AuthorTopic: Any one know the specs for psx/ps1 games?  (Read 24276 times)

Offline PAT BUTCHER

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Any one know the specs for psx/ps1 games?

on: July 01, 2009, 01:33:58 am
Hey i just registered and was wondering if anybody knows the specs for ps1 style models. I've made a few models which I shall post soon. I've been sticking to 256x256 which I'm guessing is probably the max texture size for ps1 but i have no idea about the colour pallette/colour depth or max tri's. Could anyone help me out please? thank you . Can't find this info anywhere

Offline Conzeit

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Re: Any one know the specs for psx/ps1 games?

Reply #2 on: July 01, 2009, 05:30:57 am
http://psx.rules.org/gpu.txt

This is a good amount of information on how the graphics work on the PS1 I think there could be something useful. Seems like it says it used 64x64, 128x128 and also 256x256 sized textures.
In terms of polycount I think it would be fine as well depending on what he used the rest of the polygons that would be displayed on. Its hard to say though as it's near impossible to find just polycounts on models, all i could find out about is how many polygons a second the PS1 can display.

This guy is looking great though Sqiggly, I saw him on tisource I believe awhile ago and thought it was fantastic. I really like how the texture looks on him. Will be interesting to see him coloured.

I think that is a very interesting topic...and I thought that SoulReaver one being a game that pushed ps1 to it's limits someone like you might want to check out its models and polycounts....so here is a link that will help

http://www.thelostworlds.net/Software/index.html software specifically designed to rip the game

http://www.thelostworlds.net/SR1/index.html there may or may not be something of interest here.

Offline PAT BUTCHER

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Re: Any one know the specs for psx/ps1 games?

Reply #3 on: July 01, 2009, 11:58:13 pm
Thanks alot for the reply's, that gpu text thing was pretty interesting buti dont think i'll be following everything in there! looks like 16 colours, 256 max but pushing it unless its a huge character taking up most of screen or something and just keep geometry as simple as. Can't actually find any polycounts on the sould reaver site though but cheers anyhoo.

Offline Squiggly_P

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Re: Any one know the specs for psx/ps1 games?

Reply #4 on: July 04, 2009, 06:39:31 am
Yeah, specs for the PS1 are hard to really nail down.  I think the performance of that system was largely dependent on the software it was trying to run.  Just looking at screenshots I'd say that the average character had in the ballpark of 250-400 triangles.  It's hard to really know for certain.   A lot of the 'limitations' on that system were probably just the result of the technology and the techniques being so new.  I mean, obviously it can only do so much, but according to some of the numbers I've seen, there are games that came out on the system that sould have been impossible.  I doubt Sony even knew exactly what that sytem could do.  Seems like every 6 months or so a game would come out that was previously not possible on the system.  They even made a big deal out of crap games like "Blasto" because it streamed the levels off the disc on the fly.  It was revolutionary at the time (tho also not that fun...), and the levels did look fairly decent sometimes.  Probably a lot more geometry going on in games that did that.

And I don't know about 16 colors per map, either.  I've been looking at some other games - some of the later FF games and RPG's especially - and some of them seem to have used more that 16 colors per map.  FF9, for instance...  lemme find a texture real quick...
http://www.spriters-resource.com/psx_ps2/finalfantasyix/index.html

Just checking the Zidane texture, there are well over 400 colors in use.  I'm going to assume that this is for the battle mode models, where they are more detailed.  The resolution is odd as well.  Looks like 128x192.  Dunno how common that was.  It could also be a 128x128 and a 128x64.  I honestly don't know how the system handled something like that, but it couldn't have been an easy feat or more games would have used textures like these.  I'm assuming that there was some some bit of code that square used to shoehorn several of these into the PS1's memory at the same time.  If you cut that into two textures then it looks like each sheet might have an 8bit pallet, but both would have their own pallets... I'm too lazy to check :P, but that's how it looks.  It's definitely more than 16 per sheet, tho.  The backgrounds seem to throw off that limitation as well: http://www.mobygames.com/game/playstation/final-fantasy-ix/screenshots/gameShotId,25059/

If I had to guess from that game alone, I'd say that you could use 128x128 textures as a max size with a unique 8bit pallet for each.  That doesn't even sound possible on the system, but apparently FFIX did the impossible.

