Last week I made a test in Bitwig where I boosted a 0dBFS sine wave by 64dB into "clipping", exported it to 32 bit float wav, imported it again, reduced gain by 64dB and there the old sine was in all it's glory. Theoretically now with rounding errors and a loss of precision, but nothing audible.

Of course as soon as you go into 24 or 16 bit fixed point representations (and you will have to eventually) that clipping becomes a problem.

...I feel like the "style" you're reacting to is the "N64 style", which is to say that you've become habituated to seeing games built to the N64's specific limitations. If the N64 had launched with better alpha blending, then "N64 style" would include PS1-esque explosions, but it didn't, so you don't.

It's like how people prefer 24 fps, because movies have long been recorded at 24 fps.

Obviously, this is just my intuition and we'll never the know the alternate history. But objectively, I don't see why explosions which resemble physical spheres better fits the aesthetics of Star Fox. But, those sorts of explosions absolutely do evoke the N64. If I was creating an N64-esque indie game, I would want to avoid alpha blending.

Using the RSP makes this possible at a reasonable framerate, but it requires writing custom microcode for it and Nintendo didn't provide the necessary tools or documentation back in the day.

My read is that this makes pseudo-HDR rendering techniques possible on the N64.

> However, it is possible to implement saturating addition and subtraction in software without branches, using only modular arithmetic and bitwise logical operations that are available on all modern CPUs and their predecessors, including all x86 CPUs (back to the original Intel 8086) and some popular 8-bit CPUs (some of which implement the Z80 instruction set) are still in production.

Does anyone know what the implementation of this is, without conditional moves?

I'm pretty sure the voodoo came out before all the others you mentioned.