Happy Birthday You Big Gray Bastard!!

[Dangerboy]

Here's to my numero uno's 14th Birthday - the 9 / 9 / 95 launch of the PlayStation one!

I celebrated by opening and confirming a Factory Sealed NBA 2 Ball worked. : )
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VL4ku4UEo9g



Celebrate anyway you can.

Happy birthday to the Dreamcast as well!

Jason
The Biggest PlayStation Fan - Certified!

[ScourDX]

Wow..never realize Playstation was released on the Sept 9th. Was it coincidence on Sega's part?

[Sonicwolf]

Happy birthday to the PlayStation. So many great games...

Hurray for classic PS texture warping!

[Dangerboy]

Scour:
Not so much a coincidence, just that the dates worked out perfect for marketing.
Sega had straight 9s (9/9/99) while Sony used "Ninth of September" and a Red backwards E to market the PSX. (I.E. "(E)NOS" = "Ready (red E) Ninth of September" = Sony Backwards.

Even the movie "9" launched today.

[Gentlegamer]

I didn't realized PlayStation shared its birth date with Dreamcast. I'll have to throw in some Twisted Metal and Crash Bandicoot in my gaming celebrations this month.

[megasdkirby]

Sweet! The PSOne was an excellent console! Still have mine hooked up!

[kupomogli]

Happy Birthday to the greatest system of all time, that which spawned the second greatest system as well as the second greatest portable of all time.

[RPG_Fanatic]

I didn't realized PlayStation shared its birth date with Dreamcast.

The Dreamcast shares it's birthdate with the Playstation.

[badinsults]

I bet the sealed game fans will be cringing at that one.

Nice find, though.

[TwinThumbs]

Hurray for classic PS texture warping!

Heck yeah! As Homer might say, "Mmmmmmm....texturrrre warrrrpinnnngggg...." Good stuff! I didn't realize it was also PSX's b'day either, but here's to you, ya Big Gray Bastard! I'll try to play a little MoH or MoH Underground tonight in celebration.

[LiquidPolicenaut]

Too true too true...9/9/95 was the American release date for the good ol' Playstation...but I read soooo much about it in magazines that the Playstation became my first import system when I bought it in June, alongside Tekken and Ridge Racer, for $380 from some small shop in Flushing, Queens. *sigh* memories. I had also bought the Saturn on the "surprise" launch date just back in May and, while I loved it, Ridge Racer and Tekken blew me away. I had just played Tekken for the first time in the arcade and was so psyched to play it at home and, when I did, my god...I couldn't believe how exact it was to the arcade..

I still love ya Playstation! I shall have a marathon of some of my classics for the system. MGS, Castlevania, Resident Evil, Bust A Groove, Xenogears, etc. etc....

[Tupin]

Today was also the day the PS1 cult classic Ore No Ryouri was released. I think it was to capitalize on a pun based on the matter of the game.

[Ed Oscuro]

Affine texture mapping

[Sonicwolf]

Affine texture mapping

Is that the technical term for the warping I mentioned above? I always wondered what it was called.

[Ed Oscuro]

I've gone back and forth on that over the years. I used the term back around the time I first joined (don't remember where I picked it up), then decided it was wrong, then decided it was right. Today I revisited the cycle (hopefully for the last time). Unfortunately, I can't cover this from a mathematical perspective, but perhaps this will help all the same. Andre LaMothe's websight (I have a game programming book by him) illustrates it with a simple flat mapping, but you'll notice it doesn't resemble our beloved PlayStation textures. Wikipedia shows the exact warping and labels it the result of an affine texturing mishap. You'll note that the original polygon, a tilted square, has been (seemingly) cut into two triangles, each of which is covered with a texture "leaning" along one of the sides of the triangles. I'm guessing this is just what happens and has nothing to do with the standard practice of transforming a square primitive into two triangles.

So why would LaMothe show the presumably limited and outdated affine texture mapping result if it doesn't attempt to show a perspective-altered texture as on the PlayStation? This page covers the basic uses for affine texture mapping. The first is when you don't need to take perspective tilting into account (walls in a Wolfenstein 3D-type engine are always straight up and down; the BUILD Engine uses an extra corrective element to create its slanted walls and floors). Outdated and useless for modern, non-resource-starved systems because the innately direction-correct nature of early games is more than compensated for by modern art and gaming design. The second use is a single item in the environment, rather than the whole environment, which is always-facing - such as sprites or possibly HUD elements where it's wasted effort to introduce perspective corrections. As time goes on, though, I wager that we'll be seeing less of these as trees that always face you are starting to seem cheesy, and I wonder if you get any savings from stripping perspective correction from the HUD elements when it means extra code in the pipeline (and the graphics hardware is optimized for it anyway).

This is what LaMothe is describing; if you attempt to correct the texture by aligning it to a polygon (via a simple linear interpolation) you probably get the effect seen in the Wikipedia article.

[Haoie]

Lots of console birthdays thesedays, eh?

[DEBRO]

Hi there,

I'm sorry I'm late for the birthday celebration. I too love the original PlayStation. I have wonderful memories of buying my launch machine (which I still have) and enjoying every minute we shared together.