Love Copetti. Even as someone who is not particularly knowledgeable of everything he’s talking about, I I really enjoy thumbing through his writing and diagrams. There’s just something really fun about trying to understand what is going on under the hood with these machines, especially fifth and sixth generation consoles
They hold up pretty well when you play them as they were originally supposed to: on a CRT if you can or using emulators' CRT filters if you can't. Trying to play them at very high resolutions on crisp LCD displays is the worst way to go IMO.
It's interesting how different it is from the N64, which was seemingly designed to produce perfectly correct pixels even though no player would own displays that could really show the difference. I guess that's what you get when you let SGI design the GPU.
Did read this years ago and read it today again. Just so happy that there are people producing such quality work. Even if I personally don't know much about any of it, I still find myself being totally sucked in while reading.
This is great, but it was originally published in 2019. See the past discussions in 2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22932134 (114 comments) and 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27576902 (114 comments also).
It’s been updated many times since then!
So? That was 5-7 years ago. I haven't seen this before, so I appreciate it being posted :)
Yep! Just that the post title should have a (2019) in it. Or maybe (2021) or (2025), given the most recent revision dates.
Love Copetti. Even as someone who is not particularly knowledgeable of everything he’s talking about, I I really enjoy thumbing through his writing and diagrams. There’s just something really fun about trying to understand what is going on under the hood with these machines, especially fifth and sixth generation consoles
1994 always gets me too. It feels like they are more a late 90s thing.
They didn't launch outside of Japan until late 1995, so most people got one in '96.
Which means that we're really talking about hardware from 91-93, right? I.e. if launch was 94 then they were designing in 91-93ish.
PS2 didn't come out until 2000. Most of the games I remember are from later too.
These articles are always excellent.
PS1 games do not hold up so good, but PS2 games uprezzed to 1440p-4k are basically perfect imo.
They hold up pretty well when you play them as they were originally supposed to: on a CRT if you can or using emulators' CRT filters if you can't. Trying to play them at very high resolutions on crisp LCD displays is the worst way to go IMO.
It's interesting how different it is from the N64, which was seemingly designed to produce perfectly correct pixels even though no player would own displays that could really show the difference. I guess that's what you get when you let SGI design the GPU.
The 2D ones (e.g. Symphony of the Night) do.
Did read this years ago and read it today again. Just so happy that there are people producing such quality work. Even if I personally don't know much about any of it, I still find myself being totally sucked in while reading.