I had one of these, in the UK at the time. We (myself and two other guys) put together a demo loosely based on “Rollerball”, which Sony were very encouraging about, but that’s not the point of this post.

I will always remember the NDA contract I signed… One of the terms was “If any of the terms of this contract are broken, financial reparation may not be sufficient”.

I’m assuming “your first-born child” or something was what they had in mind, but I was young, single and childless, so … <shrug>

I'm pretty sure they were insinuating that they can tell the cops to put you in jail over a civil contract violation. Might be true if they pulled some weird legal maneuver with copyright law.

This was the era of Peak Sony.

Lik Sang remembers.

that's a name i haven't heard in a long time

When I worked in Japan, we did a shared project with an extremely large Japanese corporation. Because we shared source code with them and knew about their business plans, I was made to understand that if I were negligent (i.e. let my laptop get stolen on a train or something) and allowed the company secrets to be stolen, I could face huge fines and even jail time. This was only 5 years ago.

I'm almost surprised you are allowed to disclose those facts to us today.

This language is here because it (arguably) assists Sony with seeking non-financial “equitable” orders from a court.

In the case of an NDA, that would mean an injunction to stop you from disclosing.

there was also custom firmware that someone had written for one of the cheat devices (i think maybe the "gameshark"?) with that, and a $40 mail order ISA board, and some time building a MIPS cross compiling gnu toolchain, you could write programs in C and run them on the consumer/production PS1 as a hobbyist.

i'm trying to remember what the OS situation was though. i remember some really thin libc that made syscalls into some rom maybe? or maybe it was just a thin libc. i do remember being able to access the audio device without doing anything super low level...

edit: here we go! the firmware was called caetla and here's a nice 22yr old webpage that describes it: http://hitmen.c02.at/html/psx_faq.html

one thing i do remember clearly. the r3k cpu was quite slow and there was no fpu! it did have a gpu though, perhaps an early case calling for gpgpu and perhaps i wasn't that smart...

The PS1 didn't really have a GPU in the modern sense. It had a rasterizer. That's it. A thing that draws triangles or quads, with primitive texturing. It doesn't have any vertex processing. It doesn't even understand the Z dimension. Nothing even remotely resembling shaders, of course. At its core, all it does is draw 2D triangles and quads at integer pixel coordinates.

Instead, the CPU had specific instructions (a coprocessor, in MIPS parlance) to accelerate fixed-point geometry processing. That's where the math happens. So it did have an "FPU" - a fixed-point unit, not a floating-point unit :-)

The GPU didn't really have the kind of muscle you'd need to do gpgpu, since a lot of the rendering workload was handled by dedicated instructions on the CPU instead of special-purpose or general-purpose GPU hardware like we have today. The PS2 inched closer but the PS3 was probably the first time Sony hardware could do anything resembling GPGPU. I don't think you were missing anything obvious :-)

AFAIK some other console vendors' audio DSPs were used for compute by specific games, though - I recall reading about a console game for one of Sony's competitors using the console's DSP to decompress game data during loads instead of synthesize audio.

> I recall reading about a console game for one of Sony's competitors using the console's DSP to decompress game data during loads instead of synthesize audio.

Maybe Burning Rangers for SEGA Saturn? That game uses alpha transparency for rendering fire instead of the usual (for the time) SEGA-style mosaic transparency, but it uses the sound processor to do it and has very sparse audio as a result: http://segabits.com/blog/2011/06/05/retro-review-burning-ran...

Might have been the Sega Saturn. That one had lots of chips?

At least the Nintendo 64 had a GPU that you could control with microcode, maybe that could be called a GPGPU ?

Eh, that "GPU microcode engine" was a fairly general MIPS with a vector unit like the CPU of the PS1. The GPU itself was just a rasterizer too like the PS1's (albeit more complex, understanding the Z dimensions, antialiasing, and subpixel coordinates). I wouldn't really call it GPGPU.

