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Comment by Causality1 | Hacker News Reader

I don't think I would have gotten as interested in gaming if it weren't for Nintendo's decisions with the N64. The native bilinear texture filtering, Z-buffer, and subpixel model rendering make such an enormous difference to me I'd have found the Playstation unplayable.

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To me, N64 continued the video game "tradition" I knew from the 16-bit era. Colorful, fast-paced, responsive. PSX games by contrast were dour, slow-paced, and controlled poorly because of Sony's initial failure to consider how digital control wouldn't work in a 3D environment.

The N64's control sticks used digital rotary encoders.

The PSX only had D-pad style controls at release in 1995 -- no joysticks! The Dual Analog controller wasn't released until 1997.

(I think you're getting distracted by the terms "digital" and "analog". It may help to think about this in terms of discrete and continuous inputs instead.)

True, but there's a rather radical difference between an input device with nine possible states like a d-pad and one with 65,536 possible states like the N64 control stick.

The N64 blurry textures and washed out color had me thinking initially that my friends TV was broken. It was only Rare and Factor 5 games on the N64 that really impressed me. Of course they could do nothing for the blurry picture quality. That was a hardware thing that has been fixed with a hardware HDMI mode that offer de-blurring

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