VladR Posted December 7, 2018 Share Posted December 7, 2018 Tony Crowther did trippy visuals on Playstation far better than Tempest X3 as it was in N20: What a beautiful second-generation game on PS1! Certainly doesn't look like 256 colors, all those smooth light effects imply 65,536 colors. It would take an insane amount of coding effort to pull that tunnel off at 25 FPS on PAL jag (as there's no axis-aligned texturing, all texturing is generic, hence per pixel), and that's without the lightmapping and translucency effects. With those effects, perhaps 12.5 fps (50/4) at best... 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leech Posted December 7, 2018 Share Posted December 7, 2018 Yes it should work with any 3D capable TV. It's great in 3D, but VR makes it a whole different game than when in 2D/3D mode. Well worth the price of entry of the PSVR for both Polybius and Wipeout imho (despite the PSVR's occasional drift issues). At one point in time I thought Polybius was coming to the PC. Haven't seen it yet. Figured I could play it on the Vive when it does. Since I just spent the money for 2x PSVRs on a 2080RTX... don't see myself getting one any time soon. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lost Dragon Posted December 8, 2018 Share Posted December 8, 2018 What a beautiful second-generation game on PS1! Certainly doesn't look like 256 colors, all those smooth light effects imply 65,536 colors. It would take an insane amount of coding effort to pull that tunnel off at 25 FPS on PAL jag (as there's no axis-aligned texturing, all texturing is generic, hence per pixel), and that's without the lightmapping and translucency effects. With those effects, perhaps 12.5 fps (50/4) at best... Tony wasn't a huge fan of the Atari ST and was firmly in the Commodore CD32 camp with Captive II:Liberation, by time Jaguar hit. I encountered his work later with N20 on Playstation, Realms Of The Haunting on PC and Wacky Races on Dreamcast. N20 always looked built with Playstation hardware in mind. Fantastic to see people appreciating it and Tony's work. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VladR Posted December 8, 2018 Share Posted December 8, 2018 I encountered his work later with N20 on Playstation, Realms Of The Haunting on PC and Wacky Races on Dreamcast. N20 always looked built with Playstation hardware in mind. Fantastic to see people appreciating it and Tony's work. Yeah, it's very hard not to appreciate it, as a coder - I spent some time frame-pausing the N2O YT vid and damn, what a visual feast. He's clearly not using the HW texturing of PS1, as there are zero texturing glitches (present in great majority of other games). Which explains the perspective-correct texturing (or he must have figured out a genius way to hide those glitches somehow). So, he must have written a full SW rasterizer and his own texturing routines. PS1 is sure fast when you let HW handle the ugly affine texturing, but not so much if it has to do the per-pixel work, like we do on Jaguar. It's main chip is only ~33 MHz, so only marginally faster compared to jag's ~26.6 MHz, certainly not enough to write each pixel from CPU. But, perhaps PS1's bus is much fatter, and you could get away with computing and writing each pixel from CPU. I'm much more intimately familiar with SH-2's and Saturn's HW than Sony's, anyway... I know plenty people will argue - "it's just a tunnel" - yeah, but a pretty slick next-gen tunnel for its era. Gobs of PS2 games looked much worse than this. So, he was behind RealmsOfTheHaunting ? That was a pretty cool engine for the era. 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
swapd0 Posted December 8, 2018 Share Posted December 8, 2018 He's clearly not using the HW texturing of PS1, as there are zero texturing glitches (present in great majority of other games). Which explains the perspective-correct texturing (or he must have figured out a genius way to hide those glitches somehow). So, he must have written a full SW rasterizer and his own texturing routines. On the psx the CPU can't access the video RAM. If you don't want texture glitches just use smaller triangles. PS1 is sure fast when you let HW handle the ugly affine texturing, but not so much if it has to do the per-pixel work, like we do on Jaguar. It's main chip is only ~33 MHz, so only marginally faster compared to jag's ~26.6 MHz, certainly not enough to write each pixel from CPU. But, perhaps PS1's bus is much fatter, and you could get away with computing and writing each pixel from CPU. I'm much more intimately familiar with SH-2's and Saturn's HW than Sony's, anyway... PSX R3000 @ 33Mhz with 2MB for itself and with a real cache. Jaguar GPU @ 26.6Mhz with 2MB shared with other 4 processors. PSX wins. 5 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gummy Bear Posted December 8, 2018 Share Posted December 8, 2018 On the psx the CPU can't access the video RAM. If you don't want texture glitches just use smaller triangles. PSX R3000 @ 33Mhz with 2MB for itself and with a real cache. Jaguar GPU @ 26.6Mhz with 2MB shared with other 4 processors. PSX wins. PSX 10 buttons. Jag 17 buttons. Jag wins! Yaaay! 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VladR Posted December 8, 2018 Share Posted December 8, 2018 On the psx the CPU can't access the video RAM. If you don't want texture glitches just use smaller triangles. PSX R3000 @ 33Mhz with 2MB for itself and with a real cache. Jaguar GPU @ 26.6Mhz with 2MB shared with other 4 processors. PSX wins. Smaller tris help, but only to a degree. Perhaps the Sony's API allowed certain additional configuration of the texturing behavior, if you weren't really allowed to paint framebuffer pixel-by-pixel. Perhaps there was an additional slower texturing method exposed in the Sony's API ? I'm not arguing that PSX is stronger machine. It better be, but N2O certainly looks better than lots of other games of the era. I really wouldn't downplay the skill of the lead coder just to the PSX's raw power. Otherwise no PSX game would ever show those ugly affine glitches, which is most certainly not the case in the PSX game library Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