I did have that and the Yaroze (Sony's official homebrew development). I can't recall exactly how or why, but I do remember that compiling/running stuff with the Gameshark was easier than with the Yaroze.

i wanted a yaroze but they were $$$. like $600 or something in 1997 dollars iirc. a few years later i learned of this thing.

they also had some weird limitation. it might have just been that your program could only ever run on your yaroze... where the caetla hack meant you could "ship" stuff that would run on chipped playstations.

I have a yaroze. The kit was rather limited and the tooling was buged out. I also got the codewarrior dev kit which helped a lot. I never got further than some simple demo hello world style applications. I was more interested in my PC at the time. I mostly used it to just play PS1 games. I basically wasted my money on it and should have just bought a normal PS.

If I remember right the thing was region free though so I could play imports. I think you could precompile apps and upload them to the yaroze web board and download them but only to other yaroze kits. I think a couple of devs actually managed to get a real shipped game out of it.

Luckily since I kept the whole lot in nice condition they are going for a decent amount on ebay. It is funny keeping the cardboard boxes makes it worth more...

I also had the PS2 kit. Which was in my opinion was more limiting than the yaroze one.

I seem to remember some later demo disc came with some yaroze games that were playable on normal PlayStations.

PlayStation Underground: Volume 1 Issue 4 came with "Gasgar vs. Gasgar" and "Super Mansion", and were behind this wonderful warning screen: https://i.imgur.com/xntzcFk.png

Some other issues of PlayStation Underground and Official PlayStation Magazine (UK) came with other Yaroze games.

Correct. Yaroze programs could only run on other Yarozes, plus the worst restriction was that games had to fit entirely in Ram as Yaroze couldn't run burned discs.

that's right! or access the drive at all. that made it a nonstarter for me as i was trying to build a player for fat32 formatted cd-roms full of mp3s.

of course the bigger problem was that the r3k was too slow. (i ported mpg123 over to run in fixed point, but it still was many times realtime to decode a frame). i wish i'd known about this gte vector unit thing, that may have been a way to make it work... but ah well,

One thing the PS1 did have going for it was a MDEC jpeg decoder chip. Pretty much all of the FMV in PS1 games were MJPEG (a stream of independent jpegs). Between that and using the rasterizer to apply motion vectors and color interpolation, the machine was pretty well set up to do MPEG1.

The PS2 had an MDEC too. We used it in one game to do the pop-up talking head dialog between characters mid-gameplay with tiny RAM and CPU use.

Playing Mpeg Layer 2 files would be fast enough for the PS1 then.

You could play MP2 files just fine.

layer 2 was significantly lower quality at lower bitrates, significantly less computationally expensive to encode or decode and significantly less popular as a format for storing music.

i wanted to be able to play mp3 collections from psx units attached to home entertainment systems. there really weren't many other options back then.

One of my biggest regrets always was that I as a young student bought an Amiga 4000 (computer of my dreams then) instead of a Yaroze.

There was another ROM called Ez-o-Ray which was similar. It took me many years later, how embarrassing, to realize that Ez-o-Ray was Yaroze backwards!

"Ez-O-Ray had some cool features like support for the psyq dos debugger (using a TSR to emulate the psx plugin ISA boards)."

http://spin.quequero.org/psx/tute/faq.html

Sounds similar to Doctor V64. Although mainly used for piracy, it was also a much cheaper dev machine than Nintendo's official Silicon Graphics workstations.

I owned a PS1 Debugging Station. sold it recently to a collector. my dad bought it at a pawn shop when I was a kid, we didn't know what it was until I learned it could play burned games without a modchip. it was fun.

I ran into one of these at a flea market a few years ago, once owned by Maxis if anonymous marker scribbles are to be believed: https://i.imgur.com/8M8qMHI.jpg

Somewhat related: I have a copy of SimCity 2000 for PS1. An interesting novelty, but it's basically unplayable. The framerate is atrocious, and that's on top of clunky controls where the controller simulates a mouse.

I have that one too. I played it a lot as a kid and didn't find it unplayable, but the only PC I had at the time was an ancient IBM XT so I didn't have anything to compare it to. The control issues were mitigated by the fact that I also own the Playstation mouse, because I also have XCOM and there's no way I was going to play that with a controller.

