[HN Gopher] Playstation 2 Architecture
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Playstation 2 Architecture
Author : Claude_Shannon
Score : 181 points
Date : 2022-09-26 15:05 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.copetti.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.copetti.org)
| gumby wrote:
| A correction: the "emotion engine" referred to (at least before
| launch -- perhaps they changed it) the GPU itself, which was the
| only Sony-designed silicon in the original PS/2. The TMPR and
| other silicon were designed and supplied by Toshiba.
|
| Also notable: Original Playstation (AKA PS/1) compatibility was
| provided by simply putting a whole PS/1 on the board -- I think
| it might even have been by then a single chip; if so likely Sony
| designed.
|
| That was an insane project by an amazing team. I see a comment by
| me is top of the previous discussion, if you want some more
| snippets.
| smoldesu wrote:
| For me, this is what I'll always associate with the Emotion
| Engine: https://youtu.be/SpRCSU0lXZ0
|
| There used to be a great video on YouTube of the E3 crowd
| reacting to the first Metal Gear Solid 2 footage, but I can't
| seem to find it. Rest assured though, it was Melee '01-levels
| of disbelief in the audience.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| My association with the Emotion Engine will always be Soul
| Reaver 2 over MGS2:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7SQ2Wu6PvI
|
| I remember magazines at the time (Next-Generation, maybe?)
| talking at length about the Emotion Engine and how it would
| allow, among other things, for more detailed facial
| expressions.
|
| I almost wonder if Sony specifically instructed Crystal
| Dynamics to try to use it in SR2 as much as possible for
| promotional materials, because the degree of lip movement and
| detail of facial movement on that game is way more expressive
| than almost anything else on the platform, despite being an
| early title.
| frou_dh wrote:
| Is this that video?
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mr6RngfAeMY
|
| I remember obsessing over how great the MGS2 graphics were
| back in the day. Particularly the detail in the indoor
| scenes.
| smoldesu wrote:
| I found that too, but I remember seeing some uncut footage
| from the back of the crowd a few years ago... oh well.
|
| But yes, MGS2 was a real wake-up call for Western studios
| that didn't focus on strong direction and writing. Even
| though the finished product was notoriously panned at
| release, you can tell that Kojima's influence was being
| felt across the industry. Wish I wasn't playing stupid-ass
| Splinter Cell back then...
| wk_end wrote:
| I don't think your correction is accurate. If you look at a PS2
| mobo, the chip labeled the Emotion Engine is the CPU. The
| "Graphics Synthesizer" is a separate chip. You can see this on
| the Wikipedia article on the Emotion Engine [0], which also
| identifies it as a CPU. It cites an article [1] from early 1999
| - around a year before the Japanese launch - which maintains
| the same naming scheme.
|
| It's possible that at some point in development Sony was
| calling the GPU the Emotion Engine, and then renamed it to the
| GS but liked the Emotion Engine name so much that they started
| calling the CPU the EE, but that seems a little unlikely...and
| either way, the article is accurate in terms of how things
| ended up in production.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotion_Engine
|
| [1]
| https://docencia.ac.upc.edu/ETSETB/SEGPAR/microprocessors/em...
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| PS2 was unique.
|
| EE was the CPU, but it had two programmable vector units as
| MIPS coprocessors or something like that.
|
| VU0 could talk to VU1, and VU1 could talk to the GS directly.
| I think their job was generating "display lists" for the GS
| to follow and draw per frame.
|
| GS might be more accurately called a rasterizer/TMU.
|
| https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/playstation-2/
| MisterTea wrote:
| > Also notable: Original Playstation (AKA PS/1) compatibility
| was provided by simply putting a whole PS/1 on the board
|
| The IO co-processor of the PS2 was built using the PS1's
| architecture so it could double as a PS1. Rather clever and
| efficient design, two generations of consoles in one, using the
| weaker previous generation console as a co-processor instead of
| a bolted on afterthought.
