It was a great indie development community, gaining experience on what it meant a console like dev experience, sadly spoiled by tons of folks porting emulators instead of being creative.
Most like the reasoning behind PS3 Linux no longer having GPU libraries like the PS2Linux, only 2D acceleration, and eventually migration to FreeBSD as basis for PlayStation OS from PS4 onwards.
PS2Linux was the evolution of Net Yaroze introduced in the PlayStation 1.
What PlayStation had into that sense was the demo disc shipped with the Playstation 2, that had a BASIC environment like on the 8 bit home computer days, called Yabasic.
Here is a demo about it,
"How/Why Sony Classed the PlayStation 2 as a Home Computer - Demo of Yabasic"
> tons of folks porting emulators instead of being creative
On one hand this is something that annoys me a bit to this day - i am into original xbox homebrew games (bought a modded one last year specifically for this) and pretty much 99.999% of the homebrew software is emulators. While i can see the point until around mid-2000s due to the available hardware back then, emulators are by far the main target for any jailbroken console to this day[0], including modern ones - and i fail to see the point for that considering the availability and TV connectivity of cheap PCs (including some who are very small and yet very fast like those by beelink) or even Raspberry Pis, etc (not to mention way more versatile).
On the other hand it is because of the effort people put into these projects that everyone else who isn't interested into emulators (e.g. me) still have the tools and ability to use the hardware as they please instead of it becoming useless ewaste.
[0] the main exception, for whatever reason, seems to be Dreamcast. And very old consoles like NES, SNES, Gameboy, etc of course.
> and i fail to see the point for that considering the availability and TV connectivity of cheap PCs
It's a fair point. I think part of the appeal is, after you've finished the hack, you get both the emulators and the "just works" experience of a console. The controllers are high quality, sync correctly, and don't get disconnected; the UI is sane and just works out of the box; it will negotiate with any TV and audio setup correctly; you don't have to deal with OS updates breaking your setup or fiddle with any CLI-commands.
> everyone else who isn't interested into emulators (e.g. me)
You might get a kick out of this, I made two homebrew games for PSP back in high school. They run well in PPSSPP, if you don't have the original hardware handy. I'm still quite proud of them. https://coldpie.itch.io/
I think most jailbroken consoles these days are more of a PITA to get working though - e.g. updates will either have stopped anyway or if they're still been released, they may stop the jailbreak from working. Older consoles' gamepads also tend to not be in a great quality after deteriorating over the years (in fact the gamepad i got with my og xbox was in terrible condition with a non-working left trigger, though fortunately RetroFighters made a new one which i preordered), etc. Personally i think an emulator running on a tiny PC or Raspberry Pi connected to a TV with HDMI is going to be much easier and viable long term.
Though if you already have the console sitting there anyway might as well use it, but i think even the "easiest" option - Xbox Series X/S (which officially allows you to install your own programs) - is still not that seamless.
> You might get a kick out of this, I made two homebrew games for PSP back in high school. They run well in PPSSPP, if you don't have the original hardware handy.
Neat, i downloaded them and i'll check them out. Note BTW that the dev diary links seem to be broken for both games.
> Note BTW that the dev diary links seem to be broken for both games.
Ha! Yeah they were hosted on the website I set up in the mid-2000s and finally let expire. I wonder if they're on the Internet Archive, I'll update the links sometime.
"EOL" would imply that it ever received any ongoing support. The impression I get is more that Sony treated this more like a game release -- once the discs went out the door, that was it.
PS2 Linux is one of those things I knew about at the time, was super interested in yet never pursued (didn't have the means to) and now wish I had. It doesn't seem like a very practical computing environment even for the time, but that's part of what makes it so damn interesting.
I worked on this a bit! As an summer intern at SCEE in 2004, I port the Eyetoy driver to PS2 linux. Sadly, it had some legal issues due to some proprietary code in the original drivers, and it ended up not getting released.
If you didn't know, this was primarily a tax dodge for the EU. Since it ran Linux, they felt they could classify the PlayStation 2 as a general-purpose computer, which receives a lower tariff rate than game consoles. PlayStation 3 had OtherOS for the same purpose, until the EU rejected the claim and reclassified it as a game console, and then Sony pulled support for OtherOS (it also being primarily a vehicle for piracy certainly didn't help).
