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SDL Has Been Ported to Sony PS2
JigSaw writes: "SDL, the open source answer to DirectX, is a well-known cross-platform multimedia library designed to provide fast access to the graphics framebuffer and audio device. Sam Lantiga, the maintainer and SDL project leader, announced today on the SDL mailing list, that he ported the library to Playstation2 and it will allow to write and run SDL games (open source or commercial, as SDL is LGPL) on the Linux port for the PS2. Great to see Linux to become the source for a whole bunch of free SDL games (some of them with commercial-level quality), easily recompiled for the PS2 and run them without having to spend $49 USD for each game. This release will be even more significant in the near future, as SONY is planning to release the broadband adapter add-on, which will enable small developers (and even companies) to release free or shareware games, downloadable in binary or source format (most SDL games are known to have small sizes) from the web, and hop, to your TV!"
2D with SDL on the PlayStation 2 uses DMA to transfer images to the screen, and is fairly fast. SDL also takes advantage of hardware YUV -> RGB conversion and hardware image scaling.
As for 3D, SDL just provides an interface to the native OpenGL implementation. There is a port of Mesa to the PS2, but as of the Public Beta, there were lots of features which hadn't been tested and some things which didn't work due to the way PS2 hardware works.
If you want to use any of the other hardware, like the custom vector units, you'll have to program them yourself.
In general, SDL speed is pretty good on the PlayStation 2. However, in my experience, games which require a lot of memory or lots of floating point will be fairly slow.
SDL isn't a magic wand, you still have to take the advantages and disadvantages of your target platforms into consideration for the best performance of your game.
Of course, the best games are the commercial ones that Loki ported (some of which use SDL).
Still, there are some good free ones also. Sturgeon's law does still apply though...
...it was ported to the PS/2 with the 1.2.1 release a few weeks ago. The port was done by some Japanese coders. The news here is that Sony has donated a dev platform for further development...so we can all hope Mesa is ported sometime :)
So Sony still has not released Linux for the US PS2... So unless you have a Japanese PS2, this won't do you much good yet.
Looking for any old 8-bit Heathkit/Zenith software/hardware - http://heathkit.garlanger.com
I code for the PS2 for a living. I hate to break it to people - if they think they'll be coding up demos that match performance of the games available - its not going to happen.
The performance is going to be quite substandard. I can just see it now - everyone whining about how slow it is, meanwhile... its just unoptimal code.