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Looking Closely at the Restrictions of Linux on the PS2
Hal-kun writes: "I wrote an interesting article about Sony's upcoming Linux distro for the PS2 and some intellectual property concerns I have with it. It's an intresting look at how Sony limits the ability to have full access to the system, yet being able to keep it under GPL."
They can release the whole source for their linux OS. The playstation and playstation 2 have copywrite protection that searches for "bad" areas of the disc, know as the boot sector. Domestic CD-RW drives cannot perfectly duplicate these discs, so you have to "modify" your console to get it to boot these discs. Sony has recently been going after the makers of the devices that allow you to boot CD-R's and DVD-R's. So, most people, even with the PS2 linux source, couldn't use it without buying Sony's disc. They could also make it so big that you can't fit it on a 700MB disc, being a DVD release only, which would further prevent most from getting it for free.
Cthulhu Saves.
See: CSS, DVD regioning, Windows XP Product Activation, PS2 Copy Protection, eBook encryption, et al.
When will big business learn? If something is secured in a paranoid way, it will be overcome to a degree. The prize is too big.
...there are a lot of people gonna be *real* surprised at this part. Take for example embedded devices or internet appliances...
(slightly off-topic)
Where you mention "pull price", that is actually the pre-tax price of whatever you are buying. In your case, 3%. The tax is now 5%; but the net info on the labels is the same.
In case anyone is curious, there are actual laws in Japan prohibiting the selling of books, magazines, and other things at a lower-than-retail cost. It falls under "protecting the cultural heritage" or something.
Personally I have had bad experiences with Sony. I have had 4 PS1's and 1 PS2, and a multitude of other Sony products. While typically for the most part the products are good the one thing that gets me about Sony is Warranty and support. Even the most minor thing is a instant void of warranty. I watched them void a friend of mines warranty on his PS2 becuase his fiber audio out cable wasnt made by Sony. I've also seen them do the same thing for the composite cable on the way out, and even power cables on the PS1. Not to mention non Sony memory cards, yes and even games. Which brings me to my point. If using anything non-Sony voids a warranty.... What happens if you add anything at all to the Linux distro they provide you with. Does that void your warranty? Or are they making exceptions in thier policy this time. I'm willing to bet they aren't making any exceptions.
Am I lying when I tell you that im telling the truth? Or am I telling the truth when I say that Im lying?
in no time flat. Before the end of the year we will have full access to all the hardware on both systems and have full system specs. And nothing either side does will have any effect on it.
I look forward to ripping DVD's on the PS2 using the hardware decoder, then using a software DIVX to recompress the video so that it would fit on a CD-R. For personal use only. If I want to watch a movie that I bought on some other format or on another hardware platform, then that is my business and allowed under fair use. It would be nice to stream the videos to any screen in the house.
I had a lot of hopes for the indrema, but all to naught. Maybe a hacked Xbox, or hacked PS2 could be the indrema and be a great platform for developing Linux based gaming. Especially if the games where developed using a cross platform game library like SDL so that the games would be easy to cross port to any system.
-- Never make a general statement.
I hadn't realised until now how that was done, they must be using the same sync on green on/off functionality to restrict our playback.
When this was first discovered at launch a lot of people (myself included) were upset about this, if you want to play games at their best AND watch dvd's you have to keep switching leads. Sony claim they HAD to limit playback in this way (cos of the marcovision thing, I think), but most standalone dvd's over here, including ones manufactured by Sony DO let you play dvd's over an RGB lead.
Thankfully DVD Regionx from Datel enables dvd playback through rgb, as well as allowing discs from any region to be played.
That's pretty clever, though I'm also fairly certain that this will only spur open source developers to develop a Linux that will run on the bare metal.
Hmm, I'm not so sure. It's possible, of course, but I think Sony's using a smart tactic to limit hackers: give them half of what they want.
By providing a Linux for the PS/2, even an (apparently) semi-crippled Linux, they have reduced the number of people who will work on or support serious efforts to hack the hardware. Lots of people will be happy to have *any* Linux on the PS/2 and go no further...
