GoKawiilDominic Szablewski, @phoboslab — Monday, May 4th 2026
Additive Blending on the Nintendo 64
Did you ever wonder why explosions and other effects looked so much cooler on the original PlayStation than they did on the Nintendo 64?
“Silent Bomber“ for the PSX “Star Fox 64“ for the N64
The reason is additive blending! Or rather, in the N64 case, the lack thereof. While the N64 actually did support additive blending, it was practically unusable.
PSX
The PSX supports 4 different blend modes (in addition to just overwriting pixels) to control how sprites and geometry are mixed into the existing frame buffer:
0: (src + dst) / 2 1: src + dst 2: dst - src 3: dst + src/4
The one you see here in Silent Bomber is conceptually the simplest one: src + dst . That is, colors are just added to the existing ones in the frame buffer.
| R | G | B | | src (sprite) | 171 | 42 | 226 | | + dst (framebuffer) | 63 | 141 | 170 | | = result | 234 | 183 | 255 |
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