| fredoralive wrote:
| The Sega Mega Drive did something similar, normally the Z80
| is just a support CPU used to run sound (although the 68000
| could also talk to the sound chips, so some games run sound
| off the main CPU to varying degrees). But with the Master
| System converter, it's the main CPU for backwards
| compatibility. The converter itself is largely passive to
| adjust for the cartridge connection differences and adding
| the pause button, all the backwards compatibility is handled
| by the main system.
|
| On the PS2 side, apparently later systems replace the
| original IO chip with a PowerPC based chip running a MIPS
| emulator, which is kinda wild in itself.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| If the Power Base Converter is largely plastic why do they
| seem so expensive on the used market? I would imagine tons
| of clones would be available by now.
|
| There seems to be one IC on the PCB in addition to the
| passives. Maybe this is some hard to clone chip?
|
| [1]:https://retrostuff.org/2016/05/07/power-base-fm/
| HideousKojima wrote:
| Makes me wonder, could the GB/GBC hardware in the GBA be used
| by GBA games?
| Cu3PO42 wrote:
| As another comment already states: for the most part, no.
|
| However, the GBA CPU (an ARM7) in a DS is used as the IO-
| processor for DS games, while an ARM9 is the main chip. On
| the 3DS the ARM9 is the co-processor, while a new ARM11 is
| the main application processor. Since the 3DS can also run
| DS games it still has an ARM7 as well and can natively run
| GBA games, even if that functionality was barely used by
| Nintendo.
| wk_end wrote:
| It couldn't (besides the audio channels, which were
| shared).
| CountSessine wrote:
| The Emotion Engine was very much the CPU+VPU of the PS2, not
| the GPU. The GPU was referred to as the GS or Graphics
| Synthesizer.
|
| I still had all the tech manuals for the PS2 lying around on my
| bookshelf until a couple of years ago. Can't hold on to old
| stuff forever!
| amiga-workbench wrote:
| Yep, the playstation 2's I/O processor was just a playstation 1
| CPU, I believe the emotion engine still handled the graphics
| though.
| fredoralive wrote:
| The GPU was called the Graphics Synthesizer, the chips even
| have specific EE and GS logos on them (see
| https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PS2_GH-001_Motherboa...
| for example).
| Bancakes wrote:
| Early PS3's also featured PS2 hardware, hence also PS1 chips.
| maximilianburke wrote:
| The early PS3s had the emotion engine but no IOP (PS1
| processor); the IOP and sound processing unit were emulated.
| chongli wrote:
| Minor correction: PS/2 refers to the IBM Personal System/2, the
| originator of the popular port for connecting keyboards and
| mice prior to the arrival of USB. The Sony PlayStation 2 is
| usually just referred to as the PS2, without the /.
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| For extra confusion, "PS/2 Keyboards" and "PS2 Keyboards"
| were both products which were manufactured contemporaneously.
| The latter were USB.
| xattt wrote:
| Don't forget the PSX, which was originally used by the
| emulation scene to refer to the first Playstation. Then
| came Sony with an actual PSX which was a reworked PS2 with
| DVR capabilities that looked like a hi-fi component.
| moosedev wrote:
| And the PS/1, which was a line of IBM PCs for the home
| (contemporary with the PS/2, and predecessor to the
| Aptiva range).
|
| Or the PSOne, which was a cost-reduced late model
| PlayStation (1) :-)
| samlittlewood wrote:
| VUniverse: 16K VU1 demo by Mike Day (2003):
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwD7-bs9hss
| aappleby wrote:
| Random trivia - the PS2 processed pixels in 8x2 blocks (no
| texture) or 8x1 blocks (texture) - this made rasterization VERY
| FAST for large untextured triangles (16 pixels/clock, potentially
| 4x Game Cube fill rate), but slow for tiny textured triangles
| (anything smaller than 8 pixels wide wastes pixel pipes).
| aappleby wrote:
| Game Cube worked in 2x2 blocks of pixels and could also run
| primitive "shaders" by cycling a pixel block through the
| pipeline multiple times with different settings. Made for some
| nice bump mapping demos but I'm not sure how much it was used
| in practice.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I've always been kind of fascinated by the state of GPUs
| immediately prior to fully-programmable shaders becoming the
| norm. It particularly comes up in the world of emulation,
| where often those weird fixed-function pipelines were abused
| in interesting ways to produce particular effects, and now
| someone has to figure out how to write a shader for a modern
| GPU that can perfectly replicate what that old pipeline block
| used to do, including all the edge-cases around overflow,
| saturation, and so on.
