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Games Entertainment

The Playstation Documentation Project 108

Posted by emmett from the snagtrozac dept.
Hal the Slightly Incodecent writes: "After a year of hacking, The PSX Documentation Project is finished. It's basically a 153-page document discribing the innards of the PSX. All 100% free and GPLed. You can use this plus the PSXDEV, a cross-target development environment for the Sony PlayStation, to start rolling out your own (non-commercial) games. The documentation project is mine, PSXDEV is not. The original PSX doc is written in StarOffice 5.1 SDW format. There is an RTF version, a Word 97 DOC version and an HTML version as well."
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The Playstation Documentation Project More

The Playstation Documentation Project

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  • Two things:

    1. If you have the ability to post at +2, but are posting a clearly off-topic post (like the parent of this thread), then take that fraction of a second to hit "No Score +1 Bonus". It saves moderators the trouble of knocking you down, it saves some of your karma (if you care), and it lets people who read at higher threshholds ignore more crap.

    2. You took the time to put goatse.cx into a hyperlink? You sick, twisted man :)
  • Was the PSX SDK that this guy wrote GPL'ed? If it was I hope someone has a copy of it around.
  • As a QuakeForge developer - I'm the one that's doing MD2 to MDL and etc. I'm also not to be confused with the magical tiger cub Mercury, who does much more work, lol. - This story looked interesting, as we lobbyed Sony for a free "hobby licenese" to port QuakeForge to the PSX2. I haven't downloaded the files yet - but it seems the "SDK isn't here" and etc will make this another dead end.

    Maybe we should get Palsade to take up a hat, so we can buy a hobby license ( which cost to much to be a hobby ) for PSX2.

    Well, if the PSX2 (US) ships with and/or hdd or modem, I might try to hack at it - but the asm for the chipset seems like it'll be tough even though the main CPU is a MIPS. I still want to play with the dynamic pipeline the PSX2 provides mere mortals. ( The vector processor(s) can act as either an asycronsis cpu or coprocessor to the MIPS blah blah you hear it before )

    Just my rantings, while being sleep depraved... er... yeah that's right =)

    http://www.quakeforge.net

  • psxdev-sdk-1.0.tar.gz (Score:3)

    by greerga ( 2924 ) on Saturday April 29, 2000 @12:43PM (#1101936)
    You can find it on SourceForge still if you're interested: psxdev-sdk-1.0.tar.gz [lycos.com]
  • Why does the person who says, "Here is something I worked on, have it for free, have fun." have any responsibility for it? (meaning as far as it's legal).

    Commericial software complanies deny responsibility for anything their software may do.

    It's good to know what does not work right and I try to fix it. But when someone who pays nothing demands something?

    That's the type of attitude that will discourage people from giving away software.

  • Yes, it could further the spread of emualtors. Will it? Probably not. Except for some bloke setting out to create one simply for the joy of perfect emulation. (aka NESticle, UltraHLE) I don't see emulators getting much popular than they already are. The old cart-based systems are different than a PSX. They gave people a chance to play great games for their old skewl systems that they never got a chance to play, or sold years ago. ROMs could be downloaded in minutes.

    With a PSX OTOH, the consoles are cheap enough and plentiful enough that anyone wanting to code an emulator for the purpose of cheap gaming has the intelligence quotient of a fruit fly. And with a little bit of effort, any PSX game can be copied and played on a minimally-modified PSX. Downloading a PSX ISO over the internet is pretty much impractical for Joe Sixpack. Even if he had a decent broadband connection, the ISO images are incredibly difficult to find.

    And about PSX-compatible machine... it will NEVER happen in the conumer market. Sony holds all kinds of copyrights and patents that deal with how the PSX works, thereby making it impossible for someone to create a working clone. Don't believe me? Does the Apple Computer Corporation ring a bell?

    As a matter of fact, I can already see Sony sueing The Playstation Documentation Project within a few weeks, claiming that the information violates some law dealing with trade secrets.

  • But I haven't been working on it for over a year. Here is my shameless plug: http://members.home.net/narmi/
  • IANAL, but your analogy is terribly skewed in this instance... No company owns the format that a television station sends out it's information in. (NTSC or PAL, I think). The FCC owns the airwaves here in the US, but that's a different story. It's a completely different kind of market.

    However, Sony DOES have the right to take legal action against a company or person that produces and markets a PSX game that is NOT licensed through Sony. You want to make a PSX game, you have to buy a license. Legal Docmentiation? I have none, but it exists.

