No One Understands Playstation | A Dissertation

Transcript

I don't think I'll ever forget the first time I saw Resident Evil 2, because it was also the first time I'd ever seen a PlayStation. I was only 9 or 10 at the time, but I know stranger to video games. My mother played... a Nintendo NES when she was pregnant with me. I grew up playing Super Mario and Duck Hunt. At some point after that, I got a Sega Genesis and Sega Game Gear, and I had Sonic for both of those. But seeing Resident Evil 2 on a PlayStation changed the way I saw video games forever. I was visiting my half-brother, who's a couple years older than me, and I walked back and saw him playing a console that I'd never seen before. It looked more realistic than any game I'd ever seen. It was like playing a horror movie. After I remarked at how real it was, he was excited to show it to me from the beginning, and so he started a new game. and my jaw hit the floor again. The beginning of the game was like an animated Hollywood movie. Everything about it was cinematic, the lighting, the audio, even the pacing, the shock of the zombie hiding in the back seat, crashing police cruiser, culminating in the exploding tanker truck. This was pretty much the coolest thing I had ever seen in my life, and I only knew one thing for certain. that I needed a Sony PlayStation. I would argue that PlayStation wasn't just influential on me, it changed how video games would be made forever. Some people may not realize that the PlayStation began as a joint venture between Nintendo and Sony in 1988. Sony engineer Ken Kuduragi watched his young daughter playing Nintendo, Famicon, as it was known in Japan. Being an engineer for Sony, a company known for audio technology, he took note of the low quality of the sound. Ken would eventually end up designing a sound processor that Sony would produce for the Super Nintendo, which would lead to the joint venture in 1988. Nintendo, top rival Sega, had a disc-based add-on for the Genesis. Nintendo saw discs as far too slow, but also couldn't stand being left behind by Sega. 1988 880 saw Nintendo partner with Sony for their expertise in compact discs to develop the PlayStation as both an add-on to the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, but also a standalone product from Sony. Sony was already exclusively licensing and producing the SNES sound chip, and would also control manufacturing of their disc. games. However, Sony's increasing value and expansion into film and entertainment made Nintendo nervous. Nintendo then entered into talks with Sony's rival, Phillips, as an alternative source for their discs. When Sony executives found out about this, they were furious, and the PlayStation deal was canceled. Yeah, that's right. Because Nintendo was paranoid, they tried to strike a secret double deal with Phillips, and ended up creating their most powerful enemy simply because they feared Sony's power level. PlayStation was one of the fifth-generation consoles, released in America in 1995. It would compete primarily with the Atari, Jaguar, Sega, Saturn, and the Nintendo 64. I can remember as a kid, we would constantly argue over PlayStation or the N64, and especially which one had the best graphics. But to me, PlayStation was the king. And I would always point to games like Resident Evil 2 as proof of this. One day I was hit with some facts that I couldn't refute. The Nintendo 64 was a 64-bit system, and PlayStation was only a 32-bit system. Upon hearing this, I was in shock. How could the PlayStation not be better? It used awesome black discs, and the N64 used those silly, archaic cartridges. I now know... Nintendo 64's processor was a MIPS R4, running at nearly three times the speed of the PlayStation's, but PlayStation did more with less, and it forced video game developers to make a choice that would inform how they made their games moving forward. And this is a in-depth look at the history of PlayStation, the impact it had on games. and things that made it so successful. This is going to be kind of a long one. I'm going to have the sections timestamped down below, although I do, of course, recommend watching the entire thing. And by the way, I'm Jay, I make videos as DS Tech Media about tech, and so if you find this interesting, I ask you to like, share, and subscribe. Ken Kuduragi, the very same man who had designed the Super Nintendo Sound Ship, had no real interest in video games himself, but he was increasingly interested in 3D graphics and its potential applications. His interest began sometime in the second half of the 1980s when he saw a prototype from Sony's now defunct information processing research center called System G, which was unveiled to the world in 1989 as the MDE 9,000, or multi- Digital Effects 9,000, a $350,000 computer for producing 3D graphics for TV broadcast. Following the failed Nintendo deal, Sony CEO and Personal Friendiccan, Nario Olga. would support Ken's new project based on what he had learned studying System G's technology. As