It's _really_ impressive looking at early PS1 games like Crash Bandicoot and then looking at late ones like Final Fantasy IX. It's amazing what they could _do_ with FFIX on the same hardware.
@Felthry and Crash was already streaming levels from the CD while they were being played
@noiob I'm sure FFIX's use of pre-rendered backgrounds gave them a big edge on graphical quality, since they could reserve more polygons for character models and less for terrain. Still, IX even looks fantastic compared to VII, which also used pre-rendered backgrounds. The texturing quality is outstanding.
@Felthry I think it even layers animation and FMVs in some places which must've taken a ton of work and skill
@Felthry ah wait the example I'm thinking about was in 8 lol
@noiob IX does too; there are a number of panning shots of terrain and such.
@Felthry it blows my mind how much better it looks than anything on the N64 which is technically superior (except the FMV bit)
@noiob The N64 didn't have enough texture RAM to do anywhere near as much fancy stuff as the PS1. Nintendo went _all in_ on 3D games with the n64 and it's actually not really capable of doing 2D graphics at all; it doesn't have the graphical power to do detailed textures of any appreciable size
@noiob Architecture limitations mean it can't use much of it at all for textures, I believe
@Felthry okay that makes sense
I was talking to a friend about whether it'd be possible to port Mario 64 to the PSX (since the code is available now). I wonder what would be the hard limit if one didn't really care about it actually having a playable framerate or a tolerable draw distance
@Felthry doesn't the N64 have much more ram than the PSX? Especially with the expansion pak