[HN Gopher] Playstation Vita Architecture (Part 1)
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Playstation Vita Architecture (Part 1)
Author : wicket
Score : 100 points
Date : 2024-10-23 19:31 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.copetti.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.copetti.org)
| BadJo0Jo0 wrote:
| I'm a huge fan of the original PSP and the homebrew/jailbreaking
| scene that came out of it. I recently acquired a PS Vita and have
| been enjoying it's native and homebrew offerings. It's also
| surprising that the homebrew scene is still fairly active there
| too. Apparently there's some potential for Android game ports. I
| wish Sony didn't let the PS Vita flop, it feels like it had so
| much potential at the time.
| tmtvl wrote:
| I preordered a Vita back in the day and when I got it I
| immediately fell in love with it. It fits in a pocket and it
| has way better analogue sticks than that garbage the PSP had.
|
| I still use it to this day because I can't fit my Steam Deck in
| my pocket.
|
| And I concur that its potential did kinda go to waste. Imagine
| if we had Shadow of the Colossus and Demon's Souls available on
| it.
| bitmasher9 wrote:
| The Vita1000 OLEDs in general haven't aged well, but the
| Vita2000 is still a strong option for mobile gaming. The
| handheld emulation machines aren't made with the same build
| quality and the Steamdeck style consoles aren't massive by
| comparison. The Switch Lite is another fine choice, but still
| much bigger than the PSPVita 2000.
|
| I'm hoping strong sales of the PSPortal encourages
| development into a standalone mobile device, but I'm not
| hopeful it'll replace my PSP3000/Vita2000 for daily driving.
| theshackleford wrote:
| My vita oled still functions fine? I have non oled variants
| as well but I feel no reason to use them, they just exist
| as spares.
|
| Have the OLEDs all started dying or something?
| hx8 wrote:
| OLEDs degrade faster and stronger than CRT or LCD. OLEDs
| have three major sources of degradation. The percentage
| of Vitas will good OLED screens are significantly
| decreasing.
|
| * Burn in. Everyone knows about this, not a huge issue on
| most Vitas.
|
| * Use degradation. Using the OLED panel will slowly cause
| it to become more dim, and each color dims at a different
| rate. Blue dims 10% by 1k hours, and by 10k hours you can
| expect half total brightness. The Vita was released 10
| years ago, and many of them have seen thousands of hours
| of gameplay by now.
|
| * UV exposure. UV radiation is damaging to OLED displays,
| even when powered off. Long periods of small exposure,
| even if kept enclosed in storage, can damage the display.
| For Vita displays this is the major problem. Vitas that
| were rarely used outside/near windows, and were stored in
| dark places will have the least amount of UV damage. All
| of them should be noticeably more dim than their time of
| manufacture if it were possible to compare side by side.
| gambiting wrote:
| >>The Vita1000 OLEDs in general haven't aged well
|
| Really? That's an interesting opinion - I own both and
| vastly prefer the original Vita due to that OLED screen,
| it's just better in every way(the screen).
| radicaldreamer wrote:
| The white Vita OLED was an excellent device
| hx8 wrote:
| The 60 grams of weight and 3.5mm of depth are very
| noticeable on a handheld.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| calling the PSP nub an analog stick is almost an insult to
| the Vita. It was this flat protrusion that you can switch out
| caps on, and you move it around like some thinkpad nub for
| analog movement. It made sense for the time, but I still
| ponder why they never added two of them. Held back so many
| potential games.
|
| And yes, I still consider the Vita the last true "portable".
| potability in my mind implies pocketability, and the Switch
| and every other non-phone went beyond that. Devices like the
| Ayaneo Air do give me hope that that "pocketable" market may
| make a comback sooner than we think, though.
| s1gsegv wrote:
| I have a Retroid Pocket Flip that I've loved for this exact
| reason. It's just about powerful enough for Gamecube. More
| recent iterations are definitely powerful enough, and
| Gamecube is the library I love to play most.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| the ps2 emulator can run these pretty well (pcsx2). Though I
| haven't tried it on the steam deck I'm sure you can get SoTC
| and Demon's Souls on the deck via emulation.
