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Sony Annouces Linux PS2 Port for US
krismon writes "Sony has announced that it is gonna release the Linux port(old Slashdot article) for the Playstation 2 in the US, after selling out SUPER fast in japan." I saw this running, it's pretty impressive.
How the PS2 works - this is an awesome source... very informative, yet easy-to-read.
http://www.howstuffworks.com/ps2.htm
Ya.. if you knew anything about this you would know that it comes with a cable that plugs into a vga monitor, so if want yer high resolution, its comes in the box. Zeno
You're Just Jealous Because The Voices Are Talking To Me.
Has anyone been able to get the PS2 under linux to talk to a another linux box via USB? Is the USB hardware on the playstation supported in sony's linux port?
A couple of megabits a second is nothing to sneeze at, a lot of things could run full speed under X at 2Mb/s.
The firewire port would give far better speeds, but every recent PC has USB.
Currently I have a box with TV out which gets lugged into the living room occasionally to play movie files in various formats & xgalaga on the TV. Having a PS2 as an X-term would be a far more convenient (and cheaper) idea than a box with a GeForce with TV-out. Things that chew serious amounts of CPU (eg. DivX) could be run on the real box in another room and piped to the local display on the PS2. After a certain point the bandwidth of firewire would be desireable.
i'll give you one word for the best reason for this port. Mozilla. By porting Linux to the PS2, a port of Mozilla becomes trivial, and Sony doesn't have to spend the mega bucks to create a web browser. You just have to create a skin which looks decent on a TVs limited resolution, maybe an image proxy which downsamples the pics so they're viewable on a TV.
As for your question about expandablity, remember those USB ports. USB is fairly well supported on Linux, so pretty much any supported Linux device, such as storage controller, network card, input device, etc suddenly becomes a PS2 device.
If god had intended you to be naked, you would have been born that way.
Ive used it, and its SLOW
PS2 doesnt have much memory and its unexpandable anyway, so things like building a kernel take all day while the thing swaps into the stratosphere... if youre going to develop for this thing, you really want to cross compile. You dont want to self-host build at all.
CPU wise, the R5900 @ 294mhz is roughly equivalent to a K6/233. Please, dont argue about what this CPU is "theoretically" capable of. Right now GCC is very unoptimized for this architecture, so a K6/233 IS what this thing is going to perform like, unless you want to hand code MIPS ASM.
Its very cute, but the Mesa HW implementation is rather incomplete and binutils has various bugs preventing lots of stuff from linking properly.
Oh yeah, it's also expensive as hell (compared to what the equivalent $$ would buy you in x86 hardware)
To me, its mainly a curiosity, nothing more. Dreamcast Linux is far more interesting -- and far cheaper.
The main reason everyone I know who has bought PS2 linux is for the VGA adaptor so they can play PS2 games in hires ^_^;
Still, it's nice that Sony did the port.
Some DSL modems connect over USB lines as well.
Owning the hardware and software doesn't break the antitrust laws. Using the marketshare from one in order to leverage into the other *does* break the antitrust laws.
The U.S. Antitrust laws don't make it illegal to have a monopoly in the USA. They illegalize a small subset of practices which have a large impact on consumers and competitors.
Keeping
USB sucks for networking. It's designed for one-way data transfer, and bogs down if it gets much more sophisticated. Remember networking with serial cables on the mac, or null modem cables on the PC, that's why USB networking sucks, and hasn't been implemented.
My Karma is so good, I'm the Dalai Lama...or something.
Rambus has been around for quite some time. I believe they did some work in Nintendo's game consoles as well.
>I heard inbuilt DVD support under PS2 was piss poor, so why bother
>paying so much more for a flawed DVD player?
You don't have a PS2 do you? The PS2 DVD support is pretty damn good. At least I can watch DVD's on my PS2 unlike suckers like you who are going to but an XBOX and then discover you have to shell out another 29.95 to Mickysoft for the DVD support.
Right, let's get this straight, from what I've heard it is a fairly complete linux system. It's basically a port of an oldish redhat distro. It installs on the hard disk that comes with the kit (40GB) so has a reasonable /tmp, which it needs, don't forget that this is a machine with only 32mb or ram. Swap city. Having said that it apparently runs pretty well and is more than capable of running your browser (also included in the kit is a broadband adaptor), word processor etc. Resolution is limited to 800x600 though.
Sony have a page with a couple of screenshots and a features list here
Which brings us to why Sony are doing it. Yes they have got a touch of microsoft envy, they like the idea of having one unit which does DVD, games, web, interactive content and office stuff sat under your telly that is made by them. But, this is open source not m$ so don't get too upset. More than that though Sony most likely want to encourage the return of the bedroom game coder.
Think about it, they've done this before with the netYarouze project (ps one that you could connect to your pc and download code to) and they're providing the system manuals with the linux kit. Forget porting linux games, this is a games console! There's no way you'll get decent performance through mesa et al on ps2, the drivers won't be optimised for it, don't forget, it's not a PC (remember 32mb main ram, 4mb VRAM!). You're supposed to be adventurous, learn how the ps2 works, see if all those developers are right about it being hard to code for, take up the challenge.
If you do it right ps2 is an awesome machine, you just have to remember what your target platform is (hint dynamic texture management). Sony are giving people the opportunity to get back to the good old days and make games at home, go on, you know you want to!