I can tell you that support for this went all the way up to Ken Kutaragi. I discussed it with him. He was also responsible for the Ethernet port. He had real vision for the platform.
For the PlayStation 3, another thing driving Linux's removal was that organizations were buying PS3s to use in data centers. But Sony sold them at a loss (IIRC over $100/unit loss, even being sold at $600 twenty years ago) and intended to make it up on revenue from games sold. They also didn't have nearly enough at launch because they were using a brand new processor (designed with help from IBM) and a brand new Blu-Ray disc format. That slowed down their initial production, and it had to launch in time to compete with the Xbox 360 (Pre-Christmas 2005), which also had a HD-DVD attachment.
Notably, the PS3 at launch was actually cheaper than some dedicated Blu-ray players, so some home theater enthusiasts bought them (few to no games), eating into Sony's revenue even more. It took several years for the PS3 to be profitable, but it won the format war.
They should have sold a datacenter version, without the optical disc, with a copy of AIX and/or BSD, with an OS license of $200 (or at least under $1,000).
It doesn't look like a workstation was ever produced, just blades and embedded.
A hypothetical Datacenter version might have skipped the optical drive, perhaps cutting down on their losses. At launch I doubt they would have had enough spare processors to build them without cutting into their PS3 production capacity.
Additionally many game studios reported difficulty in writing for the PS3's processor compared to the Xbox, which had gone with a processor pretty similar to most PCs at the time. So by the time they had ramped up the capacity to make enough to meet PS3 demand, there were several years of worse/less performant PS3 versions of games developed for multiple platforms, making Sony's console look worse. It would have been a tough sell internally for the PS4 to use a custom processor architecture again, so they opted not to. This must have soured Sony's opinion of the Cell processor overall.
Sony should have realized that the Cell/Power was needed in great quantity, and insisted upon a second supplier. Motorola started making the PowerPC 601 in 1992, so a secondary foundry was absolutely available.
From the wiki: "The introductory design is fabricated using a 90 nm SOI process, with initial volume production slated for IBM's facility in East Fishkill, New York."
AMD did this for Intel up to the 286. Sony should have insisted upon a tidal wave of wafers, if needed.
Cell used the PowerPC isa as did the Xbox 360. Both were designed in the same IBM facility but separated by a floor. IIRC the Xbox team indirectly learned from the Cell team's mistakes at the process/microarch level.
Cell was definitely more weird to code against and Sony put max theoretical perf above Xbox's approach to be more general purpose chip architecture.
So strictly speaking it wasn't like most PCs at the time in the x86 sense but in the three mostly same cores for Xbox vs custom Cell and special ways to squeeze out performance.
Sort of. The xenon cores are pretty damn close to cell PPE cores, just with VMX-128 strapped to them. They even share some taped out blocks, and have almost all of the same microarchitectural issues like the load hit store penalty.
There's a book about the development of both of them, The Race for a New Game Machine: Creating the Chips Inside the XBox 360 and the Playstation 3 by
David Shippy & Mickie Phipps. [0]
It has some details on the awkward position the IBM developers were put in.
Rodrigo Copetti's excellent articles on the PS3[1] and Xbox 360 [2]
and Ars' Hannibal's article on the Xenon Chip. [3]
IBM sold that as BladeCenter QS series. Reportendly there even was an prototype version that had essentially same hardware as PS3 including the optical drive (production ones are dual-CPU without GPU and optical drive).
FWIW, early designs for the PS3 also were missing the GPU in lieu of another Cell chip. The end of Dennard scaling meant that they didn't hit the clock speed they originally intended (close to 5Ghz). It was originally supposed to do rasterization in software on that second cell, but relatively in the last minute they needed to strap a dedicated GPU to it. That's why Cell reads out of VRAM are incredibly slow, around 16MB/s.
While true, Its important to note that the second Cell wasn't gonna be the same type as the main CPU cell. The cell they intended to use as the GPU would have only 4SPEs(vs 7 in the main Cell)along with various rasterization components. Would have been cool. Settling on the Cell was compromise after compromise.
