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Cygnus, The PlayStation2 and Linux
The compiler targets Toshiba's new 128-bit CPU, and includes extensions to program the custom graphics chips in the next generation Playstation.
The simulator simulates most of the NG Playstation console, but you can't quite use it to play games on it - its CPU outperforms even a Pentium III. However, the simulator lets game designers debug things that would be impossible with hardware, and since it's GPL'd, they can modify it as needed to help them debug.
The tools will be available through Sony's usual developer channels as part of their hardware development systems, and yes, they'll be GPL (the compiler and simulator, at least) for those people who buy them. Cygnus will sell support contracts to game developers.
Eventually, of course, the changes to gcc, gdb, and other FSF programs will get rolled into the public releases.
You will be able to read the press releases on Monday.
Let the games begin! "
Getting those development tools isn't easy. For the current PSX, not only do you have to sign licensing agreements, but you need to spend several thousand dollars on the toolkit and a special developer's PSX unit. I've read reports that the cost for a PSX2 devel setup is supposed to be comparable. While it is certainly easier for a current Linux developer to make stuff for PSX, it's not going to be that easy. Sony has a seriously vested interest in keeping their system proprietary.
Sony does not make money on selling the playstation. In fact, they lose money. They make money by collecting a fee for each game sold for their platform. The fee is not insignificant, either (I believe it's on the order of $10 per copy per game). This is how they can build a machine that has the graphics performance of a $50,000 SGI, yet sell it for $200.
If Sony were to release their tools, people would probably start releasing games outside this setup. They have absolutely no vested interest in giving their development kit away for free, as their development kit allows them to retain control over their developers.
That said, however, I could see a day when they allow their developer to sell programs for a PC Playstation (a linux box with a nice video card). Porting ought to be pretty easy. As long as they retain their $10 fee, they won't care. In fact, seeing as though they won't have to eat the costs of building, distributing, and selling the Playstation itself, I think Sony might even prefer this setup. Time will tell...
--Be human.
The simulator is part of of gdb, so it must be GPL. In fact, the GPL on the sim is very important to developers - if they have a thorny debug problem, they can always edit the simulator to trigger a breakpoint under bizarre conditions. Try doing that with a proprietary simulator!
Greetings,
Well, there are actually a lot of reasons...
One is that they do make licensing money off of each copy of software PRODUCED (*NOT* sold. If you want to make 10,000 copies of a game, you need to pay them $100,000 (for example) to make them. If you only sell 1,000 of them at $30 per, you eat the $70,000 loss.
In the mean time, they sell the machine itself at substantially under hardware cost, and make it up in games. Thus, the BIG number to the console manufacturers is: # of sw titles licensed/unit. What this means in short is that if they've sold 1M PSX2's, and licensed 5M titles*copies at $10 each, that they have a $50 'buffer' over the hardware price that means that they can sell it at $50 undercost and break even. That's *NOT* including in-house developed games, of course. (It's also not including cost of media, which eats into that because they must press on custom media in order to manage piracy prevention mechanics, but it's a reasonable overview.)
Given that, not everyone will EVER be able to ship a PSX2 title, and the same is true for almost any console with any power. It'll be undercosted from the HW side, and they'll tack title and copycount licensing costs onto the SW side where the money (and volume!) is.
ALSO, there's the REAL problem that not everybody is going to make a good game. In fact, a lot of people are going to make really BAD games. (Fantastic Four, for example.) If you let just anyone publish for your platform, you end up with a disturbing load of bad games. If you make a minimum bar that you have to get past (including content restrictions!) you improve your overall average at the cost of losing the occasional brilliant piece of work that didn't have enough support.
There are also content restrictions, as I mentioned above. Basically, this means that you have to convince Sony that your game is good enough for them to let you sell it on their platform. (Nintendo has MUCH more stringent content restrictions because of the demographic of their product line.) These content restrictions get less and less as the platform ages. Partially because they REALLY REALLY want the initial games to be incredible Best Of Breed games, and partially because fewer top-quality manufacturers want to develop for it as the performance curve catches up to it.
All this combines to make the console manufacturers want to restrict who can ACTUALLY produce games for their platform. However, having the simulator available in GPL'ed form means some major things if it's publicly available. The most interesting of which is that it accelerates the generational advances in games. I comment on that elsewhere in these comments, but the basic idea is that it lets people grok the HW faster than they would if they could only work with a proprietary simulator or even just the chipset itself.
So, in summary, don't expect to be able to develop games on the GPL'ed simulator, but you CAN expect to learn a LOT about the hardware from it, and maybe just enough to be able to convince a game company to let you work with them on a game for the PSX2!
Cyberfox!