Sony PlayStation 2 Development Kit (2020)
retroreversing.com
retroreversing.com
It wouldn't be the first time, see XNA and XBox.
Oddly enough the first time I ever clapped eyes on a production PS 2 was at Fry’s, and it was a slimline (2nd gen) so that would have been five or six years after launch.
We were also working on the Dreamcast at the same time, but less deeply. Obviously there was no direct overlap. Luckily I never ended up visiting both companies the same day.
Logging in to the Linux side isn't even part of normal use for a PS2 TOOL. The Linux system runs the RPC so you can connect it as a target in ProDG or whatever, then it pokes your code into the memory of the PS2 side.
I think the reason why you won't see any big exclusives on PC is that because consoles are close to PCs, big games should be ported to console otherwise you're missing out on huge markets.
Beyond the live service type games I mentioned earlier, there's also a ton of smaller indie-AA type titles that are PC exclusive. Even that is dwindling down though since porting gets easier and easier for indie devs
Yeah, but today it is mostly the other way round: Big console games get ported to PC. Exceptions like Cyberpunk 2077 (which was a PC-first development) are increasingly rare. Smaller games are another matter.
Those were the days huh! I had the PS2 Linux kit too, loved tinkering with that.
Edit: I was slight hasty, it does have some unlisted discs in the box, but neither “bonus demo 8 (you)” (©2004) or the “Network Access Disc” seem to have Yabasic on them.
I had a chance to work with one of these. It was amazing to get a non-intrusive profile that provided cycle-level data of all the chips in the Emotion Engine, as well as memory access and DMA state. The real take-away was how much more important memory access was to compute. Memory locality, cache preloading, and predictable control flow had a huge bearing on performance, and that's true more broadly for high-throughput DSP-style workloads including that in high-performance gaming.
For another example, the Nintendo DS (Nitro) dev kit, for example, is also a relatively massive box, but with a full on DS still hanging off the side of it.
This is particularly true in the era before consoles were basically just locked down x86 PCs and thus developers needed access to a variant of the actual hardware to port their games/engines.
If you wanted to profile PS2 code, for example, the way you did that was with a gigantic logic analyzer connected to various traces at Sony's labs. We used their Redwood City lab. You'd give Sony instrumented code, and they'd do some kind of secret magic on it and run it on this instrumented PS3, and a few days later, you get a profile! Downside, this thing is incredibly complex, but on the upside, you had little performance penalty for profiling. Later, these kinds of tools came built into dev kits.
For the PS3, programming the Cell was quite difficult and so you had to do lots of tuning. The single PPC core (called the PPU) was really slow, so you had to offload what you could to the SPE's, which were incredibly fast on floating point math, but it was on you to interleave DMA and computation in a way to get good utilization of them. The Dev kits had tools to give you visibility into this.
Programming on a laptop only requires the laptop, as you've got all the tools you need in the OS. Only apple does debugging at the board level.
It's fun to take a stroll down memory lane.
Early Xbox 360 dev kits were literally a PowerMac G5 with some customizations. Early Dreamcast dev kits were in a mini tower case. Frankenstein appendages are common especially for exotic hardware. I remember using an early Haswell dev kit which was a huge plexiglass monstrosity with a capacitive touchscreen glued to the top. (A later dev kit had a much more manageable iPad-like form factor.)
As you can imagine these dev kits are expensive and rare. The hardware manufacturer will want these early dev kits they loan back, and they are almost always destroyed. (A few may slip through the cracks which is how unicorn find like the Nintendo PlayStation prototype was found a few years back.)
As the hardware coalesces and goes through the various development stages, subsequent dev kits typically become smaller and more manageable. In some cases they may be nearly indistinguishable from retail hardware without closer inspection.
and the book “Console Wars”. This is probably the most dramatic betrayal story you can get in business history.
That's hilarious
https://www.smh.com.au/technology/microsoft-fires-employee-f...
Apple didn't document how to control the fans. It took Microsoft a while to reverse-engineer the fan controllers. During that time period, using the G5s as Xbox dev kits required putting up with extraordinarily loud fans.
That maybe is not the whole story, but I've often assumed that was part of it.