| zerocrates wrote:
| They had a variety of issues around cost, competition with
| Nintendo, their fiddly and expensive proprietary memory card
| format, but I think just letting it die was a consequence of
| the then-widely-held view that handheld gaming, and maybe all
| dedicated console gaming, was sure to be killed by the
| smartphone. So they let themselves believe that its poor
| performance was just an inevitable result of a changing market,
| not the result of their own avoidable mistakes.
| fidotron wrote:
| Honestly, my view is the Vita was the wrong product at the
| wrong time.
|
| At the time it came out mobile SoCs were improving so rapidly
| it was never going to maintain an edge over phones for the
| normal console lifespan. You rightly call out the storage,
| but it is far from clear what other options really existed.
| Flash/SSD storage was quite expensive at that time.
|
| And market wise, the Sony audience (even more so then) would
| not have been remotely receptive to the sort of games that
| made the Switch popular later on.
|
| It was doomed from conception, and the other mistakes were
| inevitable after that.
| goosedragons wrote:
| How many mobile games look better than what the Vita was
| putting out? Even today. CoD Mobile despite releasing 7
| years after CoD Black Ops Declassified on Vita and having
| way better phone SoCs is barely an improvement.
|
| The Switch still happily runs games off microSD cards. The
| home consoles didn't get SSDs till 2020. For Vita, the
| cards were fast enough. The problem was the proprietary
| nature of the cards. They just cost way too much for the
| size especially as time wore on. I think at the time I
| imported my 64GB Vita card, a microSD card of the same size
| was half the price. By the end of the Vita's life the 32GB
| card was laughably bad value.
| gambiting wrote:
| Genshin Impact mobile is pretty much on par with
| PC/console versions, and Vita couldn't do anything even
| remotely close to it in terms of scale. Although games
| like Killzone and Uncharted definitely pushed the
| envelope in terms of what was possible with the Vita,
| really great games.
| fidotron wrote:
| > How many mobile games look better than what the Vita
| was putting out?
|
| This is a surprisingly profound question, because the
| mobile people absolutely could do games that look better
| than that and largely found it is not worth doing so. It
| is partly tech, in that people prefer battery life (you
| also cannot spend more if your battery has run out), but
| also technical aspects of graphics simply don't impress
| people as much as they did in the 90s. "Content", and
| volumes of it, is far more important.
|
| The Vita cards were fast enough but not big enough for
| games that the Sony demographic would want. For example,
| a Vita scale Gran Turismo or Metal Gear Solid entry is
| simply not going to improve on the (great) PSP entries.
|
| By the time the Vita launched we had already been
| releasing Android builds for the Xperia Play which were
| straight up ports from the PSP, as betrayed by the almost
| uniform 1.6GB per game.
|
| Edit: to add a concrete example, the developers of NBA
| Jam mobile (which was great) went back to 2D afterwards,
| and came up with a very nice engine for streaming 2D
| animation and a whole content pipeline system for using
| it. That ended up making huge amounts of money and
| entertained tens of millions of people for a long time.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Back then, only a few from companies like Glu (now owned
| by EA as of 2021) and Gameloft (Aquired by Vivendi) even
| tried. The mobilew became night and day by the turn of
| the decade, though. If Vita had a game like Genshin, then
| maybe its fate (in Asia) wouldn't have been so dire.
|
| But then again, Genshin was 8GB at launch. Definitely
| shouldn't underestimate how quick storage costs came down
| from 2012 to 2017 when the Switch launched. enabling
| larger games to casually be made.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >I think just letting it die was a consequence of the then-
| widely-held view that handheld gaming, and maybe all
| dedicated console gaming, was sure to be killed by the
| smartphone.
|
| They were right in many regards. The casual gaming audience
| disappeared in real time over gen 8 to phones. Even the 3DS
| just did "well" as a result. So sony went all in on the PS4
| and Nintendo converged handheld and console to stand out.
|
| It's coming around again now, but through emulators (Analog
| Pocket and various android handhelds), the blooming market of
| handheld PCs (Steam Deck, GPD, Aya, etc.), and the occasional
| novelty device aiming for small markets (Playdate,
| Gameshell). I don't know if we'll ever get another handheld
| like the Vita with its balance of power, build, and library.