It might look more 'genuine' to limit to 16 colors or 24 or 32 or whatever, but those limitations seem to have been defeated by the last couple years of the system's life, as there were several other games that used more colorful texture sheets.  The later FF games, Vagrant Story...  I generally just paint and don't worry about it.  You can always reduce to 8bit later and then clean it up a little. 

Also, http://www.mobygames.com/game/playstation/vagrant-story/screenshots
Vagrant Story.  That dragon thing in the second shot there has to be around 400 or more tris.  The main character probably has a similar count.  Guessing from the screen shots I've seen, I'd guess very DS-like limits.  Like 2-3k on screen at once...  maybe 3 or 4 times that in a scene or level or whatever...  I wonder what the tri-counts were for games like Gran Turismo...

But yeah.  There are papers all over that i've read that say the PSone can push this much or have this size max texture, etc, but then I'll stumble onto some screenshot or something that will defy those numbers.  It appears like you could get away with a lot if you knew how to cheat the system a bit.

Offline Dusty

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Re: Any one know the specs for psx/ps1 games?

Reply #5 on: July 04, 2009, 07:32:22 am
But yeah.  There are papers all over that i've read that say the PSone can push this much or have this size max texture, etc, but then I'll stumble onto some screenshot or something that will defy those numbers.  It appears like you could get away with a lot if you knew how to cheat the system a bit.
Well most consoles end up like this. Earlier games will look meh, and as time progresses games start to look better. People will start quoting hardware limitations and such, but eventually people start finding more efficient ways to handle things. That's why the later games, especially those at the end(or past) of the consoles lifetime look amazing. I think creativity with the hardware has a lot to do with it... which I wonder SHOULD such creative outcomes really change what people believe are the hardware limitations? I think as long as these creative tweaks and manipulations are unknown as far as how they pulled it off, then they can't really be considered legit limitations, as you wouldn't be able to reproduce them normally.

Offline ptoing

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Re: Any one know the specs for psx/ps1 games?

Reply #6 on: July 04, 2009, 11:00:09 am
The PS1 of course can do 8 bit textures (dunno about 24bit, but I doubt it), but the main problem of the ps1 (ps2 as well in fact) are their shit video ram amount.
The PS1 has 1 megabyte.

It is very easy to calculate the memory usage of a texture, basically (x*y*bitdepth)/8192 (to get kilobyte as the result without this is bits).

So a texture which is 128x128x8 takes up 16kb. If we have a scene where we have 4 characters with 192x128x8 that will be 96kb, which is not a lot if you have 1024kb to waste.
The thing with stuff like FF battlescenes or stuff like fighting games like tekken is that you have a VERY closed environment with really not that much in it so you can throw a lot of stuff on there and still have enough memory for the environment.

It's when you have a whole or partial level with lots of textures when it gets tight. And I know from several people who worked on PS1 and PS2 games that usually environment textures are 4 bit, 16 colours. Of course there some technology to shovel stuff into ram in a streaming fashion would also help a lot to improve memory usage.
« Last Edit: July 05, 2009, 09:43:37 pm by ptoing »
There are no ugly colours, only ugly combinations of colours.

Offline Akira

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Re: Any one know the specs for psx/ps1 games?

Reply #7 on: July 05, 2009, 11:19:51 am
(x*y*bitdepth)/8192 for kilobytes ptoing.
thanks Dogmeat!

Offline ptoing

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Re: Any one know the specs for psx/ps1 games?

Reply #8 on: July 05, 2009, 09:43:21 pm
oh noes, of course, that was a typo.
There are no ugly colours, only ugly combinations of colours.

Offline Ichigo Jam

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Re: Any one know the specs for psx/ps1 games?

Reply #9 on: July 14, 2009, 06:46:00 pm
The PS1 of course can do 8 bit textures (dunno about 24bit, but I doubt it), but the main problem of the ps1 (ps2 as well in fact) are their shit video ram amount.
The PS1 has 1 megabyte.
It can do 16 bit textures, but not 24.
16bit was normally only used for a few effects where the last frame's image was used as a texture (I think quite a few JRPG battle transitions used this.)

The other thing to note about the 1MB memory limit is that this has to include the surface you are rendering to (normally two of them for double buffering.)
So with a render target of 320x240 (16bit), your double-buffered screen takes 300KB, which is nearly a third of your VRAM used before you've got a single texture!
And of course it gets even worse if you want to run in higher resolutions.