Tomb Raider on the PC looked a LOT better than PS if you had a 3D Card it supported, which was PowerVR and 3DFX I think, could be wrong there. There is a Glide wrapper for it that allows it to run on modern 3D cards, but I've never had much success with it. Although havent tried that hard.
I cant remember what the highest resolution it supported on PC but I'm sure it was higher than PS which would also improve the visuals a bit

I'll leave the specs to someone else as I really cant remember.

Everything is about the same as far as I remember and I never had problems playing with a keyboard. I could between that and a pad on PS easily.

EPSXE is really good now. It's a bit of a pain to setup but one you it working and use the right graphics and sound plugins the games look surprisngly good.

There us a decent guide here regarding graphics plugins[/url]

Graphics :

Tomb Raider could support 320x200 and 640x480 in 2D software mode and 640x480 with a supported 3D accelerator. The game on the PS1 almost certainly used a 320x240 resolution.

The 320x200 resolution is very playable even with a modest Pentium, but the 640x480 mode requires something like a Pentium MMX to be playable. Otherwise its a bit of a slideshow.

I would say that the 640x480 software mode looks better than the PS1, but the 3D acceleration mode, at least with the 3dfx Voodoo, looks best of all.

PS1 has higher quality movies. Glidos can play these back with the PC version, but its not free.

Sound :

PS1 beats the PC hands down. There is more CD music in the PS version, whereas the PC game just plays the same background track over and over for each level. The sound effects in the PS1 sound more crisp and clear, presumably because the PC version had to support 8-bit sound cards while the PS1 could handle 16-bit samples.

Using the Tomb Raider Audio Pack will restore the music.

Control :

The PS1 game does not support the Analog controls of the Dual Shock. It is better overall than using a PC keyboard. However, you cannot completely remap the buttons. With all available control schemes, the jump button is ■ and the action button is x. Just as a reminder, here is the PS button layout :

. ▲ .
■ . o
. x .

In virtually all good games up to that point, the position of the buttons the game selects for the action and jump buttons is reversed.

PC version officially supports only 4 buttons using a joystick. If you run it in real mode DOS, this is all you can hope for. As there are more functions than 4 buttons can handle, you may need to use the keyboard. And there are always usual issues that gameport joysticks bring.

Running PC Tomb Raider in Windows or DOSBox allows you to use Joy2Key software to remap your gamepad's buttons to keyboard keys. This allows you to freely configure your gamepad as you like.

Great Hierophant wrote:

Graphics :

Tomb Raider could support 320x200 and 640x480 in 2D software mode and 640x480 with a supported 3D accelerator.

The PowerVR version can go up to 1024x768. With the lack of DAC blurring, 24-bit rendering w/ powerful dithering, and using your host card, this technically looks the best of the TR versions.

EPSXE will not look 'better' because of lower vertex precision. Wiggling would be obvious.

Hehe this is right up my alley. I had the PSOne and Tomb Raider was THE game to have.

Once the 3DFX Voodoo came out, you could patch your Tomb Raider game and BAM the game was stunningly beautiful. It was truly the dawn of a new era for me and I have been a Tomb Raider fan every since. I thoroughly enjoyed the last installment and looking forward to the next title!

So for me the PC version wins hands-down. The comfort of a nice big 21" screen with mouse and keyboard. Hmmmm

plus tomb raider was one of the few games that looked good on the matrox mystique