the door opening sequence is shown as the end user you may not even notice this another great example are the final Fantasy games when a fight sequence starts there's that swirly motion blow effect and you know that the fight is about to begin but what's actually happening is the game is hiding the loading from the end user now to be very clear on the Nintendo 64 there is still loading that's going on but because of its cartridge-based architecture things can be loaded in much much faster take for example this scene in Diddy Kong Racing as we approach the door to access the first set of stages when we run the game in wireframe mode new geometry data is read from C Partridge and the new scene is quickly constructed or how about this scene in Mario 64 as Mario approaches the doorway to the first stage you can see that geometry is loading in preparation for Mario to enter this Scene It all seems pretty seamless doesn't it and unfortunately the PlayStation 1 had much lower seek times to pull its data from a great example is Quake 2 technically very impressive on the PlayStation one but it's crippled with loading pores that can really take the player out of the experience over on the nintend Nintendo 64 it's quite seamless and thanks to this very fast cartridge access meant that some games on the Nintendo 64 would create what was known as Hub worlds which was a central location where a player can simply venture out in different areas of the game and unlock levels as they complete them and this is a very clever way of masking the loading between levels and worlds thanks to the very fast cartridge access of the Nintendo 64 now let's be clear hub worlds were not created or invented on the Nintendo 64 in fact the very first time I remember a hub world was when I played Castle of Illusion on the Sega Genesis all the way back in the early 90s and this is something that I really want to stress Here video game developers understood the limitations of the hardware that they were working with and came up with unique and interesting ways to make things happen but that's not to say that the PlayStation 1 was inferior to the Nintendo 64 far from it in fact where the PlayStation 1 really came into its own was its very fast 3D and texture mapping capabilities simply put the PlayStation 1 has much larger texture sizes over the Nintendo 64 and thanks to its very large storage capacity meant that many textures could be stored onto CD and this is what made the PS1 an absolute beast when it came to RPGs pre-rendered backgrounds became very popular in the mid90s thanks to the PlayStation one and it meant that developers that were still coming to terms with 3D rendering would work with their artists to come up with some unique and really amazing 2D experiences and this was something that was very popular in games such as Final Fantasy 7 Resident Evil chronocross89 is but let me know what your favorite pre-rendered backgrounds are in the comments below now of course on the Nintendo 64 there was pre-rendered visuals Resident Evil 2 was the impossible Port that came to the hardware and of course there are other examples of pre-rendered visuals in other games but when we talk about the Nintendo 64 we're talking about full 3d and while on paper that may sound like it's a lot more powerful than the PlayStation in practice it also came with its own limitations specification wise the N64 4 comes with more main memory with 4 megabytes which can be expanded to 8 thanks to the expansion pack which we did recently cover on the channel furthermore the Nintendo 64 can handle things such as bilinear filtering M mapping anti-aliasing hardware-based lighting and very importantly perspective correction thanks to its zbuffer and the goal of the Nintendo 64 was to be a powerful 3D console but on the downside the Nintendo 64 while cartridge based only had a very tiny texture cash of 4 KOB and texture sizes were quite small at 64x 32 size pixels were their maximum size allowed for color textures coupled with the anti-aliasing and bilinear filtering meant that many games often looked very blurry with that Vaseline effect that really did turn some people away from the N64 and because of the very rigid texture requirements on the Nintendo 64 this meant that developers had to be very very careful when it came to constructing 3D models and in many instances to simulate body parts on a character model they would use what was known as garage shading which essentially just interpolates color across a triangle using vertex normals completely eliminating the need for any textures and as such this is a very clever optimization technique take for example this 3D model of banjo from banjo kazui it only requires 805 triangles and as you can see there is a lot of color shading going on here there's only a handful of textures that are actually used including the eye textures the textures for the backpack the pants as well as for the feet just to name a couple and these textures themselves are quite small and only 16x 16 pixels wide which in turn is only about 500 bytes or so in size this means that these textures can quite easily fit through the 4 KOB of texture cache now over on the PlayStation it could also perform gurad and flat shading and of course texture mapping but its biggest limitation was its lack of depth or zbuffer and any floating point operations simply put lack of floating Point meant that textures would jiggle around and snap into place trying to clamp onto the nearest integer pixel unit and a lack of zbuffer meant that it was up to the developer to display geometry in the correct order furthermore the PlayStation 1 does not properly account for the camera's perspective during the texturing process instead the PS1 uses a fine texture mapping and this texture mapping is what causes the warping that we see on PS1 games now this of course is all very well known but it's made it very difficult for developers to build out larger 3D worlds on the PlayStation and in many instances would simply just clip geometry as it got far enough into the distance Silent Hill 1 is a great example of a survival horror game that uses fog to build tension and atmosphere but in reality it's simply masking a limitation of the hardware another game that does