|
| Unfortunately the inline demos seem to now be broken, but I
| found this article a fascinating treatise on how Gamecube and
| Wii games do things like render water:
|
| https://blog.mecheye.net/2018/03/deconstructing-the-water-
| ef...
| anthk wrote:
| I was about to post that, Wave Race.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| I haven't heard anyone talk about this, but the PS2 was the first
| time I recall seeing a blue LED in a consumer product. I remember
| being really wowed by it, as just a few years prior I saw 5mm
| blue LEDs being sold in an electronics hobby catalog for $95
| each.
| dtx1 wrote:
| I've heard that the original PS2 Architecture was similar to
| program for as modern vulkan based rendering. Any truth to that?
| (I have 0 experience in game/3D programming)
| aappleby wrote:
| No, not anywhere remotely similar except that some of the
| terminology like display lists (that predated PS2) are still
| used.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| There are some vague similarities; like VU1 can be used akin to
| a mesh shader to generate procedural geometry. But the overall
| architecture is very different and simplified. There's no
| pixel/fragment shaders, for example; you _just_ get Gouraud
| shaded triangles _and nothing else_.
|
| Modern GPU APIs are about as similar to programming the PS2 as
| OpenGL 1.x is similar to an Nvidia RTX 3080.
| radicaldreamer wrote:
| A really interesting and nice architecture which was difficult to
| program for (maybe outdone only by the notorious CELL
| architecture of the PS3). The PS2 Linux Kit was brilliant and was
| what got me into Linux in the first place.[1]
|
| Nowadays consoles are designed to be similar to PCs and easy to
| develop for, but I feel like we've lost a little something when
| we went from mostly custom developed chips and archs to commodity
| PCs with some custom subsystems.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_for_PlayStation_2
| pjmlp wrote:
| Another PS2Linux user!
|
| I hardly used my kit due to the issue with having to find
| monitors with separate signal cables.
| thakoppno wrote:
| PS3 otheros linux user who ran Yellow Dog Linux on it and
| remember running opencv on it. It was novel but really not
| performant.
|
| What was the ps2 linux experience like?
| pjmlp wrote:
| Much better, because Sony was still coming from Yaroze
| experience so PS2Linux had relatively good support for game
| development, and although it did not expose the low level
| APIs, it was a kind of XNA for PS2.
|
| Unfortunately most people seemed to only care to use it to
| run Linux proper and emulators, which was most likely the
| reason why PS3 OtherOS was so limited.
|
| I lost interest on the PS after that.
| monkpit wrote:
| (2020)
| Narishma wrote:
| Previous discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26243964
| tommica wrote:
| Do appreciate people linking previous discussions, always
| useful to see what people talked.
| speps wrote:
| The 'past' link under the headline does the same.
| latchkey wrote:
| Even better, install the Refined HackerNews browser extension
| and it puts all the previous links at the bottom of the page.
| 'show-similar-submissions'
|
| https://github.com/plibither8/refined-hacker-news/
| kaveh808 wrote:
| While leading the software R&D team at Square USA (we made the
| "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within" movie and one of the
| "Animatrix" shorts) our team got to develop some cool software
| both for the PS2 and the little known GSCube experimental
| machine.
|
| The GSCube was 16 GS processors in a box, and could be configured
| to access the frame buffer as a 4x4 tile format or as 16 layers
| composited in real time.
|
| For Siggraph 2000, we showed a demo of a shot from the movie
| running in real time, allowing the user to interactively change
| the surface materials of the character. The scene was Aki
| floating in zero gravity, and included individual hair strands.
|
| My own memorable piece of geekery involved implementing Perlin
| Noise entirely on the VU1, and demoing a field of tall grass
| blowing in the wind.
|
| Fun stuff.
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