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.

Comments

BASIC Programming!

[American AC in Paris]

Cool! Now The Slashdot team can practice using recursion on the PlayStation2, too!

10 PRINT "This is a"
20 PRINT "Haiku program."

Re:Britain's history of amateur games development

[RGreen]

I can't read the Sony Management's collective mind, but I suspect that the strength of the British computer games industry is one of the reasons behind their decision to sell the PS2 with an amateur development capability. Not that different from the "Net Yaroze" version of the original Playstation, really.

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.

A lot!

[Docrates]

, 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.

Idea

[Auckerman]

10 IF POSTED = ALREADY THEN GOTO 20

20 POST ARTICLE_AGAI N

Britain's history of amateur games development

[The Dodger]

Some people out there are probably wondering why this is getting released in the UK in particular.

Well, the UK has a long history of amateur games development, a legacy of home computers like the ZX-80, Spectrum, Commodore, BBC Micro, etc. Teenagers learnt how to program in their bedrooms on computers they got from Santa, then grew up to found and work at companies like Psygnosis, Codemasters, Silicon Dreams, Eidos, Ocean, Rare, etc.

I can't read the Sony Management's collective mind, but I suspect that the strength of the British computer games industry is one of the reasons behind their decision to sell the PS2 with an amateur development capability. Not that different from the "Net Yaroze" version of the original Playstation, really.

D.