playstation 1 lcd screen made in china

First of all, this excludes the LCD combo pack. Didn"t want that and so I haven"t done any research on it. What I"m concerned with is the initially released standalone PSone in a silver box (yellow boxes indicate later models, all of which are made in China).

To begin with, models made in Japan have the A1xxxxxx or A2xxxxxx serial numbers. You can actually tell right on the outside of the box if it"s made in Japan or China (it will say "Made in Japan" or "Made in China"...). Chinese-made models have the A6xxxxxx serial numbers.

Of the Japanese-made consoles there appear to be two runs, indicated by the stickers on the bottom of the console. The first run, spanning serial numbers A14xxxxx to A16xxxxx or possibly A17xxxxx, have a small circular sticker that reads simply "PSone" over the top-middle screw hole. The A17xxxxx or A18xxxxx to A2xxxxxx models have a larger rectangular sticker that says removal will void warranty. I don"t know if there"s any difference aside from the sticker in these two consoles. As far as I can tell they are identical.

A couple other notes... don"t worry if there are some scuffs on the outside box, or if the plastic packaging or tape looks a bit faded. This stuff is about 15 years old now and it won"t look brand new. Furthermore, small factory irregularities (like glue or soldering burn marks) are fine. Same type of box wear you get with any old product. One of the best ways to confirm a system is brand new, aside from it generally looking pristine but for some packaging "scuffs" (I hesitate to even call them this, because the kind of wear you"ll see is so minor), is to check the four circular pads on the bottom of the system. These are dust/dirt magnets, and you"ll be able to tell immediately if the console has had any actual play (they are sort of gray/off-white to begin with, though, unlike the NA and PAL pads, so don"t worry if they look different from the system color).

The LCD Screen (for PS one) is currently the only officially licensed monitor for the PS one that"s available on the retail market. There have been a few third-party manufactured PS one LCD screens that have seen their way onto retail store shelves thanks to companies such as Interact, Mad Catz and Electro Source, but until just recently we hadn"t seen one that came with the Sony seal of approval.

Does this really mean anything? Based on what we"ve seen of all the products, not really. The officially licensed moniker means a lot more when you"re dealing with things like memory cards and controllers because there"s a lot more reverse engineering going on because unlicensed third parties aren"t obliged to information about the console and how it works. But, in the case of an LCD screen for the PS one, it"s just a monitor that must work with the system"s output and be attachable to it. Not all that hard to do with or without Sony"s licensing.

At any rate, the Sony name generally stands for quality (let"s forget about the skipping PlayStations and the "Disk Read Errors" on the PS2 for a minute) and its official monitor, the LCD Screen (for PS one), is a top notch and well-built peripheral for the console.

When you pick up one of these units, you get yourself one of the LCD Screens, an AC Adaptor (the exact same kind that comes with the PS one unit), and an instruction manual. The screen is a 5" (diagonal width) Thin Film Transistor (TFT) liquid display and to the left and right of it you get 1 1/2 x 1 1/8 in 1.0 watt stereo speakers. Also on the front of the unit and below the screen you have button controls to adjust the brightness of the screen and the volume of the speakers.

The unit fits snuggly onto the PS one with the screws that are on its rear and looks completely stylish when mounted onto the console. It"s also extremely thin and lightweight, which really lends itself to being portable, which is what the screen and the PS one unit are intended to be.

The screen provides excellent video quality with very black blacks, very white whites and excellent color separation and overall picture quality. In fact, thanks to the reduced screen size and general clarity of the picture, most PlayStation games actually look better when being played on this PS one Screen than when played on a regular television set. It"s a lot harder to notice the low resolution of the textures and the general blockiness of polygonal models that are fairly common in most PlayStation games.

And despite the small size of the screen, you won"t experience any problems reading text in most text-heavy games like role-playing games. We were able to test Chrono Cross, Final Fantasy VII, VIII, and IX, Legend of Dragoon, and Vagrant Story and found that the text in each of those games were completely legible. With Vagrant Story, the font"s unique style made it a little less clear than the others, but still didn"t prove to be a problem. The only times that we noticed issues with reading text was during some end-game credits where the text size was much smaller than normal.

If you take a look at the back of the unit you"ll see the DC In 7.5V connector, AV Multi connector (to connect it using a standard PlayStation AV cable to television), an AV IN jack, and a headphone jack.

Sadly, its AV IN jack is one that requires an SCPH-180 U AV connection cable that"s used to connect video equipment such as camcorders to the LCD screen and not standard stereo AV connections like you"ll find in some of the third party products. What this means is that you won"t be able to easily use this as a portable monitor for other consoles like the PlayStation 2, Dreamcast, and Xbox, which is something that is possible with some of the third party units.

Even with the omissions, which include the lack of stereo AV input jacks and Car Adaptor this is a fine PS one peripheral that you really ought to consider picking up for your system if you"re looking to make it a little more portable. The monitor provides excellent picture quality and decent enough sound and looks stylish and extremely cute when attached to the PS one console. It"s currently priced at $129.99, so it"ll cost more than the unit itself, but it"s actually a decent price for a unit of this kind.

