[QUOTE=ptdebate][QUOTE=Atarifever][QUOTE=ptdebate] That second video actually looks really good--you have actual textures, visual effects like lens flare, and multiple transparency layers: things the Jaguar could rarely if ever pull off. Not to mention the palatable frame rate.[/QUOTE]
I may be wrong, but I was pretty sure the PS1 actually could not pull off real transparencies, and was forced to fake it all the time. I actually think either I said this once before here or on Atariage and was either corrected or backed up, and can't remember which.
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[/QUOTE] Hiya, Atarifever! I think you may be thinking of the Saturn. I remember that being a major criticism of the console (that it couldn't pull off real transparencies, which even the SNES could do. It used some weird unsightly dithering effect to simulate them. I don't remember hearing the same of the PS1, and it seems unlikely since there are so many PS1 games with transparencies...like this one, every Square game, SCEA game--heck, EVERY game that comes to mind. There's no possibility of add-on hardware being responsible for this as it's a disk-based console...[/QUOTE]
Now that I know is wrong. The Saturn has hardware support for transparencies. The confusion there is explained (in very, very deep detail) here.
http://www.superpcenginegrafx.net/blueshadows.html
My favourite bit of the whole thing is:
[QUOTE]Now we all know how bogus the "Saturn lacks transparencies" comment is, since the system already had lots of (mainly 2D) games with nice transparencies at that point.
But the thing is, if transparencies were used to generate blue versions of the character sprites, they'd look exactly like the Saturn's "snapped" shadows. Not the other way around. Putting a single colored transparency over a multi-colored image produces a blue tinted multi-colored image, not an image made up of blue shades.
The fact of the matter though, is that it's actually the mighty arcade hardware, that these two ports are trying to emulate, which lacks the ability to render 'real' transparencies. This, plus the facts that blue shaded shadows save a ton of memory and the developers might've wanted simple blue shaded shadows anyway is why they look the way they do in the arcade.
Why they decided to add optional higher color shadows in the Saturn version is a mystery, but a couple possible reasons are the fact that it makes for a nicer looking game and that maybe the Saturn really does use transparencies by default, to save the massive amount of memory needed for multiple version of every frame of animation. This would lead more credibility to the claims by hardcore SF fans, that the Saturn version has more animation than the PSX game. That plus the fact that the Saturn already has more ram to begin with.
So not only was the Saturn version trashed as being inferior graphically because of it's graphic superiority, but it's hardware was also trashed for lacking the ability to display what it was actually displaying (possibly using the ability it was being trashed for lacking)... all because it was displaying what the ability it was trashed for lacking would in reality appear as, instead of displaying what such an inability to display would in reality look like.
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Read the whole thing and that makes sense.