    Sony does not make money from selling their consoles or making games, they make their dough from selling licenses that allow publishers and developers to sell games that were designed to work with a Sony PlayStation(tm). Squaresoft, Electronic Arts, Activision, all of them have licenses to sell their games. In short, no license == no game. If you break that rule, you'll find yourself sitting in court.
  • Those are good points.

    I didn't think the original was all that ncredibly off topic to the subject however, expecially compared to really offtopic subjects like this one ;)

    And yes I am a sick, twisted man.

    Marc

  • Oh, and other thing about the license. All games developed by a third party under a license from Sony undergo constant quality assessment during development by some Sony representative. This is to prevent games from being released that don't match up to Sony's standards of what kind of game they want on their system. (Note that they don't have to be FUN or ENTERTAINING games to meet Sony's requirements sometimes. :P) All the big console makers do this, and this is the primary reason you never saw any blood or gore in a Super Nintendo game prior to cicra-1994.
  • An open platform is exactly what Sony and Sega DO NOT WANT. Their money comes from licensing the games developed by third parties. To (legally) create a PlayStaion game, you need a) a license and b) a developers kit, which last I heard cost around US$30,000 for hardware + software. Small change for developers, large change for me and you.

    This all goes back to the Quality Control rant I posted in a thread above.
  • A PSX development kit (commercial one and Net-Yarouze I believe) will have the ability to burn correct PSX CDs, but a PC CDR drive does not and will likely never due to the fact that it involves deliberately messing up the checksums on the disk.

    The easy solution is a modchip. Buy one for $20 (or make your own for a little more, it's not that hard), solder the sucker in and you're in business. I've done it, I ought to know. Soldering is not difficult once you've a few hours practice and someone to teach you.

    Please, PLEASE stay away from the Game Enhancer clones. They work fine for some games, but not with many. The problem has mostly to do with fact that all they do is send stop and start commands to the CD drive's spindle so that you can do the swap trick without ruining the drive motor. Any games that use redbook audio or have multpile discs will not work or will not work properly. I don't have time to explain why, but there are plenty of web pages explaining why on the net. Google is your friend.
  • I could write a book on it, but I'd rather just send you this link :-)

    http://www.scea.sony.com/net/what.htm [sony.com]

  • Why do you think microsoft is making the x-box?

    Cringely spent an entire article a while ago discussing this very issue (damned if I can find it now, though...). First of all, is Microsoft really making the X-Box? In fact, there are two questions here - what the X-Box means now, and what the X-Box might mean in the future - if or whenever the Great Master of Vapourware at Redmond ever see fit to go ahead and actually build the damned thing; this might happen by 2001, it might happen by 2003 or it might not happen at all, depending on just how important Microsoft believes gaming consoles to be.

    However, the first question can be answered right away. At the moment, the X-Box is Microsoft's way of telling the Big Console Makers (Sega and Nintendo also, but especially Sony), "if you don't watch your back, we can easily invade your turf... we can take over your market just like we took over every other market in which we were ever interested". In doing this, they make sure that the BCMs shy away from their current attitude of promoting the next-generation consoles as PC replacements, and focus instead on reinforcing and protecting their own established turf so that Microsoft won't be able to annihilate them with the X-Box. This, in turn, leaves Microsoft's reign over the PC market untouched.

    Will the strategy work? Will the X-Box ever be released? Will the gaming console replace the PC in the near future? All these things remain to be seen.
  • So there's an RTF Manual? Is that what people mean when they tell me RTFM?
  • I agree that they didn't make money when they were introduced, but don't forget, the prices are also higher when something is brand new. I can't imagine the cost of making a PSX today being much more than $25 USD.

    As for the x-box being only vaporware, I fully agree.
  • Even if Sony has any legal means of shutting the original site down, they can't shut down all the mirrors, or the copies people have saved for themselves.

    If Sony can't successfully stop an emulator from being released, then they can't stop this.
  • No, you can still program in c/c++. You just have to do a little more work - you get to make your own SDK. The one everyone is talking about did little beyond expose the functionality built into the psx bios, and with that big psx doc, you can hack that together pretty quickly.
  • The PSX documentation and the PSXDEV software are FROM COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PEOPLE, you dumbass. The software works, and the SDK was indeed an SDK (although it didn't do enough to merit the fuss thats being made over it).
  • Write your own SDK. The SDK everyone is so interested in did little beyond expose the builtin functions in the psx bios. Given the big psx doc, plus a little time, its easily recreatable.