The PlayStation 5 (PS5) is a home video game console developed by Sony Interactive Entertainment. Announced in 2019 as the successor to the PlayStation 4, the PS5 was released on November 12, 2020, in Australia, Japan, New Zealand, North America, and South Korea, with worldwide release following a week later. The PS5 is part of the ninth generation of video game consoles, along with Microsoft"s Xbox Series X and Series S consoles, which were released in the same month.

The PlayStation 5"s main hardware features include a solid-state drive customized for high-speed data streaming to enable significant improvements in storage performance, an AMD GPU capable of 4K resolution display at up to 120 frames per second, hardware-accelerated ray tracing for realistic lighting and reflections, and the Tempest Engine allowing for hardware-accelerated 3D audio effects. Other features include the DualSense controller with haptic feedback and backward compatibility with the majority of PlayStation 4 and PlayStation VR games.

The lead architect of the PlayStation console line, Mark Cerny, implemented a two-year feedback cycle after the launch of the PlayStation 4. This entailed regularly visiting Sony"s first-party developers at two-year intervals to find out what concerns they had with shortcomings in Sony"s current hardware and how such hardware could be improved in console refreshes or for the next generation. This feedback was fed into the priorities for the console development team. In the development of the PlayStation 5, a key issue was the length of loading times for games.Epic Games" Tim Sweeney, told him that standard I/O speed of hard disk drives was now a limiting factor in pushing game development.

Jim Ryan, the CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, stated that Sony had researched the feasibility of a "low priced, reduced spec" version of the PlayStation 5, like what Microsoft had done with its Xbox Series X and its lower-power counterpart the Xbox Series S; and concluded that they believed such consoles do not fare well, becoming obsolete too fast.

Cerny first publicly described the new console in an interview with Wired magazine interview in October 2019, Sony said it intended to ship its next-generation console worldwide by the end of 2020.Digital Foundry on March 18, 2020.

A major game library showcase had been planned for June 4, 2020, but was postponed until June 11 due to the George Floyd protests. This presentation was also the premiere of the console"s external hardware design.

PlayStation 5"s release in India was delayed, leading to speculation that a trademark dispute was the reason; the name "PS5" was briefly trademarked by a different person; eventually the dispute was resolved and the system released there on February 2, 2021.

The console launched with two models: a base version with an Ultra HD Blu-ray compatible optical disc drive for retail game support alongside online distribution via the PlayStation Store, and a lower-cost variant lacking the disc drive and retaining digital download support.

Following the September 16, 2020, presentation, Sony stated that pre-orders for the console were to open at various retailers on the following day. However, several retailers in the United States and United Kingdom launched pre-orders that evening, causing a rush on pre-orders, including scalping as many stores" inventories were quickly sold out, and creating confusion. Sony apologized for the incident on September 19, 2020, and promised to increase more pre-order deliveries over the coming days and stock through the end of the year.

In August 2022, Sony announced that it would raise price of PlayStation 5 by up to 20% in many markets, citing global economic, inflationary, and supply chain pressures. The U.S. however, did not see a price increase.

The PlayStation 5 is powered by a custom system on a chip (SoC) designed in tandem by AMD and Sony,CPU with eight cores running at a variable frequency capped at 3.5 GHz.GPU is also a custom unit based on AMD"s RDNA 2 graphics architecture.teraFLOPS.hardware-accelerated real-time ray tracing, a rendering technique that allows for realistic lighting and reflections.GDDR6 SDRAM with a peak bandwidth of 448 GB/s,Bluetooth 5.1, and 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6).

The cooling system includes a double-sided cooling fan for air intake that is 120 mm in diameter and 45 mm thick, and a large heat sink with a standard heat pipe design that Sony says has a "shape and airflow [which] make it possible to achieve the same performance as a vapor chamber". SoC cooling includes a liquid metal thermal conductor which sits between the SoC and heat sink.

The internal storage of the PlayStation 5 is a custom-built 825 GB solid-state drive (667 GB available)zlib and the new Oodle Kraken data compression protocol from RAD Game Tools, the unit has a typical throughput of 8–9 GB/s.input/output (I/O) bottleneck points so the performance target could be made effective. To this end, Sony designed a custom chip with multiple coprocessors to work in unison with the flash memory controller to reduce latency and channel data more efficiently around the system. At peak, the custom unit is capable of processing up to 22 GB/s of compressible data.

The base version of the PlayStation 5 includes an Ultra HD Blu-ray optical driveCDs and will not play 3D Blu-ray content.Gran Turismo 7. The PS4 version comes on 2 discs where the PS5 version comes on one.

The console"s form factor was revealed during the June 11, 2020 presentation.LEDs. Ryan stated that more colors than white and black may be available after launch.

