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.
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.
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.
That maybe is not the whole story, but I've often assumed that was part 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.