Iirc the PS2 also got a huge boost by being a cheap alternative to designated DVD players, but it eventually obviously paid off. I wonder how that factored into their PS3 strategy
Indeed, although Sony hadn't created the DVD format (Phillips), having it did boost sales of the PS2. With the PS3 Sony was pushing its own format in direct competition to HD-DVD (also Phillips), and I'm sure losing Beta max market to VHS was still in their minds. So they decided to sell PS3 consoles at a much greater loss. It did pay off as well, but the first few years cost Sony a lot.
> (it also being primarily a vehicle for piracy certainly didn't help).
The piracy hacks never used OtherOS. The first piracy hack (the PSJailbreak dongle exploit) simply exploited the GameOS usb stack and wasn't released until after OtherOS had already been removed in a firmware update.
The only hack that ever targeted OtherOS was a complex memory glitching attack that was pretty hard to pull off. As far as I'm aware, that hack was only ever used by a few people for dumping memory, and those dumps were reverse engineered to find other exploits.
If anything, OtherOS might have slowed PS3 modding efforts down, as modders were wasted years banging their heads against the reasonably secure hypervisor. Turns out, GameOS had minimal security, and once you gained kernel access, you could boot backups without needing to touch the hypervisor.
Though that was very much a team effort, I knew nothing about USB before working on that. From memory, my contribution was mostly tweaking the code until it worked, I think my PS3 was the first to be exploited by PSGroove.
Though, I wasn't happy at merely copying the sequence of packets USB that lead to an exploit, so I spent some time trying to get a better understanding of how the exploit worked. That document is the result of my efforts.
But it was a pretty hard exploit to pull off, the required pulse was pretty short and required getting lucky. Nobody ever developed it into something particularly useful for end users, and it didn't directly enable piracy.
While I suspect the unknown person who developed the PSJailbreak exploit did use that attack as a stepping stone towards hacking GameOS, it was not a requirement. And it also could have been done from GameOS once you had kernel level code executing there.
This isn't quite correct as I understand the situation. It wasn't classified as a computer in Europe because it could run Linux but, because the bundled demo disc included Yabasic (a basic interpreter) in the European regions.[0]
53 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 107 ms ] threadMost like the reasoning behind PS3 Linux no longer having GPU libraries like the PS2Linux, only 2D acceleration, and eventually migration to FreeBSD as basis for PlayStation OS from PS4 onwards.
Still have my PS2Linux kit.
https://www.tfw2005.com/boards/threads/why-the-ps3-is-a-comp...
What PlayStation had into that sense was the demo disc shipped with the Playstation 2, that had a BASIC environment like on the 8 bit home computer days, called Yabasic.
Here is a demo about it,
"How/Why Sony Classed the PlayStation 2 as a Home Computer - Demo of Yabasic"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnXpzczPc38
On one hand this is something that annoys me a bit to this day - i am into original xbox homebrew games (bought a modded one last year specifically for this) and pretty much 99.999% of the homebrew software is emulators. While i can see the point until around mid-2000s due to the available hardware back then, emulators are by far the main target for any jailbroken console to this day[0], including modern ones - and i fail to see the point for that considering the availability and TV connectivity of cheap PCs (including some who are very small and yet very fast like those by beelink) or even Raspberry Pis, etc (not to mention way more versatile).
On the other hand it is because of the effort people put into these projects that everyone else who isn't interested into emulators (e.g. me) still have the tools and ability to use the hardware as they please instead of it becoming useless ewaste.
[0] the main exception, for whatever reason, seems to be Dreamcast. And very old consoles like NES, SNES, Gameboy, etc of course.
It's a fair point. I think part of the appeal is, after you've finished the hack, you get both the emulators and the "just works" experience of a console. The controllers are high quality, sync correctly, and don't get disconnected; the UI is sane and just works out of the box; it will negotiate with any TV and audio setup correctly; you don't have to deal with OS updates breaking your setup or fiddle with any CLI-commands.
> everyone else who isn't interested into emulators (e.g. me)
You might get a kick out of this, I made two homebrew games for PSP back in high school. They run well in PPSSPP, if you don't have the original hardware handy. I'm still quite proud of them. https://coldpie.itch.io/
Though if you already have the console sitting there anyway might as well use it, but i think even the "easiest" option - Xbox Series X/S (which officially allows you to install your own programs) - is still not that seamless.
