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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!"
...that Sam Lantiga left Lokigames and is now working for Blizzard? But he is still developing SDL, as it seems. Look here for more details.
[--- PGP key and more on http://www.root42.de ---]
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.
Good point -- I had forgotten about the whole selling the hardware at a loss issue. Still, to the average gamer, who probably knows or cares little about free or Free games, $200 is an awfully high price to justify getting the ability to play SDL games.
Sure, the Cool Factor is definitely there, but the $200 entry fee would probably be too high for anybody but die-hard geeks who want to play their SDL games on a TV mainly for the hell of it, which is a far cry from small developers being able to reach millions of gamers like some people had hoped for.
>>when for $20 used you can get a decent copy of Final Fantasy for PS?
The amazon.com version of ff9 costs $40. But thats an exact copy. For a merely decent copy I would expect to pay $7-$10 and not a penny more.
Does anybody have information about whether or not developers will be able to redistribute enough of the Linux-based runtimes to make this feasible? Actual quotes from the license agreement(s) would be nice. (Or has the porter found some way around using the binary-only stuff?)
Have you tried the Aminet? It's right here.
Slagborr
This is great news of course, but how will sony react? Hundreds of free games being released will hurt commercial sales of PS2 games, especially if someone ports the SDL versions of MAME, SNES9X, and that gbadvance emulator.
Since when are `Open Source' and `commercial' opposites? According to just about everyone, including both the FSF (see their `words to avoid' list) and the Open Source Initiative (dunno where, but Google Is Your Friend) `proprietary' `closed source' or `non-free' is the opposite of Open Source / Free Software.
Commercialness does not equal being sold for money just like free to air television isn't non-commercial. It is (according to every dictionary I've ever read) to do with the motivation behind producing the work, which in the case of apps like Zope, Red Hat Linux, VideoLAN, and many other projects, is (at least partially) to make money.
Commercial software is fine and employs alot of people, and its even better for users if its also Open Source.
Ahem. *cough* :) Someone's been going to the school of CmdrTaco's all-inclusive non-objective statements. I would hardly call a majority of the SDL games commercial quality. A majority are playful diversions (like minesweeper) and the few that are commercial quality ARE commercial (like Loki's wares).
Don't get me wrong: I think SDL is a step in the right direction. But are you going to get Joe User to play these games when for $20 used you can get a decent copy of Final Fantasy for PS?
I am glad to hear that Sony has decided to go with SDL. I hope that Sony stands a chance with the Xbox, because I would hate to see Microsoft win in another market. We should give Nintendo and Sony our support.
Another cool thing about SDL is that it supports various languages through its bindings. For example I tested the guile/scheme binding a while ago.. the code needed to get things on the screen was only a few lines... sorry to say, but it lacked some features and crashed in my face.. but at least in my mind it would be awefully cool to prototype effect/AI/ ideas etc using SDL and Scheme. Other people may already have some experience using SDL with other interpreted languages?
-jk
"Premature optimization is the root of all evil" - Don Knuth
...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
SDL is nice, but I'd like to avoid getting a devkit via the grey market. SCEA has a poll going to gauge interest in the PS2. Let's get this thing released! --me
Linux to become the source for a whole bunch of free SDL games (some of them with commercial-level quality)
:(
I guess commercial software is still generally higher quality than free software
The problem is the PS2 has only a 294 MHz CPU and very high-latency RAMBUS RAM, so portable emulators will not run well on it.
My old Cyrix 166-based PC had a lot less processor power than the PS2, much slower memory (remember 70ns FPM DRAM?) and less of it (only 16MB), quite apart from the fact that it had a video card that is prehistoric by comparison (an S3 Virge).
Yet it played ~95% of all MAME games absolutely flawlessly, at full speed.
Portable != Slow, as anyone who has used Linux on a MIPS box will tell you (it runs rings around the MIPS-only IRIX)
You're not an assembler guru that's feeling hard done by optimizing compilers are you?
Actually, most of the games I know are enthusiastic about Linux. Whether they have the skills to administer a Linux system is another story, of course.
What are you talking about? Canada's been a corporosocialist country for quite a while, now. ;-)
The key difference is that nobody forces the GPL on anyone.