Sim city was atrociously slow on my 386 / 33 MHz (and 16MB of ram). Mmh brother had a 486 with 66 MHz, that’s what you needed to actually play the game.

In contrast, SimCity on the SNES was surprisingly playable.

It helps that the game was originally done on a C64 and ran on lots of other low-end platforms. There was also and unreleased NES version.

There was also a homebrew city builder for GameBoy Colour called µCity: https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2017/08/game_boy_color_tit...

Because it was developed by Nintendo and not Maxis.

Have you sent it anywhere for archival? I can imagine archive.org would want it.

IIRC several groups have full NTSC-US sets dumped. SimCity 2000 is at least in the Redump set. It weighs in at 39MB compressed.

Oh aha, thanks!

I was just looking at all my old PlayStation Developer OS CDs - still have the entire set from working on the OS's video subsystem for Sony in Tokyo. That was quite the experience, contributing to the OS, working in Tokyo as a gaijin Midwest transplant, experiencing Sony's unsure corporate attitude they'd be successful with video games...

Reading your comment, I can't help feel you have more story about this era than all the articles. I'm sure others would be fascinated to know more of that time - any blogs or books down the line?

I need to write a book. I was also a 17-year old pre-release Mac beta tester, and a Vic-20 game studio founder, also at 17. I worked for Mandelbrot in '85 - that work is in The Beauty of Fractals book. I was at E.A. during the E.A. Spouse Era, and on the Tiger Woods PSX team that had the South Park scandal. I was at Rhythm & Hues Studios too, through 9 feature films, leaving just before the collapse. I am also a Deep Fakes pioneer, I wrote the global patent, with a completely working VFX pipeline for them in '08 (but went bankrupt trying to realize Personalized Advertising, and refused to do porn.) After my 3D Avatar / Personalized Advertising efforts crashed and burned, I went into facial recognition and became a lead engineer. Yeah, I need to write a book.

At the very least you need to start a blog, what a career :D

Hell, just start a twitter a la Carmack.

I'd love to hear more about you working with Benoit Mandelbrot. I hope you find time to write your book someday.

I look forward too it as a show HN one day.

Please do. Your career sounds like quite the adventure!

I bet the Internet Archive would be keen to have a copy of those CDs, but unfortunately I've never gone through that process in order to offer any getting started steps

I worked at Sony when these were released, and worked with every one of these devkits. I had been working at Activision, and for various reasons wanted out. I ended up interviewing with Sony in Santa Monica at the time, during the process they never said they were making a console, just that they were going to start working on games. After something like 7 interviews, they finally gave me the job.

On my first day they explained that they were going to release a console. We had one kit at the office that was still marked as a Super Nintendo CD Drive (also built into the NEWS workstation cases). Then we got the NEWS workstation dev-kits, and finally the giant ISA cards.

After a change in management, the head of our division decided we were going to move the office to the Bay Area. There was a weird 3-4 month window where a bunch of people had been laid off, and I was working in a mostly empty office with a Playstation 1 devkit, and the freedom to do whatever I wanted with it. This was months before the Playstation was even announced to the public. This was one of the best experiences that ann 18 year old computer geek like me could have had.

Ha, that's super cool. I have a person on my team who has been in the games industry for 28 years now, and he's worked with most of these personally developing early PS1 games. I've only been in the industry 8 years, but working with console devkits has always been the most exciting thing for me, I love this kind of "secret" stuff and actually using it for work, I hope one day there will be a post like this detailing all the early PS5 prototypes as I think it would be cool for the public to know. MS/Sony/Nintendo still produce a lot of very custom, very specialized hardware just for devs, but very little of it is every publicly talked about, until years and years later.

Consoles these days are just glorified PC's though so they are totally boring IMO.

for me at least the fun in consoles was that they were so different from your average x86 PC. it was fun to learn about the internals of the PS1, PS2 or SEGA Saturn back in the day precisely because of their arcane and custom built hardware.

