Path: chuka.playstation.co.uk!news From: Andrew Partington Newsgroups: scee.yaroze.freetalk.english Subject: Re: What about the NDA? Date: Tue, 23 Mar 2004 16:02:53 +0000 Organization: PlayStation Net Yaroze (SCEE) Lines: 92 Message-ID: References: <45jv50l6qmbac0j284vqvmdbgheq4cqr55@4ax.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 213.106.125.140 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en In-Reply-To: Shawn B. wrote: > I've made an image of all the members' sites and downloads and information. > I'm actually going through and cleaning up the links now so they point to > the local image rather than the online site. But that is only a snapshot in > the past and not an ongoing community. Hopefully Sony will open it up but > considering Nintendo never opened up the NES/SNES I doubt it is important > enough for Sony to open up this. I suspect Yaroze will just die. > > XGamesStation is about the only "real" open platform. XBox is probly pretty > open when you consider it is intel CPU, the Graphics is ?NVidia?, Windows, > DirectX 8... as far as I can see, XBox is just a super-dedicated commodity > PC. But we can't expect to target it. PS2 Linux, I'm not familiar with > that crowd at the moment. I'm still trying to get my Hello World in Yaroze > working. > Well, the XGameStation isn't out yet AFAIK, though it could be pretty interesting with that FPGA they are talking about. Only 64K on a cartridge is a bit of a pain though. Bit of a let down from the Yaroze I think, but i'd probably get one anyway if the price was right. It's a shame really, the Yaroze seems to occupy that space where the hardware is still relatively decent and it's pretty easy to code for... I'd be interested in PS2/Linux, but i'm proper skint at the minute. Don't think I could blag the job centre into paying for one under the guise of training either ;) I think the next best thing to the Yaroze at this point in time would probably be the Game Boy Advance. I've not coded anything for GBA but by all accounts it seems a pretty good system all-in-all. OK it's not open officially, but there seems to be pretty good homebrew development stuff out there. > But I don't want Yaroze to die. > Me neither... > There was an earlier thread about opening the the full SDK now that no one > is developing for it anymore. The responze was that Sony would have to > replace all the Yaroze CD'd. I replied but don't think anyone read the > reply. > > Basically, Sony could charge a fee and if we want the SDK we pay else they > don't have to replace anything -- in terms of sending a replacement CD -- > and we just pay a fee... what is reasonable? Well, I'm US, so USD $100? > perhaps, definately more than shipping but considering the community is > barely thriving as it is, it can't be too expensive. And if it is, I'll pay > for it anyway. Maybe it would "revive" the community. Who knows. Wishful > thinking, really. I'm probably talking bollocks as usual, but doesn't it depend on the volume of CD's that need to be pressed, rather than the amount we're willing to pay for an upgrade - doesn't there need to be a run of > 1000 before it makes sense to send a CD for duplication (even if we were prepared to pay over the odds for an upgrade). Besides that, the Yaroze libs are (and it pains me to say it, since i'd like a full set of libs myself) good enough for most purposes. I don't think we're missing too much - apart from a lack of scalable/rotatable GsBG (we only get the fixed version) and some missing primitives from the TMD spec such as no lines, sprites or GsBOXF in a TMD - but we can usually get round those problems the long way round. (Dynamic TMD's are cool - apart from missing line/sprite primitives that is :) ) Mind you, if Sony want to give us the official PS1 devkit instead (the PCI card version with 8 meg of memory and full set of libs) I wouldn't say no :) Oh, speaking of bits and pieces, can Sony supply us with replacement bits like the CD drive and the serial cable nowadays, I wonder, without having to send the Yaroze back to Sony central for repair (if we sent them payment of course)? I guess that the Yaroze boot CD will be fairly hard/impossible to get hold of though. Can we still get the Yaroze fixed if we need to? > Now, gloom and doom behind... I'm glad I finally got this thing up and > running though I still don't know how to successfully compile the Tut5 with > the Codewarrior Compiler. But I'm happy, see =D > I think the best tutorial for beginners was Ira Rainey's sprite tutorial, IMHO. I think it got most of us started at one point or another. It's a good starting point for experimentation at least. Cheers, Andy P