A second-hand PS1 demo disk that I acquired had an advert for Net Yaroze, along with a little game made using the kit; as someone who had just started programming at this point, it was an exciting concept. I was rather disappointed to discover that they were no longer even sold by that time! Nowadays, I have rather mixed feelings about dev-kits: on one hand, having dedicated debugging hardware is fun, but since truly cross-platform game engines became a reality in the 2010s, these machines have little purpose except to facilitate gatekeeping on the part of console manufacturers. Writing a little OpenGL, Vulkan or now WebGL and compiling with open source compilers for a variety of platforms seems infinitely more practical than signing secret contracts with officious console publishers.
To be fair, a big part of those cross platform engines becoming a reality was the other platform owners following Microsoft and standardizing console hardware on PC architecture. It wouldn't really have been practical to do that kind of thing in the PS2/GameCube era when you had them still inventing their own 3D pipelines and trying to differentiate on that.
Microsoft allows Xbox One/Series owners to enable Dev Mode on their consoles and run their own adhoc software on them. No secret contract allowed until you want to start selling your game.
If you want your game to end up on a PlayStation or Switch, you'll still need to link/integrate their closed-sourced SDKs, so we're close to the "everything is built with open source compilers" but not quite there yet.
I remember those EB machines. I only ever saw a single one, in Japan, and never used it. We actually started working on the PS 2 before there was any hardware at all (even the Toshiba CPU had not been finished) and wrote the simulator so development could start before the hardware was available.
Oddly enough the first time I ever clapped eyes on a production PS 2 was at Fry’s, and it was a slimline (2nd gen) so that would have been five or six years after launch.
We were also working on the Dreamcast at the same time, but less deeply. Obviously there was no direct overlap. Luckily I never ended up visiting both companies the same day.
That's really interesting. Was the emulator called SKY by any chance? And do you know if it survived in any way? As a PS2 fan I'd so much love to see it.
I don’t remember that name. Part of it (a plug in for the emotion engine) might never have been available outside SCEI, I don’t know. The main part (CPU and memory emulator) we wrote was released as open source and for all I know may even survive today for modern processors.
Pretty useless video. The dev kits had both a Linux PC and a PS2 target board in the same chassis. These guys never got past the Linux login prompt. Now the PS3 dev kits were more interesting. I used a second gen one, a stainless steel box about the size of 4-6 large pizza boxes stacked up. The first gen was twice that height.
PS3 dev kit was my first console dev experience, pretty late in the cycle so the dev kit looked like a beefy consumer model. We had one of the second gen ones in the office though. I miss really getting to know the machine and working with the spus, now that consoles are really just pcs it loses that special feeling of really taking advantage of the hardware - however that's just nostalgia, I don't really want to go back to that, but I do have fond memories
It is ironic that modern consoles are so close to PCs now, but PC games were much more popular back then. Nowadays there are hardly any big PC exclusives anymore,
and many console ports are lousy, despite the extremely similar hardware. I guess much fewer people own PCs nowadays.
There are lots of PC exclusive games that are immensely popular, and I'd argue some of the most popular games in the world. csgo, valorant, league of legends, etc.
I think the reason why you won't see any big exclusives on PC is that because consoles are close to PCs, big games should be ported to console otherwise you're missing out on huge markets.
Beyond the live service type games I mentioned earlier, there's also a ton of smaller indie-AA type titles that are PC exclusive. Even that is dwindling down though since porting gets easier and easier for indie devs
> I think the reason why you won't see any big exclusives on PC is that because consoles are close to PCs, big games should be ported to console otherwise you're missing out on huge markets.
Yeah, but today it is mostly the other way round: Big console games get ported to PC. Exceptions like Cyberpunk 2077 (which was a PC-first development) are increasingly rare. Smaller games are another matter.
There's still plenty to learn about and deep dive into, even with the current batch of consoles. The most obvious difference that is openly available to talk about is unified memory. Sure it exists on some PC platforms, but you can't rely on it being there.
> These guys never got past the Linux login prompt.
