Path: chuka.playstation.co.uk!news From: Alex Herbert Newsgroups: scee.yaroze.freetalk.english,scea.yaroze.freetalk Subject: Re: Sony's grand experiment? Date: Thu, 11 Jun 1998 18:49:27 +0000 Organization: PlayStation Net Yaroze (SCEE) Lines: 84 Message-ID: <358018A7.26DDE8E0@ndirect.co.uk> References: <357EECC1.97053769@jps.net> Reply-To: aherbert@ndirect.co.uk NNTP-Posting-Host: dialin0-44.ndirect.co.uk Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.04 [en] (Win95; I) Xref: chuka.playstation.co.uk scee.yaroze.freetalk.english:1128 scea.yaroze.freetalk:721 Elliott Lee wrote: > The Yaroze has been a great (albeit expensive) toy ever since I bought > into this program in February. It kinda took me back to my roots, > back when I used to sit up late at night with a manual of Tandy BASIC > reading by the dull glow of the monitor in the after-bedtime hours. > I have been going through some old paperwork in my closet and even > found some ancient game designs, graphics, and musical scores written > years ago. In short, it has been a cool experience so far. > > But... > > What about you? What have you done with the kit? What do you like > about it? I've had mine since March, and I haven't been able to spend much time on it at all. But, I have one 2D game nearing completion, and I'm just starting with 3D which seems reasonably straight forward. It's very easy to bash some code together and get stuff going, and I'm very inexperienced with C! Personally I'd like to be able to boot out the OS as access the hardware myself, but then I didn't expect that to be an option anyhow. New libs with bug fixes and added features would be nice, but I can also see why this would be difficult for Sony. Overall? The libs are good. The documentation, whilst hard reading, gives the answer to 99% of my problems. The Net stuff is OK I guess, but I only really use the newsgroups. The tools, however, are very poor. TimTool and VabTool are vast improvements on what's supplied on the CD, but they are still very lacking. > And the big question: what do you think of the Yaroze program in > respect to Sony's efforts to bring a console within reach of the > "bedroom programmer"? It's a good attempt, but flawed. I started out as a bedroom programmer. 10 years ago I was a professional games developer working on the Atari ST (I'm a 68000 programmer at heart). But there are many differences between how it was "in the old days" compared to now th the Yaroze. It used to be possible to be a bedroom coder and a proffesional at the same time. The bedroom coder and the proffessional had the same set of tools for development. Because of this there were more bedroom coders than there are now, and as a result, much greater support from 3rd parties with dev tools, utilities and information. There are many Yaroze owners who have the brains and skill to blow away the pros, but just don't have the tools to do the job. But it's also down to the fact that the PSX is a console and not a computer, and doesn't have the same immediate access. Now if the Yaroze was sold on the high-street... who knows. Here are some seggestions which would really help bring back the bedroom programmers: Full Pro Dev Kit. Every one of us would love to get our hands on it. Even better if we could buy it on the high-street. What are you scared of Sony? I know I'm just dreaming, but it is possible for Sony to protect themselves in the same way as they have done with the Yaroze. Let us burn our own CDs. Why not? Sony could still leave in the bit that checks for the Memory Card Key - distribution problem sorted. (Btw, it is actually possible to burn your own CD's if you have a hacker's mentallity. Everything you need is on the PSM cover disks. Please don't email me or ask me any questions on this subject, as I will not give any answers. I don't want to upset Sony any more than I probably have already. > I find it interesting that we have almost no help except from other > members, minimal tools for development, and the program still is > divided among 3 factions (SCEA, SCEE, SCEI) rather than one whole > group. But, we have formed international programming groups, > engineered our own tools when there's a need, and have produced some > pretty sweet games under our limitations. Was the hands-off > approach part of the plan? > I think it was part of the plan. And in my mind, probably the best way. I know I've said a lot here, but if is sparks of a debate, that's fine by me! Herbs