> You might get a kick out of this, I made two homebrew games for PSP back in high school. They run well in PPSSPP, if you don't have the original hardware handy.
Neat, i downloaded them and i'll check them out. Note BTW that the dev diary links seem to be broken for both games.
Ha! Yeah they were hosted on the website I set up in the mid-2000s and finally let expire. I wonder if they're on the Internet Archive, I'll update the links sometime.
Note that nowadays Sony uses FreeBSD and clang for a reason.
"EOL" would imply that it ever received any ongoing support. The impression I get is more that Sony treated this more like a game release -- once the discs went out the door, that was it.
It was more than a tax dodge.
CEOs like tax dodges and plausible deniability.
Notably, the PS3 at launch was actually cheaper than some dedicated Blu-ray players, so some home theater enthusiasts bought them (few to no games), eating into Sony's revenue even more. It took several years for the PS3 to be profitable, but it won the format war.
It doesn't look like a workstation was ever produced, just blades and embedded.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(processor)
Additionally many game studios reported difficulty in writing for the PS3's processor compared to the Xbox, which had gone with a processor pretty similar to most PCs at the time. So by the time they had ramped up the capacity to make enough to meet PS3 demand, there were several years of worse/less performant PS3 versions of games developed for multiple platforms, making Sony's console look worse. It would have been a tough sell internally for the PS4 to use a custom processor architecture again, so they opted not to. This must have soured Sony's opinion of the Cell processor overall.
From the wiki: "The introductory design is fabricated using a 90 nm SOI process, with initial volume production slated for IBM's facility in East Fishkill, New York."
AMD did this for Intel up to the 286. Sony should have insisted upon a tidal wave of wafers, if needed.
Cell was definitely more weird to code against and Sony put max theoretical perf above Xbox's approach to be more general purpose chip architecture. So strictly speaking it wasn't like most PCs at the time in the x86 sense but in the three mostly same cores for Xbox vs custom Cell and special ways to squeeze out performance.
It has some details on the awkward position the IBM developers were put in.
Rodrigo Copetti's excellent articles on the PS3[1] and Xbox 360 [2]
and Ars' Hannibal's article on the Xenon Chip. [3]
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/6056634
[1] https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/playstation-3/
[2] https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/xbox-360/
[3] https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/06/xbox360-2/
The piracy hacks never used OtherOS. The first piracy hack (the PSJailbreak dongle exploit) simply exploited the GameOS usb stack and wasn't released until after OtherOS had already been removed in a firmware update.
The only hack that ever targeted OtherOS was a complex memory glitching attack that was pretty hard to pull off. As far as I'm aware, that hack was only ever used by a few people for dumping memory, and those dumps were reverse engineered to find other exploits.
If anything, OtherOS might have slowed PS3 modding efforts down, as modders were wasted years banging their heads against the reasonably secure hypervisor. Turns out, GameOS had minimal security, and once you gained kernel access, you could boot backups without needing to touch the hypervisor.
Though that was very much a team effort, I knew nothing about USB before working on that. From memory, my contribution was mostly tweaking the code until it worked, I think my PS3 was the first to be exploited by PSGroove.
Though, I wasn't happy at merely copying the sequence of packets USB that lead to an exploit, so I spent some time trying to get a better understanding of how the exploit worked. That document is the result of my efforts.
But it was a pretty hard exploit to pull off, the required pulse was pretty short and required getting lucky. Nobody ever developed it into something particularly useful for end users, and it didn't directly enable piracy.
While I suspect the unknown person who developed the PSJailbreak exploit did use that attack as a stepping stone towards hacking GameOS, it was not a requirement. And it also could have been done from GameOS once you had kernel level code executing there.
That was my workstation for a student job. It had a MIPS R3000.
DEC probably would have lasted longer if they had bought MIPS instead of sinking all the effort into Alpha (and PRISM before it).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECstation
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnXpzczPc38
It came with yabasic on a demo disk, that's what qualified it as a computer for the eu tax break.
ps2linux was chronologically irrelevant to your claim AIUI...
PS2Linux was the next iteration of Net Yaroze from Playstation 1.
0. http://www.jp.netbsd.org/ports/playstation2/