It actually depends on the school. SCEA doesn't have any ownership over the IP. If the school lets the students own it, then great. If the school says that it gets the IP, then okay.
Actually, no. Universities have never been able to purchase the hardware. Previously, only licensed developers were able to get the hardware.
While I would love to give away the hardware for free, that would be like MS giving a retail 360 with every copy of XNA. Trust me, SCEA isn't making a profit on the dev kits:-)
You are correct, with PS2/PS3 Linux and Yaroze, the hardware was hidden from the users.
With PlayStation-edu, students have the exact same SDK, compilers, debuggers, docs, and tools which professional developers have. With these, the entire hardware layer of the machine is exposed.
There seem to be two common questions about the program.
1) Why not PS3?
The PS3 is a complex box to program for and the amount of knowledge which a student would get in a semester actually wouldn't be that much. The goal of the program is to help teach students about the low levels of the hardware...regardless of the platform. The PS2 is a very good teaching tool for this. I have seen too many students graduate who think that they can program "the metal" only knowing C# and Java. They don't know anything about DMA, registers, bus contention, instruction latency, etc.
2) What about indie games?
Again, the goal of ps-edu is instructional. However, I am in close contact with Sony World Wide Studios, so if a student creates a great game, I can easily put them in touch with WWS.
For those of you who have used Max on the Macintosh or NeXT, Miller Puckette, who wrote the patching program "Max", has created a new version which runs under Linux. It is called Pd and you can grab it at
http://www.crca.ucsd.edu/~msp/software.html
There is also a real-time graphics add-on library. The program is not really meant for casual use, but rather for people who have specific real-time performance needs which aren't met by the typical consumer apps.
Slashdot Mirror
It actually depends on the school. SCEA doesn't have any ownership over the IP. If the school lets the students own it, then great. If the school says that it gets the IP, then okay.
Mark
Actually, no. Universities have never been able to purchase the hardware. Previously, only licensed developers were able to get the hardware.
:-)
While I would love to give away the hardware for free, that would be like MS giving a retail 360 with every copy of XNA. Trust me, SCEA isn't making a profit on the dev kits
Mark
You are correct, with PS2/PS3 Linux and Yaroze, the hardware was hidden from the users.
With PlayStation-edu, students have the exact same SDK, compilers, debuggers, docs, and tools which professional developers have. With these, the entire hardware layer of the machine is exposed.
Mark
There seem to be two common questions about the program.
1) Why not PS3?
The PS3 is a complex box to program for and the amount of knowledge which a student would get in a semester actually wouldn't be that much. The goal of the program is to help teach students about the low levels of the hardware...regardless of the platform. The PS2 is a very good teaching tool for this. I have seen too many students graduate who think that they can program "the metal" only knowing C# and Java. They don't know anything about DMA, registers, bus contention, instruction latency, etc.
2) What about indie games?
Again, the goal of ps-edu is instructional. However, I am in close contact with Sony World Wide Studios, so if a student creates a great game, I can easily put them in touch with WWS.
Mark
For those of you who have used Max on the Macintosh or NeXT, Miller Puckette, who wrote the patching program "Max", has created a new version which runs under Linux. It is called Pd and you can grab it at
http://www.crca.ucsd.edu/~msp/software.html
There is also a real-time graphics add-on library. The program is not really meant for casual use, but rather for people who have specific real-time performance needs which aren't met by the typical consumer apps.