> Did you ever wonder why explosions and other effects looked so much cooler on the original PlayStation than they did on the Nintendo 64?

Begging the question, aren't we?! Of the examples displayed, I much prefer Star Fox's fx to Silent Bomber's. They fit the game's style well, and the explosions when killing an enemy are just the right amount of rewarding, while not being so ostentatious as to be distracting. SF64 nailed the game feel of destroying enemies, those small little intangibles that make the game satisfying on a visceral level, as Nintendo is so good at doing.

Discussed a bit more here in 2017-2018: https://forums.nesdev.org/viewtopic.php?t=16414

It's the same issue you encounter with audio mixing. You have to clamp out-of-range values, even though they don't occur a lot. If you don't you get awful artifacts, and have to lower everything so that it can never overflow your range.

Interesting so the N64 had a more flexible color blending process, and in doing that no clamping.

So the 'good explosions' were possible on N64 if you did the blending+clamp by hand?

  > Did you ever wonder why explosions and other effects looked so much cooler on the original PlayStation than they did on the Nintendo 64?

yes! fantastic article and now i finally know why ^^

Posted earlier this week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48067111

See also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturation_arithmetic