Was the PS2 "Emotion Engine" over hyped?

I remember playing gran turismo on the PS2 in 2001 with my buddy and we were both like ‘I can’t see how graphics can ever get better than this’

I still can't believe Gran Turismo 4 ran and looked like it did on the PS2. It sure could do some stuff in the right hands.

Great video, but it doesn't scratch the surface of how difficult this system was to develop for. I was working as a graphics developer for EA at the time the EE came out and part of my job was to assess whether external devs had the technical capability to program it, most struggled to get a single polygon on the screen without the help of middleware. The biggest error I see in videos like this, and the corresponding architecture charts they show, is that there was no connection between the VU0 and VU1 other than the DMA bus. In reality, VU1 could access VU0's register set. This made it possible to do skinning on VU0 and pass the vertex data directly to VU1 for transform and lighting using a spare register as a semaphore for synchronization, thus side-stepping the main bus bottle-neck altogether. Another thing people often neglect to mention is that the vector units had a 4-cycle latency for each instruction with no stalling. If you executed any assembly instruction, and tried to use the result less than 3 instructions later, you simply got the wrong value. The final kicker was that the VUs had both an integer and floating point pipe; when you wrote the assembly for it you literally wrote two instructions per line. Now put all this together and try to imagine what programming this system was actually like. On any given cycle you had to know the exact state of not just the two instructions on that line but also the 6 instructions still in various stages of execution from the previous 3 cycles. And if you were doing the V0 skinning trick, and trying to keep it in perfect synchronization with VU1, then you had to keep track of 16 different instructions all running simultaneously. And this was for each and every cycle of your inner loop, which was typically written to process 3 vertices at once with each step looping back (first pass for transform, next for lighting, next for uv). Programming the PS2 was hard. Programming it properly was an absolute nightmare!

PS2 was the beginning of a new era. It turned your home console into an entertainment center. It looked and functioned like a little mini PC, and doubled as your DVD player. Where-as the Dreamcast tried for the classic SNES console style, as did the gamecube. GTA 3, MetalGearSolid 2, Jak and Daxter. I still remember the first time I played the intro of GTA 3, and hopped into that first car on the bridge and starting driving, once I realized it was an actual open world, with radio stations. It was groundbreaking at the time, the previous GTA game was a top down DOS game. For me, this was mind blowing.

I remember an interview with Cory Bloyd, who worked at the Munkeyfun studio, and he had revealed how difficult/easy it was to develop for different consoles, from the N64 to the PS3. Here's what he said about the PS2: You got a 10-inch-thick stack of manuals written by Japanese hardware engineers. The first time you read the stack, nothing makes sense. The second time you read the stack, the 3rd book makes a little more sense because of what you learned in the 8th book. The machine has 10 different processors (IOP, SPU1&2, MDEC, R5900, VU0&1, GIF, VIF, GS) and 6 different memory spaces (IOP, SPU, CPU, GS, VU0&1) that worked in completely different ways. There were so many amazing things you could do, but it all required a lot of dedication. Getting the first triangle to appear on screen took months because it involved commands between the R5900->VIF->VU1->GIF-> processors and the strange memories, without any feedback about what you were doing wrong until you had taken each step all along this path. If you were willing to twist your game to fit the machine, you could achieve impressive results. There was a debugger for the main CPU (R5900). It worked very well.

Kutaragi was a maniac. A visionary maniac but still responsible for more gray and lost hairs amongst the development teams than any other person.

Some PS2 games still look modern 20 years later. Tekken 5 comes to mind.

The goal of many 60 FPS games on the PS2 really endeared it to me compared to many games of the generations that book-end the PS2. Smooth game play has always been something I have preferred going all the way back to the 8-bit days!

The studio I worked at during this time had optimised the disc I/O to such a degree that when the PS/2 Slim was released, our games stopped working due to I/O failures because of very slight timing differences in the IOP when Sony combined multiple processors into fewer packages. The fix was simple: swap two instructions around in the IOP code, but this was before the days of issuing patches. That era of game consoles was dominated by software developers spending a generation trying to catch up to the vision of the hardware engineers.