  • Cool (Score:1)

    by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )
    It this were to be developed with something like SDL (not sure if this is possible tho) people could play the same game on many different platforms. The main advantage would be that PS users would be able to play against PC users. :) Of course, we PC users would have better input devices, but what the hey.

    -------
    CAIMLAS

  • I quote from freshmeat:

    PSXDEV is a free GPL'd development environment for the PlayStation (PSX).

    Releases 6 and 7 (and probably earlier ones) were under the GPL. Therefore, he has to provide source for these versions, which he is not doing. Also, he must stop using any other GPL'ed code if he wishes to release binary RPM's to the public, and considering the nature of the product, this might be difficult. (We're talking about gcc, binutils... free software, guys!)

    Someone please send him a nice e-mail explaining what he can and can't do with GPL'ed software. There's nothing wrong with changing your own license for a new version of a program that's all your code, but that isn't what's going on here.
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
  • Sony, Sega and Nintendo do not make profits selling the consoles. They lose money on them. Their profits come from licensing development toolkits to developers. Freeing the development toolkits would be a very bad move if they want to make a profit.

  • An open platform means more games, more programmers, and, more importantly, more sales.

    Unlike PC makers, console makers actually take a loss on console sales. They make it up by developing software (Crash Bandicoot etc.), selling devkits, and licensing the patent rights.

  • Here (Score:2)

    by friedo ( 112163 )
    I have posted a ASCII version here [rit.edu]

    Enjoy.

  • He doesn't have to supply the sources to it, because he's not distributing it anymore. And if he decided to release later versions of the software under a closed license, he doesn't have to distribute the source with those, either. It's his software, he can do whatever he wants with it.

    -----------

    "You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."

  • what would possess someone to posts excerpts without adding any insight to said excerpts?

    Protection against the Slashdot Effect. Even if the site gets Slashdotted, the basics are here so that we can get the gist of the article.

    that information is one click away.

    That is, until the site experiences the distributed denial of service commonly referred to as "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters."

  • I dont get it: all the stuff thats inside the PS is proprietary, copyrighted and presumably covered by patents. So how can someone hack that stuff and GPL it? I honestly dont understand how this should legally work. Come on, enlighten me.
  • Information wants to be free. We want linux to be widely used so that there are more programers available to write cool programs for us.

    Therefore, O'Reilly should release their books on the 'net for free?
    --

  • Re:No SDK (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    i have a question.

    so without his SDK, you cant program the playstation in c/c++?

    ummm, then whats the point of making all these nice gtk apps and drivers if you cant use them!??
  • Oh yeah... now I can make that PSX port of NetHack [nethack.org].
  • If your friends got a PSX older than scp9000, they can buy an external ModChip-GameShark-GameBoyEmu
    device. But watch out some GB Emulators don't have sound.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Nope. Console makers make money on console sales. Ever opened up a Playstation? There isn't much inside. They're not that expensive to make.

    Why do you think microsoft is making the x-box? Good profit margin.
  • They profit off of licensing games for the system. Even though the devkits are expensive, let's look at the realities of things...would you make more money selling 1000 $20K dev kits, or licensing millions of copies of games every year?

  • So how is this work with emulators? If you wrote a PlayStation game but released it only for emulators say as a download from the net or burned to CD-R how does Sony have any right to block you if you aren't using any of their hardware or software to develop and you aren't including their trademark on the game? I don't see how they can legally do much to somebody who has never signed any agreement with them and who is using none of their intellectual property in their product. It'd be a pretty lame lawsuit to sue someone for using low level hardware specs in the programming of a game that they never claimed to work on your platform. What about a version of Linux that runs on PlayStation. Then if I code a Linux game and somebody figures out that they can burn a copy of PSX Linux and my game to cd-r and play it on their PSX is it my fault? I really hope that somebody is working on a PSX version of Linux that is API compat w/ the video/sound stuff Loki and others are working on for Linux. :)
  • I find it somewhat humorous that the majority of reactions to this article are complaints about GPL-compliance and legal issues. Has the MPAA/RIAA/*.* lawsuits/bullying scared so many fellow geeks away from such a cool possibility?

    For those of you that remember the Yaroze, this is a big deal! The Yaroze program is not accepting any new members in the U.S. and cost a few hundred dollars to take part in. I, for one, am going to tackle porting my Win32 3d Engine to the PlayStation.