The Blu-ray version has dimensions of 390 by 260 by 104 millimetres (15.4 in × 10.2 in × 4.1 in) and 4.5 kilograms (9.9 lb), and the download-only version is slightly slimmer, at 390 by 260 by 92 millimetres (15.4 in × 10.2 in × 3.6 in) and 3.9 kilograms (8.6 lb).cooling management and minimizing noise during operation.

The front includes a USB-C port with USB 3.1 Gen 2 and a USB-A port with USB 2.0. The back has two USB-A ports with USB 3.1 Gen 2, an HDMI 2.1 port, Gigabit Ethernet, and power.

The DualSense wireless controller for the PlayStation 5 was revealed on April 7, 2020.DualShock controller but with modifications influenced by discussions with game designers and players.force feedback through voice coil actuators that can change the resistance to the player as necessary, supporting experiences such as virtually drawing an arrow from a bow.DualShock 4, though the "Share" button was renamed to "Create" with additional means for players to create and share content. A new built-in microphone array was added so players can speak to others using only the controller,USB-C connectivity, a higher-rated battery, and an audio jack.Easter egg, the texture of the controller unit is covered in miniature versions of the four PlayStation button symbols (cross, circle, square, and triangle).

The PS5 is backward compatible with most existing PS4 controllers and accessories for PS4 games only – some with limited functionality. PlayStation Move, PlayStation Camera, PlayStation VR Aim Controller, officially licensed headsets, and specialty controllers with official licenses like flight sticks and racing wheels.PlayStation VR2 system built for the PlayStation 5 in January 2022.

Sony began shipping a minor hardware revision of the PlayStation 5 in August 2021. The new design reduced the size and weight of the heat sink, reducing the net system weight by 300 grams (0.66 lb), without having a noticeable effect on cooling performance, according to Digital Foundry and Gamers Nexus.

The PlayStation 5"s redesigned user interface is characterized by Sony as "accessible and informative", providing real-time updates of friends" activities, available multiplayer activities, and single-player missions and rewards. Cerny stated "we don"t want the player to have to boot the game, see what"s up, boot the game, see what"s up", so all of these options are "visible in the UI".visual language.

4K resolution and high dynamic range. Users are greeted with a stylistic boot-up animation and new login screen. The central design concepts and motifs introduced on the PS4 were redesigned into a new home screen user interface. The top of the screen has a row of applications, and two upper tabs to switch between showing games or media apps. Selecting a game directly reveals individual activities such as a specific level or multiplayer mode. PlayStation Store is no longer a standalone application and is now fully integrated into the home screen user interface.

The most significant departure from the PS4 interface is the introduction of the Control Center, instantly summoned from the bottom of the screen by pressing the PS button. The Control Center is divided into two sections. The upper portion is a row of cards suggesting actions based on the current game or recent actions such as a group chat. Game-related cards may present players with gameplay information such as a progress report toward completing specific missions, or listing game challenges with an option to jump directly to it. PlayStation Plus subscribers see game activity cards with hints, tips, screenshots, or videos detailing how to complete the activity. System-level items may present the player with options such as PlayStation Store sale information, or recent screenshots taken by the user to be shared. These features are available for PS5 games or for updated PS4 games. The lower portion of the Control Center contains a customizable horizontal row of icons, including notifications, status updates, friends list, and system settings.single-player video games which Sony felt were thriving on the PlayStation console environment. Sony recognized that at the present, many players did not have as much time to commit to playing games, so the notion of activity cards was used to help give players an idea of what activities they could do in a game and how long it would take so that they could work that activity into their schedule.

Sony"s Remote Play application, available on the PlayStation 4, Microsoft Windows, iOS and Android devices, was updated just prior to the PlayStation 5"s launch to allow a user to remotely play their PlayStation 5 games on these other devices over a local network.

In April 2021, Sony released a new software update through which users can transfer their downloaded PS5 game to an external USB hard drive to free up space.

Sony announced a PlayStation 5 system software beta program in June 2021, similar to the Xbox Insider program, where signed-up users can receive early releases of planned updates to the console"s software for testing prior to their release.

In September 2021, Sony released a new software update offering support for the new trophy tracker, Control Center customization, 3D audio support for built-in TV speakers, internal SSD expansion and several UX enhancements.

Sony introduced Game Trials in October 2021, starting with a limited release for UK users for Death Stranding: Director"s Cut and Sackboy: A Big Adventure. Users have access to download and play the full version of the game for a fixed amount of time through these Game Trials, after which they would be required to buy the game to continue playing.

Sony announced its concurrent responsibilities of supporting the PlayStation 4 community, and embracing the PlayStation 5 as a major technological advancement. In an interview with Geoff Keighley, General manager Eric Lempel affirmed that Sony "want[s] to evolve every part of the experience", but for that to happen "we can"t take everybody with us from previous consoles into [a next-generation experience]. You need new hardware, you need new devices to experience what these developers want you to experience."

