[TheDimensioner]

@Reventon2010 I don't know about GTA 1, but Perspective Correct Texturing, and PGXP in general, seems to have no effect on GTA 2. That's using "Memory only" mode, but using the more complex "Mem + CPU logic" mode, the building textures get stretched, like on the second couple of pictures.

 

[Thirteen1355]

By the way, how's The Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver on this amazing thing?

Does it work well with PCSX-R/PGXP?

 

[superjupi]

It works quite well, but still not the Dreamcast version.

 

[TheDimensioner]

@Thirteen1355, @superjupi Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver works, but needs "vertex caching", because textures won't be "connected" without it. It's different from the initial issues Spyro had, though. Here the triangles are bigger, and it looks like a mosaic art of some sort XD. I've made videos (again XD), one with vertex caching (and enhancements) and another with OpenGL 1.78 and no vertex caching, just the intro, to show the issue. I used "Memory only" mode, because I really saw no difference using "Mem + CPU logic", aside from the slowdown.

Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, "Memory only" mode + vertex caching (Pete'sOGL2 Tweaks 2.4)

"Memory only" mode, no vertex caching (OpenGL 1.78)

The slowdowns are due to my weak system, and also because this game has lots of details, and is also heavier for the emulator (probably). The weird thing about it, is that the internal FPS when using Pete'sOGL2 (Tweaks or not) is 30 on some scenes, but it jumps to 60 during battles or rooms with animated objects, like the flying souls the main character eats. It's very perceivable on the first video (I can't record at 60FPS on high resolutions), there's slowdown whenever an enemy appears, or after entering a big room. If I enable CPU overclock, the game "locks" at 30 FPS all the time, but animations are faster, and some cutscenes will break. Using OpenGL 1.78, the FPS is 30 all the time as well, without overclock. Maybe Pete's OpenGL2 2.9 really has some timing issue, because this is the second game that changes FPS like that (Medal of Honor was the first). But I have no way to measure the FPS on the real hardware, so I wouldn't know what's the correct behaviour of those games.

 

[unreal676]

Decided to make a quick video showing off some Xenogears combat with PGXP and xBRZ enabled. 60fps because it's a 60fps game, it looks stunning and I swear, one of the best looking games I've seen on the PlayStation! =)

(Audio is normal, not like last time)

 

[TheDimensioner]

So, I got kind of nostalgic and decided to dust off my old PlayStation, see if still worked. It did, so I decided to play some Crash Bandicoot, in its original form, the way it was meant to be played. The disc I have has Crash 1, 2 and 3 in it, but 1 didn't worked, so I pressed reset, and now booted Crash 3. Besides my head now not being able to clear the feeling of "why everything shakes?" (I got too used with PGXP XD), I immediately noticed something. Those "holes" that appear at a distance, even with PGXP, happen on the real hardware as well! It's very weird actually, I don't remember that happening at all. Unless my PlayStation is too old (it only works when standing vertically actually), or maybe the disc I have has been compressed or had something modified to fit the 3 Crash games in it, but still, maybe this issue can't actually be fixed with PGXP. Some kind of ancient draw distance/LoD bias method? Here's some pics and video (got used to it now). I had to use a Windows Phone to record, and also sorry about my old 14" CRT, it sucks, but I still play my Wii on it XD.

Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped on real PlayStation. Original SCPH-1001 model, with the separate RCA inputs and parallel I/O port, if it interests. It also has that issue with the power supply being just under the CD drive, so over time it heated up the lens, its thin metal support dilated and shifted the lens focus, that's why it only works standing up.

Spoiler

Also some pics

Spoiler

EDIT: The pics were too big .

 

[unreal676]

@TheDimensioner Oh wow, playing on a CRT too! Is the shaking really noticeable on the real hardware? I know it's a bit obvious on an LCD panel, also doesn't tend to look as good their either.

 

[TheDimensioner]

@unreal676 It is for me, after playing too much on PGXP . In the video, if you look at the hills on the sides with the purple flowers, as Crash moves foward, they start moving up and down rapdily. It's subtle on this game, but in other games with more detail, "wobblyness" is more noticeable.

