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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."
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!
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?
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.
Enjoy.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
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.
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.
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
That`s known to be a bad April fool`s joke.
Get a bunch of Playstations, overclock them to 1 Ghz, port Linux to them, and then make a gigantic Beowulf cluster.
Have Linux and gcc been ported to Playstation yet?
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?
This could also result in a company creating a playstation compatible console with higher performance and dvd playback for the people who wanted a playstation 2 for dvds and can't run all of their games because only the ones that use the sony API are supported under the playstation 2. This could create a serious problem for sony because if the competitors console was designed well enough games might come out supporting both consoles on one dvd.
...and use the cluster to run DeCSS and decode our DvD's under Linux!
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 :-)
n64dev.50megs.com
If he made a clean room implementation - then Sony doesn't stand a chance..
Hetz (Heunique)
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
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!).
> The biggest problem I have with consoles is picture quality.
:)
Yes, free anti-aliasing.
Specifically:
1. Spatial Anti-Aliasing. Text looks HORRIBLE on TV's due to a imprecise location of the "fuzzy" pixel.
2. Temporal Anti-Aliasing. As you mentioned, interlaced video provides for more fuzziness.
> TVs aren't very sharp either, so detailed graphics will go unnoticed.
Yes, with about an effective video height resolution of around 500 pixels, monitors win this one hand down.
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.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.