Logging in to the Linux side isn't even part of normal use for a PS2 TOOL. The Linux system runs the RPC so you can connect it as a target in ProDG or whatever, then it pokes your code into the memory of the PS2 side.
I worked with one of these. I did an internship at SCEE in 2003 to port the Eyetoy camera driver to Linux to work with ps2linux. Sadly, it was nerfed by legal right after we released it as GPL. I fixed it up to keep the proprietary stuff in a separate kernel module, but alas I was gone at that point and it never got past legal afaik.
You were a dude after my own heart. I had two EyeToy cams from buying EyeToy Play 1 and 2, and obviously only needed one on the console, spent many hours trying to get it working on Linux, which was surprisingly difficult, whereas it worked on Windows with ease.
Those were the days huh! I had the PS2 Linux kit too, loved tinkering with that.
Does anyone know how many European PS2s actually shipped with Yabasic? AFAIK the tax ploy failed so they stopped at some point, and my slim PS2 doesn’t list any discs on the box content list. Although it was second hand so it could have gone missing if it was unlisted for some reason.
> The upgraded model DTL-15000 with the Performance Analyzer is especially rare and was a more expensive unit so developers tended to only have a couple and used them for debugging performance issues with their games.
I had a chance to work with one of these. It was amazing to get a non-intrusive profile that provided cycle-level data of all the chips in the Emotion Engine, as well as memory access and DMA state. The real take-away was how much more important memory access was to compute. Memory locality, cache preloading, and predictable control flow had a huge bearing on performance, and that's true more broadly for high-throughput DSP-style workloads including that in high-performance gaming.
Can anyone explain why dev kits are always so much larger than the release product? I get that some shrinking may occur after the dev kit is released (board revisions) and that (possibly) the kits need to support more things inside, but they always seem comically large.
For another example, the Nintendo DS (Nitro) dev kit, for example, is also a relatively massive box, but with a full on DS still hanging off the side of it.
I’ve used quite a few hardware dev kits in my time. These early dev kits are prototypes —- released long before the hardware or industrial design is finalized. They are made in small batches, often by hand (with bodge wires everywhere), and are highly optimized for disassembly, debugging, and troubleshooting. They often have tons of ports.
Early Xbox 360 dev kits were literally a PowerMac G5 with some customizations. Early Dreamcast dev kits were in a mini tower case. Frankenstein appendages are common especially for exotic hardware. I remember using an early Haswell dev kit which was a huge plexiglass monstrosity with a capacitive touchscreen glued to the top. (A later dev kit had a much more manageable iPad-like form factor.)
As you can imagine these dev kits are expensive and rare. The hardware manufacturer will want these early dev kits they loan back, and they are almost always destroyed. (A few may slip through the cracks which is how unicorn find like the Nintendo PlayStation prototype was found a few years back.)
As the hardware coalesces and goes through the various development stages, subsequent dev kits typically become smaller and more manageable. In some cases they may be nearly indistinguishable from retail hardware without closer inspection.
I'll add that initial dev kits are typically released 18 months before the console launch, that means they are built using technology that is one generation behind the hardware that the actual console will use. In the old days before Moore's Law ended, that meant that the console had to have a much more expensive CPU and GPU, to try to match the expected performance of the console hardware. These days, with only marginal improvements in CPU and GPU from generation to generation, this is much less of an issue.
Fun fact: The PowerMac G5 CPU cooling fan controllers have a failsafe mode: If the OS doesn't communicate with the fan controller, the fan controller assumes the worst: that the CPU is switched into the most power-hungry mode possible. To prevent potential damage to the CPU, after about 30 seconds, the cooling fans are cranked up to extraordinarily loud levels.
Apple didn't document how to control the fans. It took Microsoft a while to reverse-engineer the fan controllers. During that time period, using the G5s as Xbox dev kits required putting up with extraordinarily loud fans.
I can't find the photo with a quick google, but way back in the day an employee posted a photo of a TON of G5s arriving at Microsoft HQ.. supposedly they got fired for it, and it wasn't until a year or two later when the 360 was announced that everyone put two and two together.
