[HN Gopher] Official Playstation 1 Development Kit (Hardware) (2...
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Official Playstation 1 Development Kit (Hardware) (2020)
Author : pjmlp
Score : 325 points
Date : 2021-07-01 06:16 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.retroreversing.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.retroreversing.com)
| djmips wrote:
| I worked at Capcom in the nineties and had a set of these ISA
| boards in my PC at work but we also used the serial port and a
| debug kit so artists could preview their art without needing
| expensive dev boards.
| a-dub wrote:
| there was also custom firmware that someone had written for one
| of the cheat devices (i think maybe the "gameshark"?) with that,
| and a $40 mail order ISA board, and some time building a MIPS
| cross compiling gnu toolchain, you could write programs in C and
| run them on the consumer/production PS1 as a hobbyist.
|
| i'm trying to remember what the OS situation was though. i
| remember some really thin libc that made syscalls into some rom
| maybe? or maybe it was just a thin libc. i do remember being able
| to access the audio device without doing anything super low
| level...
|
| edit: here we go! the firmware was called caetla and here's a
| nice 22yr old webpage that describes it:
| http://hitmen.c02.at/html/psx_faq.html
| a-dub wrote:
| one thing i do remember clearly. the r3k cpu was quite slow and
| there was no fpu! it did have a gpu though, perhaps an early
| case calling for gpgpu and perhaps i wasn't that smart...
| kevingadd wrote:
| The GPU didn't really have the kind of muscle you'd need to
| do gpgpu, since a lot of the rendering workload was handled
| by dedicated instructions on the CPU instead of special-
| purpose or general-purpose GPU hardware like we have today.
| The PS2 inched closer but the PS3 was probably the first time
| Sony hardware could do anything resembling GPGPU. I don't
| think you were missing anything obvious :-)
|
| AFAIK some other console vendors' audio DSPs were used for
| compute by specific games, though - I recall reading about a
| console game for one of Sony's competitors using the
| console's DSP to decompress game data during loads instead of
| synthesize audio.
| Lammy wrote:
| > I recall reading about a console game for one of Sony's
| competitors using the console's DSP to decompress game data
| during loads instead of synthesize audio.
|
| Maybe Burning Rangers for SEGA Saturn? That game uses alpha
| transparency for rendering fire instead of the usual (for
| the time) SEGA-style mosaic transparency, but it uses the
| sound processor to do it and has very sparse audio as a
| result: http://segabits.com/blog/2011/06/05/retro-review-
| burning-ran...
| eru wrote:
| Might have been the Sega Saturn. That one had lots of
| chips?
| inDigiNeous wrote:
| At least the Nintendo 64 had a GPU that you could control
| with microcode, maybe that could be called a GPGPU ?
| monocasa wrote:
| Eh, that "GPU microcode engine" was a fairly general MIPS
| with a vector unit like the CPU of the PS1. The GPU
| itself was just a rasterizer too like the PS1's (albeit
| more complex, understanding the Z dimensions,
| antialiasing, and subpixel coordinates). I wouldn't
| really call it GPGPU.
| marcan_42 wrote:
| The PS1 didn't really have a GPU in the modern sense. It had
| a rasterizer. That's it. A thing that draws triangles or
| quads, with primitive texturing. It doesn't have any vertex
| processing. It doesn't even understand the Z dimension.
| Nothing even remotely resembling shaders, of course. At its
| core, all it does is draw 2D triangles and quads at integer
| pixel coordinates.
|
| Instead, the CPU had specific instructions (a coprocessor, in
| MIPS parlance) to accelerate fixed-point geometry processing.
| That's where the math happens. So it did have an "FPU" - a
| fixed-point unit, not a floating-point unit :-)
| gxqoz wrote:
| Sounds similar to Doctor V64. Although mainly used for piracy,
| it was also a much cheaper dev machine than Nintendo's official
| Silicon Graphics workstations.
| softwarebouwer wrote:
| I did have that and the Yaroze (Sony's official homebrew
| development). I can't recall exactly how or why, but I do
| remember that compiling/running stuff with the Gameshark was
| easier than with the Yaroze.
