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Comment by softwarebouwer | Hacker News Reader

I did have that and the Yaroze (Sony's official homebrew development). I can't recall exactly how or why, but I do remember that compiling/running stuff with the Gameshark was easier than with the Yaroze.

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i wanted a yaroze but they were $$$. like $600 or something in 1997 dollars iirc. a few years later i learned of this thing.

they also had some weird limitation. it might have just been that your program could only ever run on your yaroze... where the caetla hack meant you could "ship" stuff that would run on chipped playstations.

Correct. Yaroze programs could only run on other Yarozes, plus the worst restriction was that games had to fit entirely in Ram as Yaroze couldn't run burned discs.

that's right! or access the drive at all. that made it a nonstarter for me as i was trying to build a player for fat32 formatted cd-roms full of mp3s.

of course the bigger problem was that the r3k was too slow. (i ported mpg123 over to run in fixed point, but it still was many times realtime to decode a frame). i wish i'd known about this gte vector unit thing, that may have been a way to make it work... but ah well,

One thing the PS1 did have going for it was a MDEC jpeg decoder chip. Pretty much all of the FMV in PS1 games were MJPEG (a stream of independent jpegs). Between that and using the rasterizer to apply motion vectors and color interpolation, the machine was pretty well set up to do MPEG1.

The PS2 had an MDEC too. We used it in one game to do the pop-up talking head dialog between characters mid-gameplay with tiny RAM and CPU use.

Playing Mpeg Layer 2 files would be fast enough for the PS1 then.

You could play MP2 files just fine.

layer 2 was significantly lower quality at lower bitrates, significantly less computationally expensive to encode or decode and significantly less popular as a format for storing music.

i wanted to be able to play mp3 collections from psx units attached to home entertainment systems. there really weren't many other options back then.

One of my biggest regrets always was that I as a young student bought an Amiga 4000 (computer of my dreams then) instead of a Yaroze.

I have a yaroze. The kit was rather limited and the tooling was buged out. I also got the codewarrior dev kit which helped a lot. I never got further than some simple demo hello world style applications. I was more interested in my PC at the time. I mostly used it to just play PS1 games. I basically wasted my money on it and should have just bought a normal PS.

If I remember right the thing was region free though so I could play imports. I think you could precompile apps and upload them to the yaroze web board and download them but only to other yaroze kits. I think a couple of devs actually managed to get a real shipped game out of it.

Luckily since I kept the whole lot in nice condition they are going for a decent amount on ebay. It is funny keeping the cardboard boxes makes it worth more...

I also had the PS2 kit. Which was in my opinion was more limiting than the yaroze one.

I seem to remember some later demo disc came with some yaroze games that were playable on normal PlayStations.

PlayStation Underground: Volume 1 Issue 4 came with "Gasgar vs. Gasgar" and "Super Mansion", and were behind this wonderful warning screen: https://i.imgur.com/xntzcFk.png

Some other issues of PlayStation Underground and Official PlayStation Magazine (UK) came with other Yaroze games.

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