Sony"s definition of consoles as distinct generations had been widely interpreted as an era-defining shift to PS5-exclusive games that exploit the console"s capabilities instead of releasing cross-generation games that play across both PlayStation consoles. Ryan said that there should be no disappointment as the PS5 versions take advantage of the console"s advanced feature set and initially planned that PS4 versions can be freely upgraded. Few major games such as Horizon Forbidden West, Gran Turismo 7 and Horizon Forbidden West when preorders were announced, but after negative feedback from consumers, stated that this upgrade will be free, but all future PS4 to PS5 upgrades from their first-party games will be at cost, reversing course from their earlier plans.

According to Hideaki Nishino, Sony"s senior vice president of Platform Planning and Management, the PS5 is designed to be backward compatible with more than "99 percent" of PS4"s 4,000+ game library, playable from launch day.PlayStation VR.saved game files through cloud storage or transfer them using a USB storage device so no progress is lost.GCN-based GPU.clock timing required particular attention; though the Zen 2 CPU has an instruction set to handle the PS4"s Jaguar CPU, their timings can be very different, so Sony worked closely with AMD when developing the Zen 2 CPU to more closely match the Jaguar"s timings.PlayStation Plus game streaming service which is available for the PlayStation 5.

The PlayStation 5 was generally well received at launch, with much praise of its DualSense controller"s improved haptic feedback and adaptive triggers.Laptop Mag calling it "deceptively cute".

More technical reviews, such as those by variable refresh rate and the advertised 8K video output mode were not present at launch. They criticized the console"s inability to output a native 1440p video signal but lauded the ray-tracing, SSD speed, and 120 Hz output capabilities.

The PlayStation 5, as with the Xbox Series X/S, was in limited supply immediately upon launch,a global semiconductor shortage,COVID-19 pandemic.Scalpers took advantage of the shortage, attempting to sell the console for thousands of dollars.

Sony reported total shipments of the PS5 through its fiscal quarter ending December 31, 2020 of 4.5 million units, which were similar numbers to the PS4"s launch shipments.fiscal year in March 2022,Bloomberg News reported in January 2022 that Sony was continuing to produce the PlayStation 4 rather than discontinue it at the end of 2021 as to help alleviate the shortage of PlayStation 5 while the chip shortage continued.

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As somebody that has a computer science background, I’m always fascinated by games that are the work of skilled developers that learned the intricacies of a console’s hardware to squeeze every last bit of performance from the machine or use some limited resources creatively to accomplish things you didn’t think was possible.  Even though it did have some limitations (especially in terms of memory), the Sony Playstation hardware was well-crafted and made it easy for developers to quickly learn how to maximize performance results compared to the Sega Saturn and Nintendo 64 (read our full technical comparison).

Not to downplay some of the stunning visuals that the likes of Square’s art direction and pre-rendered elements, but there is a LOT of competition on the PS1 for some truly impressive coding that really maxed out what the Playstation was capable of. Square will indeed get some mentions below, but you might be surprised by a few developers and games that somehow stayed under the mainstream radar.

One of my other goals in this piece is to try to present diversity – not only in the types of games, but also in the ways developers worked around the limitations of the PS1. There are so many great stories of developers trying new things and accomplishing impressive feats.  I hope you find them all fascinating as well!

Being released in August of 1999 (after two and a half years of development) Soul Reaver was up against the upcoming US release of the Sega Dreamcast and Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time had redefined gamer’s expectations of action adventure titles. However, Crystal Dynamics’ labor of love ended up being possibly the biggest technical achievement of the Playstation’s library while sharing an ambitious interactive storytelling experience.

We came up with the idea of leveraging the 3DS Max animation timeline to attach spectral values to the vertices in the geometry – i.e., frame 0 was the material world, and frame 1 was the spectral realm (or vice versa; I can’t remember for sure). This way we could alter the x,y,z coordinates of each vertex, as well as its RGB lighting values, to create a twisted, more eerily lit version of the physical realm.”

Soul Reaver’s soundtrack often gets a lot of acclaim. Even though it could have been simple to include pre-recorded CD audio on a PlayStation game, Soul Reaver actually uses a high-quality sequenced audio (similar to the SNES) that could dynamically altered and shifted based on what is happening on the screen. The Crystal Dynamics team was able to create a soundtrack of phenomenal quality while taking up very little storage space on the disc.  DF Retro’s 36 minute Soul Reaver video digs into some of these.

On top of all this, Soul Reaver runs at a resolution of 512×240 while targeting 30 fps. While it does have some occasional slowdown dipping into the 20 fps zone during larger areas and battling larger quantities of enemies, this is still impressive considering something like Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on the N64 only ran at 320×240 at about 20 fps during the same time period.

With many of the innovative art direction and storytelling choices made in Metal Gear Solid, it is easy to overlook many of the technical optimizations accomplished by Konami’s team to create a game that would not only make the most of the Playstation’s hardware but would be an entity that would age relatively well at such an evolutionary stage for console gaming and is one of the most defining games on the PS1.

