Sure, horses for courses and all that.
Ultimately it’s just the content they want, they didn’t care back then about image/gameplay quality, and care equally little now, it’s just that what they’re playing now is literally worse than the thing they played in childhood on a CRT in the correct aspect ratio with no lag. But not caring is not caring I guess.
I’m actually happy that I’m pretty ignorant on image quality and framerates and stuff and been trying to actively keep it that way. I do have a 50/60hz mod on my Saturn and always keep games on original aspect ratio but I really don’t mind playing 50hz PAL games. If I stumble upon a 50/60hz comparison on Youtube I quickly rewind past it.
Been thinking about getting an OSSC in the future but don’t really see it as an immediate need and I’m very happy with how for example the Saturn looks on my LCD with RBG scart.
Man, it just keeps getting worse:
My interest level went from about 4/10 to -3/10. Thanks but no thanks.
Shit is in “haha oh wow” territory now.
My only mistake was having expectations. See if I didn’t apply the logic that they had a perfectly working ps1 emulator that they already had running on a $100 box a few years back I wouldn’t have been let down now.
Ok F this thing.
Maybe I should put my PSTV in a PS1 looking shell and call it a day.
It makes zero sense that they are using the PAL versions. Just, why?
Also, $99 and it doesn’t come with a USB power adapter? Oh, Sony…
Lol really? That’s odd.
This thing is so Sony pre-PS3 launch. Five hundred ninety nine US dollars. Giant enemy crab. Arrogant Sony is on the way back…
Who gives a crap, these idiots will buy whatever we poop out Sony in full effect.
It says ‘based on’ the PAL versions…
But Tekken 3 has ZERO PAL optimisation - it was actually the game that awoke me to PAL issues when I played the NTSC version, first time I’d ever seen that, since before the PS1 50Hz/60Hz was controlled by the console, even when I’d played imported SNES etc games they were in 50Hz because the console played them like that. Tekken 3 was the first game I ever saw in native 60Hz.
Many first party SNES/N64 games had partial PAL optimisation for screen space or speed (usually just screen space on N64), but there was no ‘bad’ PAL version to compare them to, like there was with Tekken 3 NTSC vs PAL.
Anyway, my point is maybe Tekken 3 PAL could be forced to run at 60Hz, since it has no optimisation? It’s literally 20% slow and squashed, it’s essentially just the NTSC game forced down to 50Hz anyway, just like playing a NTSC SNES game on a PAL console.
"Well we lovingly recreated the looks and feel of the system itself and menus, now it’s time to get the ISOs. Which versions should we use?
Whatever man, just get whatever comes up first on the download list."
I was reading the review on TomsGuide: PlayStation Classic Review: Retro Done Wrong | Tom's Guide
But R4 on the PlayStation Classic doesn’t play like the R4 I knew. It’s sluggish and hazy, and there’s ghosting even with the menu animations. I initially chalked it up to the hardware struggling to run one of the PlayStation’s most demanding games, until a friend very astutely pointed out to me that this particular version of Ridge Racer Type 4 is of the PAL variety.
Ugh, 50hz Type 4. I was trying to avoid this the last time I picked it up from the EUR PS Store! What is interesting though is the PS Blog post doesn’t tag Type 4 as a 50hz game. But surely the TomsGuide reviewer/friend can’t be wrong about this?
It’s not me they’re cheating - I have the means and dedication to run all this stuff on native hardware on a gorgeous CRT - but rather, it’s the fact that you shouldn’t need such dedication and means in the first place to enjoy these games in high quality.
I feel bad for the 35 year old guy who plunks down 100 bucks for a little nostalgia only to run the games and say “this sucks” without really knowing why. It’s a bummer for retro games in general and poorly represents us.
I was never going to get this product, but I wanted other people to enjoy it because it’s supposed to be a celebration of a piece of our hobby’s history.
The lack of care here is a slap in the face to both hardcore fans who keep the scene alive as well as the people who made video games into the industry that it is today (ie the common fan or parent who gets 1-2 video games per year for their family who really deserve better).
I’m not outraged -it’s not that serious- but rather puzzled as to why things like this keep happening year after year. Sony, the kings of image processing, are the ones that have allowed poor handling of 240p content for decades now. And it’s not even a cost cutting measure. Rather, it’s simply a lack of care to configure things adequately.
In a world where M2 exists and where Sony has perfected the art of image processing better than anyone, it’s genuinely fascinating how something like this can continue to happen.
I don’t want to say “lazy devs” because we don’t know who worked on this and what kind of constraints they were under. But I will say that the lack of standards and oversight is peculiar.
If you want to deliver a barebones experience, by all means, do so. But at least use nearest neighbor upscaling and proper NTSC versions of the games as a bare minimum. I don’t think that’s asking much. And I can’t see how that would change development costs or time.
Well it was always a fast and easy cash in to the craze around Nintendo’s offering, I just expected more since they already had a working PS1 emulator so thought even with it being as bare bones as possible for maximum profit that they would at least have that on check. Along with how easy it has been to “open” up other systems it didn’t matter to me what games got put on it.
Will honestly say that them putting the PAL versions of some of the games, 50hz and all, on it was never something I considered as a possibility even for a second. Like if you had me list possible downsides of the device before it came out it wouldn’t have even occurred to me while them going with separate emulation was something I had a slight worry about.
Why would a PAL version create ghosting in the menus though?
I think this sums it up best. The litany of issues that shouldn’t have made it into this product given Sony’s pedigree probably comes down to poor management and silos within the business.
I felt this way when I picked up a modern Walkman. It’s the A45 series, and a gorgeous piece of hardware, but it’s also pretty obvious that the team in charge of making the software for it was far detached from other teams within the company.
Despite using an in-house Sony OS (probably freeBSD based like the Vita and PSP) the scrolling performance and touchscreen responsiveness would be abysmal for a device released from Sony almost 10 years ago, let alone today. The first gen iPod Touch and Microsoft Zune run rings around it from this standpoint. It’s still a solid device, just one that’s not nearly as good as it could be - they could have implemented the PS Vita team’s work but weren’t able to for some reason.
With the PS Classic my guess is the resources that would have enabled a good product just weren’t available to work on the PS Classic, or someone deemed them too important to work on the PS Classic compared with something else within the company.
I don’t know, though. I feel like choosing 60hz versions of games isn’t a result of resource-constraints. I think you’re ultimately right about another part of your post though - it’s more about organizational silos. Its likely more about poor management and organizational innefficiencies than anything else. The wrong people were assigned to this.
Maybe even some interns made it who never saw a real PS1 before.
Sad to say I think this is quite likely. Or at least not familiar with the stuff that’s being ignored here. The whole execution feels so “out of touch”