    To the Slashdotters who complain that the author isn't being perfectly compliant with the GPL: Grow up. This is one of the coolest applications of the Open Source concept ... and I would like to think that more coders would be dying for a chance at PSX coding. The creator of the software is giving away the software. It is *free*. You can write your own PlayStation games now... for *free*. This has the potential to create a community of size that the Yaroze never could command ...
  • Now that the government has denied people the right to think, it's quite inevitable that Sony will shut these people down.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • You posted this too late, I suppose

    This deserves to be at LEAST score: 3
  • I made a mirror of it, just in case it 'disappears' (Next to the DeCSS & QuakeLives source):

    http://home.wanadoo.nl/whatdoya/ [wanadoo.nl]

    Now I would like a native Linux PSX emu ;-)

  • Hi guys,

    I think you should be informed that my mysterious psxdev SDK was just some types and functions. It had nothing in common with the official, NDA'd developer material. I removed it from my site because I wrote it for my personal amusement and not for the public. I think it was a mistake to publish it - now I get tons of mail from kids.

    I originally wrote PSXDEV for the Yaroze station, because of this crappy MSDOS environment. But it evolved very quickly and I thought others (like game companies) may find it useful. My web server logs are quite a proof that some companies do find it useful :-)

    And to clear some of these myths:

    • Linux for PSX-1
      I've tried it. I got a kernel compiled, but the missing MMU made me crasy. I've used portions of the uClinux project to emulate the MMU, but the limited resources of the PSX showed me that it wasn't useful at all. I dropped that project.
    • Linux for PSX-2
      This project has already started. Visit The Wulfstation Project [slashdot.org]'s Homepage. That's a serious project. We don't want to use such a cluster to crack DVD's or games. Linux for PSX-2 is definitely possible and very easy. But don't expect a distro. And it is not useful for games.
    And again about Linux and PSX-2: as announced by sony, the official SDK is linux based. PSX-2 ifself is not powered by linux, because the linux kernel is (actually) not useful for games. (just search for the announcements on this site)

    And last but not least: what if sony sues me? Very simple. I will shut down psxdev.de, gift all the material to game companies and let me hire by one of them. Or what do you think I have planned for the near future, i.e. writing MS Office applications?

    have fun.. daniel

  • Get a bunch of Playstations, overclock them to 1 Ghz, port Linux to them, and then make a gigantic Beowulf cluster.
  • Wouldn't this also further the spread of emulators?

    Is the past precedent set with the Sony v. Connectix case enough to prevent lawsuits against gaming companies formed to create "free" games without a license from Sony?
  • That`s known to be a bad April fool`s joke.
  • Get a bunch of Playstations, overclock them to 1 Ghz, port Linux to them, and then make a gigantic Beowulf cluster.

    Have Linux and gcc been ported to Playstation yet?
  • ...which would sort of imply that if we are going to have a version of Linux running on that thing, that some Sony rep has to give it the thumbs-up.
    (Along with all the costs and license restrictions that this would bring)

    Kernel reconfiguration will have to be done in a 3d 'shoot this wall to enable network aliasing support' style... etc.

  • I'd love to have a Playstation CD with MAME and a bunch of ROMs on it. :) Yeah, yeah, the ROMs aren't commercially distributable... but if I could press my own CD with my own ROMs, that'd be fine by me!

    Is it possible for a normal CD burner to produce a CD which will boot and run on a Playstation, or is there some sort of copy protection which needs to be in place?

  • No SDK (Score:4)

    by EvlG ( 24576 ) on Saturday April 29, 2000 @09:17AM (#1101981)
    I visited the web site and noted that the developer removed the SDK, and posted that his reasons are "clsoed source." What's the deal with that? Did he remove the SDK because Sony got pissed, because he decided he wanted to sell it? Because he just got tired of supporting it?

    I think that free software authors have a certain responsiblity to the community of users they create. It's simply not fair to your users to post a bunch of files and later remove them from distribution, without an explanation.

    I wonder how this thing can be useful, if there's no SDK. Are we supposed to write all the games in assembler?
  • Lets take for example my best friend that has PS: He bought it to play games like Tekken, NFS3 and more. I'm presenting his as a general user, I'm asking myself for what will he need PS Documentation Project? Well the answer is clear: He doesn't need it at all, because as the most of PS users (I don't counting the induviduals that bought PS just to find what in the box and how can they hack/fix/overcloak/destroy it) he bought PS with only one purpose and the purpose is: To play games. I understand that the Documentation wasn't made for users like that but is it good to write a very fat Documentation that almost won't be used? I know that some people will say "YES" but if they right, why don't we start writing Documentation for any program that anyone makes using the most simple programming languages even thought there are lot of apps of that type we make documentation to each and each prgram. My question here is does it costs the job?