the chief manager of the project, Kudaragi remained a key engineer designing the PlayStation's graphics chip. He really is the father of the PlayStation in a literal and figurative sense. His success with PlayStation made Sony Computer Entertainment the most profitable division of Sony and earned Ken the position of CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment in 1921. Before moving any further I must acknowledge Rodrigo Copetti of copetti.org. He does an amazing analysis of consoles ranging from generations 3 through 8. Many of the images I'm using are straight from his site and his research has been a foundation for this video. The PlayStation had 2 megabytes of RAM dedicated to the processor, 1 megabyte to the GPU, and 512 kilobytes or half a megabyte to sound and disk functions. Sony designed their GPU and sound chips in -house, but would need a suitable CPU to handle the processing of data for those two chips. They worked with a company called LSI Logic, who had a program to design MIPS-based processors, according to the client company's needs. This meant picking from cores to be included in the final package. The custom service was called Coreware, and the director of LSI Coreware from 1985 to 93 was Jensen Huang. After leaving LSI, he co-founded a little company you've probably never heard of called NVIDIA. Sony chose the CW 33,000, a MIPS R-3,000 paired with three integrated co -processors. the system control code processor, which controls how the cache is implemented, thus enabling direct memory access and adding the scratch pad. The geometry transformation engine is a specialized math processor that accelerates vector and matrix calculations, taking care of the first stages of the graphics pipeline, such as 3D projection, lighting, and clipping data that will be sent to the GPU for rendering. And the final co-processor is the MDEC or macro block decoder, aka the motion decoder. The macro block is a data structure that houses a picture similar in encoding to a JPEG. The MDEC decompresses bitmaps capable of computing 9 ,000 macro blocks per second. This allows streaming of full motion video at a resolution of 320 by 240 and at 30 frames per second, making those awesome CGI videos possible. which are actually just a grid of thousands of those tiny 16 by 16 macro blocks decompressed by the motion decoder. PlayStation's success is often chalked up to its simplicity, but it made 3D simple by using cutting-edge custom silicon. It was an early example of a SOC or system-on-chip design, where the CPU and its co-processors are made into a single dye or chip. The first commercially significant example of a system on chip was the Arm 610 in the 1993 Apple Newton, the result of a joint venture between Acorn, Apple, and VLSI, who, like LSI, pioneered custom integrated chips. For PlayStation, it meant the CPU 3D acceleration and video decompression, all running at the same speed. and handling direct memory access for the GPU, sound, and disc. It's the secret weapon of the console. If these were all separate chips, like in Sega Saturn, it wouldn't just be harder to program for, it would mean less speed and performance. Today, System On Chips are found in every smartphone, typically integrating the CPU, GPS, wireless networking, and any number of co-processors. While the PlayStation's custom system on chip was produced by LSI Logic, at its core was a MIPSR-3,000 licensed from MIPS technologies, the same way Apple, Google, and Samsung smartphones use Core's license from ARM. In the early 90s, SGI had become the industry leader in 3D graphics and animation with their high-end ERIX workstations powered by MIPS processors, so successful that in 1992, SGII went from being MIPS's largest customer to their parent company. So the PlayStation and the N64s processors use the same architecture as the high-end SGI machines used to create not only the biggest games, but also the revolutionary CGI in major Hollywood movies like Jurassic Park, Titanic, and Toy Story. So Sony chose to give the CPU 2 megabytes of extended data out RAM. This particular type of RAM has lower latency and more efficiency than others. Sony seems to prioritize premium RAM chips because it's a trend that continue with future consoles as well. PlayStation's 2 megabytes are connected using the 32 -bit D-Bus to main bus interface unit to the CPU and the video subsystem, which consists of the GPU, 1 megabyte of V-RAM, and the RGB encoder. The CD-ROM controller, motion video decoder, GPU, sound processor, and parallel port have an exclusive direct memory access controller. to bypass the main MIPS CPU for access to the EDO RAM, much faster than waiting for the CPU to assign data. However, if the DMA transfer is happening, the CPU cannot access main memory and it will be left idle. That is, unless it has something in the Scratchpad to keep it busy. The Scratchpad is a 1 kilobite block of faster SRAM normally used as the data cache, but instead repurposed as Scratchpad in Sony's custom