 

[Reventon2010]

So, I got kind of nostalgic and decided to dust off my old PlayStation, see if still worked. It did, so I decided to play some Crash Bandicoot, in its original form, the way it was meant to be played. The disc I have has Crash 1, 2 and 3 in it, but 1 didn't worked, so I pressed reset, and now booted Crash 3. Besides my head now not being able to clear the feeling of "why everything shakes?" (I got too used with PGXP XD), I immediately noticed something. Those "holes" that appear at a distance, even with PGXP, happen on the real hardware as well! It's very weird actually, I don't remember that happening at all. Unless my PlayStation is too old (it only works when standing vertically actually), or maybe the disc I have has been compressed or had something modified to fit the 3 Crash games in it, but still, maybe this issue can't actually be fixed with PGXP. Some kind of ancient draw distance/LoD bias method? Here's some pics and video (got used to it now). I had to use a Windows Phone to record, and also sorry about my old 14" CRT, it sucks, but I still play my Wii on it XD.

Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped on real PlayStation. Original SCPH-1001 model, with the separate RCA inputs and parallel I/O port, if it interests. It also has that issue with the power supply being just under the CD drive, so over time it heated up the lens, its thin metal support dilated and shifted the lens focus, that's why it only works standing up.

Spoiler

Also some pics

Spoiler

View attachment 185881 View attachment 185889 View attachment 185897 View attachment 185905

EDIT: The pics were too big .

Nice find with the terrain holes. So there is no problem with pgxp then. It's just a bug that was there in the first place.

I was wondering, what does pgxp work like on the jetski level? The Crash developers programmed a software z-buffer just for that level. So would pgxp like that or spit out corruptions?

 

[TheDimensioner]

@Reventon2010 I think it works as it should. PGXP mode shows a white circle around the jet ski, maybe that's the z-buffer part? Nevertheless, the moving water looks like what I think water would look like on the PSX...

Spoiler

 

[didado]

http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/02/making-crash-bandicoot-part-1/

@ TheDimensioner and iCatButler maybe to.

Interesting story how they handled the game on the playstation other programmers didn't or couldn't

 

[Reventon2010]

@Reventon2010 I think it works as it should. PGXP mode shows a white circle around the jet ski, maybe that's the z-buffer part? Nevertheless, the moving water looks like what I think water would look like on the PSX...

Spoiler

I think the z-buffer is to prevent any z fighting on the water mesh. There's a lot of overlapping waves with transparency. Without a z-buffer, the ps1 doesn't know in what order front-to-back to show the polygons. So you would get a lot of flickering and flashing.

It's amazing the way Naughty Dog could levearage the Hardware potential of the ps1. Also, it looks good with pgxp.

 

[Thirteen1355]

@Thirteen1355, @superjupi Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver works, but needs "vertex caching", because textures won't be "connected" without it. It's different from the initial issues Spyro had, though. Here the triangles are bigger, and it looks like a mosaic art of some sort XD. I've made videos (again XD), one with vertex caching (and enhancements) and another with OpenGL 1.78 and no vertex caching, just the intro, to show the issue. I used "Memory only" mode, because I really saw no difference using "Mem + CPU logic", aside from the slowdown.

Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, "Memory only" mode + vertex caching (Pete'sOGL2 Tweaks 2.4)

"Memory only" mode, no vertex caching (OpenGL 1.78)

The slowdowns are due to my weak system, and also because this game has lots of details, and is also heavier for the emulator (probably). The weird thing about it, is that the internal FPS when using Pete'sOGL2 (Tweaks or not) is 30 on some scenes, but it jumps to 60 during battles or rooms with animated objects, like the flying souls the main character eats. It's very perceivable on the first video (I can't record at 60FPS on high resolutions), there's slowdown whenever an enemy appears, or after entering a big room. If I enable CPU overclock, the game "locks" at 30 FPS all the time, but animations are faster, and some cutscenes will break. Using OpenGL 1.78, the FPS is 30 all the time as well, without overclock. Maybe Pete's OpenGL2 2.9 really has some timing issue, because this is the second game that changes FPS like that (Medal of Honor was the first). But I have no way to measure the FPS on the real hardware, so I wouldn't know what's the correct behaviour of those games.

Yeah, I rather play this on Demul emulator (Dreamcast). It actually works.

 

[Thirteen1355]

So, I got kind of nostalgic and decided to dust off my old PlayStation, see if still worked. It did, so I decided to play some Crash Bandicoot, in its original form, the way it was meant to be played. The disc I have has Crash 1, 2 and 3 in it, but 1 didn't worked, so I pressed reset, and now booted Crash 3. Besides my head now not being able to clear the feeling of "why everything shakes?" (I got too used with PGXP XD), I immediately noticed something. Those "holes" that appear at a distance, even with PGXP, happen on the real hardware as well! It's very weird actually, I don't remember that happening at all. Unless my PlayStation is too old (it only works when standing vertically actually), or maybe the disc I have has been compressed or had something modified to fit the 3 Crash games in it, but still, maybe this issue can't actually be fixed with PGXP. Some kind of ancient draw distance/LoD bias method? Here's some pics and video (got used to it now). I had to use a Windows Phone to record, and also sorry about my old 14" CRT, it sucks, but I still play my Wii on it XD.

Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped on real PlayStation. Original SCPH-1001 model, with the separate RCA inputs and parallel I/O port, if it interests. It also has that issue with the power supply being just under the CD drive, so over time it heated up the lens, its thin metal support dilated and shifted the lens focus, that's why it only works standing up.

Spoiler

Also some pics

Spoiler

View attachment 185881 View attachment 185889 View attachment 185897 View attachment 185905

EDIT: The pics were too big .

Crash Bandicoot 2 was the first game I played, ever. I was 4, so I didn't understand a bit of it, and that game was soon forgotten by old me. When I was 6, I got a Nintendo 64 with Banjo Kazooie. That quickly became the game that I remembered being my first game ever.

Still, they were very vague to me, so I was quite happy I could play Banjo on Project 64. Played Crash 2 much later on EPSXE, but it wasn't that interesting to me. The best thing Crash has, are the controls. They are perfect. The game is a bit generic, in my opinion. Nothing stands out. Not if you have played Banjo, or even Mario 64.

 

[TheDimensioner]

@Thirteen1355 I've played the PC version of Soul Reaver, but it's just a port of the PSX version. Than I got the Dreamcast version running on nullDC (Demul is too heavy for my system) and it definitely looks like the best version. The PC version seems to "emulate" most of the PSX wobbliness, much like someone commented about the PC version of Final Fantasy VIII in the Tweaks thread, where character models would "snap" their vertices while still. But PCSXR-PGXP, being an emulator, has many options and "tweaks" that can be applied to the game, which the PC version does not have (it only has a bilinear filter option), and it runs better than Dreamcast emulators on my system, so I'll stick with the PSX version. Someone also made an "undub" for the PSX version. This game had an official Brazilian-Portuguese release, with dubs and all, and this hack works quite well, besides lower quality audio. The widescreen hack here also works better in my opinion.

My first game was Alex Kidd in Miracle World (reason of my profile picture). The Sega Master System was an amazing console, not only the design, but the controller felt much better than a NES controller, that my father bought later. In the NES, I don't remember playing Mario so much, because it felt "repetitive" for me. The levels were similar, the castles were all equal, and the bosses were all the same. I don't actually remember beating Super Mario Brothers on the NES, I played Duck Hunt much more XD (I had that Duck Hunt/Super Mario combo cartridge). The first 3D console I came in contact with was the N64, and I did play Super Mario 64 a lot on it. But it was borrowed from my older brother, and eventually I had to part ways with, without ever beating it as well. But than my father bought a PlayStation, and the first game I played was Crash Bandicoot. I liked that immediately, and it sticked with me until this day. I played all the N64 games on Project64 as well, and even most of the games that I didn't have, like the classics Banjo, and even Zelda, but today, I've beaten more PSX games than N64 games. And like I said in the Tweaks thread maybe, I didn't perceive what the PSX did with textures at all initially XD. It was only after PGXP started that I could really see the PSX did things differently from the likes of N64 or Dreamcast, so now I like "non-wobbly" textures better. Different experiences develop different tastes...

 

[Thirteen1355]

@Thirteen1355 I've played the PC version of Soul Reaver, but it's just a port of the PSX version. Than I got the Dreamcast version running on nullDC (Demul is too heavy for my system) and it definitely looks like the best version. The PC version seems to "emulate" most of the PSX wobbliness, much like someone commented about the PC version of Final Fantasy VIII in the Tweaks thread, where character models would "snap" their vertices while still. But PCSXR-PGXP, being an emulator, has many options and "tweaks" that can be applied to the game, which the PC version does not have (it only has a bilinear filter option), and it runs better than Dreamcast emulators on my system, so I'll stick with the PSX version. Someone also made an "undub" for the PSX version. This game had an official Brazilian-Portuguese release, with dubs and all, and this hack works quite well, besides lower quality audio. The widescreen hack here also works better in my opinion.