The effective use of polygons and textures was a solid foundation for Metal Gear Solid, but Konami took it one step further by having a dedicated “optimization” programmer that went through all the code to find crucial points of the engine to turn into assembly code. (Mostly to get models to fit nicely in the PS1’s small 1kb fast-cache)

Team created their own development ecosystem to maximize PlayStation hardware for the purposes of 3D platformers – complete with custom programming language and texture compressors.

They also got their hands dirty quickly and kept learning as they worked on their first fully–3D game. They did a lot of impressive problem-solving and innovation, especially for a small upstart, but didn’t rest on their laurels after a single success. They continued to work on refining both the gameplay and engine of their game and also their internal development processes as they worked on the sequels. This process could easily be compared to what we have all experienced as gamers: the first time you play a game or a certain level, you’re trying to out what needs to be done to be successful. But after you made it through most of the battle the first time, you now have a better idea how to play through it again – learning from your mistakes and taking new approaches that could work better. (See this classic scene from Scott Pilgrim vs The World ** spoilers **)  While the original Crash Bandicoot was pushing the PlayStation when it arrived, this constant refinement and growth at Naughty Dog resulted in Crash 3 pushing the limits all the more.(You can read about Naughty Dog’s evolution in their processes here)

To help with the more cartoon-like animation, they used a sophisticated three or four-joint weighing system instead of a 1-joint system with few “bones” that a lot of developers were using at the time. They used high-end animation software on their PCs and then mapped every vertex for every frame at 30 fps since the PS1 couldn’t render it in realtime. The also wrote their own vertex compressors in assembly language to optimize the processing efficiency.

“We did experiments in free roaming camera control and settled on branching rail camera + pre-calculation = gorgeous visuals. The idea was that the camera would follow along next to, behind, or in front of the character, generally looking at him, moving on a “track” through the world. Dave and I experimented with pre-calculating the visibility and sort (the Playstation had no z-buffer, and hence no easy way to sort polygons) ahead of time on the SGI workstations the artists used. Although painful and expensive, this worked really well. As long as you could never SEE more than a set number of polygons (800 for Crash 1, 1300 for Crash 2 or 3) from any given position we could have perfect occlusion and sort, with no runtime cost. We conceived of using trees, cliffs, walls, and twists and turns in the environment to hide a lot of the landscape from view – but it would be there, just around the corner.”

Andy also did some other crazy coding work that would help create a system for making their work efficient and make the most of the Playstation’s resources. Their level designs came out at about 8 to 16 megs each, so he developed an algorithmic texture packer that would efficiently cram the levels into the PS1’s 2 megs of RAM. Some of the levels came out at 128meg, so Dave created a bidirectional 10x compressor to help get the 128meg levels down into 12 and also developed a tool for managing the construction of the gigantic 3D worlds. On top of all that, Andy created a new programming language (with Lisp syntax) that featured “all sorts of built in state machine support (very useful with game objects), powerful macros, dynamic loading etc.”.

“The Crash series employs an extremely complicated virtual memory scheme which dynamically swaps into memory any kind of game component: geometry, animation, texture, code, sound, collision data, camera data, etc. A workstation based tool called NPT implements an expert system for laying out the disk. This tool belongs to the class of formal Artificial Intelligence programs. Its job is to figure out how the 500 to 1000 resources that make up a Crash level can be arranged so as to never have more than 1.2 megabytes needed in memory at any time. A multithreaded virtual memory implementation follows the instructions produced by the tool in order to achieve this effect at run time. Together they manage and optimize the essential resources of main, texture, and sound RAM based on a larger CD based database.”

Because of this, the team was actually a bit concerned that Crash was accessing the CD more than the PS1’s drive was rated for. So if you ever notice that it seems like the drive is being read a lot while playing, you’ll know why.

For Crash 2, the team at Naughty Dog rewrote approximately 80% of the game engine and tool code based on the lessons they learned and the bottlenecks they saw in the first game. In the end, Crash 2 aimed for twice as much on the screen while maintaining the 30 frames per second. It also added more effects such as Z-buffer-like water effects, weather, reflections, particles, talking hologram heads, etc.

Crash 3 challenged the team to develop new engines or sub-engines to power a more free-roaming 3D style, up to 10X longer view distances, and more level of detail features. They had to overhaul the background polygon resource manager and the AI memory manager to handle the increasingly large firehouse of data that had to be processed for the game.

After Super Mario 64 and Rare’s Banjo-Kazooie on the N64 has made its mark and Naughty Dog was about to release its third installment with Crash Bandicoot: Warped, another upstart studio by the name of Insomniac Games unleashed a new platformer for the PlayStation with a 3D panoramic engine to allow the players to have open exploration without restrictions of how far you can go.

