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Consoles and handhelds · Sony PlayStation

Sony PlayStation PS1

8owners with an opinion
60%of verdicts positive
1/1positive/negative since 2024
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance and value; criticized for display.

What people wrote

Likes it
I've got an original xbox, a PS2 and a PS1 all softmodded or mod-chipped with all the games I could never afford 20-25 years ago. I even have wireless controllers. I never worry about the console being connected to the Internet or maintaining a subscription.
Doesn’t like it
I strongly disagree here. I was so hyped for the GBA that I bought it on release day, only to be disappointed later. One of reasons is the lackluster sound; seriously, Nintendo had already built an impressive sound system for the SNES, and then the GBA just had a software-driven DAC? Why did the cheapened out so much? Same as for the PS1, I always found the wobbly polygons and warping textures painful to watch.
Neutral
When I was a kid I had a classic playstation (PS1) it had multiple kinds of video outputs, one of which was S-video, which was a lot sharper than composite, problem was sharper wasn't better, it made pixel games have sharp edged pixels and the blur and scanlines that blended were missing, it also made the motions of 3D things just look clunky and disconnected. In almost every way possible the higher resolution output made it look worse. So yeah, making a movie sharper could very likely make it worse.
Doesn’t like it
Dreamcast was years after PS1 when 3D games were a dime a dozen and no one cared by that point. That's why Sonic Adventure and Hydro Thunder are forgettable where Tekken and Rayman are not. I mean, you could make this same argument to claim that the Atari VCS was better than the NES because the idea of "playing games on your TV" was no longer a novel new experience by the time the NES rolled around. For everything about to say, please note that I'm not arguing one system was better than the other. Just talking about how they fit in historically. I owned and enjoyed all of these consoles. For me, the Dreamcast was the first "modern" 3D console where everything came together. PS1 3D games were largely pretty ugly. Jaggy warping textures and the hardware was not really powerful enough for big worlds. Perhaps even more importantly, the lack of analog controls was a very very serious impediment. Obviously despite this there were a lot of classic PS1 titles. A few games like Gran Turismo even seemed to pull off miracles graphically while other titles like Metal Gear Solid just leaned into the grimy pixelated look. The N64 was largely a joke to me. You had a standard analog control, but the hardware was clearly a mess. Specifically there was far too little texture memory so every game had these giant low-res smoothed out blurry textures. Again obviously a few games transcended that but in general, man, yikes. The Dreamcast was the first modern 3D console. T…
Likes it
I have been working on PlayStation 1 homebrew SDKs [1] and tools over the last year. Unlike other retro consoles - especially Nintendo consoles - the PS1 gets almost no attention at all; "PS1-style" games made using Unity or Unreal Engine seem to be decently popular, but nobody wants to bother with the real hardware anymore. Which is a shame, as the PS1 is a relatively simple platform which can be found for relatively cheap and offers a bare metal development experience reminiscent of modern 32-bit microcontrollers, with some interesting graphics and audio hardware thrown in. It is a platform unencumbered by the tile/sprite and storage limitations of the 8- and 16-bit eras, yet still limited enough to be a breeding ground for creativity and at the same time easily expandable with custom hardware through its integrated serial port and ISA-like parallel bus. [1] https://github.com/Lameguy64/PSn00bSDK
Likes it
I'm not sure if delaying it would have made any difference. PS1 was a zeitgeist machine, especially with titles like wipEout. I remember going to underground nightclubs in London and there'd be a chillout room with Playstations in. The Dreamcast just wasn't cool enough I guess. I think Sega also seriously fucked up with the Saturn. There were lots of claims of it being more powerful than the PS1, but nobody could extract that power really. A Saturn dev at a studio I worked at had a complete breakdown just trying to keep up with what I was doing on the PS1. I feel they burned a lot of industry bridges with that machine. I'd have loved to see the Dreamcast succeed because I'd always been a big fan of Sega, but I think a lot of things just went awry for them.
Neutral
When I was a kid, my mother would take me and my brother to Blockbuster every Friday. We could each rent a game. Every time we'd go, we'd beg her to let us rent whatever the newest console was at the time (mostly Playstation, though we rented GameBoy Color a few times, too). She'd give in occasionally. After we had finally come to own a PS1 and N64, my brother and I had a paper route and would buy cheap used games instead of renting.
Neutral
