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The Playstation Documentation Project
Hal the Slightly Incodecent writes: "After a year of hacking, The PSX Documentation Project is finished. It's basically
a 153-page document discribing the innards of the PSX. All 100% free and GPLed. You can use this plus the PSXDEV, a cross-target development environment for the Sony PlayStation, to start rolling out your own (non-commercial) games. The documentation project is mine, PSXDEV is not. The original PSX doc is written in StarOffice 5.1 SDW
format. There is an RTF version, a Word 97 DOC version and an HTML
version as well."
Two things:
:)
1. If you have the ability to post at +2, but are posting a clearly off-topic post (like the parent of this thread), then take that fraction of a second to hit "No Score +1 Bonus". It saves moderators the trouble of knocking you down, it saves some of your karma (if you care), and it lets people who read at higher threshholds ignore more crap.
2. You took the time to put goatse.cx into a hyperlink? You sick, twisted man
Was the PSX SDK that this guy wrote GPL'ed? If it was I hope someone has a copy of it around.
As a QuakeForge developer - I'm the one that's doing MD2 to MDL and etc. I'm also not to be confused with the magical tiger cub Mercury, who does much more work, lol. - This story looked interesting, as we lobbyed Sony for a free "hobby licenese" to port QuakeForge to the PSX2. I haven't downloaded the files yet - but it seems the "SDK isn't here" and etc will make this another dead end.
Maybe we should get Palsade to take up a hat, so we can buy a hobby license ( which cost to much to be a hobby ) for PSX2.
Well, if the PSX2 (US) ships with and/or hdd or modem, I might try to hack at it - but the asm for the chipset seems like it'll be tough even though the main CPU is a MIPS. I still want to play with the dynamic pipeline the PSX2 provides mere mortals. ( The vector processor(s) can act as either an asycronsis cpu or coprocessor to the MIPS blah blah you hear it before )
Just my rantings, while being sleep depraved... er... yeah that's right =)
http://www.quakeforge.net
You can find it on SourceForge still if you're interested: psxdev-sdk-1.0.tar.gz
Commericial software complanies deny responsibility for anything their software may do.
It's good to know what does not work right and I try to fix it. But when someone who pays nothing demands something?
That's the type of attitude that will discourage people from giving away software.
Fight Spammers!
Yes, it could further the spread of emualtors. Will it? Probably not. Except for some bloke setting out to create one simply for the joy of perfect emulation. (aka NESticle, UltraHLE) I don't see emulators getting much popular than they already are. The old cart-based systems are different than a PSX. They gave people a chance to play great games for their old skewl systems that they never got a chance to play, or sold years ago. ROMs could be downloaded in minutes.
With a PSX OTOH, the consoles are cheap enough and plentiful enough that anyone wanting to code an emulator for the purpose of cheap gaming has the intelligence quotient of a fruit fly. And with a little bit of effort, any PSX game can be copied and played on a minimally-modified PSX. Downloading a PSX ISO over the internet is pretty much impractical for Joe Sixpack. Even if he had a decent broadband connection, the ISO images are incredibly difficult to find.
And about PSX-compatible machine... it will NEVER happen in the conumer market. Sony holds all kinds of copyrights and patents that deal with how the PSX works, thereby making it impossible for someone to create a working clone. Don't believe me? Does the Apple Computer Corporation ring a bell?
As a matter of fact, I can already see Sony sueing The Playstation Documentation Project within a few weeks, claiming that the information violates some law dealing with trade secrets.
But I haven't been working on it for over a year. Here is my shameless plug: http://members.home.net/narmi/
IANAL, but your analogy is terribly skewed in this instance... No company owns the format that a television station sends out it's information in. (NTSC or PAL, I think). The FCC owns the airwaves here in the US, but that's a different story. It's a completely different kind of market.
However, Sony DOES have the right to take legal action against a company or person that produces and markets a PSX game that is NOT licensed through Sony. You want to make a PSX game, you have to buy a license. Legal Docmentiation? I have none, but it exists.