With this ambitious plan of flying and full movement, the Insomniac team needed to figure out how to handle long view distances without the “fog” that was common in this console generation. Insomniac developer Peter Hastings explained the team’s fresh take on the problem: “There were actually two separate worlds being rendered in a Spyro level. Each level had a detailed version built out of textured polygons, and a much more impressionistic, simple version built out of fast-rendering untextured polygons. For anything near the player, the detailed world was drawn, but for distant objects the simple version was used. This ‘Level-Of-Detail’ system is now used by pretty much every game on the planet, but at the time it was quite new.” Alex Hastings, Insomniac’s VP of Software built the panoramic ending using Assembly draw routines for seven different renderers that worked on a different level of detail in the environment (Alex claimed that 80% of Spyro was written in assembly for peak efficiency). Alex knew that the PlayStation could handle many more polygons than the other consoles (and even many PCs) at the time, so him programming these ambitious engines in assembly was the best way for their new title to stand out from the crowd.

To supplement the expansive worlds, Matt Whiting and his experience designing flight systems for NASA was a critical part of developing Spyro’s control system and camera code. Hastings praised Whiting’s contributions, “the smoothness of the controls is owed to his ability to squeeze a great deal of matrix algebra into the tiny slice of computational time that the PlayStation could give us.” The natural and smooth controls found in Spyro are especially impressive when you realize this was before the PlayStation controller had analogue controls – you get just as good control with the standard D-Pad.

By the time Spyro 3 was published, Insomniac was pulling off great ice reflections, semi-dynamic lighting and a lot of impressive particle systems for fire, water, smoke, and explosions. There were also many subtle graphical and animation refinements from the previous installments that were already technical marvels. It was obvious that the team had become skilled professionals of creating a clean and cohesive visual package on the PlayStation.

DreamFactory was a modest but star-filled development firm headed by Shiichi Ishii, a developer on Virtua Fighter and director for Tekken. With his industry experience, it shouldn’t be a surprise that their first projects, Tobal No. 1 and Tobal 2, were not only stunning technical feats, but were also some of the first pure 3D fighting games – not just 3D characters on a 2D plane. Namco eventually worked on this concept with Soul Edge and Soul Calibur, but Tobal pioneered it on the PlayStation and pulled it off with a superior resolution and frame rate. Within Tobal, you can dash towards, jump around, and circle around your opponent with complete fluidity and confidence. In another great detail, the characters block differently for each incoming attack.

Tobal No. 2, in particular, feels very organic, smooth, and vibrant. The animation in this brawler is silky smooth with its high frame rate and it has some great touches that gives the game some personality. Tobal 2’s visuals actually rival some N64 titles as the character models are very smooth (unlike Tobal No. 1’s more blocky presentation). Designed by Dragonball Z and Chrono Trigger character designer, Akira Toriyama, the characters have an anime-inspired look to them, but still feel very human. The Gouraud shading and the vibrant colors bring in this feel, but avoid it feeling cartoon-like. The lighting effects are very nice looking as well, especially on the game’s fireballs.

Even with all these great visuals, the Tobal games (and DreamFactory’s other fighter, Ehrgeiz) are the only Playstation fighters to hit 480i at 60fps without many polygon sacrifices. The games actually ran at a very sharp (relatively speaking) 512×512 resolution and then scaled to 640×480. Not many games used the PSX’s 640×480 mode because most games focused on the shimmering textures we all love in. 2stead of the shaded polygons that Tobal pulls off so well.

Unlike Tobal No. 1, No. 2 was never released in the US. It is unfortunate as Tobal No. 2 improves on the original in every aspect. Tobal was also just as impressive (if not more) than the mighty Tekken 3, but we will get into a comparison in just a bit.

Sega’s Virtua Fighter had broken into the fighting scene with revolutionary 3D technology in 1993, but within a year or two, Katsuhiro Harada was at Namco working on way to create a strong rival to Sega’s creation. His initial research project revolved around how the body reacts in 3D movement and to replicate something like judo or Chinese kenpo. Harada admits that due to a lack of balancing, “Tekken 1 isn’t really a fighting game. It should be called a human body action game. They have abilities, and they hit each other, but it’s not really a martial arts game.” Developer Yutaka Kounoe added, “the first two games were created as an experiment; even the developers couldn’t predict how it would turn out… The third game which I was in charge of, was a more calculated production.”

Converting from the original arcade versions is always a challenge, but with the third installment, not only was the source game more refined, but the PlayStation port was almost arcade-perfect. The animation speed is impressive and the textures are carefully crafted to make the limited polygon models look as solid as possible. On the original Tekken, the PlayStation version had its animation compressed of 30% from the arcade version. By the time the team had improved their skills for Tekken 3, compression was much less severe – only reduced by 10%. The main compromises from the arcade are a slightly reduced polygon count and the backgrounds are 2D graphics instead of the the sharper 3D backgrounds found in the arcade.

