Cygnus, The PlayStation2 and Linux 54
The compiler targets Toshiba's new 128-bit CPU, and includes extensions to program the custom graphics chips in the next generation Playstation.
The simulator simulates most of the NG Playstation console, but you can't quite use it to play games on it - its CPU outperforms even a Pentium III. However, the simulator lets game designers debug things that would be impossible with hardware, and since it's GPL'd, they can modify it as needed to help them debug.
The tools will be available through Sony's usual developer channels as part of their hardware development systems, and yes, they'll be GPL (the compiler and simulator, at least) for those people who buy them. Cygnus will sell support contracts to game developers.
Eventually, of course, the changes to gcc, gdb, and other FSF programs will get rolled into the public releases.
You will be able to read the press releases on Monday.
Let the games begin! "
create your own? (Score:1)
well if they are gonna release the tools, wouldn't that mean that joe programmer will have the ability to code his own psx2 games or tools? imagine the possibilities.. how cool. xbill for psx2
"Prozac, because it works!"
woo hoo (Score:1)
Emu? (Score:1)
I'll believe it when I see it. (Score:1)
I can't wait until I can get my hands on the Emotion Engine version of Virtual Stoop Tag 2000!
-The Cheese
think for a second (Score:1)
create your own? (Score:1)
Remember, development system for the original Playstation (at least the one by Psygnosis / SN Systems) uses GCC, too. That doesn't mean that everyone with a Linux box can hack it.
PSX development costs $$$ (Score:2)
Maths performance... (Score:1)
Why restrict the developers? (Score:1)
not want everybody jumping on their bandwagon?
An awful long time to start up (Score:1)
Doesn't that designation have some sort of expiration date?
But! (Score:1)
PSX development costs $$$ (Score:1)
Why restrict the developers? (Score:3)
If Sony were to release their tools, people would probably start releasing games outside this setup. They have absolutely no vested interest in giving their development kit away for free, as their development kit allows them to retain control over their developers.
That said, however, I could see a day when they allow their developer to sell programs for a PC Playstation (a linux box with a nice video card). Porting ought to be pretty easy. As long as they retain their $10 fee, they won't care. In fact, seeing as though they won't have to eat the costs of building, distributing, and selling the Playstation itself, I think Sony might even prefer this setup. Time will tell...
tools are GPL? well, pretty sure the emu won't be (Score:3)
I did not know DJ Delorie worked for Cygnus ... (Score:1)
When did that happen (or did he help found Cygnus?)
How does Delorie.COM factor into Cygnus then (still a separate entity?).
Setting a few things straight... (Score:1)
1.) Just because you get the compiler, and maybe even the simulator, doesn't mean you will be able to write PSX2 games. You often need things like, say, libraries and docs on the instruction set! You could probably get the basic instruction set from the compiler code, but you still need things like addresses of certain hardware features.
I was at GDC and saw first hand the demos of PSX2. The Sony VP explicitly stated that programming for the multiple vector units had to be done in assembly to get any type of efficiency. Try doing that without documentation...
2.) Even if you could run regular PSX2 games on the simulator, do you have ANY clue as to how slow they would go? The PSX2 can sustain 50+ million poly/sec because of its 3 vector floating point units. A PC with sufficient hardware acceleration won't be able to match that until at least late 2000. Not to mention the GLORIUS hardware acceleration support there is for Linux... I would imagine that the current simulator chunks out less than 1 fps on their demos, very playable...
3.) Sony will NEVER release an PSX2 emulator for the PC. Even thought they only make money on software sales, and despite the fact that a PC won't be able to handle PSX2 games for at least a couple years, there are other issues. If an emulator is sold, there is less demand for the hardware. Less demand for the hardware leads to less demand for software written for it, even if it can be run on PC's. Developer's will just write everything for PC's, and Sony loses money. Just ask yourself why Sony is suing Connectix for their PSX1 emulator.
Sorry to smash the fantasy...
Dan
danjohnston@mindspring.com
tools are GPL? well, pretty sure the emu won't be (Score:1)
DJ!
So the sim is GPL'ed as well...? Sweet! The next question is whether it's going to be available seperately or not...?
