PSP: Playable on show floor, impressions inside.

[Farid]

archie4oz:

If you want any CPU left over to do anything they are...

Most PS2 games were tested to be between 2 and 5 mpps. The CPU resources weren't lacking for AI and game logic even in a comparably complex DC game like Test Drive Le Mans.

Test Drive le Mans a.k.a Les 24H du Mans the game from infograme's Melbourne House, the same guys that said their Grand Prix Challenge on PS2 was pushing 18~20M polygons?
Do we really have to bring them (Melbourne House) into each "weekly DC vs. PS2 discussion" ritual?

 

[ChryZ]

This is a PSP thread, keep on topic. I am so sick and tired of this idolized Sega-here-DC-there-bla-bla in every damn thread. Sega is done, get over it, if you need to whine in union, go, open a new thread, that people who don't care, then don't have to read

 

[Lazy8s]

Your perception is backward. The problem is not the ones pointing out the truth on the matter; it's those who choose to argue the obvious whenever it's mentioned in passing. No one cares when someone remarks that a low-poly game looks 'Dreamcast-level' because it's been accepted that the newer machines can do more geometry. Why is it someone always has to take exception whenever DC is mentioned to have better IQ than PS2 in light of the specifics?

 

[London Geezer]

Your perception is backward. The problem is not the ones pointing out the truth on the matter; it's those who choose to argue the obvious whenever it's mentioned in passing. No one cares when someone remarks that a low-poly game looks 'Dreamcast-level' because it's been accepted that the newer machines can do more geometry. Why is it someone always has to take exception whenever DC is mentioned to have better IQ than PS2 in light of the specifics?

Maybe because someone won't let if freaking drop...?

Any argument you had has been dismantled not by one, not by 2, but by 3 devs in this thread alone. Let's not even start talking about all the other threads where your arguments on poor old DC have been slaughtered by even more people who obviously, by your own word, have more knowledge about the inner workings of each console than you or I have.

Now, this is a PSP thread. Keep it like that.

 

[Lazy8s]

london-boy:

Maybe because someone won't let if freaking drop...?

And if you look back in this thread, that someone was marconelly!... arguing against the specs and Fox5's comment.

by your own word

Not by my word.

 

[Simon F]

Remember that the games which used FSAA via supersampling on PS2 traded off color depth, full height buffers and the ability for proscan support.

Considering that 99% of DCs games traded off color depth, you shouldn't even begin to consider that as an argument.

Do you mean running the framebuffer in 16bit instead of 24bit mode? Unlike immediate mode renderers, it makes relatively little difference on DC/CLX2 since each tile is rendered internally to completion at full ARGB 32 bit precision before being dithered down once only to 16bit. The loss of quality is quite small especially when compared to an immediate mode renderer that's doing alpha blending into a 16bit buffer!

 

[London Geezer]

Not by my word.

I'm not the one saying DC could do all sorts of effects without having seen them in a game, like, EVER.

I'd imagine someone like Crazyace, if you'd prefer, with an observant eye and extensive experience of Dreamcast games could also point out dot product bump mapping being used in-game. And again, that's just saying these features were practical enough to be turned on - not that such a game implemented any of its graphics in flattering ways (good programming is never a given).

And Crazyace was, together with Faf and Archie, the one who made it clear that your views are just wrong.

Enough with this already. Or do u have another 8000 word essay on Shenmue and the Mystery of Bump-Mapped Bottle in the works?

 

[Lazy8s]

london-boy:

And Crazyace was, together with Faf and Archie, the one who made it clear that your views are just wrong.

Crazyace was mentioned to give you the second opinion you said you'd require. Why don't you ask... Crazyace could probably point it out.

Which views were shown to be wrong?

Or do u have another 8000 word essay on Shenmue and the Mystery of Bump-Mapped Bottle in the works?

Bump-mapped bottle? Seriously, where are you getting this stuff from? You're the only one who's mentioned this, and now you've done it twice.

 

[London Geezer]

london-boy:

And Crazyace was, together with Faf and Archie, the one who made it clear that your views are just wrong.

Crazyace was mentioned to give you the second opinion you said you'd require. Why don't you ask... Crazyace could probably point it out.

Which views were shown to be wrong?

Or do u have another 8000 word essay on Shenmue and the Mystery of Bump-Mapped Bottle in the works?

Bump-mapped bottle? Seriously, where are you getting this stuff from? You're the only one who's mentioned this, and now you've done it twice.

Just a very old thread, Lazy, where apparently it was "proven" that there is ONE bottle in the whole game of Shenmue that is bumpmapped.... Just a joke.

 

[Squeak]

PS2 doesn't support DOT3 Bump mapping as a native texture mode. You have to do a " bit of a hack" to do it. IIRC according to Sony (in "Develop" magazine) you need to

• put your bump mapped objects in first.
• Texture them with four passes using 4(?) variations of your normal map

• 
  Shouldn’t that be 3 variations (X,Y and Z)?

• 
  It was something vaguely like (and I'm really stretching my memory here)
• Add Light direction "positive" with "forward normals"
• Subtract Light direction "negative" with "forward normals"
• Add Light direction "negative" with "reverse normals"
• Subtract Light direction "postive" with "reverse normals"

or some such thing. It was basically to overcome not having signed maths.