design. The purpose of the Scratchpad is to have a more flexible cache system available to the programmer. Neither the kernel nor Sony libraries will try to make use of it. It's completely up for grabs by the programmer. This was a clever, efficient, very simple design that could be optimized by developers who took the time to plan out their coding. So LSI's coreware system on chip designs allowed for a fourth code processor, which would have been a floating point unit or FPU. FPUs accelerate calculations with fractions and exponents for higher precision. Used in 2D and 3D graphics, color, and even audio. So what does it actually do? Basically, math with decimals and fractions. For example, a fixed point representation with a uniform decimal point placement convention can represent the numbers 123.45, 12,335, etc. Whereas a floating point representation could represent 1 .234567, 123467, or whatever, hopefully you get the point. Here, let's try visual representation. The difference in points representing distances on this graph looks like this in fixed precision or like this in floating point precision. Essentially, it translates to smoother graphics, animations, and effects. And today, floating point units can be found in just about any computer device with audio and video playback, but in the early 1990s they were a premium upgrade. So why didn't Sony include one? It may have been to achieve PlayStation's $299 price tag at release. Ironically, the N64 did include an FPU, and it was released... at $199 a year later than the PlayStation. But Nintendo priced the N64 to match Sony's price cut to $199. Sony could have also left the floating point unit out to keep the development as simple as possible, something that both the N64 and Sega Saturn struggled with. The PlayStation's MIPS CPU itself was a traditional 5-stage Risk Pipeline, where it queues up the multiple instructions and executes them in parallel. So the main CPU, GTE, does a lot of the heavy lifting by doing all of the geometry math. It then sends the vertices to the GPU 64-byte, first-in, first-out buffer. The GPU then uses this data to draw primitives, which are triangles. The GPU then applies clipping to skip wasting time drawing operations for unseen polygons. The triangle primitives location is defined using XY coordinates. Each coordinate is the center of a pixel called a sampling point. The rasterizer converting the vectors into triangles and then into pixels. Everything becomes a wireframe made up of primitives. The GPU also has functions for generating sprites. Sprites are the 2D Raster images that were the primary graphics assets for the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis consoles. However, many PlayStation games such as Squares' Final Fantasy tactics made extensive use of them for the character models. In the end, everything becomes a pixel map. The frame buffer is the final destination, but before that, the shader applies lighting effects to the polygon's surfaces. PlayStation's GPU has two algorithms for shading, flat and gurod. In flat shading, each primitive has a constant light level, and with gurad shading, each primitive's vertex embeds its own light level, then the brightness between each point is interpolated automatically. Flat shading fills at 2.5 times more polygons per second than garage shading. The GPU's shader unit is also capable of semi-transparency, which simulates light passing through, multiple textures, and dithering. The dithering algorithm softens changes in color and allows a digital image to look correct while actually using less colors. The GPU stores all of this as a frame buffer in the 1 megabyte of VRAM, along with images of textures that it will apply to the polygons using texture mapping. Finally, the shaded surfaces are blended with the textures. Koppedi.org shows a shot of the frame buffer for Spyro of the Dragon. However, these are super tiny resolution. So here are some other frame buffer examples from emulated PlayStation graphics engines. And finally, the PlayStation lacked any sort of texture filtering, but instead made use of the nearest neighbor algorithm as a fast and cheap way of scaling colors and edges. And here you can see a 2D texture mapped onto 3D primitives. The PlayStation used a fiend texture mapping, the fastest and least precise method. It only uses two-dimensional coordinates. This means the textures lacked perspective or depth, and they would often appear warped or distorted as the viewport moved by them. In computer graphics, the visibility problem is one of the main challenges and it's about determining which polygons are visible from the viewport. Getting this wrong results in things drawn incorrectly or effects appearing broken. PlayStation's solution is via ordering tables, which give surfaces a Z-index determining the order which they are drawn. Additionally, it includes direct memory access functions for both the CPU and GPU to create and traverse ordering tables. PlayStation uses an adjustable frame