/vr/ - Retro Games

>N64 with CD/mini-CD drive and 8kb texture cache.
Powerful system that would have bulldozed PS1.
>1995 Saturn with better CPU, VDP and simpler motherboard.
Cheaper console that would have given Sony a headstart but would hold on better in the long term, both for itself and Sega overall.
>Atari NES
Either Atari would still be in the game today, or Nintendo would have never taken off.
>1984 Atari 7800 launch
Atari could probably have competed with Master System and NES.

>>6042320
At 4KB, N64 had the largest texture cache ever embedded into a GPU up until that point in time. Many GPU manufacturers didn’t upgrade their GPUs to have 4 KB texture caches until a year *after* the N64 came out. So a larger texture cache is unrealistic, even for alt-history.

In any case, the whole texture cache thing was just a band-aid for crap memory architecture. Aside from adding a CD Drive, texturing could be fixed on N64 just by adding a second independent memory bus, which would also double the system’s bandwidth.

>>6042582
Maybe easing on the texture blur then.

>>6042720
3-point bilinear filtering, which is what the N64 does, actually produces slightly sharper textures than regular bilinear filtering because it can result in diamond shaped aliasing.

If you wanted N64 to have less blurred textures, it needed higher-res ones.

>>6042178
The NES was originally going to be branded under Atari...
The Sony PS2 was originally going to be a Nintendo product...
If Sega had gotten behind one product instead of fracturing into a dozen simultaneously competing with each other...

>>6042178
The NES was originally going to be branded under Atari...
The Sony PS1 was originally going to be a Nintendo product...
If Sega had gotten behind one product instead of fracturing into a dozen simultaneously competing with each other...

>>6042732
I'd rather have no texture filtering.

>>6042996
Generally speaking, no texture filtering makes textures look worse. Texture filtering is a bit like supersampling in that every drawn pixel is generated from multiple texel samples.

It would be idiotic and backwards to not at least have it as an option.

>>6043001
I know I'm in the minority, but I prefer the sharp pixelated look in retro stuff. I grew up with the N64 and a 3D accelerated PC, but I always liked the PS1/software mode look.
I'm all for filtering on modern, high res textures though obviously.

>>6043104
It really depends on the types of textures used by the game. For games with pixel art, or textures showing mostly geometric shapes (like straight lines), filtering can fuck them up.

But for textures with arbitrary patterns, you need filtering. It would have been nice if developers could have given a toggle for console games though.