  • Re:Emulators? Legal action? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This could also result in a company creating a playstation compatible console with higher performance and dvd playback for the people who wanted a playstation 2 for dvds and can't run all of their games because only the ones that use the sony API are supported under the playstation 2. This could create a serious problem for sony because if the competitors console was designed well enough games might come out supporting both consoles on one dvd.

  • Graphics:

    • The GPU is the unit responsible for the graphical output of the PSX. It handles display and drawing of all graphics. It has the control over an 1MB frame buffer, which at 16 bits per pixel gives you a maximum "surface" of 1024x512 resolution. It also contains a 2Kb texture cache for increased speed. The display can be set for 15-bit color or 24-bit color.
    Number crunching:
    • Because the PSX also totally lacks an FPU. A second coprocessor has been added called the Geometry Transformation Engine or GTE. The GTE is the heart of all 3d calculations on the PSX. The GTE can perform vector and matrix operations, perspective transformation, color equations and the like. It is much faster than the CPU on these operations. It is mounted as the second coprocessor (Cop2) and as such takes up no physical address space in the PSX. The GTE is covered later in the document.
    Movies:
    • The Motion Decoder (MDEC) is a special controller chip that takes a compressed JPEG-like images and decompresses them into 24-bit bitmapped images for display by the GPU. The MDEC can only decompress a 16x16 pixel 24-bit image at at time,called "Macroblocks" These Macrobock are encoded block that uses the YUV (YCbCr) color scheme with Discrete Cosine Transformation (DCT) and Run Length Encoding (RLE) applied The MDEC also performs 24 to 16 bit color conversion to prepare it for whatever color depth the GPU is in. Due to the extremely high speed that the decompression is done, the decompressed RGB bitmaps can be combined to from larger pictures and then ,if displayed in sequential order, to produce movies.
    Sound:
    • The SPU has 24 hardware voices. These voices can be used to reproduce sample data, noise or can be used as frequency modulator on the next voice. Each voice has it's own programmable ADSR envelope filter. The main volume can be programmed independently for left and right output.
  • I have seen this page on Linux on the N64 [heise.de] but I don't know if it's true or not.
  • I don't see how this would change anything in the emu world. Good PSX Emulators (with cracks) are pretty easy to find and download already. Maybe we will see a new beta of Bleem! in a month or two, but that's it imo.
  • ISOs hard to find? You have got to be kidding. Multiple thousands of people trade psx isos every day on the irc networks, and thousands more download them as readily as they used to download warez on ftps. Anyone with a school ethernet hookup, no conscience, and a cd burner can be in psx piracy heaven.
  • ...and use the cluster to run DeCSS and decode our DvD's under Linux!
  • This is Playstation, not Playstation2.. No DVD drive.... Wait, I just ruined your joke. My bad.
  • Thank you! That document may have contained good information, but the presentation was so ugly I couldn't stand to read very much of it.

    Let this be a lesson to all of you: Office products product absolutely nasty HTML because they try to make your document look like it came from a word-processor instead of look like a normal web page. Sometimes trying to preserve the original appearance of something in a new medium is a really bad idea.

  • The content is great, but perhaps you're overlooking the most readable crossplatform document format:

    Text
    ___

  • Re:No SDK (Score:3)

    by MarkKomus ( 71304 ) on Saturday April 29, 2000 @09:31AM (#1101992)
    "I think that free software authors have a certain responsiblity to the community of users they create."

    I'm not sure that they have any real responsiblity to the community, what they are doing is for their enjoyment and done for free. It would be great if people could continue to support software they write but that doesn't always work out. In this case the author may just have had something happen to him personally that he doesn't want the whole world knowning about. I hate not knowing reasons as much as anyone, but sometimes we have to just accept it.

  • Re:No SDK (Score:4)

    by silicon_synapse ( 145470 ) on Saturday April 29, 2000 @09:32AM (#1101993)
    I don't think free software authors have a responsibility to the community at all. When they write something and decide to give it away, we should be grateful and WE owe THEM. If they decide they don't want to give it away anymore, that's too bad but it's their code and their choice. They don't have to explain anything.


    How am I supposed to hallucinate with all these swirling colors distracting me?
  • Don't mind me, I didn't realize this was just one package, I thought he meant the whole distribution (all of PSXDEV).

    (The wording didn't seem clear to me, just like where they say "GNU General Public License Version 2", and link to the LGPL...)

    What confused me was, I still saw all the binary RPMs for the different packages, which would mean that he *is* still distributing it. Now I see the source RPMs, and realize they were just talking about one program. :)
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].

