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Fascinating read, even if not very technical. That type of deep work must be a joy to do. Wonder if there are still places where one might get a chance to work like that, specifically on “low level” stuff

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It's wild how often these "this was my first development job of any kind" stories crop up in the gaming industry. This seems like a deeply technical project requiring expertise in some very niche areas. Yet Sony trusted this fresh grad with zero experience to knock out one of their marquee features essentially on his own... and it worked??

I don't have any evidence for this but I feel like things used to work more this way in the future. Now we send everything to experts, people with licenses and degrees and years of experience. And I mean it works, but we pay in terms of lost creativity, and create fewer opportunities for younger and lesser experienced people to become experienced themselves.

*in the past

Low-level programming isn't that hard if you've got all the docs. Hard part of emulator development is when you have to figure out everything yourself.

Also, as part of backward compatibility the PS2 just has a miniature PS1 in it, so the hardware is fundamentally able to do the old things.

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