You've seen the Commodre 64 pushed to its breaking point. You've seen the Sega Genesis stretched beyond all logical boundaries. You've even seen the Atari 2600 exploited in this manner to produce dazzling colors and sound.
But what about the widely loved, mega popular 32 bit powerhouse, the Playstation? Not PS3, not PS1, the first one. Easily the top selling 32 bit home console (Saturn, 32X, CD32 and 3DO weren't much competition) the PS1 introduced a generation to CD based games and texture mapped polygon graphics.
So what can it do in the hands of a programming wizard? Some pretty impressive stuff, in fact. Feast your eyes on "Deadline Caught Me" by Paradox:
Pretty predictable given the PS1 was made to do 3D, and had CD audio. The reflective environment mapped morphing 3D shapes near the end are eye catching, though. This was well before any programmable shaders, mind you.
Next up is "Monophobia" by Witchcraft:
A bit dry, but points for minimalist style and some well done 3D. It's common for demos to have cryptic text strewn about, usually just to seem cool/mysterious. Next up is "Pawlov" by Elitegroup:
More of that cool reflective chrome effect. That must be computationally cheap to do as I've seen it on a lot of low powered hardware like the GP32 and the iPod Mini back in the day (yes, there's even demos for the iPod Mini).
Now, what about games? Astonishingly, Quake 2 was ported to PS1. Levels had to be cut down with more load areas in between to fit them in ram. And there's some weird poly subdivision stuff going on with flat surfaces that suggests it could have even been a bit more optimized than it is. But still! Quake 2, on PS1!
Alien Resurrection is another particularly nice looking fps for the PS1. As I recall Alien Trilogy had kind of a janky 3D engine that was a mixture of 2.5d raycasting (like Doom/Wolf3D) and polyobjects, plus sprite based characters and pickups. Much like Chasm: The Rift in that respect. Resurrection is fully 3D though and stunning for the time:
Ridge Racer Type 4 has exemplary visuals, and is a must have for racing fans. It's the one I still play and I'm not even a racing game kind of guy. The music is really fitting and chill. The mixture of polys and sprites flesh out the trackside scenery, and environment mapping on cars does an adequate job of making them look shiny:
Spyro the Dragon pioneered the use of LOD (Level of Detail) technology to achieve huge draw distances by reducing the polygon count and texture detail of objects as they get further from the player, or increasing it as they get closer.
The idea being that you couldn't make out fine detail on stuff that's further away on the low res analog TVs of the time, so there was no point in devoting rendering power to it. This is why distant scenery like castles and mountains are textureless, and only gourad shaded:
Crash Bandicoot 3 is another platformer that redefined how lush graphics could be on the PS1 hardware. Like Crash 1, the secret sauce which made such amazing graphics possible was the linear level structure and over the shoulder fixed camera.
Since devs could know exactly what would be onscreen at any point in the level, they could tweak poly counts at various points to ensure a maximum of visible detail while also ensuring framerates never dipped unacceptably:
That's all for this time. I hope this was more relatable, I think just about everybody on Earth has at least heard of the Playstation. Has it been interesting to see what that boxy grey machine is really capable of, when all is said and done? Stay tuned to see more machines pushed, stretched and coaxed into producing seemingly impossible graphics!