Squall_Leonhart wrote:Gil_Hamilton wrote:Panzer88 wrote:I would shoot for the N64, It's the more insane undertaking but I have the upmost faith in you. Plus being the first system to use a graphics accelorator (first mainstream console right) I think that would be a good match for someone like you who knows a decent amount about that sort of thing.
Pretty sure the PS1 was the first home system with 3D hardware.
Not very GOOD 3D hardware, mind you, but... it had it.
And you'd be wrong.
The PS1 is completely 2D.
Graphics processing unit
This chip is separate to the CPU and handles all the 2D graphics processing, which includes the transformed 3D polygons.
Features:
* Maximum of 16.7 million colors (24-bit color depth)
* Resolutions from 256×224 to 640×480
* Adjustable frame buffer
* Unlimited color lookup tables
* Maximum of 4000 8×8 pixel sprites with individual scaling and rotation
* Emulation of simultaneous backgrounds (for parallax scrolling)
* Flat or Gouraud shading, and texture mapping
its nothing more then Pseudo 3D rendering 2D Textures / polygons on a screen in a way that appears 3D.
...without a zbuffer its impossible to provide 3D depth.
*SNAP!*
It's pretty clearly NOT impossible, as they do it.
Hell, fucking Battlezone did it on a 6502.
I'd also consider a technical description of the chip's functionality more relevant to this discussion than a bullet-list of features cut/pasted from Wikipedia.
Especially a bullet list with no cited references and at least one known factual error. The PS1 does not have sprites. At all. Ever.
It has sprite functions in the BIOS, but they merely create quads with textures. All 2D functions are wrapped to the 3D hardware that doesn't exist.
Also, you skipped the PS1's Geometry Transformation Engine, which was the component that did all the heavy lifting in the graphics.
It's not in the chip responsible for the final image rendering. So. Fucking. What?
The "Data Decompression Engine" that was responsible for MJPEG and H.261 video decoding wasn't in the chip responsible for final rendering either. Does that mean the PS1 doesn't have hardware-accelerated video capabilities?
Yes, the 3D is going to be "flattened" at some point. Where exactly it happens is not my fucking problem.
The exact same thing happens on a modern 3D chipset. But it's all packed away into one chip, keeping the transformation engine very close to the rendering engine.
In fact, the PS1 was ahead of it's time in having dedicated transformation hardware at all, in an era when transformation was usually dumped onto the CPU and ignored.
SPEAKING of the transformation engine... it's kind of a big deal, since it's the point that the 3D objects stop being 3D objects.
I'd argue that, if you were naming features that had to be present for a chipset to be considered 3D hardware, the transform engine would be a hell of a lot more important than a Z-buffer.
A Z-buffer is only used for determining hidden surfaces, and is not the only solution or the oldest. It's not even the BEST solution. It's just the easiest to implement.
Interestingly, the Playstation had a transformation engine well before it became standard, and many 3D accelerators that featured z-buffers did not feature a transformation engine, leaving the "hard part" to the CPU. The GeForce was the first PC graphics chipset to do transformation in video hardware.
So arguably, nothing before the GeForce is a 3D graphics chipset. But then, that's probably why the Voodoos and the Rivas and the like were sold as 3D graphics ACCELERATORS. They never promised to do it all.
...
I'm damned no matter what I do.
If I say the PS1 has 2D hardware, because it DOES have 2D function calls, I get chewed out because it wraps the 2D calls to the polygon hardware, so it only has 3D graphics.
And now if I say it has 3D hardware at all, I get chewed out because it's too primitive to really be 3D so it's really only 2D graphics.
If it doesn't have 2D graphics hardware, and it doesn't have 3D graphics hardware.... apparently it doesn't have graphics hardware at all, and the entire system is just a mass hallucination.
Screw it.
There's no such thing as 3D graphics. ALL systems are 2D.
Except the Virtual Boy, and a select few games on other systems that used external addons and/or cardboard glasses to create an image with actual depth that hasn't been flattened.
And even THEY are debatable, as they actually produce two separate 2D images and rely on the brain to create the illusion of depth.
Do you really want to go down this road?
funkyass wrote:thats like saying quake was a 2d game because I ran it on my cirrus logic VLB card.
but then again, you don't need hardware to do z-buffer. Without hardware T&L, hardware z-buffer is a bit pointless.
the video cards that where the PS1's contemporaries didn't much more than what the PS1 did.
Actually, they did less in some respects. The PS1's contemporaries didn't feature hardware transform. The PS1 DID.
Now, it didn't do it WELL, and the system has a LOT of geometry errors because of it, but... it DID it.