Hundreds of comments, apparently this news went around the world. I assume they thought at the time the Macs were needed for developing MS Office for Mac OS.
I absolutely love how Sony then trampled over Nintendo by first using their experience from this collaboration to make their own PS, then basically cloned the N64 architecture in the form of PS2.
Sony didn't want anything to do with this project. This was all Ken Kutaragi's ambition, and after the Nintendo disaster he joined forces with the Sony Music side of the business (!) to form Sony Computer Entertainment, and was basically given full autonomy to launch his console. Sony Music knew retailers, knew how licensing worked, and knew how to take advantage of Nintendo's greed by undercutting their margins.
I don't know whether they had lower margins, but they used CDs, which were cheaper to produce than the ROM chips which were so far common for consoles (N64, SNES, Mega Drive, NES, ...). The price of those did go down a lot over time (early NES cartridges had 4 KB, early N64 cartridges 8 MB, a 2000 fold increase), but not quite quick enough apparently. High cartridge prices were not limited to Nintendo.
Were there really significant similarities between the N64 and the PS2 architectures? My understanding is that all the "first generation 3D consoles" had substantial weaknesses in their architecture, due to lack of experience, which were ironed out in the next generation.
They weren't identical, but they sure stood apart from others. Both used 64-bit MIPS CPUs, both had dedicated 128-bit SIMD cores driving their display list based GPUs. For a 1996 N64 having a SSE2 level SIMD was absolutely amazing. They're even similar from emulation standpoint: only in the last decade we've got enough CPU power to consistently emulate them at full speed.
Aside from the reasons mentioned by other comments, dev kits include a ton of IO for debugging (multiple ethernet ports, video outs, etc), as well as more memory and storage. IIRC the Wii devkit used an FPGA for the IO controller, and the debug IO board was almost as big as the main board.
The days of tuning software have changed. In the past, these systems were indecipherable and had no good profiling or debugging tools, so they came with a lot of hardware connected which allowed you to profile and tune and debug.
If you wanted to profile PS2 code, for example, the way you did that was with a gigantic logic analyzer connected to various traces at Sony's labs. We used their Redwood City lab. You'd give Sony instrumented code, and they'd do some kind of secret magic on it and run it on this instrumented PS3, and a few days later, you get a profile! Downside, this thing is incredibly complex, but on the upside, you had little performance penalty for profiling. Later, these kinds of tools came built into dev kits.
For the PS3, programming the Cell was quite difficult and so you had to do lots of tuning. The single PPC core (called the PPU) was really slow, so you had to offload what you could to the SPE's, which were incredibly fast on floating point math, but it was on you to interleave DMA and computation in a way to get good utilization of them. The Dev kits had tools to give you visibility into this.
Programming on a laptop only requires the laptop, as you've got all the tools you need in the OS. Only apple does debugging at the board level.
Because Apple don’t release low-level dev tools externally? I’m sure there are some wonderful frankensteins in their labs, but they have less of a need to release them externally.
I think in addition to what people say on this thread, the console vendors also don't want devices resold and in circulation that can run unsigned code to pirate games. So they make them really unattractive to use as actual gaming devices.
That maybe is not the whole story, but I've often assumed that was part of it.
Nowadays the devkits require a license key to operate, which only works for a limited amount of time, so when they do slip into the wild it's generally not possible to do anything interesting with them. You can find videos of people playing with PS4/PS5 devkits and they just throw an error that the system has expired and needs to be renewed. They're just collectors items now, unfortunately.
Beyond just having more stuff inside, making something small and stylish costs more in time and money, so dev tools tend to be more functional as they aren’t a mass market product.
Dev kits for game consoles typically started shipping well before the actual device hardware did to give external developers enough time to create launch games. It wasn't uncommon for the dev kits to go out a year or more before the console shipped to retail.
This is particularly true in the era before consoles were basically just locked down x86 PCs and thus developers needed access to a variant of the actual hardware to port their games/engines.