  • Re:Looks good... (Score:3)

    by Ian Schmidt ( 6899 ) on Saturday April 29, 2000 @10:30AM (#1101995)
    Bleem exploits a bug in the Windows 9x kernel to get itself into Ring 0 (kernel mode on Intel processors) and wreak havoc without Windows' interference. As you might imagine, we can't allow that on Wine :-)
  • First, it's "conceited".

    Second, I've been here for a while, and it works like this. Moderators have a limited amount of time to look through a lot of posts for important stuff. Tagging a post with "Moderate this up!" increases the chance that they will look at it, and evaluate it to see if it looks important.

    Therefore, writing something that looks important and saying "Moderate this up!" is a good way to get initially modded up. However, if you didn't deserve this moderation, you'll get flamed, sometimes quite legitimately, followed by "Insightful? WTF?!?!!", and get moderated down to oblivion.

    Therefore, this tactic should only work correctly if you actually have something to say, which is the point of moderation in the first place.

    I thought I had something important to say about what I saw as a rather large GPL violation. But upon rereading their page carefully, I realized that I was completely wrong. And maybe you could have figured that out from my reply to Foogle (if that was up at the time you posted), I essentially said "Never mind, my fault, etc., etc.".

    Sure, their website is confusing, and they got other details wrong, but fundamentally I didn't realize what people were getting upset about, didn't see the source RPMs, and thought the situation was worse than it actually was.

    Feel free to keep moderating, just mod the good posts up, and ignore these three! ;)
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
  • Well, since the games will be put onto a CD-R disk, won't you need a MOD chip in whatever Playstation your using? This isn't a problem for me but it is for alot of my friends who don't have MOD chips and don't feel confident in their own skill to take a soldering iron to their PSX's chipset.

  • I've made a split-up version of the pages [bestiary.com] on my home page. Hopefully this is a bit easier to read than the 1.5Mb document on Joshua's site...
  • No, but gcc is available as a cross-compiler.

    (see above, over-moderated crap about PSXDEV, sorry guys...)
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].

  • Re:GPLing copyrighted material? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    You can't copyright ideas, only the expression of the ideas. So the instruction set and algorithms aren't copyrighted, but if Sony produces a document on the instruction set they can copyright that (and put it under NDA). Someone else can produce a document and license it however they want. Or they can make a compiler and GPL it. I don't know if any patents apply here, but copyright doesn't apply. Reverse engineering for interoperability is specifically allowed, even by the DMCA. That's why PS emulators are legal now.

  • N64DEV (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    BTW there is also a free N64 dev project:

    n64dev.50megs.com [50megs.com]

  • If he made a clean room implementation - then Sony doesn't stand a chance..

  • note how it says on that page, that the pro action replay doesn't work on 9000 series psx consoles. consider that all of the $99 playstations that target etc have been pumping out are all 9000 series.

    --

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • There's a possibility of getting Connectix Virtual Game Station to run on Wine (it's a heck of a lot more compatible with PSX games than bleem, and they didn't resort to teenage hax0r tricks to write it :) It doesn't work yet though (needs address space separation, like an increasing pile of other things).

    PSEmuPro is playable on recent versions of Wine, but only if you have a 3dfx GLIDE compatible video card and Glide3x for Linux installed (I get nice flat 60 FPS on my Voodoo2 playing Raystorm with sound :-)
  • I believe GCC is the official compiler for PS2.
    Linux, on the other hand, no.
  • Could it not be argued that to prevent someone making a product that works with, in this example, a Sony Playstation, has about as much legal sense as Sony trying to prevent the BBC from making a television programme that can be viewed on, say, a Sony television set?

    I've never thought the legal system made much sense anyway.

    If there are any lawyers out there in /.land, could they explain why Sony would be able to prosecute people for writing games for it's console? Seems to me that the customer, the End User would gain; and like the MPAA, the rich guys really hate that.
  • Stallman in the past has spoken directly to that topic. He feels that books like the O'Reilly ones, being non-free, take away the incentive for people to write free documentation.

    It is rather ironic how much money one can spend on books and documentation for free software.

    Yes, I know, I know. That's how the free software developers make their money... is that really true? Not very many of the O'Reilly books are written by the software author him/herself (the Camel and Llama books are an exception).

  • Let's get real. No matter how much of a precedent this is, it simply won't stop a huge electronics company from legally harassing a smaller, nimble company whose only crime is to deliver a technically superior compatible product.