<Electronics_lession>
For *any* monitor, it is required to know when a horizontal scan line starts, when it stops, and where the top of the screen is. This information is called sync, and is seperate from the video data that paints the image.
In a normal, modern monitor, five signal lines go to the monitor:
Now, the hsync line is in one state while the monitor is scanning across the display, and another state during the time the electron beam is being swept back across the display (the horizontal retrace interval). The vsync line is in one state when the screen is being painted, and another when the beam is brought back to the top of the screen (the vertical retrace.)
Now, in older monitors, to save signal lines, they used a technique call "sync on green". During the normal horizontal scan, the green line was at a voltage between 0V and 1V, with 1V being full on green, and 0V being no green. During horizontal retrace, the green line went to -0.5V to signal sync. During vertical retrace, the green line was -0.5V during the whole scan line, and went to 0V during the horizontal retrace. By suitable filtering and phase-lock techniques the actual sync signals were recovered from this. Thus, a sync on green monitor required only 3 signal lines.
Now, if you take a normal monitor, and connect it to a sync-on-green system, the monitor's sync inputs will be undriven. A multirate monitor will simply turn off it's drive to the screen, assuming the computer is turned off.
Sync on green has nothing to do with "synchronizing the red and blue signals with the green" - they are synchronous in time already.
Your best bet for such things is to go to a computer graveyard, and try to find an old monitor. Many older monitors would do sync on green as well as normal discrete sync.
</Electronics_lession>
<Rant>
What I don't understand is why everybody is getting so excited about this. Sony is locking you away from the hardware - without a massive RE effort you are not going to be able to do much with this system. For the price of the PS2 and the Linux distro and hardware you could by far more useful devices (until somebody cracks all the hardware protection). Assuming somebody does manage to get raw HW access, Sony will make that person disappear in a puff of red smoke.
Why don't we all just ignore these people until they learn to play nice with others? Look at the Atari 2600, the Apple ][, the PC. They were successful because people could hack them. Sony and Apple learned the wrong lesson ("We must have total control! Nobody BUT US CAN MAKE MONEY OFF THIS") rather than the right lesson ("Hardware like parachute - works best when open.").
</Rant>
www.eFax.com are spammers
I have a japanese ps2-linux kit (although really the only thing that makes it japanese is the machine it's running on) and I am personally very glad I have it.
1. as a developer, this gives us a cheap way to give artists/designers tools that actually show how elements will look on the TV (colors), and how PS2 specific art (graphics/sound/etc) will be rendered. it is a huge savings to be able to use TCP/IP and open-gl for these tools. it also makes working from home a bit simpler, and who can argue with that?
2. as a programmer, I get to program two things that I enjoy (just for the hell of it) - linux and ps2 hardware - at the same time. sure, I have a few PCs here that would kick the linux kits ass easily at generic apps, esp. memory-hungry and cpu-hungry apps. but just for the fun of using linux on an embedded system, it's great.
and for a wannabe console game programmer, shit -it's an awesome place to start. you can begin with the familiar ground (linux/open-gl/etc) and slowly move to the real hardware specific features.
3. as for GPL vs. Sony's IP rights, I think some people around here have this impression that there is some guy at sony "headquarters" in japan making this hugely compicated agenda that is surely not in the best interest of the open software crowd. I'm pretty damn sure this isn't the case, and as a matter of fact, I think there are some people at sony who have gone pretty damn far (maybe even slightly beyond what their lawyers would consider comfortable) to show their support for the open software crowd. some people there do care, but some don't. same as everywhere. and instead of bitching about it, I'm damn happy that they've taking this starting step (opposed to how closed the PS1 was).
there were probably a couple of people at sony who went to bat saying that they should release this linux kit because there'd be a ton of people who'd be very glad to have it. and that stance was probably pretty unpopular. so the message I want to send to those guys it "hey thanks, great job. good start!" so that maybe in the future, they'll go a little bit farther next time and have even fewer things closed.
flame if you want.
whatever.
In no way was this designed to be some sort of feasible Linux system in a general sense. Sony don't particularly want you hacking about making drivers and doing weird things with their hardware. In fact they've made it pretty damn difficult to do so. And as for ideas on hacking it to gain more access... I respecfully suggest that people making these overtures don't have that much of an understanding on what the PS2 hardware is like.