Sony does not make money from selling their consoles or making games, they make their dough from selling licenses that allow publishers and developers to sell games that were designed to work with a Sony PlayStation(tm). Squaresoft, Electronic Arts, Activision, all of them have licenses to sell their games. In short, no license == no game. If you break that rule, you'll find yourself sitting in court.
I didn't think the original was all that ncredibly off topic to the subject however, expecially compared to really offtopic subjects like this one ;)
And yes I am a sick, twisted man.
Marc
Oh, and other thing about the license. All games developed by a third party under a license from Sony undergo constant quality assessment during development by some Sony representative. This is to prevent games from being released that don't match up to Sony's standards of what kind of game they want on their system. (Note that they don't have to be FUN or ENTERTAINING games to meet Sony's requirements sometimes. :P) All the big console makers do this, and this is the primary reason you never saw any blood or gore in a Super Nintendo game prior to cicra-1994.
An open platform is exactly what Sony and Sega DO NOT WANT. Their money comes from licensing the games developed by third parties. To (legally) create a PlayStaion game, you need a) a license and b) a developers kit, which last I heard cost around US$30,000 for hardware + software. Small change for developers, large change for me and you.
This all goes back to the Quality Control rant I posted in a thread above.
A PSX development kit (commercial one and Net-Yarouze I believe) will have the ability to burn correct PSX CDs, but a PC CDR drive does not and will likely never due to the fact that it involves deliberately messing up the checksums on the disk.
The easy solution is a modchip. Buy one for $20 (or make your own for a little more, it's not that hard), solder the sucker in and you're in business. I've done it, I ought to know. Soldering is not difficult once you've a few hours practice and someone to teach you.
Please, PLEASE stay away from the Game Enhancer clones. They work fine for some games, but not with many. The problem has mostly to do with fact that all they do is send stop and start commands to the CD drive's spindle so that you can do the swap trick without ruining the drive motor. Any games that use redbook audio or have multpile discs will not work or will not work properly. I don't have time to explain why, but there are plenty of web pages explaining why on the net. Google is your friend.
http://www.scea.sony.com/net/what.htm
Why do you think microsoft is making the x-box?
Cringely spent an entire article a while ago discussing this very issue (damned if I can find it now, though...). First of all, is Microsoft really making the X-Box? In fact, there are two questions here - what the X-Box means now, and what the X-Box might mean in the future - if or whenever the Great Master of Vapourware at Redmond ever see fit to go ahead and actually build the damned thing; this might happen by 2001, it might happen by 2003 or it might not happen at all, depending on just how important Microsoft believes gaming consoles to be.
However, the first question can be answered right away. At the moment, the X-Box is Microsoft's way of telling the Big Console Makers (Sega and Nintendo also, but especially Sony), "if you don't watch your back, we can easily invade your turf... we can take over your market just like we took over every other market in which we were ever interested". In doing this, they make sure that the BCMs shy away from their current attitude of promoting the next-generation consoles as PC replacements, and focus instead on reinforcing and protecting their own established turf so that Microsoft won't be able to annihilate them with the X-Box. This, in turn, leaves Microsoft's reign over the PC market untouched.
Will the strategy work? Will the X-Box ever be released? Will the gaming console replace the PC in the near future? All these things remain to be seen.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
So there's an RTF Manual? Is that what people mean when they tell me RTFM?
I agree that they didn't make money when they were introduced, but don't forget, the prices are also higher when something is brand new. I can't imagine the cost of making a PSX today being much more than $25 USD.
As for the x-box being only vaporware, I fully agree.
Even if Sony has any legal means of shutting the original site down, they can't shut down all the mirrors, or the copies people have saved for themselves.
If Sony can't successfully stop an emulator from being released, then they can't stop this.
No, you can still program in c/c++. You just have to do a little more work - you get to make your own SDK. The one everyone is talking about did little beyond expose the functionality built into the psx bios, and with that big psx doc, you can hack that together pretty quickly.