    More often than not, in situations like these the purpose of the lawsuit is to bury the defendant with legal fees. Do you think that the DVD CCA is suing all these people just because they think that the law is on their side? Well, that may be true to some extent, but you bet your bippy that the overwhelming motivation is to simply legally harass the defendant, on the premise that the defendants simply do not have the funds for legal fees.

    So, even though Sony was bitch-slapped in the Connectix case, that doesn't stop them in any way from filing an identical lawsuit, even word-for-word, against someone else.

  • Sure, they're cheap to make now. The parts are cheaper, the design has been refined, ports removed, etc. Sony probably sells 'em at cost (or at a small profit). But when the PSX first came out Sony took a loss on every one sold. The PS2 is the same way.

    I forget the exact numbers, but Sony's per-unit game license fee is pretty hefty. That's where the big $$ is... and that's why you don't see PSX games being produced without a license.

  • Reverse engineering for interoperability is specifically allowed, even by the DMCA.

    What is the interoperability in reverse engineering PS?

    It seems like interoperability would relate to mail clients, word processors, etc. Or is it now okay to define 'interoperablity' as 'making anything capable of running anything else'? It seems to me like bending the rules.

  • > If you wrote a PlayStation game but released it only for emulators say as a download from the net or burned to CD-R how does Sony have any right to block you if you aren't using any of their hardware or software to develop and you aren't including their trademark on the game?

    I don't see how Sony would have any legal standing ... the game would be your work.


    > I don't see how they can legally do much to somebody who has never signed any agreement with them and who is using none of their intellectual property in their product.

    Yes, that is the important part.

    The emulator itself might be on shaky ground. (Where did the ROM's come from?) They might have an invisible contract when you buy the PSX saying you do not have the right to backup up the ROMs. But since you never signed any NDA's or anything else, I think this would be shaky as well.

    Frankly Sony doesn't care about the garage developer, they are more concerned about people pirating licensed games. That, and the PSX is already 5 years old: the PS2 has all the focus right now.

    Cheers

  • Assuming M$'s console isn't vaporware -- it has one BIG advantage over other consoles: Easy porting of PC games to it. Don't understand what a big deal this makes to smaller developers !

    There are a lot of games that just can't be done on a console (or rather badly, e.g. Warcraft 2 on PSX) due to limited memory.

    Have you checked out Worms: Armageddon on the Dreamcast? Now the Dreamcast has some nice hardware, even 16 Megs of ram too boot, but the PC version is WAY better

  • Back when I worked on Need For Speed 1 for PSXin 96, our game code ended up about 600K, leaving the rest of system ram for road geometry and textures. (Allthough I believe we crammed all the textures into the video memory. They were 8-bit palettized textures, at a screen rez of 320x240.)
  • The biggest problem I have with consoles is picture quality. Since they're meant to be hooked up to a TV, consoles don't support high resolutions, and the resolutions supported are interlaced, which increases flickering.

    TVs aren't very sharp either, so detailed graphics will go unnoticed. Playing PC games on a TV just blows because you can't see all the incredible detail that your expensive Voodoo3/GeForce/etc renders.
  • you need a modchip for this...
    but the cd with the roms doesent need any such
    because of the MAME cd already beeing loaded in mem...
  • Interestingly his page continually warns me that I am not using linux.... his page script says
    if (navigator.platform != "LinuxELF2.0")
    How very interesting. Has Navigator ever said that? I thought it said X11; Linux as the string. KFM satisfies it, though.

    Offtopic but what the hell, it bothered me.
  • One: none of it's copyrighted. You can't copyright a device; that is what patents are for.

    Two: Yes, it's proprietary, and a good chunk of it is patented.

    However, there's a nice little thing called fair use, which allows one to do this sort of thing with a protected work for personal, educational/research use, or to achieve compatibility. This falls under the "educational use" part of the fair use doctrine. Because there is a very complete workks cited list, our friend here has nothing to worry about. It all appears to be quite legitimate.
  • to start rolling out your own (non-commercial) games

    The Document itself is under a no-restrictions license. PSXDEV's license issues look complex, but you can write PSX software with out using PSXDEV. So why can we not use this to make commercial software? Does Sony make you pay a license to sell Playstation software? If so how could they enforce this?

    tangent - art and creation are a higher purpose

  • Re:No SDK (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 29, 2000 @09:43AM (#1102021)
    You can see Google's cached copy of the download page here [google.com]. The SDK is still listed, with an MD5 checksum of 51444aa8fe8469f009020bfdf86f2fab. An RPM and SRPM were also available. Too bad Google doesn't mirror binaries.
  • Heh heh heh.