However if someone absorbs much of the included hardware manuals, gets a handle on some of the DMA issues and maybe learns a bit of vector unit assembly then they're some ways down the road in becoming a useful PS2 commercial developer. Is that anyone here? I doubt it.
I'm sure the debate will continue and some hard-core Linux evangelists will crow about license issues and that there ought to be unfettered access to the hardware. That's not Sony's agenda and, to be honest, why is this much of a desirable thing anyway. Quite clearly Linux on a PC is more useful in any event.
I'd really like to know if this will sell anything in the West at all. The demand for games developers is such that you can get an entry level job straight out of university anyway. If you're going to work on PS2 dev, they'll factor in that training on the 'real steel' dev-kits anyhow.
If you wanted to do home-brew game development for console-like applications, the Gameboy Advance is an infinitely more feasible platform from a technical point of view. Coupled with the fact you could give a copy of your work to someone else or demonstrate it on a stock GBA, it's got to be a more attractive platform for this sort of thing.
Ok, sure - sooner or later, somebody WILL crack the protection layer and get raw hardware access. Everyone knows it, since I've seen about 80 posts so far saying how fast it will happen. So then what? Everyone's so firm that this will happen. That it MUST happen, for the greater good or something. But what will anyone do with it? Are there going to be any apps that make the PS2/Linux kit a must have? Will somebody develop some breakthrough game? Or will we see more of the consoles running apache that we see now with the Dreamcast? "Yeah, well I have a PS2 running apache! And all I have to do is boot from a dvd and keep all my served files under 8Mb so they fit on a memory card." Bah. Nobody will develop games for it. It'll be nothing more than a novelty that gets stuffed away in the closet when you realize that you can do way more on a PC that, for the same price, has far superior hardware. It's like watching a bunch of cats, scratching at a closed door, and as soon as somebody opens it, they sniff around and walk away.
do not read this line twice.
What others have said, about attracting budding developers, is true, but it's not the real story.
The console industry represents a new revenue model for the "personal computer industry" - and it may mean the demise, or at least marginalization, of the PC in the home. You see, Playstation represents 40% of Sony's entire revenues (yes, Sony as in Sony music, pictures, VCRs, telephones, PDA's, computers, etc...). That's an enormous amount of money. And they sell those consoles at a loss for quite a while, too. How, you ask? Because every time a game get's sold, they get a piece of the action. They've used their hardware platform to become an indispensable middle-man, and it's making them filthy rich.
Microsoft, ever vigilant, realizes that a lot of their revenues come from home users, and only games really drive sales of home computers. Console game sales have been spanking PC game sales for some time - to the point where, in a few years, the PC game industry will find itself in a state of serious decline. If not for email, web browsers and word processors, not many people would buy PC's at all. And by the way, consoles, starting with the Dreamcast, are already doing email and web browsing.
It's simple economics - console? $200-300. PC? $500 and up. And for a good PC, that can play the latest games? $1500+. I'm sure you can understand why consoles have an order of magnitude more penetration than PC's.
Microsoft understands this, and that's why the XBox has a hard drive. The console is going to be able to surf and do email and IM and, eventually, do word-processing (USB/ethernet printers!), TiVO-like functionality, etc. etc. That's convergence, baby. And at that point it's replaced the home computer, and PC's are something you only see at the office or at a hobbyist's house. PC games will stop being ported to the console and start being ported from it, if at all (this part is well under way).
Sony is a threat to Microsoft - Bill earnestly wants to keep owning the "home computing" market. They want all those "home consoles" to be running Windows. They want to be the middleman for every game and application sale in the home. The XBox is a multi-billion dollar loss-leader predicated on this very notion.
Sony is a very smart company. They're savvy, they're well run. They know the score, and they have a big first-mover advantage. It's going to be a bloody fight. We know that Microsoft intends to make the XBox into a $300 home computer, based on Windows, to run "consumer applications" along with consumer games, and be waiting at the finish line when the race is over. In this round, Sony just introduced a prototype for _their_ consumer applications platform.
It's Linux.
We're on the road to Tycho.