In Hull, the telephone service is still run by it's own company (Kingston Comms),and although they're great in many ways (unlimited length local calls for 5.5p, and adsl very early), there is a bad side (adsl which is now quite slow and expensive compared to the rest of the country (512/256 unlimited use for £25ish a month))
They're a private company though, with shares on the stockmarket and suchlike (I speak as someone who bought some at 225p a share, watched them rise to 1500p in a few days, then plummet to 100p or so.... I really should have sold them at some point....)
While this is all very nice and pretty, if this is based on the PDC build of Longhorn (which is painfully slow on any of my systems, but that's besides the point...) then it doesn't have the new fangled hardware accelerated bits that are going to be part of Longhorn (Indigo? or is that something else). The GUI that comes with the Longhorn betas is just a testing one that won't be useful in the final release, so I can't really see what use skinning the gui in the beta that'll never actually be used is....
The rain is going straight down, when you look at the scene just afterwards yhou can see this, it's just that the cameras moving with them while they're running, so it only looks like it's at an angle.....
As far as I can tell from the documentation here, there're pretty much completely custom chips (they run a completely different assembler to the core, and have various other quirks (double instructions for one)).
The fact that only VU0 is setup as a coprocessor (VU1 is on the bus but you can't easily talk to it at the speed you'd want for a coprocessor, and it only has 32kb or ram, so it needs regular feeding from the main core), means that it was never really designed for it, which is more the design of the console than any flaw in the Linux system they give you.
And in reply to someone above who said that you needed custom Sony bits, you don't actually need them (you can just boot Linux off a memory card using the RTE CD that comes with the kit), but then you only have 8mb of data, which is painfully slow, and no network access or HDD, so the bits that come with the kit are really mandatory for a passably useable system.
While we're here, I'll refrain from plugging my PS2 Quake 2 port, 3 FPS is enough for anyone right?
I take it that by saying that you can't access the VUs seperately or suchlike you mean that you can, as shown by the various Vu programming competitions that they've had, where the gfx demo is run on VU1 only, and the overly large pdfs you get that tell you how to do it (anyone fancy printing out >600 pages?).
The PS2 linux kit is basically a subset of the proper PS2 SDK, and apart from running in a special Sony enviroment you can do pretty much everything (apart from playing too much with the DMAC, but there're people working on that)
The lack of ram is annoying, but it's all 'proper' PS2 games use, and they seem to run well enough to me.....
Slashdot Mirror
In Hull, the telephone service is still run by it's own company (Kingston Comms) ,and although they're great in many ways (unlimited length local calls for 5.5p, and adsl very early), there is a bad side (adsl which is now quite slow and expensive compared to the rest of the country (512/256 unlimited use for £25ish a month))
They're a private company though, with shares on the stockmarket and suchlike (I speak as someone who bought some at 225p a share, watched them rise to 1500p in a few days, then plummet to 100p or so.... I really should have sold them at some point....)
If you're offering, please...
davez@davez.co.uk
While this is all very nice and pretty, if this is based on the PDC build of Longhorn (which is painfully slow on any of my systems, but that's besides the point...) then it doesn't have the new fangled hardware accelerated bits that are going to be part of Longhorn (Indigo? or is that something else). The GUI that comes with the Longhorn betas is just a testing one that won't be useful in the final release, so I can't really see what use skinning the gui in the beta that'll never actually be used is....
The rain is going straight down, when you look at the scene just afterwards yhou can see this, it's just that the cameras moving with them while they're running, so it only looks like it's at an angle.....
As far as I can tell from the documentation here, there're pretty much completely custom chips (they run a completely different assembler to the core, and have various other quirks (double instructions for one)).
The fact that only VU0 is setup as a coprocessor (VU1 is on the bus but you can't easily talk to it at the speed you'd want for a coprocessor, and it only has 32kb or ram, so it needs regular feeding from the main core), means that it was never really designed for it, which is more the design of the console than any flaw in the Linux system they give you.
And in reply to someone above who said that you needed custom Sony bits, you don't actually need them (you can just boot Linux off a memory card using the RTE CD that comes with the kit), but then you only have 8mb of data, which is painfully slow, and no network access or HDD, so the bits that come with the kit are really mandatory for a passably useable system.
While we're here, I'll refrain from plugging my PS2 Quake 2 port, 3 FPS is enough for anyone right?
I take it that by saying that you can't access the VUs seperately or suchlike you mean that you can, as shown by the various
Vu programming competitions that they've had, where the gfx demo is run on VU1 only, and the overly large pdfs you get that tell you how to do it (anyone fancy printing out >600 pages?).
The PS2 linux kit is basically a subset of the proper PS2 SDK, and apart from running in a special Sony enviroment you can do pretty much everything (apart from playing too much with the DMAC, but there're people working on that)
The lack of ram is annoying, but it's all 'proper' PS2 games use, and they seem to run well enough to me.....