| a-dub wrote:
| i wanted a yaroze but they were $$$. like $600 or something
| in 1997 dollars iirc. a few years later i learned of this
| thing.
|
| they also had some weird limitation. it might have just been
| that your program could only ever run on your yaroze... where
| the caetla hack meant you could "ship" stuff that would run
| on chipped playstations.
| gambiting wrote:
| Correct. Yaroze programs could only run on other Yarozes,
| plus the worst restriction was that games had to fit
| entirely in Ram as Yaroze couldn't run burned discs.
| a-dub wrote:
| that's right! or access the drive at all. that made it a
| nonstarter for me as i was trying to build a player for
| fat32 formatted cd-roms full of mp3s.
|
| of course the bigger problem was that the r3k was too
| slow. (i ported mpg123 over to run in fixed point, but it
| still was many times realtime to decode a frame). i wish
| i'd known about this gte vector unit thing, that may have
| been a way to make it work... but ah well,
| corysama wrote:
| One thing the PS1 did have going for it was a MDEC jpeg
| decoder chip. Pretty much all of the FMV in PS1 games
| were MJPEG (a stream of independent jpegs). Between that
| and using the rasterizer to apply motion vectors and
| color interpolation, the machine was pretty well set up
| to do MPEG1.
|
| The PS2 had an MDEC too. We used it in one game to do the
| pop-up talking head dialog between characters mid-
| gameplay with tiny RAM and CPU use.
| anthk wrote:
| Playing Mpeg Layer 2 files would be fast enough for the
| PS1 then.
| anthk wrote:
| You could play MP2 files just fine.
| a-dub wrote:
| layer 2 was significantly lower quality at lower
| bitrates, significantly less computationally expensive to
| encode or decode and significantly less popular as a
| format for storing music.
|
| i wanted to be able to play mp3 collections from psx
| units attached to home entertainment systems. there
| really weren't many other options back then.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| I have a yaroze. The kit was rather limited and the tooling
| was buged out. I also got the codewarrior dev kit which
| helped a lot. I never got further than some simple demo
| hello world style applications. I was more interested in my
| PC at the time. I mostly used it to just play PS1 games. I
| basically wasted my money on it and should have just bought
| a normal PS.
|
| If I remember right the thing was region free though so I
| could play imports. I think you could precompile apps and
| upload them to the yaroze web board and download them but
| only to other yaroze kits. I think a couple of devs
| actually managed to get a real shipped game out of it.
|
| Luckily since I kept the whole lot in nice condition they
| are going for a decent amount on ebay. It is funny keeping
| the cardboard boxes makes it worth more...
|
| I also had the PS2 kit. Which was in my opinion was more
| limiting than the yaroze one.
| phreeza wrote:
| I seem to remember some later demo disc came with some
| yaroze games that were playable on normal PlayStations.
| stordoff wrote:
| PlayStation Underground: Volume 1 Issue 4 came with
| "Gasgar vs. Gasgar" and "Super Mansion", and were behind
| this wonderful warning screen:
| https://i.imgur.com/xntzcFk.png
|
| Some other issues of PlayStation Underground and Official
| PlayStation Magazine (UK) came with other Yaroze games.
| BBC-vs-neolibs wrote:
| One of my biggest regrets always was that I as a young
| student bought an Amiga 4000 (computer of my dreams then)
| instead of a Yaroze.
| malkia wrote:
| My first job was port from PS1 -> PC, then next project was
| another game, but this time port PC -> PS1 - we never got this
| kit (it was small studio of 4 people). We used (what I think was)
| the Yaroze... "printf" debugging all the way :) (oh, and when you
| remove the "printf" things were not working - lol, because
| printf() kept on clearing math errors, and our PC game was
| floating point heavy). TLDR: First port (PS1->PC) went really
| well, second one - we were able to get to the 2nd worst game done
| for PS1. (back then).