It is interesting to compare some of the most innovative 3D fighters from the era – Tekken 3, Tobal 1 & 2, Virtua Fighter 2 (on the Sega Saturn), and Dead or Alive all had some impressive technical capabilities, but also have some distinct advantages and disadvantages. Tekken 3 and Tobal No. 2 are the top contenders on the PlayStation and it is up for debate which one actually pushed the PlayStation hardware most. Both games run 60 fps at 480i – the best frame rate and video output you can get on the PlayStation. One could argue that the textured polygons in Tekken 3 are more taxing than the shaded polygons in Tobal (but the shading may have actually aged better). However, Tobal No. 2 has 3D elements in its backgrounds (vs pure 2D for Tekken 3) and Tobal No. 2 has more free-range 3D movement to process.

As one of the biggest mainstream hits with an attention to detail, we couldn’t overlook Gran Turismo 2’s drive for realism. While the original Gran Turismo was groundbreaking at its release, the sequel had subtle improvements such as lighting effects and car rendering that made it one of the most convincing PlayStation games on the market.

While he didn’t publicly comment on the sequel, lead developer Kazunori Yamauchi estimated that the original Gran Turismo utilised around 75% of the PlayStation’s maximum performance. Based on the subtle improvements, it is easy to assume Gran Turismo 2 is more toward the 80% to 85% range.

The original Ridge Racer was one of PlayStation’s first big system pushers. Regardless of what you thought of Ridge Racer as a game, you had to agree that it was an excellent port of the arcade version that showed the true potential of Sony’s 32-bit wonder. However, in order to compete with the high standard set by the Gran Turismo series, Namco had really bumped up the graphic quality of the Ridge Racer series in Type 4 while staying true to its arcade roots. Ridge Racer Type 4 features a smooth framerate locked solidly on 30 frames per second and lots of detailed textures throughout the game. Also, it hits that target much more reliably that Gran Turismo 2.

The environment design and use of color is especially praiseworthy. When you are cruising around the tracks, the moody skyscapes either share the warmth of summer or put you under the trance of night. The lighting effects on the cars and roads for night time driving give the game a stylish edge that retro gamers appreciate in Japanese-made titles. The whole environment of the game is a work of art and was otherwise unseen on the Playstation.

Ridge Racer Type 4 also works around standard limitations of the PlayStation hardware, such as affine texture mapping issues, by using a healthy volume of triangles for the track’s surface. This approach minimizes warping compared to other Playstation games, including the original Ridge Racer.

Ridge Racer Type 4 has a great use of light sourcing and things like brake lights give off tracers in tunnels. There are still some imperfections in this fourth Ridge Racer increment, however, such as seeing the opposing cars through walls. Nevertheless, this late Playstation racer is still a great sight to behold on Sony’s 32-bit platform.

While Ridge Racer was the main technical showpiece during the Japanese launch of the Playstation, WipEout was one of the biggest draws during the Western launch. The team at Psygnosis showed remarkable talent in creating such a stunning 3D racer running at 30fps so early in the Playstation’s life. On top of pure speed, WipEout pulled off the impressive floating element of these futuristic vehicles. The game’s design language and the soundtrack were also crucial to setting itself apart from its competition.

This leads us to WipEout 3, which is an easy selection of the most technically impressive installment on the PlayStation. Overall, this third installment is faster, deeper, and more refined than its predecessors. It’s also worth noting that support for the Dualshock analog controller also helps give the game more precise control and force feedback.

This innovative and influential series was set out to mimic the feel of 1960s and 1970s car chase films and put you in (partially) faithful recreations of actual city layouts such as Miami, LA, and New York that you could explore in an open world environment. Driver 2 expanded on the free-roam structure of the original and added the ability to step out of your car to explore on foot and commandeer other vehicles in the game’s open world environments. If this sounds familiar, you could say Driver 2 was very influential on the PS2-era Grand Theft Auto titles and the other “sandbox” games that were spawned from GTA’s success. Of course, the Driver series was running well on the PS1 and squeezing what performance it could out of the hardware to make it all happen.

Tony Oakden, the lead programmer on Driver, shared the the original Driver started out as a PC game, but was moved to the PS1 as it became a dominant platform, “Technically it was a bit of a nightmare to port code from the PC to the PlayStation… The PlayStation isn’t particularly hard to program for, in my opinion, but by the late 90s it was already quite dated compared to current generation PC with dedicated video cards… The processor was quite a bit slower than the standard PC of the day, there was hardly any RAM, no hardware floating point support at all and a rather primitive rendering system with no Z-Buffer or perspective correction… “So we had to take the version made for the PC, which had all that extra processing power and hardware, and make it work on the Playstation. We had to pull all sorts of tricks to make the game work let alone look good.”

“I think there are a few glitches but you have to remember that this game was pushing the boundaries in terms of what the PlayStation could do. A lot of people said we’d never be able to make a free roaming driving game on the PlayStation at all. That’s the thing about true pioneers isn’t it? They are exciting and great but tend to be a bit rough around the edges.”