swapd0 Posted December 8, 2018 Share Posted December 8, 2018 As you can see in the capture, it has affine texture glitches. 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lost Dragon Posted December 8, 2018 Share Posted December 8, 2018 Sadly, never seen any commercial magazine do a Making Of...N20, so can't even guess how Tony went about making the magic happen. As for Realms Of The Haunting..yep, that's Tony. I fell in love with it originally for its Cornish location/setting..not that far from where i live . 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+CyranoJ Posted December 8, 2018 Share Posted December 8, 2018 Draw wobbly textures to hide wobbly glitches. All a bit obvious really. 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
skip Posted December 9, 2018 Share Posted December 9, 2018 (edited) At one point in time I thought Polybius was coming to the PC. Haven't seen it yet. Figured I could play it on the Vive when it does. Since I just spent the money for 2x PSVRs on a 2080RTX... don't see myself getting one any time soon.It will be coming to PC at some point in time but Llamasoft are a bit swamped at the moment. It currently only supports Oculus as they dont have a Vive. Hopefully this changes but Im not aware of any plans for it. Edit: https://store.steampowered.com/app/906120/POLYBIUS/ Edited December 9, 2018 by skip Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leech Posted December 9, 2018 Share Posted December 9, 2018 Ha, Q4 is almost over. As long as it's coded for OpenVR, or SteamVR instead of using the Oculus SDK, it should work on everything. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Stephen Posted December 14, 2018 Share Posted December 14, 2018 I'm digging Polybius on the PS4, I should try it in VR, but it looks amazing on my 3D TV. Still not sure if I could tolerate a PSVR, since I have a Vive Pro... I can't play it without VR. It's a 100% different game. It was made from day one to be used on VR. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
skip Posted December 14, 2018 Share Posted December 14, 2018 Ha, Q4 is almost over. As long as it's coded for OpenVR, or SteamVR instead of using the Oculus SDK, it should work on everything. I suspect its coded using the Oculus SDK. Not 100% on that. I think Minotaur Arcade Vol 1 is launching on Steam on Dec 21. It has VR support so I guess we will find out then. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leech Posted December 14, 2018 Share Posted December 14, 2018 I suspect its coded using the Oculus SDK. Not 100% on that. I think Minotaur Arcade Vol 1 is launching on Steam on Dec 21. It has VR support so I guess we will find out then. Interesting, I know the Genesis Classics has VR support (it's kind of crap though) and there is the Neo Retro Arcade which is cool to play with. At this point for arcade stuff, I am planning on finally building a Mame cabinet 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lost Dragon Posted November 19, 2019 Share Posted November 19, 2019 On 11/15/2018 at 6:15 PM, Isgoed said: Yes, N2O looks beautiful on a CRT with RGB scart. The youtube vid doesn't do the game justice as it looks very pale and dull in comparison. Never seen this one It looks painfully slow, but very N20 inspired: 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DragonGrafx-16 Posted November 20, 2019 Share Posted November 20, 2019 I played the DOS version of Tempest 2000. I love it. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Isgoed Posted November 23, 2019 Share Posted November 23, 2019 On 11/19/2019 at 9:41 PM, Lost Dragon said: Never seen this one It looks painfully slow, but very N20 inspired: If I didn't know better, I would say that is N2O in it's primitive form. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Flojomojo Posted September 2, 2023 Share Posted September 2, 2023 Necro-bump! Sorry/not sorry. 😃 I put this old game on a new Anbernic RG35XX recently and it looks and runs amazingly well on a small, sharp, bright screen like that or the Miyoo Mini. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Helper Posted September 2, 2023 Share Posted September 2, 2023 I am surprised Atari did not release this on the VCS when they integrated DosBox into the Atari VCS OS... I think they just forgot about it LOL! Missed opportunity I believe. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zerosquare Posted September 2, 2023 Share Posted September 2, 2023 Tempest X3 was neither developed nor distributed by Atari. So they probably don't own the rights for it. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Austin Posted September 2, 2023 Share Posted September 2, 2023 Tempest X3 was also never a PC game, so Dosbox would not apply anyway. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DragonGrafx-16 Posted September 2, 2023 Share Posted September 2, 2023 2 hours ago, Austin said: Tempest X3 was also never a PC game, so Dosbox would not apply anyway. Tempest 2000 was... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Austin Posted September 2, 2023 Share Posted September 2, 2023 4 minutes ago, DragonGrafx-16 said: Tempest 2000 was... Indeed, it was. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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