Basically, is all of this something that falls into the (reasonable) GPL situation of 'if you license it, you get the source, if you don't, it's not available, unless you can get it from someone else who has licensed it'?
I don't know if Sony sees it this way or not, but I can definitely picture this being a GREAT way for people who want game industry jobs to learn the innards of the engine before applying for work at game companies, for example. This would accelerate the normal 'hardware internals' advances amazingly.
(What I mean by that is that the normal game-generations start with 'standard libraries, standard coding', and accelerate with better libraries, more asm-oriented programming, then better and better understanding of how to use the hardware to the absolute maximum... If you start out with a simulator whose source is 100% available, and 100% accurate, then your ability to understand the hardware enough to max it is jumpstarted really really strongly! This means Good Things(tm)!)
Anyhow, the jist is that I'd like to know if this stuff is going to be available to non-Sony developers at all, especially prior to the actual US launch...?
Cyberfox!
PSX development costs $$$ (Score:1)
Personally, I'm amazed and very pleased at the route this kind of thing is taking. Companies are clearly starting to realize that releasing the development tools to your product in an open manner merely increases the popularity of the platform, and consequently their income.
How come it took so long?
Wrong, I think (Score:1)
The simulator will be a development tool, and may even have graphics, but there's no guarantee for that, and there is also no guarantee that even if graphics are output, that they will be in a playable framerate.
Plus the fact that it doesn't mean the simulator can actually play a PSX2 game; it just simulates the PSX2 hardware enough so that code will act and react properly... May be a good start for crafting a PSX2 emulator, but in no way itself necessarily enough to play a game
AS
Why restrict the developers? (Score:2)
Well, there are actually a lot of reasons...
One is that they do make licensing money off of each copy of software PRODUCED (*NOT* sold. If you want to make 10,000 copies of a game, you need to pay them $100,000 (for example) to make them. If you only sell 1,000 of them at $30 per, you eat the $70,000 loss.
In the mean time, they sell the machine itself at substantially under hardware cost, and make it up in games. Thus, the BIG number to the console manufacturers is: # of sw titles licensed/unit. What this means in short is that if they've sold 1M PSX2's, and licensed 5M titles*copies at $10 each, that they have a $50 'buffer' over the hardware price that means that they can sell it at $50 undercost and break even. That's *NOT* including in-house developed games, of course. (It's also not including cost of media, which eats into that because they must press on custom media in order to manage piracy prevention mechanics, but it's a reasonable overview.)
Given that, not everyone will EVER be able to ship a PSX2 title, and the same is true for almost any console with any power. It'll be undercosted from the HW side, and they'll tack title and copycount licensing costs onto the SW side where the money (and volume!) is.
ALSO, there's the REAL problem that not everybody is going to make a good game. In fact, a lot of people are going to make really BAD games. (Fantastic Four, for example.) If you let just anyone publish for your platform, you end up with a disturbing load of bad games. If you make a minimum bar that you have to get past (including content restrictions!) you improve your overall average at the cost of losing the occasional brilliant piece of work that didn't have enough support.
There are also content restrictions, as I mentioned above. Basically, this means that you have to convince Sony that your game is good enough for them to let you sell it on their platform. (Nintendo has MUCH more stringent content restrictions because of the demographic of their product line.) These content restrictions get less and less as the platform ages. Partially because they REALLY REALLY want the initial games to be incredible Best Of Breed games, and partially because fewer top-quality manufacturers want to develop for it as the performance curve catches up to it.
All this combines to make the console manufacturers want to restrict who can ACTUALLY produce games for their platform. However, having the simulator available in GPL'ed form means some major things if it's publicly available. The most interesting of which is that it accelerates the generational advances in games. I comment on that elsewhere in these comments, but the basic idea is that it lets people grok the HW faster than they would if they could only work with a proprietary simulator or even just the chipset itself.
So, in summary, don't expect to be able to develop games on the GPL'ed simulator, but you CAN expect to learn a LOT about the hardware from it, and maybe just enough to be able to convince a game company to let you work with them on a game for the PSX2!
Cyberfox!
Setting a few things straight... (Score:1)
I know they've tried to stop Connectix from further development and release of their product via injunction, which has been overturned twice(once for Mac, once of PC).
