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.

Fair enough!

Not only that, for a device from 1995... It's still amazing to learn about this, its not as if most people will read this once, and remember everything on the page in one go.

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.

Yeah, any 8/16-bit pixel are t wasn't made to be viewed on a screen with that high a resolution. CRTs smoosh/blur the image a bit so you don't see all the hardlines.

> 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

On the emulator side I would definitely recommend Duckstation. It's performant, has great UI / UX and also has a CRT filter available by default that more or less recreates the original look, even slightly warping the image to make you feel like you are staring into a TV tube.

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.

> PS1 games do not hold up so good

Eeh ... speak for yourself. PS1 did mark the dawn of the 3D era for home consoles. There are lots of people who are into the low poly 3D models with the characteristic PS1 "wobble".

Sure a lot of it may be nostalgia but it does have its charm and I can say it's grown a lot on me over time. Especially once I learned about the PS1's unique hardware limitations. If my social media feed is anything to go by "PS1 graphics" are having a bit of a revival with lots of people trying to recreate that look.

I had the N64. It did not wobble. Seeing a Playstation in action with its wobble was so weird.

It is quite amazing to me to see the specs and what developers managed to squeeze out of that!

Yes an entire generation of games running on a mere 2MB of RAM and 1MB of VRAM.

The crazy thing too was how much a step up PS2 was compared to PS1 in terms of available compute and sheer horsepower. But even that wasn't enough for a sandbox game like GTA 3 to run without a lot of clever tricks [1]

[1] https://youtu.be/cIbCxbrBCys?si=cLMr4-7ubGD4fNWi

The 2D ones (e.g. Symphony of the Night) do.

Love the 2D games of the PS1 era. I still replay Mega Man X4/5/6 every once in a while.

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.