Slashdot Mirror
Playstation 2 Outperforms Everything?
Emperor Palpatine writes "This article in Wired talks about the soon to be released Playstation 2 from Sony. Some pretty impressive talk. If they work it out so we can hook these up to a 10baseT, I may have to give it a try. "
I imagine it has something to do with the deal they (likely) cut with Cygnus to develop their tools:
"Hi, we need gcc ported to this CPU."
"No problem. Here's your Linux executable."
"Uh, can we get a WIN32 binary?"
*snicker* "Not easily. Besides, there's no decent make for Windoze."
"Can't you integrate it with Visual C?"
"No. Micros~1 won't tell us how to integrate it, and VisualC isn't Open Source. Their make syntax is completely non-standard, anyway."
*sigh* "Okay, how much does this Linux thing cost?"
"It's free."
"...You're kidding."
"Nope."
"Well then the tools must cost extra."
"Nope, it comes bundled with a compiler, industry-standard make, perl, bash, and EMACS."
"...For free."
"Yes."
"You're not bullsh*tting us?"
"No."
"Why didn't we know about this before?"
"We wonder that ourselves a lot..."
I suspect a *BSD port is a simple matter of a recompile...
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
I bet what they mean is that it will run on a linux based OS, but the complier and a visual programming tools will be proprietary. Also the hardware is going to be proprietary, so while the OS that they build for this special hardware can't legally be proprietary, it won't do you much good if you don't have the hardware which will likly be kept under lock and key from non developers
Anyone have a sploit for this Playstation yet? Or should I old school it and left right left right up up down down left right left B A it?
Want Root?
> Why would a machine designed to play games need a text editor? It doesn't. COnsoles are for games, and only for games.
And only for games with the most primitive of input methods I might add. I can't see myself playing TAK on a console. Lessee, all the number keys are used, as well as ctrl, shift, alt, pause, several fkeys, and several keys on the keyboard. Arrow keys scroll the screen so you don't have to whip the mouse (or in a console's case, the stick) around to do it.
Heck, a game like Longbow 2 probably uses every single key on the keyboard.
Yes perhaps the PSX2 can theoretically use the keyboard. But the average console game will never use one. Thus most are joystick jigglers where complexity is in these ridiculously hard to sequence "combos"
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Think about this. That many polygons, at a TV resolution, you could probably do much of the texturing with polygons Now that's 3d :)
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
>>3) Rent a game first to try it.
>
>Fine. But 2 big problems. First, it is hard to find places to rent PC games
Gee, have you wondered why that might be the case?
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
>hiking costs for us, the gamers. If you're an >addict like me, they can break your bank.
Interesting that you refer to gaming as an addiction, making the social significance of stealing to support your habit even more apparent. Do you think other addictions should be enabled in this fashion? We should force the liquor and tobacco producers to reduce their prices, then. Capitalism be damned, it is imperative that we make it as easy as possible for people with impulse-control problems to indulge in their preferred vices.
Yeah, right. What you're doing is theft, in part from your fellow programmers...assuming you're a programmer yourself. Get a life/clue/whatever.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
Umm, are you asking me why the linux OS can't be proprietary? Well the kernal itself can't be proprietary as long as they use any of the linux code that has been currently developed. The only way you could make a proprietary linux would be to make a completly cleanroom kernal only based upon the current kernal specs. But I doupt sony cares to create its own kernal, and they definatly wouldn't be calling it linux cause callig it that would pretty much define it to be linux, which is under the GPL and can't be proprietary
Well Nintendo has several very good reasons to keep with cartridges for the N64. Oviously in hinesight they were wrong, but while everyone wants to say Nintendo picked cartidges just to be greedy, that isn't the whole story. The space available on a single normal old system cd wasn't enough for much growth in games. Saturn and Playstation both have several games that require 2 cds. Nintendo oviously didn't understand that such oddities were acceptable to the average gamer. Its a combination of stupid desisions and not understanding that the gamer audience had grown up. But I'm not willing to assume anything about Nintendo till I see the dolphin.
Let us pause for a moment and reflect on life during the days of the Atari 2600.- -----------------
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Furthermore, real-life polygons aren't only 3 pixels, and they're not solid colour. They're larger, and they're textured. Also, although your scene could theoretically contain more than 75 million polygons, you're relying on your application to be able to calculate which ones are visible, and pass their coordinates to the renderer at a rate fast enough to keep up. Although possible, I'd guess this is unlikely to be the case with PSX2.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
If people take the time to actually look up the technical details (see Microprocessor Report April 19, v15 i5) they'll probably get a more realistic idea of the capabilities instead of third-hand info from marketing flacks (not that I've got anything against salesdroids but slashdot is suppose to be targetted at a technical audience).
You can think (very broadly speaking) of the EmotionEngine as a R5K (like in SGI O2) coupled with 2 vector and 1 image unit. I wish people luck in developing partly asynchronous parallel/threaded algorithms that can get anywhere near the "peak" 6.2 Gflops. Also the I/O processor (ie the old Sony chip) only has space for 1 PCMCIA card on a 32 bit I/O bus. The other major constraint is total memory of 32 MBytes with no hard disk for swap space unless some bright spark can do some magic with an IEEE-1394 peripheral. As one wag noted, its easy to create a fast chip when you don't need to worry about memory hierarchies. At least it will have a lot of graphic functions built in (fog, sprites, particles, etc) so you can dazzle people with gee-whiz effects.
A go-kart is still a go-kart even if powered by a formula 1 engine. It will be a very useful and amusing console toy but don't expect it fufill your fantasties of having a supercomputer in your bedroom.
LL