On top of the already impressive game, Driver also featured a Director Mode that let the player shoot and cut their own mini car chase movie with a simple, freeform camera system. Most modern games have a similar camera, but it’s mostly for internal purposes of taking media screenshots and trailers. However, touches like this showed that the team at Reflections had a real passion for creativity, maxing out the hardware, and making people take notice.

The texture maps are improved in Driver 2, but there isn’t much more room for improvement over the original with all the complexity of the free-roam environment. Unfortunately, the frame rate does take a hit a bit more and there are some pop-up issues. You can tell the team was really trying to squeeze every last bit that the Playstation could muster.

In between their work on Gran Turismo and Gran Turismo 2, the team at Polyphony Digital dove into a completely different genre, but still managed to re-define what one could expect out of the Playstation hardware. Omega Boost was a stunning mech-based shooter that had a hybrid on-rails/free-roaming mechanic in open space. Even though the game is on rails for the most part, the large “open” space field gives the illusion of moving where you want.

John Carmack had an astounding talent for coming up with new ways to push the limits of hardware (primarily PCs) to display 3D environments and Quake II was one of the biggest breakthroughs in an already impressive string of achievements. Of course, Quake II was developed with a modern (at the time) personal computer equipped with cutting-edge accelerated graphic cards and the Sony Playstation had a much more modest hardware setup (especially when it came to the limited amount of RAM).

Instead of porting Quake II, the development firm, Hammerhead effectively re-created the game from scratch with the Playstation’s hardware limitations in mind while trying to keep the PS1 version as faithful to the original as possible. The end result was incredibly impressive considering the circumstances and became the standard for how first-person shooters on the Playstation (or even the Saturn and N64) should be judged.

Quake II for the Playstation can easily be put in an extreme class of PC to Console ports that focus on extreme optimization for fixed hardware, cutting corners in all the places that more people won’t notice. In an interview, Chris Stanforth, head of development at Hammerhead,  shared

To work around the RAM limitation, Hammerhead reformatted the original Quake II maps into chunks that could be handled by the Playstation and then reconstructed them to be as close the original as possible. To keep authenticity levels high, the team avoided using common visual tricks like fogging or strategically placing walls to keep the draw-distance from getting out of hand. Some of the larger levels had to be split over two loads on the Playstation to help compensate for the RAM deficiency, however. There is no skybox for the levels (many gamers may never notice) – instead, a flat Gouraud-textured purple sky is drawn around the top of the level. Other compromises compared to the PC version include removing the ability to crouch (mostly to simplify the control scheme for the Playstation controller).

Many graphical effects were able to replicated in creative ways on the Playstation. Colored lights for levels and enemies and yellow highlights for gunfire and explosions manage to make an appearance on the Playstation version with the addition of lens flare effects located around the light sources on the original lightmaps. Hammerhead’s engine also uses particles to render blood, debris, and rail gun beams to increase the authenticity.

Quake II on the PS1 manages to run in 512 by 240, at a smooth 30fps regardless of the number of players. There is a minor loss of detail for the four-player mode, but given the relatively small display area (given the smaller displays of the day), it was a modest sacrifice.

Easily overlooked for a handful of reasons, Alien Resurrection on the Playstation is actually an interesting example of a quality first-person shooter that had to deal with the PS1’s hardware limitations.

Alien Resurrection originally started out in development as a third-person horror title in the image of Resident Evil and was originally targeted for a late 1997 release to line up with the film’s release. The original game was then scrapped as Argonaut Games (the company behind the SuperFX Chip on the Super Nintendo) was tasked with creating a first-person shooter based on the movie property instead. Instead of pumping out a mediocre shooter, Argonaut worked on an impressive 3D engine that was ahead of its time. Everything is completely 3D with multi-levels, platforms, ladders, and vents all present.

Many of the best moments in the Alien films are all about atmosphere and suspense and Argonaut tunes the game engine toward accomplishing that goal while simultaneously showing off some nice effects and avoiding some of the Playstation’s weaknesses.

The game often takes place in dimly-lit areas that not only help show off some cool lighting and shadow effects from gunfire, explosions, and red emergency strobes (which feels very in-line with the film’s atmosphere), but the darkness also hides some of the imperfections that are typically apparent in Playstation games. In addition to lighting and explosions, steam blasts and scripted events like a alien bursting through a doorway play out dramatically.

Having been delayed a full three years after the Alien Resurrection film had been released had some benefits as Half-Life (released a year earlier in 1999) seems to be a bit of an influence in visuals and the minimalistic but engaging sound design. Great sound design with excellent environmental effects and Alien screeches right out of the Fox archive immerses you into the horror setting. The lack of background music leaves you to wander eerily quiet hallways and listen for Aliens through background hums of equipment or clinking of chains. Distant, echoing sounds of screams and gunfire suggest battles elsewhere in the ship, and the chirps of the motion tracker raise hairs on the bac