The PSX documentation and the PSXDEV software are FROM COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PEOPLE, you dumbass. The software works, and the SDK was indeed an SDK (although it didn't do enough to merit the fuss thats being made over it).
Write your own SDK. The SDK everyone is so interested in did little beyond expose the builtin functions in the psx bios. Given the big psx doc, plus a little time, its easily recreatable.
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CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I quote from freshmeat:
PSXDEV is a free GPL'd development environment for the PlayStation (PSX).
Releases 6 and 7 (and probably earlier ones) were under the GPL. Therefore, he has to provide source for these versions, which he is not doing. Also, he must stop using any other GPL'ed code if he wishes to release binary RPM's to the public, and considering the nature of the product, this might be difficult. (We're talking about gcc, binutils... free software, guys!)
Someone please send him a nice e-mail explaining what he can and can't do with GPL'ed software. There's nothing wrong with changing your own license for a new version of a program that's all your code, but that isn't what's going on here.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
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Sony, Sega and Nintendo do not make profits selling the consoles. They lose money on them. Their profits come from licensing development toolkits to developers. Freeing the development toolkits would be a very bad move if they want to make a profit.
An open platform means more games, more programmers, and, more importantly, more sales.
Unlike PC makers, console makers actually take a loss on console sales. They make it up by developing software (Crash Bandicoot etc.), selling devkits, and licensing the patent rights.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Enjoy.
what would possess someone to posts excerpts without adding any insight to said excerpts?
Protection against the Slashdot Effect. Even if the site gets Slashdotted, the basics are here so that we can get the gist of the article.
that information is one click away.
That is, until the site experiences the distributed denial of service commonly referred to as "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters."
Will I retire or break 10K?
I dont get it: all the stuff thats inside the PS is proprietary, copyrighted and presumably covered by patents. So how can someone hack that stuff and GPL it? I honestly dont understand how this should legally work. Come on, enlighten me.
Therefore, O'Reilly should release their books on the 'net for free?
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i have a question.
so without his SDK, you cant program the playstation in c/c++?
ummm, then whats the point of making all these nice gtk apps and drivers if you cant use them!??
Oh yeah... now I can make that PSX port of NetHack.
My other first post is car post.
If your friends got a PSX older than scp9000, they can buy an external ModChip-GameShark-GameBoyEmu
device. But watch out some GB Emulators don't have sound.
Actually, there is an alternative to a MOD chip which, IMO, is a LOT better.
Here it is...
-- Dr. Eldarion --
It's not what it is, it's something else.
They profit off of licensing games for the system. Even though the devkits are expensive, let's look at the realities of things...would you make more money selling 1000 $20K dev kits, or licensing millions of copies of games every year?
Wherever there's a will, there's a motorway.
So how is this work with emulators? If you wrote a PlayStation game but released it only for emulators say as a download from the net or burned to CD-R how does Sony have any right to block you if you aren't using any of their hardware or software to develop and you aren't including their trademark on the game? I don't see how they can legally do much to somebody who has never signed any agreement with them and who is using none of their intellectual property in their product. It'd be a pretty lame lawsuit to sue someone for using low level hardware specs in the programming of a game that they never claimed to work on your platform. What about a version of Linux that runs on PlayStation. Then if I code a Linux game and somebody figures out that they can burn a copy of PSX Linux and my game to cd-r and play it on their PSX is it my fault? I really hope that somebody is working on a PSX version of Linux that is API compat w/ the video/sound stuff Loki and others are working on for Linux. :)
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
I find it somewhat humorous that the majority of reactions to this article are complaints about GPL-compliance and legal issues. Has the MPAA/RIAA/*.* lawsuits/bullying scared so many fellow geeks away from such a cool possibility?
... and I would like to think that more coders would be dying for a chance at PSX coding. The creator of the software is giving away the software. It is *free*. You can write your own PlayStation games now... for *free*. This has the potential to create a community of size that the Yaroze never could command ...
