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Why PlayStation Graphics Wobble, Flicker And Twitch (hackaday.com)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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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. ...

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[–] 67 points 9 months ago (11 children)

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.

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  • [–] 28 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    This Noodle video on how old games were developed with CRT in mind was absolutely mind-blowing to me.

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago

    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

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  • [+] -54 points 9 months ago (8 children)
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  • [–] 32 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [+] -17 points 9 months ago (3 children)
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  • [–] 8 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

    CRTs don’t „have“ pixels, but they display a signal that originated from a pixelised source. Popping colors and different gamma curves is not a contradiction to what I said.

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  • [–] 24 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [+] -15 points 9 months ago (2 children)
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