Although often tossed together into a singular ‘retro game’ aesthetic, the first game consoles that focused on 3D graphics like the Nintendo 64 and Sony PlayStation featured very distinct visuals that make these different systems easy to distinguish. Yet whereas the N64 mostly suffered from a small texture buffer, the PS’s weak graphics hardware necessitated compromises that led to the highly defining jittery and wobbly PlayStation graphics. …

  • 3D graphics were incredibly primitive back then. There really weren’t “3D processors” as we know them today.

    On top of that, CRTs masked many of the weirdest graphical artifacts - the shimmering we see on modern screens was much more of a blur on screens at the time.

    It’s fun to look back at the PlayStation and the N64, and to see how each of them handled limitations in a different way.

      • Yeah, for example when emulating GB/GBC/GBA games, simulating the slow LCD response time makes all the difference. Jittery shaking animations become soft blurs, and everything feels much closer to the authentic hardware

    • Resident evil for N64 is mind boggling how they were able to shrink it down enough to fit on that tiny rom chip.

      • dukemirage@lemmy.worlddeleted by creatorEnglish
        1 month

        Pixels on a CRT aren‘t quadratic. Light bleeds between them, and persisted between frames. That was definitely some kind of post processing you could call masking and the games of that era leaned heavily into it. Hardware and games were designed to be displayed on a CRT.

      • 1 month

        This reads like someone who was born after the CRT era trying to describe them. No, you’re just wrong about that. CRT monitors had a huge effect on the output of the visuals in contrast with modern screens.

      • I’m not sure how to reply to this.

        Mainly because my own math skill is unrelated to processor technology of the late 1990s.

  • 1 month

    Which emulator fixes the wobbling and upscales the textures again? The games I’ve seen in that emulator look great, nearly as good as PS2 games.

  • Not a problem for me. How about an article on how devs release shittier, messier, harder to use GUIs every goddamn release. I swear its like four buttons to power it off.