Does anyone have recommendations for a PS1 web/js/wasm emulator? PCSX-Redux [0] has been great on desktop, and DuckStation [1] as well.
I found a few js/emscripten efforts, but if anyone has a rec, I'd appreciate it. Thanks!
PS1 games do not hold up so good, but PS2 games uprezzed to 1440p-4k are basically perfect imo.
The evolution of graphics was brutal in the 90s and early 00s, but somewhere around the PS3's appearance it slowed down since lighting models were becoming "good enough" on the PS3 for not being annoyingly bad and asset creation costs became the limiting factor rather than hardware.
On the emulator side I would definitely recommend Duckstation. It's performant, has great UI / UX and also has a CRT filter available by default that more or less recreates the original look, even slightly warping the image to make you feel like you are staring into a TV tube.
The ps1 was released 1.5 years before the N64, the 3dfx voodoo chip is as capable as the n64 (maybe more so considering memory available), but I guess both Nintendo and Sony did opt for a bit more cost-efficient designs to make a profit on their consoles.
Looking at the release dates, the progression of capability is quite matched.
1994 dec 3 ps1 1995 nov 6 3dfx voodoo 1996 jun 23 n64 1998 nov 27 dc 2000 mar 4 ps2
4k lets you scale the image and insert scanlines without scaling artifacts and with enough extra pixels to make the scanlines feel properly soft.
HDR lets the shader compensate for the brightness lost to the CRT filter without desaturating the color.
As for gameplay, that console has a massive library, with thousands of commercially released games (and a lot of hidden gems). I'd be surprised if any gamer wouldn't find at least one to their taste in that catalog.
Eeh ... speak for yourself. PS1 did mark the dawn of the 3D era for home consoles. There are lots of people who are into the low poly 3D models with the characteristic PS1 "wobble".
Sure a lot of it may be nostalgia but it does have its charm and I can say it's grown a lot on me over time. Especially once I learned about the PS1's unique hardware limitations. If my social media feed is anything to go by "PS1 graphics" are having a bit of a revival with lots of people trying to recreate that look.
The crazy thing too was how much a step up PS2 was compared to PS1 in terms of available compute and sheer horsepower. But even that wasn't enough for a sandbox game like GTA 3 to run without a lot of clever tricks [1]
I worked on the Metal Gear Solid port from PSX to PC, and Konami programmers chose a wild trick to store how the "C4" bomb was planted - either on the wall, or on the ground.
Essentially the pointer pointed to the same physical memory address, but if it was planted on the wall (or on the ground, I forgot) - then it was OR-ing it with 80000000h or was A0000000h - or maybe something else - lol was long time ago.
It was fun porting this on PC, and right now I don't even remember what I did exactly - hahaha
The PS1 also happens to have RAM aliasing, because there's not enough RAM to cover the entire decoding window for the RAM. I don't know the details, but I've seen PS1 executables setting their stack pointer to the end of the devkit's 8 MiB of RAM and yet they work on retail units, because it ends up at the end of the retail's 2 MiB of RAM. So theoretically, you could stuff bits in there too (and without messing with different memory regions with different cache behaviors).