    Yeah, and emulating that stuff comes with quite a penalty, I understand.

    Ah well, no Bleem. Next option? :)
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
  • How does an off-topic post receive a score of 2?

    If you payed attention and didn't spend all your time with your incredibly weak attempts at flamebait you would notice that some people post at +2 by default. This is after they have reached a certain level of karma.

    Of course you are too busy trolling for Goatse.cx [goatse.cx] and rather immature name calling to notice such things aren't you?

    Love,

    -Marc

    Flame all you want, I'll post more.

  • LaTeX Version (Score:3)

    by Bob Uhl ( 30977 ) on Saturday April 29, 2000 @10:56AM (#1102024)

    I am currently working on a LaTeX version of the documentation. Go to http://latakia.dyndns.org/~ruhl/playst ation/ [dyndns.org] to take a look. It is a work in progress, but every change I make will be mirrored on the site immediately (the magic of hard links!).

  • As a rule, I don't moderate up posts that say "Moderate this Up!"

    You said, Moderators have a limited amount of time to look through a lot of posts for important stuff. . Yes, they do have a limited amout of time to moderate, but 3 days is definately a good chunk of time. When I get moderator priveleges, I usually spend about a day & 1/2 to get rid of em (keep in mind I reload Slashdot incessently). Just let moderators do their jobs.

    On a side note, apparently the way to get moderator status often is to read Slashdot a lot, and post just enough to keep, say, 10 "recent posts" in your user info. Ever since I slowed down posting, I've got moderator status a lot more often. Just a thought :).
  • I have been aware of this project for a while now, but have never seen any applications created from it. Don't get me wrong, I am not trying to bitch, I have high hopes for members of the Demo Scene porting some classic demos or creating fresh ones directly on the PSX. A Cthugha port also seems logical, as does Geiss, etc.

    At this point my PSX is mostly collecting dust. I would love to put it back to work diligently rendering fresh eye candy.

    Does anyone know of any ISO images out there ready to burn?

  • Soldering is not difficult once you've a few hours practice and someone to teach you.

    It's not even that complicated. I taught myself basically. With the modchips, I just sort of tapped the solder points on the board until they were softened up, then touch the wire and voila, it hardens up. I accomplished it with merely being gentle on a handful of playstations. The trickier part is prying the cables out of their sockets without breaking...
  • Well, according to the docs the processor is a RISC running at 33mhz.. Sure, just move the jumper to the x30 multiplier?? Hehe.. JoeDark
  • > The biggest problem I have with consoles is picture quality.

    Yes, free anti-aliasing. :)

    Specifically:

    1. Spatial Anti-Aliasing. Text looks HORRIBLE on TV's due to a imprecise location of the "fuzzy" pixel.

    2. Temporal Anti-Aliasing. As you mentioned, interlaced video provides for more fuzziness.

    > TVs aren't very sharp either, so detailed graphics will go unnoticed.

    Yes, with about an effective video height resolution of around 500 pixels, monitors win this one hand down.

  • Documented Systems (Score:3)

    by zavyman ( 32136 ) on Saturday April 29, 2000 @09:57AM (#1102038)
    That is so great that the PS has such a complete documentation, allowing any programmer make games for the platform. Two systems that I would love to program for, given the chance, were Sega Saturn and Sega CD. But there was no generally available development enviornment or even specs on what was inside.

    I hope companies like Sony and Sega realize that people really want to have the platform open. An open platform means more games, more programmers, and, more importantly, more sales. It's too bad that Sony didn't do this themselves and it took a combined effort to get this released. And they released it completely for free!
  • Maybe the various playstation projects for Linux will show some more progress? Or maybe people will show some more interest in them?

    Do any of the PSX emulators reimplement the BIOS functions with C routines? I heard that was what UltraHLE did. Besides, then non-PSX owners could use it without having to (legally) get a PSX BIOS.

    However, I'd be very happy if a game company released a cross-platform emulator sometime before the system itself is dead. I don't want a Playstation, but I'd love to be able to play the later Final Fantasy games under Linux, for instance.

    That means that either Square has to port them, x86/DOS/Windows emulators under Linux have to get a lot better (Wine doesn't run FF7; does Wine run "Bleem!"? Does VMWare use 3D-cards, or could the X Server help on that?), or PSX emulators will have to get a lot better. I'd happily buy Tactics, but I'd be playing it on my computer! (I don't have a TV, just a TV Card, getting a PSX just seems silly. :)
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].

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