| bsenftner wrote:
| I was just looking at all my old PlayStation Developer OS CDs -
| still have the entire set from working on the OS's video
| subsystem for Sony in Tokyo. That was quite the experience,
| contributing to the OS, working in Tokyo as a gaijin Midwest
| transplant, experiencing Sony's unsure corporate attitude they'd
| be successful with video games...
| mdaniel wrote:
| I bet the Internet Archive would be keen to have a copy of
| those CDs, but unfortunately I've never gone through that
| process in order to offer any getting started steps
| Zenst wrote:
| Reading your comment, I can't help feel you have more story
| about this era than all the articles. I'm sure others would be
| fascinated to know more of that time - any blogs or books down
| the line?
| bsenftner wrote:
| I need to write a book. I was also a 17-year old pre-release
| Mac beta tester, and a Vic-20 game studio founder, also at
| 17. I worked for Mandelbrot in '85 - that work is in The
| Beauty of Fractals book. I was at E.A. during the E.A. Spouse
| Era, and on the Tiger Woods PSX team that had the South Park
| scandal. I was at Rhythm & Hues Studios too, through 9
| feature films, leaving just before the collapse. I am also a
| Deep Fakes pioneer, I wrote the global patent, with a
| completely working VFX pipeline for them in '08 (but went
| bankrupt trying to realize Personalized Advertising, and
| refused to do porn.) After my 3D Avatar / Personalized
| Advertising efforts crashed and burned, I went into facial
| recognition and became a lead engineer. Yeah, I need to write
| a book.
| ElCapitanMarkla wrote:
| At the very least you need to start a blog, what a career
| :D
| mywittyname wrote:
| Hell, just start a twitter a la Carmack.
| Zenst wrote:
| I look forward too it as a show HN one day.
| onepointsixC wrote:
| Please do. Your career sounds like quite the adventure!
| chaoticmass wrote:
| I'd love to hear more about you working with Benoit
| Mandelbrot. I hope you find time to write your book
| someday.
| Daegalus wrote:
| I owned a PS1 Debugging Station. sold it recently to a collector.
| my dad bought it at a pawn shop when I was a kid, we didn't know
| what it was until I learned it could play burned games without a
| modchip. it was fun.
| Lammy wrote:
| I ran into one of these at a flea market a few years ago, once
| owned by Maxis if anonymous marker scribbles are to be
| believed: https://i.imgur.com/8M8qMHI.jpg
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| Somewhat related: I have a copy of SimCity 2000 for PS1. An
| interesting novelty, but it's basically unplayable. The
| framerate is atrocious, and that's on top of clunky controls
| where the controller simulates a mouse.
| stavros wrote:
| Have you sent it anywhere for archival? I can imagine
| archive.org would want it.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| IIRC several groups have full NTSC-US sets dumped.
| SimCity 2000 is at least in the Redump set. It weighs in
| at 39MB compressed.
| stavros wrote:
| Oh aha, thanks!
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| I have that one too. I played it a lot as a kid and didn't
| find it unplayable, but the only PC I had at the time was
| an ancient IBM XT so I didn't have anything to compare it
| to. The control issues were mitigated by the fact that I
| also own the Playstation mouse, because I also have XCOM
| and there's no way I was going to play that with a
| controller.
| ant6n wrote:
| Sim city was atrociously slow on my 386 / 33 MHz (and
| 16MB of ram). Mmh brother had a 486 with 66 MHz, that's
| what you needed to actually play the game.
| eru wrote:
| In contrast, SimCity on the SNES was surprisingly playable.
| bluedino wrote:
| It helps that the game was originally done on a C64 and
| ran on lots of other low-end platforms. There was also
| and unreleased NES version.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| There was also a homebrew city builder for GameBoy Colour
| called _uCity_ : https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2017/0
| 8/game_boy_color_tit...
| salamandersauce wrote:
| Because it was developed by Nintendo and not Maxis.