For those of you that remember the Yaroze, this is a big deal! The Yaroze program is not accepting any new members in the U.S. and cost a few hundred dollars to take part in. I, for one, am going to tackle porting my Win32 3d Engine to the PlayStation.
To the Slashdotters who complain that the author isn't being perfectly compliant with the GPL: Grow up. This is one of the coolest applications of the Open Source concept
Now that the government has denied people the right to think, it's quite inevitable that Sony will shut these people down.
Devilled Eggs - A disturbing little creation of mine.
I haven't had time to look at it, I just grabbed the files.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
I think you should be informed that my mysterious psxdev SDK was just some types and functions. It had nothing in common with the official, NDA'd developer material. I removed it from my site because I wrote it for my personal amusement and not for the public. I think it was a mistake to publish it - now I get tons of mail from kids.
I originally wrote PSXDEV for the Yaroze station, because of this crappy MSDOS environment. But it evolved very quickly and I thought others (like game companies) may find it useful. My web server logs are quite a proof that some companies do find it useful :-)
And to clear some of these myths:
- Linux for PSX-1
- Linux for PSX-2
And again about Linux and PSX-2: as announced by sony, the official SDK is linux based. PSX-2 ifself is not powered by linux, because the linux kernel is (actually) not useful for games. (just search for the announcements on this site)I've tried it. I got a kernel compiled, but the missing MMU made me crasy. I've used portions of the uClinux project to emulate the MMU, but the limited resources of the PSX showed me that it wasn't useful at all. I dropped that project.
This project has already started. Visit The Wulfstation Project's Homepage. That's a serious project. We don't want to use such a cluster to crack DVD's or games. Linux for PSX-2 is definitely possible and very easy. But don't expect a distro. And it is not useful for games.
And last but not least: what if sony sues me? Very simple. I will shut down psxdev.de, gift all the material to game companies and let me hire by one of them. Or what do you think I have planned for the near future, i.e. writing MS Office applications?
have fun.. daniel
Get a bunch of Playstations, overclock them to 1 Ghz, port Linux to them, and then make a gigantic Beowulf cluster.
Wouldn't this also further the spread of emulators?
Is the past precedent set with the Sony v. Connectix case enough to prevent lawsuits against gaming companies formed to create "free" games without a license from Sony?
I'd love to have a Playstation CD with MAME and a bunch of ROMs on it. :) Yeah, yeah, the ROMs aren't commercially distributable... but if I could press my own CD with my own ROMs, that'd be fine by me!
Is it possible for a normal CD burner to produce a CD which will boot and run on a Playstation, or is there some sort of copy protection which needs to be in place?
I visited the web site and noted that the developer removed the SDK, and posted that his reasons are "clsoed source." What's the deal with that? Did he remove the SDK because Sony got pissed, because he decided he wanted to sell it? Because he just got tired of supporting it?
I think that free software authors have a certain responsiblity to the community of users they create. It's simply not fair to your users to post a bunch of files and later remove them from distribution, without an explanation.
I wonder how this thing can be useful, if there's no SDK. Are we supposed to write all the games in assembler?
Lets take for example my best friend that has PS: He bought it to play games like Tekken, NFS3 and more. I'm presenting his as a general user, I'm asking myself for what will he need PS Documentation Project? Well the answer is clear: He doesn't need it at all, because as the most of PS users (I don't counting the induviduals that bought PS just to find what in the box and how can they hack/fix/overcloak/destroy it) he bought PS with only one purpose and the purpose is: To play games. I understand that the Documentation wasn't made for users like that but is it good to write a very fat Documentation that almost won't be used? I know that some people will say "YES" but if they right, why don't we start writing Documentation for any program that anyone makes using the most simple programming languages even thought there are lot of apps of that type we make documentation to each and each prgram. My question here is does it costs the job?
Graphics:
- The GPU is the unit responsible for the graphical output of the PSX. It handles display and drawing of all graphics. It has the control over an 1MB frame buffer, which at 16 bits per pixel gives you a maximum "surface" of 1024x512 resolution. It also contains a 2Kb texture cache for increased speed. The display can be set for 15-bit color or 24-bit color.
