PS1 could never do 2D

vgmuseum.com/mrp/cv-sotn/documents/nocturne-port.htm

>The Playstation (henceforth PSX) cannot do 2D. "But," you say, "I've played 2D games on the Playstation. Of course it can do 2D. I've even seen specifications for the 2D capabilities of the Playstation in FAQs and other sources." This is misleading. The games you have played appear to be 2D because they are flat, not because they are 2D. While the Saturn has distinct hardware for displaying and processing 2D sprites and other 2D elements, the Playstation does not. In order to represent a 2D game, the PSX must have a 3D engine that creates a polygon, textures one side of it, and then keeps that side facing the same direction and manipulates that polygon as if it was a sprite. This means that doing 2D on the PSX is really just doing flat 3D. The specs you've seen in FAQs and on the net, then, are an estimation of the ability of the PSX to pretend to be doing 2D. This is unlike the Saturn, which has separate 2D and 3D capabilities that can be mixed when needed or utilized separately. In order to create Dracula X on the Playstation, the incredible 2D-looking game that it is, the programmers had to create a custom 3D engine. The theory, then, is that the Saturn Dracula X is a port of the PSX's 3D engine with modifications rather than a game reprogrammed to properly utilize the Saturn's 2D and 3D capabilities. While the Saturn version of the game has extra content and some reprogrammed or changed special effects, the engine itself was a direct port and the graphics were not effectively modified or touched up as a result.

Can anyone more savvy with this please verify? I can't wrap my head around this shit. Every 2D game was a polygon trick?

Lawl no. What a fucking mess of lies. Just look to the many snes and arcade games ported to the PSX.

>Every 2D game was a polygon trick?
Yes. Same with the N64. 2D based graphics were a thing of the past to most people by that point, the Saturn was a unique case for its time and was not well suited for 3D, despite that being the way the market was headed. Its a shame SOTN wasn't rebuilt to make proper use of Saturn hardware and was just a quick port job with a distorted aspect ratio and a terrible framerate.

So the porting process involved a middle man that handled all sprites as flat quads...

Sprites are based entirely on Rectangles. You do realize that a rectangle is a Polygon, right?

I thought that the PlayStation basically banned 2D games to focus on.

But the N64 used 2D sprites, they were just in a 3D plain. The coins in Super Mario 64, for instance, were sprites (even though they appeared to be spinning). The "2D objects in a 3D space" is especially obvious with an emulator which renders polygons at a higher resolution but doesn't do the same for everything else.

*3D plane, sorry can't spell tonight

>This is misleading. The games you have played appear to be 2D because they are flat

Not brainlet enough to think a 3D object in 2 dimensions isn't 2D

Didn't the PS1 render everything in 2D due to a lack of a z-buffer?

So you had to render to a surface rather than a framebuffer. Big fucking whoop.

It's pretty common for 3D-oriented systems to lack dedicated 2D hardware. Old 2D consoles would give you a certain amount of background layers, sprites, palettes, etc that you could use with almost no cost in speed, since the built-in hardware was taking care of drawing them to the screen. When 2D stopped being the main way of doing things, that hardware was tossed aside in favor of 3D hardware. If you wanted 2D, you had to write your own code to draw 2D layers using the CPU or GPU's polygonal hardware. If I'm not mistaken, the Nintendo DS was the last thing to have dedicated 2D hardware outside of basic frame buffers. Can anyone confirm this?

It's alright.

No, this isn't true, or the Rockman ports to PSX would be like the most expensive thing ever.
He's generalizing based on the fact that Symphony of the Night was not a true 2D game. It still used sprites (most were carried over from Rondo), but the backgrounds and other effects were rendered in 3D and locked in a single view.

>I thought that the PlayStation basically banned 2D games to focus on.

They did in the US. Why we missed so many great games.

What people in here fail to understand is, 2D games weren't using 2D sprites. They were using 3D and making it look like they were 2D.

>b-b game X exists!

3D models, all of them

My life has been a lie

...OK, so which one is it?

For several years now, I've seen people babble about the "fact" that "PS1 was not a REAL 3D machine, because it draws polygons on a static 2D grid, and lacks sub-pixel accuracy.

That just makes it a POOR 3D machine. And if I recall correctly, the issue was that it used fixed-point numbers with small fractional portions for its 3D math. If your machine can't handle floating point numbers (3.5867, etc), you have to used fixed-point. In that case, you have an integer that acts as the numerator for a set denominator. The denominator is determined by how many bits of the number you devote to the fractional portion of the fixed-point number. So if you have a 32-bit number, and you say 8-bits go to the fractional, well, 8-bits can range up to 256, so whatever 32-bit number you use is basically that number over 256. So 1.5 is 384, because 384 / 256 = 1.5. The problem with the Playstation is that there weren't enough bits for the fractional, so you had a small denominator, which made things jumpy, since you were working with bigger chunks for the fractions.

PS1 literally can only move polygons' vertices on a 320x240 sized 2D grid of sorts. Since it matches the output resolution of the console, it didn't matter that much back in the days, even less so on the old CRTs, but everyone who has used the older PS1 emulators and upped the resolution knows about the "polygon wobbling" it results.

PS1 also lacked Z-Buffering, which resulted conflicting / overlapping polygons.

Having just replayed Xenogears on PS3 and Vita, both of which use the original internal resolution of games, I can tell you that the polygon wobbling is noticeable. Not distracting but present.

This may be true but it's misleading to say the PlayStation "couldn't do 2D." Anything could technically be done, it's just that it would have to be done in software. In fact, that's probably why the PSOne ports of FFVI and Chrono Trigger sucked so bad.

>The games you have played appear to be 2D because they are flat
Really made me think

For example, write an NES emulator and play a rom of Super Mario Bros. on the PS1. That's the PlayStation "doing 2D."

I'd theorize that the "wobbling" you perceive with the OG 240p resolution has more to do with the texture-warping effect, caused by the lack of perspective-correction, and the mentioned depth-conflicts of overlapping polys, caused by the lack of Z-buffer.

One better example would be the PS1 port of Duke3D, which runs entirely in software. This is why it does not suffer of the texture warps and other typical PS1 game issues. However, it runs very slow at times because of this.

Forgot about that one. True.

n64's cpu was shit.