People keep saying this, but I honestly don't think it's true, at least on PS5. Yes, the consoles are built upon x86 foundations but that's basically where similarities end with PC. It's still like in the "old" days - if you want to get maximum performance out of the kit, you need to get right down to the metal and use all kinds of special APIs and features which either just don't exist on PC or are such niche hardware that no one codes for it. The way you allocate memory, the way you manage your rendering pipeline, the way you do IO, the hardware accelerated decompression, even the audio chip - it's nothing like on PC. Xbox S/X are far closer to PC since Microsoft is really trying to unify all the APIs, but Playstation isn't anywhere near that. I'm not saying if it's better, but it's definitely not a "glorified PC", at least not in my view, and I'm leading a PS5 development team specifically.

Yeah, not every board with an x86 CPU is "your average x86 PC".

FM Towns Marty, for example.

What about consoles by Nintendo? Their controllers have motion control and all sorts of craze that PCs don't have.

The switch is not that far off from a tablet with some bluetooth controllers.

The Switch is 90% an Nvidia Shield Tablet. One of the best Android tablets ever and it barely sold. Get Nintendo to market it and it sells at a rate matching 50% of the global tablet market every year.

Turns out the secret to a successful gaming tablet is to actually have games for it.

That's sort of Nintendo's console strategy in a nutshell. Why chase specs when you can just create the best $250 hardware you can and then make amazing games for it? Bonus, since you don't have to care much about being a port target for 3rd parties you can experiment with input methods and other innovations.

It's a good plan, I just wish the hardware were slightly nicer. Like, every smartphone on the planet has had scratch-proof glass for years and years, but the Switch's screen is this cheap plastic which is very easy to ruin.

With completely different OS.

I worked at Capcom in the nineties and had a set of these ISA boards in my PC at work but we also used the serial port and a debug kit so artists could preview their art without needing expensive dev boards.

There was also the Net Yaroze, an official consumer version of the PS1 dev kit.

From the same site: https://www.retroreversing.com/net-yaroze

I remember one magazine used to bundle people's Net Yaroze games on to demo discs here in the UK. Some of them were great!

As I recently learned from semi-random Wikipedia reading, Sony didn't exactly come up with the idea of these kits by itself. Sony bought Psygnosis in '93 and had it develop some early PS1 hits—but it seems the dev still had some freedom, including developing for N64 and Saturn and publishing its games (until 99 or so). And thus:

> As Psygnosis had previously published PSY-Q development kits for various consoles by SN Systems, Psygnosis arranged for them to create a development system for the PS based on cheap PC hardware.

> While Sony had provided MIPS R4000-based Sony NEWS workstations for PlayStation development, Psygnosis employees disliked the thought of developing on these expensive workstations. When Psygnosis arranged an audience for SN Systems with Sony's Japanese executives at the January 1994 CES in Las Vegas, Beveridge and Day presented their prototype of the condensed development kit, which could run on an ordinary personal computer with two extension boards. Impressed, Sony decided to abandon their plans for a workstation-based development system in favour of SN Systems', thus securing a cheaper and more efficient method for designing software. An order of over 600 systems followed, and the company supplied Sony with additional software such as an assembler, linker, and a debugger. SN Systems would go on to produce development kits for future PlayStation systems, including the PlayStation 2: it was bought out by Sony in 2005.

It's also said that Psygnosis played a role in developing the console itself:

> Ian Hetherington, Psygnosis' co-founder, was disappointed after receiving early builds of the PlayStation and later recalled that the console "was not fit for purpose" until his team got involved with it. Hetherington frequently clashed with Sony executives over broader ideas. In the months leading up to the PlayStation's launch, Psygnosis had around 500 full-time staff working on various games as well as assisting with software development.

IIRC Psygnosis also functioned as help for external developers, having quite some staff for that—but I can't find the quote right now.

My first job was port from PS1 -> PC, then next project was another game, but this time port PC -> PS1 - we never got this kit (it was small studio of 4 people). We used (what I think was) the Yaroze... "printf" debugging all the way :) (oh, and when you remove the "printf" things were not working - lol, because printf() kept on clearing math errors, and our PC game was floating point heavy). TLDR: First port (PS1->PC) went really well, second one - we were able to get to the 2nd worst game done for PS1. (back then).