Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

The Playstation Documentation Project

Posted by emmett on from the snagtrozac dept.

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."

8 of 108 comments (clear)

  1. psxdev-sdk-1.0.tar.gz by greerga · · Score: 3

    You can find it on SourceForge still if you're interested: psxdev-sdk-1.0.tar.gz

  2. No SDK by EvlG · · Score: 4

    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?

    1. Re:No SDK by MarkKomus · · Score: 3

      "I think that free software authors have a certain responsiblity to the community of users they create."

      I'm not sure that they have any real responsiblity to the community, what they are doing is for their enjoyment and done for free. It would be great if people could continue to support software they write but that doesn't always work out. In this case the author may just have had something happen to him personally that he doesn't want the whole world knowning about. I hate not knowing reasons as much as anyone, but sometimes we have to just accept it.

    2. Re:No SDK by silicon_synapse · · Score: 4

      I don't think free software authors have a responsibility to the community at all. When they write something and decide to give it away, we should be grateful and WE owe THEM. If they decide they don't want to give it away anymore, that's too bad but it's their code and their choice. They don't have to explain anything.


      How am I supposed to hallucinate with all these swirling colors distracting me?

    3. Re:No SDK by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3

      You can see Google's cached copy of the download page here. The SDK is still listed, with an MD5 checksum of 51444aa8fe8469f009020bfdf86f2fab. An RPM and SRPM were also available. Too bad Google doesn't mirror binaries.

  3. Re:Looks good... by Ian+Schmidt · · Score: 3

    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 :-)

  4. LaTeX Version by Bob+Uhl · · Score: 3

    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!).

  5. Documented Systems by zavyman · · Score: 3

    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!