Developing for the Playstation 2?

Posted by Cliff on Thursday September 20, 2001 @03:45AM from the from-the-PC-to-the-console dept.

Kentai asks: "Im thinking of building my final year CS project around developing a piece of software for the Playstation 2 and I am wondering what various pitfalls I should expect. Bringing our own software to the living room on nice hardware seems like a whole new computer medium that would be fun to exploit. Problems I am expecting so far include: issues like obtaining a compiler (pretty important), the whole Playstation 2 CDR issue and legal issues. What compilers can one use to develop PS2 software, and how much does each solution cost? Also, has anyone had any luck or placed any hope on a Java VM for this platform?"

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A PS2 developer speaks by Junks+Jerzey · 2001-09-20 04:13 · Score: 5, Informative

That would be me :)

The main thing to expect from the PS2 is that you have minimal to no library support. If you want to get polygons or bitmaps on the screen, you have to manage video memory yourself, you have to talk to the graphics hardware directly, and so on. If you want to really get performance, then you have to write custom assembly code for the vector processors.

The bottom lines are: (A) the learning curve is very steep; and (B) expect to do very embedded-systems type of work, and not be able to rely on fancy C++, Java, or the like.