I totally agree that a simulator and emulator does not make. With very good hardware and a graphics accelerator, I can see perhaps 5 fps, if at all, maybe higher if someone tries to HLE route that was done with the N64 and eschew all the low level emulation. But a simulator is useful for debugging and code testing more than game testing...
What Sony could and should do is a combo DVD-drive and graphics accelerator kit to play PSX2 games on a PC, as well as DVD movies. Or make it a integral part of their own line of PCs to differentiate them against other brands. I could see myself purchasing one of these =)
AS
I did not know DJ Delorie worked for Cygnus ... (Score:1)
tools are GPL? well, pretty sure the emu won't be (Score:1)
The real power of the GPL in this case is not the distribution terms, but having the source, which gives the licensed developers a much wider range of debugging and optimizing options (which means cooler games, faster to market :)
NG PlaystationDevelopment also on Windows machines (Score:1)
-B
PSX development costs $$$ (Score:1)
Anyway PSYQ is now using standard SCSI parts so their system could be cheap, but the price hasn't really dropped. If I had to make a PS game today I would just emulate it on a PC and do most of my owrk there. Not possible when it first came out, but not very difficult today.
Jonathan
Propriety free software (Score:1)
Then you have to get past the copy protection system (which convieniently also blocks out foreign games and homemade ones), which might not be legal (on the gameboy the copy protection involves the gameboy logo being stored at a certain place on the rom. If you haven't licensed usage of the logo, then your games won't run on a real gameboy). An alternate way around this problem is to write games that will only play on chipped playstations. However, there is no guarantee that chipping will be possible on the PSX2.
After you get through the first two challenges, the worst one awaits. You have to survive the lawsuits that will come at you from Sony. Even if you are in the right, what are the chances that you will be able to afford the legal fees.
To my knowledge, only one company has ever been able to get away with making unauthorized console games. That was a company called Wisdom Tree Publishing, which made christian video games for the NES, SNES, and PC. Nintendo put up a big fight, but eventually Wisdom Tree weathered the storm and continued making games.
As an interesting side note, ID software had wanted to port Wolfenstein 3D to the SNES. They had managed to get the game working on an Apple 2GS (which was very similar to the SNES), but Nintendo wouldn't authorize it. So rumor has it that ID Software gave a cheap license of the Wolfenstien engine to Wisdom Tree to spite Nintendo, and Wisdom Tree then made an unauthorized christian game based on the engine.
--
Joshua Boyd (I keep forgeting my login
http://catpro.dragonfire.net/joshua
Distributing the GPL'ed parts (Score:1)
You want to bet a buck? :-) I say the GPL'ed stuff is on sunsite about one week after release to developers. And then people will start to write GPL'ed versions of the proprietary libs and docs.
--
Sony's (non)Vaporware (Score:1)
Thus, no one places any stock on M$ future products, while everyone believes in Sony's.
I'm sure some are blinded by the Linux angle. I'm blinded by the Squaresoft and the SCEA and other games that have proven themselves over and over again on the PSX1. That and DVD, possibly, and PSX1 compatability. What's not to be hopeful about?
AS
The PSX2 platform and the Linux Kernel (Score:1)
---------
not public = start-up (Score:1)
other question (Score:1)
linux port to psx2? it could do 128 bits before nt did 64...
Wrong, I think (Score:1)
PSX development costs $$$ (wrong) (Score:1)
Being a brat, I went with both, but most people don't have that option or would consider it a waste (it is). Of the next-gen systems, whoever gets to market first with the most games will win the most market share. Why else would Nintendo be going to CD/DVD when they make so much money from cart manufacturing and licensing? CD/DVDs make development easier and allow ports of games popular on other systems (read: psx, psx2).
--Andrew Grossman
grossdog@dartmouth.edu
published yaroze games (Score:1)
has put a yaroze game on every cover disk for a while now.
I think a few people have been headhunted by
codeshops as a result of their amateur yaroze output.
--
Quantity of games? (Score:1)
the *quantity* of games, but the *variety*.
Sure, it's mostly same-old driving/fighting/shooting, but
compared to N64, you get a whole lot more choice.
Of course quantity breeds variety, so you had a
good point.
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Dear God not Cygnus (Score:1)