Is that article from Develop online somewhere?

Not that I know of. I can't even find what I've done with my print copy

On a related note, I just thought of a cheap way to do “high qualityâ€￾ bump mapping, here is how:
Make a CLUT bump map like described in this article: http://dienst.isti.cnr.it/Dienst/Re...2000-B4-01-03/pdf?tiposearch=cnr&langver=
....

Obviously this can’t be the first time someone thinks of this, so I would like to know, does it work? If not, then why?

No, you aren't. The EPO website was not up so I can't get a link, but "Argonaut" have a patent doing exactly that. If you want to have a search I think it's titled "Bump mapping in 3-D Computer Graphics."

Thank you for the explanation, and for the search string - quite amazing what you can get patented nowadays (I heard microsoft successfully patented the concept of saving games to a harddrive on a console) .
I read the patent, but it doesn't seem to mention any lightmaps or alpha CLUTs though, which was really what my "idea" was about. Apparently It's just regular CLUT bump mapping, with all the inherent limitations.

How much power does it take to real time encode DTS or 5.1?

2-6% CPU depending on the # of channels you're encoding. Dunno about VU0 utilization since I never profiled it or anything, but it didn't appear to burn up too much of it... However since you're essentially DMA'ing audio in chunks of 512 samples all over the system with each call to the DTS lib, and thread priority for it is pretty high and they didn't like you interrupting it to use VU0 (caused all sorts of problems)... However they may have improved/fixed it since and I imagine since it's a pretty constant routine it'd be easy to schedule around it assuming it still doesn't want to hog VU0's state... However I never did anything extensive with it, and that was a long time ago that I played with an evaluation of the SDK... (like when it came out, and we were pretty tight with EA)

Actually what I meant to ask was whether either SPU processors (ARM7 or IOP) is powerfull enough to encode DTS.
But if you say that it only takes a few procent of the main CPU to do it, the answer, I guess is yes?

 

[Deepak]

Why is it someone always has to take exception whenever DC is mentioned to have better IQ than PS2 in light of the specifics?

I have both DC and PS2 and I find DC games less colorful and washed out. PS2 SCII is lot more colorful and vibrant than DC SCI. After looking at GT3, I hate looking at TD:LM.

 

[Teasy]

Ty

As PC-Engine said a video gives perspective and allows you to see something from more angles, which can be imporant. Of course a picture can also give you perspective, but its something those PR pics didn't do. Nintendo often do pretty poor PR shots IMO. They did the same with GBA-SP AFAIR. That system looked SOO plasticy and cheap in the PR pics, but in reality it looked a lot better. Anyway I've found a decent pic of DS in a real life situation to compare to a PR shot.

Here (in this PR shot) DS looks huge, clunky and thick, like GameGear size or something, it also has a cheap plastic sort of look.

In this pic it looks a lot better, much smaller (GBA size), nowhere near as thick/clunky and less plasticy (I know its not a real word BTW ).

I'm not saying DS looks like some sort of style icon. Frankly, as I've said, I'm not interested in that personally. The only problem I would have is if it looked really bad. When I see it in video's and in the second pic above it looks perfectly ok.. that's good enough for me.

 

[London Geezer]

What if the guy's hands are bigger than tennis rackets...

 

[Teasy]

london-boy

I've seen GBA and DS side by side in a video. The bottom part of the DS is the same size as a GBA (145mm x 80mm).

 

[London Geezer]

london-boy

I've seen GBA and DS side by side in a video. The bottom part of the DS is the same size as a GBA (145mm x 80mm).

I was kidding obviously.

 

[Fafalada]

Do you mean running the framebuffer in 16bit instead of 24bit mode? Unlike immediate mode renderers, it makes relatively little difference on DC/CLX2 since each tile is rendered internally to completion at full ARGB 32 bit precision before being dithered down once only to 16bit. The loss of quality is quite small especially when compared to an immediate mode renderer that's doing alpha blending into a 16bit buffer!

We're not talking about PC games here - just because frontbuffer is 16bit, backbuffer doesn't have to be.
As far as I am aware, 24-32bit is common practice for backbuffers in PS2 games, just like fullheight.
Personally I don't like the results you get by downsampling to 24/32->16bit buffer so much(I'd prefer to have 16bit YUV framebuffer for that purpose like GC does), but I agree that as far as tradeoffs go, it's one of the less offensive ones.

 

[Teasy]

london-boy

Ok, use a smillie next time though I knew you were kidding about his hands possibly being bigger then tennis rackets, obviously. But I just thought you were exagerating while still making a serious point (what if the bloke is massive and has huge hands).

 

[London Geezer]

london-boy

Ok, use a smillie next time though I knew you were kidding about his hands possibly being bigger then tennis rackets, obviously. But I just thought you were exagerating while still making a serious point (what if the bloke is massive and has huge hands).

He does look like a huge eastern european basketball player afterall... (<---smilie)

 

[Teasy]

london-boy

I think he looks a little bit like The Rock from WWE in that pic

Reggie Fils-Aime, the most elecrifying man in games entertainment history

 

[London Geezer]

london-boy

I think he looks a little bit like The Rock from WWE in that pic

Reggie Fils-Aime, the most elecrifying man in games entertainment history

He actually kinda looks like Wario!