Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Lord Kane
For 2d, the Saturn does kick ass, but IIRC the 3d was bolted on at a later date...
|
Unfortunately, a lot of people don't realize that good 3D = good 2D. Actually, all of the functions for PSX's GPU are essentially 2D in nature (unlike on a PC 3D accelerator where you feed it 3D vertices, the final projection to 2D occurs outside of the GPU for PSX)
This is what a (pretty minimalist) set of 3D features gives you for 2D on a system like PSX:
Hardware blitting (means fast sprites. You still have to do a sprite engine, but they're just blitting textured quads, more or less. PSX has specific 2D blitting too... so it's a little more work here than say, with SNES, but very little and no tangible speed loss).. there aren't any real limits to how many sprites you can have onscreen at once, either.
Rotation, scaling, shearing, and projection (basically, anything you'd expect to be able to do with mode 7 and whatever tricks on SNES) in hardware.
Color blending (like SNES's but better)
PSX has paletted textures, so you get paletted sprites/tiles.
PSX lets you mess with the framebuffer directly and use it as a texture, so you get all kinds of effects available that way.
All of the above is done for "free", or rather, not in the CPU, and the accelerated components that do this are very fast.
I'm not sure who ever said PSX wasn't fit for 2D games, but that's pretty far from the truth. The only reason Saturn ever had much of an edge was because of more VRAM or VRAM extension cards, letting it have more sprite animation frames in fast memory on once.
As far as N64 goes.. I can't even imagine why Saturn would be better than N64 for 2D games. I think the people who did 2D games for N64 just did an exceptionally bad job and this kind of stuck.
- Exo