The jump from PS1 to PS2 was ridiculous. We went from largely impressionistic 3D to finely detailed 3D worlds and characters, and the characters could show emotion reasonably well. I feel so fortunate to have been able to get a PS2 at launch with Tekken Tag Tournament, and Timesplitters, and love that it still works. Silent Hill 2 and MGS 2 were just spellbinding.

I was working as an RA in the dorms at the time the PS2 came out. I remember how many PS2 boxes came in the door on release day, and how quickly they came in over the next few months via the mail room. No one really cared about the lack of games. The "killer app" that the Dreamcast and Gamecube lacked was the DVD player. Much like the PS3 years later, the PS2 was a very affordable (and at the time of release cheapest) DVD player on the market. Players were frequently $500-$1000. The PS2 came out and prices rapidly dropped post release resulting in the first sub $100 units at the end of 2000. We had a video rental place on campus that was VHS only until the PS2 came out, then they rapidly shifted to DVD.

Games built specifically for Dreamcast and then ported onto PS2 early on made people question the hardware. Somewhat understandably they were better on Dreamcast, but when games specifically built for PS2 started to arrive there was no more questioning the performance. GTA3, Gran Turismo 3 and Metal Gear Solid 2 arrived showcasing that PS2 could indeed outmuscle Dreamcast in the right hands. Later on sequels to these games showed incredible refinement. PS1 was my personal favourite era but i have to admit PS2 was probably the greatest console ever made. The list of ganes for it is unbeatable. The height of game quality and the sheer depth of the library is amazing.

Fun facts: GTA SA did collision detection on the a vector unit afaik Disc access was also reprogrammed and models + textures were moved next to each other so they can be read at the same time. There was also a copy of the archive in another part of the disc so the laser doesn't have to move too far. Adam Fowler was responsible for the disc system Interiors were put high up above the fly limit, with textures loaded across 17 dimensions so they could unload the outside world and have them more detailed Reflections worked by rendering a copy of the same room underneath with a transparent floor texture

Not as overhyped as the PS3's Cell processor. Or PS5's magical SSD. The PS2 was and always will be iconic for the advances in video game development.

I don't think I caught you mentioning this, but for some reason all of my friends and I referred (and still refer to this day) to that signature PS2 slow motion/blurring effect as "emotion engine", meaning that whenever we watch a twitch stream with a PS2 game that does it, we immediately all type "EMOTION ENGINE!" :D. Was this just something that we made up on our own, or was it common for other people to refer to that signature slow motion blurring as "emotion engine"? Fantastic video and really informative! Thank you!

October 26, 2000 I will never forget that day. I was in middle school and my parents were so cool they stood in line at Best Buy to get me a PS2 on launch day. Sure I had no games yet and was playing Crash Bash on it but I was so excited! Once I got Tekken Tag Tournament and a memory card I was in business.

I'm still in the PS2 era and choosing to stay here a while. Awesome console, amazing library!

My dad and I were in a Circuit City once in 2000, I look over at a wall of screens and there's a race on, so I say to my Dad "hey, races are on over there." As we start walking closer it starts to Dawn on us that it's a video game, ( Gran Turismo 3) and that led to months of us trying to get a hold of a PlayStation 2. My dad looked everywhere to find that damn thing. We even saw one poor guy who got the last unit out of a kb toys. He was putting it into his car he had it balanced on his knee against the trunk, (out of its box by the way,) and he lost balance and we both saw the thing shatter. That was a sad day. I remember when I finally got the PlayStation 2 because I was sicker than a dog with the flu for almost a week. My brother comes into my room with a box and he says "a package came from Dad." Instantly knew what it was and was excited beyond belief. I must have been playing PlayStation 1 games on that thing for 3 months before I could save enough allowance to buy my first PlayStation 2 game.

I love that you make these and I love that I’m someone who says “a deep dive on the emotion engine?? Yes please!”

Real time reflections in the opening of Xenosaga FFX being the first game with proper wind physics in the grass. Jak and Daxter being the first game to use Inverse Kinematics to prevent feet from sliding on the ground walk walking/running Gran Turismo being the one of the 1st console games to output at 1080i widescreen, ushering in Full HD PS2 gave us SOO much...