| benoau wrote:
| I remember getting the PSP, and this was the iPod and PDA era,
| the PSP was just absolutely amazing. It was better than
| anything else _by far_ , even with the silly little UMD optical
| discs. Thanks to EU regulations pressuring Apple's restrictions
| you can get PPSSPP for iPhone now and the games _still_ hold up
| amazingly well.
| goosedragons wrote:
| The Vita, as flawed as it was, was pretty incredible at
| release too. The OLED screen, the PS3ish level visuals, a
| second analog stick finally. It was easily my favorite
| console from when I got it until I picked up a Switch.
|
| Sony really bungled it with the over draconian DRM and
| proprietary memory cards. Had it used microSD cards and not
| been SO anal about how anything got on there it could have
| done a lot better. And had they ditched the back touch panel
| and added real R2/L2 in New 3DS style and perhaps clickable
| thumbsticks, it could have been something!
| gambiting wrote:
| I think Sony was just incredibly scared of having a repeat
| of the PSP situation where piracy was absolutely
| dominating, they sold crazy number of consoles and very few
| games(comparatively). I knew at least 10-15 people with
| PSPs when I was a teenager and none of us ever owned a
| single actual PSP game on a disc.
| cheeseomlit wrote:
| Same, the PSP was my first introduction to homebrew gaming and
| custom firmware. Having all those emulators on a handheld blew
| my mind back then. I actually still have it in a drawer
| somewhere- which reminds me, check your battery! You don't want
| a bloated battery ruining such a lovely device (or burning your
| house down)
| Sarkie wrote:
| https://android.rinnegatamante.it/
| ElCapitanMarkla wrote:
| Hardware wise it was a fantastic console, I picked an OLED
| version up a couple of years ago. The problem I always had was
| the lack of games. There were a handful of good titles but
| nothing really blew me away. I think I spent more time playing
| Risk or Rain than anything else.
| zelos wrote:
| Back when I was commuting by train every day, the Vita was my
| favourite console. It felt like it got a lot of great ports
| of the big indie titles of the time, plus a decent number of
| bigger titles: Hotline Miami, Spelunky, Stealth Inc, Wipeout
| 2048, Resogun, Super stardust, Persona 4, Guacamelee.
| corysama wrote:
| I never followed the Vita homebrew scene. But, what I've read
| from following the single board computer emulation scene is
| that Vita homebrew took a while to pick up speed. But, today
| the Vita is a respectable portable emulation device on par with
| many small SBCs currently being manufactured.
|
| https://docs.libretro.com/guides/install-psv/
| Vitamin_Sushi wrote:
| I miss the PSP jailbreaking scene. Back when I was in high
| school, I made quite the pocket change cutting PCB traces on
| people's PSP batteries. Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure
| that got me interested in electronics in the first place.
| hansonkd wrote:
| Writing homebrew for PSP was my first introduction to
| programming and my gateway to Python (through PyGame).
| gambiting wrote:
| Haha, same. And that's how I got into programming, making
| homebrew games for my PSP - I taught myself C++, and I even
| participated in several competitions for homebrew, PSPSnake
| was one that got thousands of downloads, for a 15 year old
| that was crazy cool.
| corysama wrote:
| Note that this is but one article in a long running collection.
|
| https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/
| stonethrowaway wrote:
| Books like these fall into the pantheon of didn't ask for it,
| didn't expect it, but now that it's here, I'm reading it from
| sunrise til sunset. The author has written several other books on
| processors and embedded architecture. Much needed, frankly.
|
| The embedded world leans much further towards disassembling,
| breaking down, explaining, reasoning and so on and so forth
| compared to the software world. Not sure why, these guys go all
| out to probe and put together circuit diagrams and just about
| fucking everything. The recent Nintendo modding scene shows this
| to an extreme. Software Reverse engineers clutch their IDA
| licenses and plugins like it's going out of style. Copetti is the
| kind of individual we need more of.
| anthk wrote:
| IDA? More like GHydra and diferent FLOSS tools.
| atgreen wrote:
| Many years ago I worked with Toshiba on the Media Embedded
| Processor (MeP), referenced in this article. We (Red Hat) did
| some toolchain work to support the configurable nature of the
| processor, which was novel at the time. The MeP didn't take over
| the world but I was happy to learn that it landed in the PS Vita.
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