Path: chuka.playstation.co.uk!news From: Toby Sargeant Newsgroups: scee.yaroze.freetalk.english Subject: Re: Is the PS2 Really that bad?... Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2000 08:58:26 +1100 Organization: PlayStation Net Yaroze (SCEE) Lines: 37 Message-ID: <38D15902.E70DA61@fulcrum.com.au> References: <38CD5436.EAA1629C@which.net> <38ce2355.7468968@www.netyaroze-europe.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: redback.spyda.net Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en] (X11; I; Linux 2.2.14 i686) X-Accept-Language: en Robert Swan wrote: > >Whats all this stuff about a VU0 and VU1 maths co-processors? sounds > >cool > >whatever it is, cut this maybe what all the stuff about PS2 being hard > >to program for is all about. > > Yep - thats one reason it could be hard to code. Once everyone sorts > out how they want to work with it it will be pretty cool. I'm not sure why people shoud be afraid of what is essentially just multiprocessing. While it does require a little more thought than normal, multithreaded code isn't all that hard to write, and when you're dealing with special purpose processors that perform a limited set of operations, things just get easier. Noone seemed to have any problems programming the BeBox, or dealing with the Amiga copper, which essentially covers anything that the PS2 could throw at developers, at least at a level of basic concepts. Of course, I'd love to know that I was wrong, and that there was actually something novel and tricky about programming the PS2. Anything with high magic factor is heaps'o'fun :). Frankly, after spending a few months in the land of Win32, I think the biggest problem developers can face are complex, inconsistent, overweight badly documented API's. As a cosmetic example of the inconsistency Microsoft has chosen to force down the collective throats of developers worldwide, the methods used for controlling reference counting in COM are called AddRef() and Release(). These two functions are essentially inverses of each other, so why on *earth* weren't they named like that? Acquire()/Release() or AddRef()/RemoveRef() would make so much more sense from a consistency standpoint. And don't even get me started on the *total* waste of time that is hungarian notation. Toby.