“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.” ― Brian Eno

>CD distortion

There is no such thing as CD distortion. Does that make the whole opinion invalid?

Perhaps lack of distortion? I remember some DJ friends from back in the day saying that CDs sound more "sterile" than vinyl (this was late 90s/early 2000s).

Yeah maybe, but as a composer he should know better than that, no? Or does he rely on his engineers for that?

Perhaps they mean mp3 distortion? Many CDs were encoded as mp3?

There's even a Bloodborne demake for PSX. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXcwpNWoR8s

I'm not sure it is unique. The problem with the PSX is the lack of a z buffer and affine texturing. Those certainly weren't unique limitations in the 90s.

Indeed, last year i made a 3D platform/adventure game for an MS-DOS game jam[0] and noticed that some people added it to their "PS1-styled" game lists even though it had nothing to do with PS1 :-P (nor i ever had a PS1 myself - i did buy a PS2 though a few years ago but only played a single game on it - i want to figure out a way to modchip or something so i can do some homebrew, though i dont want to mess with the hardware side of things and i hope it'll be eventually supported by FreeDVDBoot instead).

However i think the combination of lack of z-buffer, affine texturing and RGB color output with dithering was kinda unique - or at least very rarely seen elsewhere. You could see several z-buffer-less and affine-only texture mapped games on software rendered PC games, but pretty much all of them were using 8bit palettized modes. Some also used dithering (e.g. Ultima Underworld) though it was very rare.

By the time there were a few games that used RGB colors and software rendering (e.g. Unreal, Heretic 2), PCs were also powerful enough to do perspective correct texturing.

[0] https://bad-sector.itch.io/post-apocalyptic-petra

It also has that strange polygon jitter for lack of floating point, and no texture filtering.

The lack of floating point unit on the PS1 is commonly misinterpreted, see https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/playstation/#tab-5...

I'm not sure why you think the "Models/textures flicker due to lack of Z-buffering" is not accurate. I mean, sure, models/textures can flicker for other reasons too so technically that can be inaccurate but lack of z-buffer is one of the most common reasons since the majority of 3D games software relied on z sorting polygons that couldn't always be sorted perfectly (static geometry could be preprocessed with, e.g., a BSP tree, but as long as dynamic geometry entered the picture things became much hairier).

Or is it that it isn't a problem of PS1 but a problem of games - which, again sure, this might be true but that'd be the splittiest of hair splitting :-P it is the lack of a hardware feature that drove the games do what they do, so it isn't entirely "blameless".

> Or is it that it isn't a problem of PS1 but a problem of games

Yes, this is what I wanted to emphasize.

My intent wasn't to say that the 'lack of z-buffering' statement was incorrect (it's still true), but that there's a fundamental issue behind it, the visible/hidden surface determination, and now it depends on the developer's implementation. I believe this is overlooked on non-technical sites.

With this, I just wanted to make it more informative for the reader. I don't think the question is if the PS1 has a z-buffer or not. Sure, z-buffering is a solution, but there's the reasoning behind it that I wanted to transmit it to the reader.

Anyway, that's just my opinion.

Your citation contradicts itself. The polygon jitter exists for lack of floating point unit. While it's possible to emulate the necessary precision, it's uneconomical without the acceleration provided by a dedicated processing unit. Without floating point, the PSX isn't fast enough to render complex scenes in real-time accurately; Hence the jitter.

I don't mind being wrong and I will correct the article if needed. That being said, I'm interested in debating this, what if the PS1's GPU had implemented some sort of sub-pixel precision and edge antialiasing? Do you think the lack of floating-point vertex coordinates would have been noticeable? (I'm assuming the 'jitter' means the sudden jumps when polygons move slowly).

I have no idea :)

There's also the haunted PS1 demo discs. [1] https://hauntedps1.itch.io/