this is Tekken 3 if you take a look at the arcade original and compare it side by side with the PlayStation things look almost identical but take a Clos look at the background s on the PlayStation they're all 2D whereas on the arcade it's fully 3D you win of course clever developers could work around any challenge Crash Bandicoot and Spyro were examples of very well optimized 3D worlds that had handrolled Z buffering and level of detail and it showed that in the right hands the PlayStation 1 was more than capable of getting the job done and some of the more impressive 3D games on the PS1 could sit side by side with anything that the Nintendo 64 could do but it took time and commitment on the flip side Resident Evil 2 on the N64 isn't really a game that would ever be meant for the N64 but thanks to its programmable vector-based co-processors meant that the developers could simply handroll their own optimized full motion video routines and speaking of full motion video that's a great lead into the next object many believe that FMV is a gimmick and adds nothing to a video game but I disagree the PlayStation came with a dedicated chip on the motherboard known as the motion decoder or mde to decode up to 320x 240 video footage at 30 frames per second this meant that developers could incorporate FMV sequences such as intros and outros and just about anywhere they wanted but it's the clever use of the mde decoda that really made it an essential part of the hardware games such as Final Fantasy 7 8 and9 would often transition from gameplay to FMV almost immediately to really immerse you into the world sometimes especially when you playing the game on a CRT you really didn't even notice it even more clever use of FMV was a game such as fear effect this game would have looping FMV video backgrounds over gameplay if you look at the wireframe here it's a simple quad that's rendering the movie in the background with the 3D models in the foreground and this adds to the interactivity and the immersion and it's because you could decode movies very fast that these transitions were also very fast and for me fear effect is one of those unique experiences that could really only happen on the PlayStation 1 back in the day now of course over on the Nintendo 64 full motion video was certainly achievable but many developers would simply not use it thanks to the lack of storage found on the cartridge format and one of the most interesting examples of this is Mortal Kombat 4 this is one of the games that has ports to both the PlayStation 1 and the Nintendo 64 now when you compare these two games side by side they look pretty close to each other both of them run at 60 frames per second and both of them have a very similar look in terms of fidelity and visuals but check out this intro sequence at the start of the game with Ryden on the PlayStation 1 this sequence is a full motion video but over on the Nintendo 64 it's being rendered in realtime 3D responsible for the death of an entire civilization to rid all Realms of shino's Menace I waged a war that plunged the earth into centuries of dark high civilization to rid all Realms of shak's Menace I waged a war that plunged the earth into centuries of darkness and banished Shak into a place called The Nether now it's up to you to determine which one you think is better but this is more of an example to show how developers tackle problems in different ways depending on the hardware they had to work with now last but certainly not least is that the Nintendo 64 offered four controller ports and thanks to its 3D Hardware four play split screen games were achievable and like pre-rendered backgrounds on the PS1 this became part of the fabric of what made the Nintendo 64 so cool Fourplay split screen games were not even a thing before the N64 and this was a massive Innovation at the time that made many games such as Mario Kart 64 golden eye fzero Perfect Dark to name a few a fantastic way to play multiplayer games with friends over on the PlayStation of course it's possible to have four player games thanks to its add-on but just like full motion video on the Nintendo 64 four player split screen games on the PlayStation 1 was not very common so in conclusion it's these limitations and features that made the N64 and PS1 so amazing that developers worked with and worked around to make amazing 3D experiences many of these limitations would turn themselves into gameplay design choices and some of these are still being used in video games to this day some of them are not help ever and it's a real shame that number one Xbox and Playstation Hardware is just about the same and there's really nothing unique and interesting about any port of a game anymore and for me the very best ERA in video games was when Sony Sega Nintendo and Microsoft all had different Hardware with different architectures and exclusive games that were built specifically for that Hardware in mind and this is certainly a topic that I'm very interested in covering in the future we're going to take a look at the original Xbox PlayStation 2 Dreamcast and GameCube ERA with their different architectures as well and come up with interesting and unique discussions around those systems but we're going to leave it here for today's episode guys I do feel like that generation the early 2000s was the last great generation in video games personally but let me know what you guys think in the comments below let me know your thoughts opinions and experiences playing PlayStation 1 and N64 games back in the day for now we're going to leave it here guys thank you so much for watching if you like this episode please don't forget to leave me a thumbs up and I'll catch you guys in the next one bye for now

Channel: Modern Vintage Gamer

Views: 454,894

Keywords: why are video games boring now, good old games, gaming, ps1, n64, playstation 1, sony, nintendo 64, old games were better, old games are better, retro games, mvg, modern vintage gamer, 3d, why you can no longer enjoy video games, game, design, playstation, mario 64, banjo kazooie, metal gear solid, diddy kong racing, technical, differences, video game, different, explanation

Id: nUjoMdWH-JI

Length: 14min 51sec (891 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 15 2024