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Playstation 2 Basic?
onion2k writes: "Looks like us UK dwellers are getting something for the Playstation 2 that no one else in the world is (apart from an inflated price and a long delay). PSX2extreme are reporting that the UK Playstation 2 will ship with a version of YABasic, a programming language for the little black box. Few details at the moment, except that rather than Sony being nice its a tax dodge. Still, bonus." I know CowboyNeal is still waiting for his PS2. Gotta admit, I'm curious what you could do with BASIC on a PS2.
Now, granted, this probably isn't anywhere CLOSE, but Sony has already gone into amateur Playstation programming with their "Net Yaroze" deal. It was about a $600 product with a sleek black Playstation, two black controllers, two black memory cards, and a PC devkit. It had about two megs of RAM that you could store a game created on the devkit (no textures or FMV's, obviously) and you could upload it to their website (which no longer exists, it seems). It was discontinued in the US for lack of support, but the Japanese version is still alive and kicking, and they have yearly contests.
:> I wonder how much functionality this BASIC thing will have. Probably not nearly as much.
:>
I would have killed to have had the money back then for one of those.
Still, I feel like killing my friend in the UK and taking his YABasic.
10 PRINT "This is a"
20 PRINT "Haiku program."
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
I was one of the people who worked on the YABasic project at Sony's Technology Group in London, where I worked on the documentation.
The YABasic had two reasons for being done. One, the UK Government was trying to classify the PS2 as a game system only rather than a more general purpose computer to tax imports. Sony has always seen the PS2 as a general purpose machine, and in the future you will see a number of toys, add-ons, applications and software that is non-gaming on the system. There are some very exciting things going on right now that may be announced soon.
The other reason that YABasic was written is that the Technology Group there is tasked with doing things that other companies don't have the time or reason to do. Games companies are busy trying to recoup their costs for the devkits and down-time from learning the system, so somebody had to show the world some of the more interesting things the PS2 could do. Sure, there is a history of hmoe enthusiast programming in the UK and that probably helped. Expect to see updates to YABasic and demo progras on magazine cover-disks and also the ability to freely swap programs on memory cards. We had great fun going retro and trying to recreate all those old-school demos - 8-Bit programs with 128-Bit fill rates!
FYI, YABasic is a fully virtualised machine, so PEEK and POKE only set variables in the interpreter and don't directly address the underlying machine. *IF* management decide to release the specs for the underlying chipsets (and press releases from Sony do suggest that it's at least licensable), then YABasic may be changed to allow direct access to the GIF, DMAC and other chips. Heck, it's all memory mapped at the end of the day.
- Robin Green
Sony R&D, Foster City.
Recall that originally C++ used the Cfront compiler to generate C code which was then compiled as normal. Also, NQC for Lego Mindstorms is a replacement programming language that surpasses the functionality of the graphical programming tool Lego provides.
Perhaps someone will build a CFront-like compiler to generate YaBasic statements from a higher level language (such as Perl) allowing for more fully featured programming. YaBasic may be a small step right now, but I can see technically skilled PlayStation2 programmers coming up with replacement (or at least a wrapper) for YaBasic (though Sony UK is not off the hook for supplying a cheesy language for their system).
Note: I'm kidding about using Perl. Ugh... (shudder)
-- "I am disrespectful to dirt. Can you not see that I am serious!"
, I'm curious what you could do with BASIC on a PS2.
...the same thing i did with a compumate computer sitting on top of my atari 2600 about a thousand years ago, learn to program!
it's a great tool to inspire youngsters to learn computer programming.
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
20 POST ARTICLE_AGAI N
Burn Hollywood Burn
Hey, you have to start somewhere. Is it a reality to expect a hole slew of 8 year old kids to want to start programming when Hello World is 5 pages of code full of magic numbers and linked against 3 or 4 different libraries? Kids will outgrow BASIC all by themselves. They will feel cramped by the lack of solid data structure support. They will yearn for the greener fields of malloc() and free(). They will want their code to run faster, and they will _want_ to link to those libraries to get at their functionality. These things will happen on their own. I say make the beginning environment as unintimidating as possible, turn off this snobbery and remember that _everybody_ has to start at the beginning. Raise no barriers to who may enter, and let those with the curiosity and drive to learn more do so at their own pace, driven by their own curiosity. Those are the people who will become good programmers, because they are looking for better solutions, and are not satisfied with what they have if they know there is something cooler out there.
There is no need to jumpstart people and drop them hungry, cold, wet and naked into the world of modern programming, i think it's healthy if they get there themselves, at their own pace, starting from their own comfortable beginning. A little preachy, but i think it matters. I tried a lot of langages out before i settled on C and C++ as my two languages of choice. If i'm working with a sane and well written class library, i'm happy. On the way though i tried out BASIC, Pascal, Assembly language (for 3 different processors), Object Oriented Pascal, Forth, and even Perl.
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Play Six Pack Man. I
"Gotta admit, I'm curious what you could do with BASIC on a PS2. "
20 years after atari, the ps2 comes out. Able to do graphics that make your head spin. It's first challenge: Pong in Basic