Number crunching:- Because the PSX also totally lacks an FPU. A second coprocessor has been added called the Geometry Transformation Engine or GTE. The GTE is the heart of all 3d calculations on the PSX. The GTE can perform vector and matrix operations, perspective transformation, color equations and the like. It is much faster than the CPU on these operations. It is mounted as the second coprocessor (Cop2) and as such takes up no physical address space in the PSX. The GTE is covered later in the document.
Movies:- The Motion Decoder (MDEC) is a special controller chip that takes a compressed JPEG-like images and decompresses them into 24-bit bitmapped images for display by the GPU. The MDEC can only decompress a 16x16 pixel 24-bit image at at time,called "Macroblocks" These Macrobock are encoded block that uses the YUV (YCbCr) color scheme with Discrete Cosine Transformation (DCT) and Run Length Encoding (RLE) applied The MDEC also performs 24 to 16 bit color conversion to prepare it for whatever color depth the GPU is in. Due to the extremely high speed that the decompression is done, the decompressed RGB bitmaps can be combined to from larger pictures and then
,if displayed in sequential order, to produce movies.
Sound:Let this be a lesson to all of you: Office products product absolutely nasty HTML because they try to make your document look like it came from a word-processor instead of look like a normal web page. Sometimes trying to preserve the original appearance of something in a new medium is a really bad idea.
Text
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Don't mind me, I didn't realize this was just one package, I thought he meant the whole distribution (all of PSXDEV).
:)
(The wording didn't seem clear to me, just like where they say "GNU General Public License Version 2", and link to the LGPL...)
What confused me was, I still saw all the binary RPMs for the different packages, which would mean that he *is* still distributing it. Now I see the source RPMs, and realize they were just talking about one program.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Bleem exploits a bug in the Windows 9x kernel to get itself into Ring 0 (kernel mode on Intel processors) and wreak havoc without Windows' interference. As you might imagine, we can't allow that on Wine :-)
Well, since the games will be put onto a CD-R disk, won't you need a MOD chip in whatever Playstation your using? This isn't a problem for me but it is for alot of my friends who don't have MOD chips and don't feel confident in their own skill to take a soldering iron to their PSX's chipset.
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#nohup cat
I've made a split-up version of the pages on my home page. Hopefully this is a bit easier to read than the 1.5Mb document on Joshua's site...
n64dev.50megs.com
If he made a clean room implementation - then Sony doesn't stand a chance..
Hetz (Heunique)
There's a possibility of getting Connectix Virtual Game Station to run on Wine (it's a heck of a lot more compatible with PSX games than bleem, and they didn't resort to teenage hax0r tricks to write it :) It doesn't work yet though (needs address space separation, like an increasing pile of other things).
:-)
PSEmuPro is playable on recent versions of Wine, but only if you have a 3dfx GLIDE compatible video card and Glide3x for Linux installed (I get nice flat 60 FPS on my Voodoo2 playing Raystorm with sound
Stallman in the past has spoken directly to that topic. He feels that books like the O'Reilly ones, being non-free, take away the incentive for people to write free documentation.
It is rather ironic how much money one can spend on books and documentation for free software.
Yes, I know, I know. That's how the free software developers make their money... is that really true? Not very many of the O'Reilly books are written by the software author him/herself (the Camel and Llama books are an exception).
Let's get real. No matter how much of a precedent this is, it simply won't stop a huge electronics company from legally harassing a smaller, nimble company whose only crime is to deliver a technically superior compatible product.
More often than not, in situations like these the purpose of the lawsuit is to bury the defendant with legal fees. Do you think that the DVD CCA is suing all these people just because they think that the law is on their side? Well, that may be true to some extent, but you bet your bippy that the overwhelming motivation is to simply legally harass the defendant, on the premise that the defendants simply do not have the funds for legal fees.
