The original PlayStation (referred through this document as the PSX) won its generation not by being the most powerful, but by being cheap and developer-friendly. The Sega Saturn, while a beast of a machine, was also absurdly difficult to program for with its several CPUs that had to be babysat in tandem, and while the Nintendo 64 could push some polys, its absurdly limited texture memory and use of has-been cartridges meant games were more expensive to produce for it and frequently not as appealing to look at. The PSX took plenty of shortcuts in rendering, leading to blocky, jittery textures, stilted meshes, and lots of z-sorting issues—and none of it mattered. The games spoke for themselves, and the developers took care of the rest.
This document originated in the summer of 1999 and was last updated April 30, 2000. I found it on accident, digging around the MultimediaWiki, and stumbling onto an HTML copy from Zophar's Domain. While I sure wanted to read it, I think you can see from that link—it wasn't a pretty sight. Over a megabyte of hideous, word processor-born HTML (from StarOffice 5.1!), typeset like utter garbage to boot. It was slow and unreadable, and for the trove of information inside, it deserved better. Certainly now, there's far more information on PSX development online than there was at the time, but this document was the first of its kind, and given that PDFs and plain text versions float around out there, I figure it deserved a good HTML copy too.
An initial pass with HTML Tidy did a bit of good, but by and large, this was methodically cracked over a period of days using a whole lot of Notepad++ regex and manual reformatting. I then split it into separate pages for readability, though there's also a single page version if you wanna download and print it or something. I also tried to fix as many of the misspellings as I possibly could. Ironically, despite the PSX's age, this might be one of my more relevant cleanup projects. PSX emulators are still regularly updated and new ones crop up all the time. Simple to program for also means simple to emulate, which becomes apparent when you compare the state of Saturn and N64 emulators at current.
Surprisingly, despite how much technical detail this one goes into, I still got a lot out of reading it. Just the other day, I was wondering how with a 128 KB card, there were still only 15 usable blocks (turns out, one block's for the file table!). As for if I would ever do this kind of absurd, pointless cleanup job again—probably. It's in my nature, despite how arduous it is, and it's fun to peek through as I clean it all up. Hopefully you get something out of it too, if you're the right type to understand it. And if not? At least we can all enjoy a bit of Ridge Racer.
Up to the index, onwards to Introduction.