buffer, giving the devs the option to prioritize colors, resolution, and textures, or resources as they saw fit. Max's resolution is 1,024 by 512, 16 -bit, which would be 960 by 512 with 24-bit true color. Maximum output resolution was 640 by 480, but PlayStation was primarily designed for CRT. televisions and they would typically divide that resolution up into pages of 320 by 240 in 16-bit or 24-bit sacrificing more memory. It could even hold and display different color depths at the same time. The two pages used page flipping where the system renders one frame while displaying the other. The rest of the space is occupied by your color lookup tables, color depths, textures, sprites, and static images. Here's my mock-up from earlier, and here it is with some bullshit textures. And yes, as stupid as this is, I'm kind of proud of it. The PlayStation would be known for several types of errors in graphics such as jagged edges or aliasing wobbly polygons or warped texture perspectives, sometimes even flickering, disappearing polygons. And all of this commonly gets blamed on PlayStation's lack of a floating point unit. However, copetti.org seems to indicate things like flickering or occluded surfaces are the result of some developers relying on software approximations to gain performance. He also mentions that Techniques like tessellation dividing a larger polygon up into smaller ones could have been used to reduce distortion. But I don't know enough about computer graphics and I could be completely misinterpreting this. So if you think I got this wrong, read the article on copetti.org and go ahead and flame me in the comments section. After everything is rasterized by the GPU, it gets sent out... to the RGB or composite encoders, where it's converted to an analog TV standard. And just to say a word about analog displays. I started the video with a disclaimer about formats, resolution, and emulation, because most of the footage I'm using is 1080p emulation footage that lacks PS1's quirks like wobbly polygons, distortions, and jagged edges, and I've even formatted square 43 aspect footage to 16x9 widescreen. Even the footage you see here is the 1998 game Heart of Darkness, painstakingly modified and edited to make it fit into a fake CRT TV. 1080p actually makes original PS1 footage look worse. because we're talking about analog TV signals and 1080p displays. And I would argue that using the better footage gives you a better idea of what it looked like back in the day because we didn't have 1080p HD footage to constantly compare it to. 240p to 1080p, it's a huge difference. And so yes, it does look better than it would, and know the footage is not from the original hardware, but it is a closer representation to the way the footage looked to me as a kid. The first generations of the PlayStation had the most video signal outputs, RFU modulator, which was the first one to get removed, the typical RCA composite video, S-video, which provides Luma, plus sync combined, and chroma, and finally the AV multi-out, which provides all the previous signals except the RFU, plus RGB and a 5-plus volt line. Later revisions removed ports, and at the end, only the AV multi-out was left. Naturally, Sony's system included a very competent sound processor capable of CD-quality playback, Copetti.org describes the CD subsystem as its own computer within the PlayStation that provides direct access to the disc for reading music or video for playback. The SPU could decompress audio and it included its own 32 kilobytes of SRAM as a buffer, as well as its own sub-CPU with 512 bytes of RAM and a 16 kilobyte ROM for the DSP, and dedicated copy protection separate from the main system. Sony's sound processor supports both PCM and ADPCM audio sources. ADPCM is adaptive. differential postcode modulation, a type of PCM developed specifically for speech coding. The SPU runs at a sampling rate of 44.1 kilohertz across 24 16-bit channels. It supports live MIDI sequencing, demonstrated here in Final Fantasy 7, where you can actually play the piano. and a host of digital effects such as pitch modulation, looping, and digital reverb, as well as an ADSR envelope, like the ones found on synthesizers for shaping the attack, decay, sustain, and release. And so PlayStation offered both the streaming of high-quality audio from the disc, or the ability to synthesize it in real-time the way previous consoles would. Also on the back was the serial I .O. port designed specifically for the PlayStation link cable, allowing you to connect two PlayStations together. This meant you could do multiplayer without the split single screen, assuming that both PlayStation's had their own television. And lastly, there was the parallel I.O. port. apparently intended to become a RAM or memory expansion port. However, Sony never released any official products that could actually use it, and it was eventually removed from the later models. However, products such as the…

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