So, even though Sony was bitch-slapped in the Connectix case, that doesn't stop them in any way from filing an identical lawsuit, even word-for-word, against someone else.
Back when I worked on Need For Speed 1 for PSXin 96, our game code ended up about 600K, leaving the rest of system ram for road geometry and textures. (Allthough I believe we crammed all the textures into the video memory. They were 8-bit palettized textures, at a screen rez of 320x240.)
Interestingly his page continually warns me that I am not using linux.... his page script says
if (navigator.platform != "LinuxELF2.0")
How very interesting. Has Navigator ever said that? I thought it said X11; Linux as the string. KFM satisfies it, though.
Offtopic but what the hell, it bothered me.
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
The Document itself is under a no-restrictions license. PSXDEV's license issues look complex, but you can write PSX software with out using PSXDEV. So why can we not use this to make commercial software? Does Sony make you pay a license to sell Playstation software? If so how could they enforce this?
tangent - art and creation are a higher purpose
postmoderncore - art and creation are a higher purpose
Heh heh heh.
:)
Yeah, and emulating that stuff comes with quite a penalty, I understand.
Ah well, no Bleem. Next option?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I am currently working on a LaTeX version of the documentation. Go to http://latakia.dyndns.org/~ruhl/playst ation/ to take a look. It is a work in progress, but every change I make will be mirrored on the site immediately (the magic of hard links!).
At this point my PSX is mostly collecting dust. I would love to put it back to work diligently rendering fresh eye candy.
Does anyone know of any ISO images out there ready to burn?
Whats Yaroze?
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You're completely correct, expect for one small detail:
...
The Net Yarouze kit wouldn't allow you to create your own PSX CDs. The games were created within (once again, I might be slightly off) 4MB of space on *your PC's hard drive*. Playing the games involved using the included Serial cable to download data to the Yarouze (Black PSX).
Why only 4MB (from what I recall) of space? Sony liked to state that the Ridge Racer engine and one entire level could fit inside that amount of space. Besides, the Yaroze was designed for the experimentation of programmers; *not* artists wanting to test pre-rendered video on the PSX.
Modchips should work just fine.
I remember reading something over a year ago about how to 'transplant' the boot code from a licensed PSX game onto your own CD, so that you might be able to distribute your game
lynx -dump http://www.execpc.com/~halkun/PSX/html/playstation .html > ps.txt
Because I couldn't read that *tiny* font, and the centered lines were annoying me. Also, the HTML file is *HUGE*, thanks to StarOffice. The text version is about 3.5 times smaller!
Maybe next time I'll try converting one of the other versions, or use a browser that better supports tables, but for now at least I can read the darn thing!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
That is so great that the PS has such a complete documentation, allowing any programmer make games for the platform. Two systems that I would love to program for, given the chance, were Sega Saturn and Sega CD. But there was no generally available development enviornment or even specs on what was inside.
I hope companies like Sony and Sega realize that people really want to have the platform open. An open platform means more games, more programmers, and, more importantly, more sales. It's too bad that Sony didn't do this themselves and it took a combined effort to get this released. And they released it completely for free!
Maybe the various playstation projects for Linux will show some more progress? Or maybe people will show some more interest in them?
:)
Do any of the PSX emulators reimplement the BIOS functions with C routines? I heard that was what UltraHLE did. Besides, then non-PSX owners could use it without having to (legally) get a PSX BIOS.
However, I'd be very happy if a game company released a cross-platform emulator sometime before the system itself is dead. I don't want a Playstation, but I'd love to be able to play the later Final Fantasy games under Linux, for instance.
That means that either Square has to port them, x86/DOS/Windows emulators under Linux have to get a lot better (Wine doesn't run FF7; does Wine run "Bleem!"? Does VMWare use 3D-cards, or could the X Server help on that?), or PSX emulators will have to get a lot better. I'd happily buy Tactics, but I'd be playing it on my computer! (I don't have a TV, just a TV Card, getting a PSX just seems silly.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
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