My first game was Alex Kidd in Miracle World (reason of my profile picture). The Sega Master System was an amazing console, not only the design, but the controller felt much better than a NES controller, that my father bought later. In the NES, I don't remember playing Mario so much, because it felt "repetitive" for me. The levels were similar, the castles were all equal, and the bosses were all the same. I don't actually remember beating Super Mario Brothers on the NES, I played Duck Hunt much more XD (I had that Duck Hunt/Super Mario combo cartridge). The first 3D console I came in contact with was the N64, and I did play Super Mario 64 a lot on it. But it was borrowed from my older brother, and eventually I had to part ways with, without ever beating it as well. But than my father bought a PlayStation, and the first game I played was Crash Bandicoot. I liked that immediately, and it sticked with me until this day. I played all the N64 games on Project64 as well, and even most of the games that I didn't have, like the classics Banjo, and even Zelda, but today, I've beaten more PSX games than N64 games. And like I said in the Tweaks thread maybe, I didn't perceive what the PSX did with textures at all initially XD. It was only after PGXP started that I could really see the PSX did things differently from the likes of N64 or Dreamcast, so now I like "non-wobbly" textures better. Different experiences develop different tastes...

Heh. I have the PC version of Kain, and I don't notice any of the wobbliness from the PS1 version.

Super Mario Bros never was my type of game. I've only played the All-Stars (SNES) version, on emu.

I always say, PS1 has more good games, but N64 has the best games.

 

[TheDimensioner]

Not much the wobbliness, but I guess the same character models, without some kind of rework to fit the PC. And I agree, N64 has the best games, but I'm more drawn to PSX games for some reason.

 

[Thirteen1355]

Does Dreamcast version contain different models? That would be great (although I didn't really notice)!
PS1 has more RPGs, and I like RPGs really much. However, I still haven't tried many of them. I played FF7, a really good game, but on PC (with some mods to improve the ugly graphics).
FF7 really looks uglier than FF1. But the world is really good (story less so), I loved the locations and gameplay. And with the mods, which made the game look like a N64 game (no HD graphics, I didn't want these), the game looks pretty neat as well.

But I still need to try Valkyrie Profile, Final Fantasy 9 (will probably try this on PC as well), Xenogears, Chrono Cross (maybe) and Star Ocean 2.

 

[iCatButler]

I think the z-buffer is to prevent any z fighting on the water mesh. There's a lot of overlapping waves with transparency. Without a z-buffer, the ps1 doesn't know in what order front-to-back to show the polygons. So you would get a lot of flickering and flashing.

It's amazing the way Naughty Dog could levearage the Hardware potential of the ps1. Also, it looks good with pgxp.

A z-buffer won't actually tell the system the order in which to show polygons, it just stores the depth of the last pixel rendered at any position, it's not actually very useful for layered alpha transparencies at all. When depth testing is enabled for opaque geometry it's generally used to reject a new pixel if it is further from the viewer than the one already in the buffer, meaning rendering can be order independent.

The PS1 does actually have a feature called the "ordering table" to help games render primitives in order from furthest to nearest. It's basically a series of linked list nodes in an array which can be indexed using a very low precision depth value, the game generates one of these values for each triangle and then pushes the triangle into the table at that point. When it renders the scene it then iterates through the primitives in the reverse order they appear in the table.

I've been experimenting with this a little because while the values are very low precision, they are coherent unlike the w coordinates produced by the GTE.

Spoiler

I've changed depth value display to a spectrum from blue to red because it's easier to see small differences.

The Z components generated by the GTE are high precision and calculated per-vertex but different objects are processed at different scales making the z data incoherent.

The Ordering Table positions are coherent across the whole screen but are stored per-face and at a low resolution, making it unfit for creating a depth buffer...

I think the z-buffer described might actually be used to display the waterline on the player character.
There are various techniques used to display half submerged objects in the jetski levels. Crates are rendered as two meshes, half above and half below the water line. Mines, buoys and ramps appear to have animated textures with baked in water lines.

The player character has a small rectangle blended over it with what appears to be a single bit depth buffer to remove pixels that would be obscured by the part of the character above the water. I think I read something about Crash 2 using a similar technique for still water. I'd probably need to use a VRAM debugger to confirm it though (the one in the Software plugin doesn't work for me).

Spoiler

Edit: Actually... it looks like the jetski mesh changes shape in the lower pictures. I guess that means it's using the same method as the crates, rendering the below water part, then the water, then the above part...

In that case I'm not sure where the z-buffer is being used in that level. I can find references to it on Wikipedia but they all cite an issue of Game Informer that I can't find online.

Maybe something got lost in translation and they confused software clipping plane with z-buffer.

 

[TheDimensioner]

@Thirteen1355 Raziel (the main character) seems to be changed:

Spoiler

The Dreamcast version is 60 FPS also, which is cool XD.

But the PC version is the same as the PlayStation:

Spoiler

There is a widescreen hack and 60FPS "hook" for this game as well, but it's vert-, and my CPU seems not to handle the higher FPS, even for a 17 year old game XD.