As someone who is trying to develop a PlayStation 1 game using modern C++ (GCC still has MIPS 1 support so why not) I can almost feel the author's pain, even though I'm running into different issues. Getting today's abstraction layers to run on nearly 30 year old hardware is not that different from adding them to a game that was developed back when memory protection was not a thing. Here are some of the issues I've run into so far: - Having no access to the STL (which would be too bloated for the PS1) makes many C++ features unusable. The ones that do not rely on the STL, such as virtual methods for I/O drivers or constexpr for compile-time string hashing, are still useful though. - The PS1 is, very roughly speaking, a slow CPU with a bunch of fast ASICs bolted on. Most of those operate asynchronously but require relatively high-bandwidth streams of data (display lists, textures, geometry, audio...) that has to be generated by the CPU in real time or provided by another peripheral such as the CD drive. Feeding multiple ASICs running in parallel is an exercise in buffering and synchronization. - As if that wasn't enough, most peripherals have their own proprietary data formats: the GPU uses a nonstandard 16-bit RGB color format where the top bit is used to enable alpha blending, the audio mixer only supports a custom ADPCM encoding and so on. I had to roll my own tools to convert assets into these formats ahead of time. - Coroutines or threads are usually not an option since c…
Likes it
That post introduced me to both WebGL and reverse engineering back in the day. I remember reading it years ago and asking myself "seriously, is it that easy to do 3D in a browser???". The web as an app platform is not without its issues, sure, but for quick prototyping being able to just write some JS and have instant access to plenty of APIs is awesome. Last year I decided to finally break out of the browser and get into actual PS1 homebrew. Unfortunately the state of the scene wasn't, and to some extent still isn't, that great: most homebrew games are still made using what's basically a modded version of the original Psy-Q SDK, which is rather limited in many ways. I started contributing to an open-source PS1 SDK instead [1] by first adding a dynamic linker, then revamping the build system entirely and now building a custom high efficiency FMV playback library (totally not inspired by pl_mpeg of course) that combines the hardware accelerated MJPEG-like decoder with the GPU's alpha blending capabilities. I'm also working with a few other people on reverse engineering one of the most famous PS1-based arcade systems, the Konami System 573. It's a shame the PS1 isn't receiving the attention other consoles are getting in the homebrew scene. The hardware is architecturally simple yet powerful [2], but I guess nobody wants to fiddle with 120mm polycarbonate circles anymore. [1] https://github.com/Lameguy64/PSn00bSDK [2] https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/playstation
Doesn’t like itDoesn’t say they own it
> After all, could you really, badly, critic a 30’s movie because it is not shoot in HD? 1930s films did "shoot in HD". Most films were either 16mm or 35mm, both of which have more than enough fidelity to represent video at 1080p or higher without loss of quality. Here's a copy of Wizard of Oz on 4K UHD: https://www.amazon.com/Wizard-Oz-Limited-Anniversary-Collect... A more realistic take is could you criticize 1920s films for not shooting with sound, and the answer is yes, absolutely. Films went from almost entirely silent to almost entirely talkies in roughly 3 years because of massive, unprecedented, and immediate commercial pressure to do so. Audiences ate up even mediocre talkies and shunned silent works now considered classics. The only reason colour film adoption wasn't similarly fast was because of Technicolor's monopoly. Flash forward to the 1990s, where cinema as a medium was very sophisticated. Now look at blockbusters beginning to use CG rather than animatronics. The airplane in Air Force One. Jar Jar Binks in Phantom Menace. Hell, take the 1997 re-releases of the Star Wars trilogy which inexplicably added garbage like CG Jabba the Hutt. The purple stuff in The Langoliers. Even going back to Lord of the Rings, even going back to the Hobbit, even going back to "early" Marvel films there are tons of moments where CG is jarring. The Polar Express -- an excellent and heartwarming Zemeckis film -- is mostly known because no one likes the dead-eye CG. Yes, absolutely,…
Doesn’t like itDoesn’t say they own it
I've noticed that too, the PS1 just doesn't seem to inspire the same passion that other popular consoles do. I think it's because most of the top games on it were part of franchises that flowed on to the PS2 and Xbox. Other than Final Fantasy 7-9 and Castlevania SOTN, there's not really that much to do on the PS1 that you can't do better with a sequel on a later console, and even FF7 had a PC release back in its day and now other remakes. And the internet was becoming common by then, so the PS1 never had the "my uncle works at Nintendo" air of mystery. And from a developer perspective, it's not all that constraining enough to be interesting. It's just low-res and slow. The architectural simplicity works against it. There's not all that much to do by cleverly arranging tiles and sprites or banging hardware registers like on the earlier 2D consoles. And nobody is really going to be impressed by any 3d lighting or animation wizardry that's still going to fall short of what even the N64 can do. The PS1 dominated its market at the time, but that market just moved on to the newer generations rather than capturing much nostalgia.