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| I had one of these, in the UK at the time. We (myself and two
| other guys) put together a demo loosely based on "Rollerball",
| which Sony were very encouraging about, but that's not the point
| of this post.
|
| I will always remember the NDA contract I signed... One of the
| terms was "If any of the terms of this contract are broken,
| financial reparation may not be sufficient".
|
| I'm assuming "your first-born child" or something was what they
| had in mind, but I was young, single and childless, so ...
| <shrug>
| appleflaxen wrote:
| I'm almost surprised you are allowed to disclose those facts to
| us today.
| jandrese wrote:
| I'm pretty sure they were insinuating that they can tell the
| cops to put you in jail over a civil contract violation. Might
| be true if they pulled some weird legal maneuver with copyright
| law.
| mywittyname wrote:
| This was the era of Peak Sony.
| elsonrodriguez wrote:
| Lik Sang remembers.
| RichEO wrote:
| This language is here because it (arguably) assists Sony with
| seeking non-financial "equitable" orders from a court.
|
| In the case of an NDA, that would mean an injunction to stop
| you from disclosing.
| [deleted]
| gambiting wrote:
| Ha, that's super cool. I have a person on my team who has been in
| the games industry for 28 years now, and he's worked with most of
| these personally developing early PS1 games. I've only been in
| the industry 8 years, but working with console devkits has always
| been the most exciting thing for me, I love this kind of "secret"
| stuff and actually using it for work, I hope one day there will
| be a post like this detailing all the early PS5 prototypes as I
| think it would be cool for the public to know. MS/Sony/Nintendo
| still produce a lot of very custom, very specialized hardware
| just for devs, but very little of it is every publicly talked
| about, until years and years later.
| datenarsch wrote:
| Consoles these days are just glorified PC's though so they are
| totally boring IMO.
|
| for me at least the fun in consoles was that they were so
| different from your average x86 PC. it was fun to learn about
| the internals of the PS1, PS2 or SEGA Saturn back in the day
| precisely because of their arcane and custom built hardware.
| najima44855 wrote:
| What about consoles by Nintendo? Their controllers have
| motion control and all sorts of craze that PCs don't have.
| jandrese wrote:
| The switch is not that far off from a tablet with some
| bluetooth controllers.
| corysama wrote:
| The Switch is 90% an Nvidia Shield Tablet. One of the
| best Android tablets ever and it barely sold. Get
| Nintendo to market it and it sells at a rate matching 50%
| of the _global tablet market_ every year.
| jandrese wrote:
| Turns out the secret to a successful gaming tablet is to
| actually have games for it.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| That's sort of Nintendo's console strategy in a nutshell.
| Why chase specs when you can just create the best $250
| hardware you can and then make amazing games for it?
| Bonus, since you don't have to care much about being a
| port target for 3rd parties you can experiment with input
| methods and other innovations.
| TillE wrote:
| It's a good plan, I just wish the hardware were slightly
| nicer. Like, every smartphone on the planet has had
| scratch-proof glass for years and years, but the Switch's
| screen is this cheap plastic which is very easy to ruin.
| gambiting wrote:
| People keep saying this, but I honestly don't think it's
| true, at least on PS5. Yes, the consoles are built upon x86
| foundations but that's basically where similarities end with
| PC. It's still like in the "old" days - if you want to get
| maximum performance out of the kit, you need to get right
| down to the metal and use all kinds of special APIs and
| features which either just don't exist on PC or are such
| niche hardware that no one codes for it. The way you allocate
| memory, the way you manage your rendering pipeline, the way
| you do IO, the hardware accelerated decompression, even the
| audio chip - it's nothing like on PC. Xbox S/X are far closer
| to PC since Microsoft is really trying to unify all the APIs,
| but Playstation isn't anywhere near that. I'm not saying if
| it's better, but it's definitely not a "glorified PC", at
| least not in my view, and I'm leading a PS5 development team
| specifically.
| veltas wrote:
| Yeah, not every board with an x86 CPU is "your average x86
| PC".
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| FM Towns Marty, for example.
| Pulcinella wrote:
| There was also the Net Yaroze, an official consumer version of
| the PS1 dev kit.
|
| From the same site: https://www.retroreversing.com/net-yaroze
| mr_sturd wrote:
| I remember one magazine used to bundle people's Net Yaroze
| games on to demo discs here in the UK. Some of them were great!
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