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Sony Opens PS2 Platform
Ars Technica reports that Sony will be removing their content approval process for the Playstation 2 so that developers require less funding to make games.
"Since there are no licensing fees, the only cost to the developer would be the PS2 dev kit. In order to help alleviate some of that financial burden, Bain said that in some cases Sony will lend out dev kits. Another option for developers making small, casual titles is to purchase PS2 debug dev kits, which cost about 1/10 of a full version. Bain went on to explain another possible option for smaller local developers: the PlayStation Network. 'One thing that a lot of developers seem to forget is that PlayStation Network is free,' he explained. 'Consumers do not have to pay a monthly fee ... game developers should create games for local markets.'"
There is an officially sanctioned Linux install kit from Sony for the PS2.
Your statement is misleading, as both the Linux kit and the specific model of PS2 that it requires have been discontinued for years. Allow me to correct:
There was an officially sanctioned Linux install kit from Sony for a long-discontinued model of the PS2.
The whole point of XNA is that games can run on the Xbox and Windows with (virtually) no modifications to the source code. Your own desktop PC will make a pretty good VM.
ROMANES EUNT DOMUS
As dev units are custom electronics (and plastics), they'd be hard pressed to give new ones away without taking a significant financial hit. However, I've seen lots of disused PS2 equipment loitering around offices in the industry. I'm sure if Sony called back some of those (at least the ones they published), they'd have quite a few to loan out to the community.
On a side note, this may be a pretty historic change. It's difficult to see if they mean that they're removing the initial content approval but not the final quality certification, or if Sony really announced that it will be a completely open platform, ALA the Jaguar at the end of its life. Sony is either saying here "You're free to produce whatever" or "We don't care what you make, as long as it doesn't crash and meets our other requirements." Will Sony still manufacture the disks, or are they out of the loop? Is there still a cert process?
With Sony still referring to "Licensed Developers," it sounds like a process of some sort is still in place. But even with one, this is still a huge announcment in an industry dominated by arbitrary 1st party rules.
The ______ Agenda
Please actually get information before you post things...
The Emotion Engine is the CPU, it's a joint project between Toshiba and Sony, it's a MIPS R5900 class CPU with two embedded vector units. (One of which has a direct pipeline to the GPU)
The Graphics Synthesizer is the GPU, it's a chip made by Sony, and it's a more or less simple triangle raster with fogging/mipmap/texturing/gourad shading and some other minor features. It has no pixel shader or vertex shader. (The "vertex shader" is effectively code running on the VU1 of the CPU)
A dual core Mac G5 does have a PPC970 style core, however it's dual core. The CELL has one PowerPC processing element with two hardware threads, both "effectively" running at half the clock rate. However this misses the entire point of the CELL which is the EIB and SPUs, the PPU is there in theory to just be a C&C center for the system itself and the SPUs/EIB. (In reality it's actually where most games run.... with the SPUs offloading specific tasks such as rendering, physics, audio, and occasionally AI.)
Sony is not making the PS2 platform "open". You still can't create a program disk for the PS2, because content has to be signed to load, and Sony is retaining control of the signing keys.
This article really should be titled something like "Sony simplifies approval process for PS2 programs."
If anybody could create program disks for the PS2, we might see it used as a business machine, in kiosks, for retail applications, call centers, thin clients, etc. It's cheap, stateless, and low-maintenance.