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Games Entertainment

Playstation 2 Basic? 169

Posted by CmdrTaco from the wouldn't-that-be-sweet dept.
onion2k writes: "Looks like us UK dwellers are getting something for the Playstation 2 that no one else in the world is (apart from an inflated price and a long delay). PSX2extreme are reporting that the UK Playstation 2 will ship with a version of YABasic, a programming language for the little black box. Few details at the moment, except that rather than Sony being nice its a tax dodge. Still, bonus." I know CowboyNeal is still waiting for his PS2. Gotta admit, I'm curious what you could do with BASIC on a PS2.
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Playstation 2 Basic? More

Playstation 2 Basic?

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  • Man... it's been ages, but I can see it now... sitting down and writing my own little pong game for the PS2, or maybe see if "David's Midnight Magic" will port from the C64... "Wizard of WOR" here I come...

    And imagine how much better those cheap-ass sprites will look on your shiny new PS2...

    Better yet, I should just swim right on over to Europe, buy about 6 PS2's, and sell them here in the US for about $16 billion apiece! Yeah... then I can retire to Costa Rica...

    and for those of you who are wondering "Why Costa Rica?" - I don't know... it just sounds cool, don't you think?

  • BASIC was the first language of MicroSoft and a
    mainstay through Visual Basic & ActiveX- a
    lifetime of almost 25 years. Its only recently
    they will be making their C/C++/Java variant C#
    the main language.

  • I like nitpicking:

    Teenagers learnt how to program in their bedrooms on computers they got from Santa, then grew up to found and work at companies like Psygnosis, Codemasters, Silicon Dreams, Eidos, Ocean, Rare, etc.
    1. Santa didn't give you a computer. Your parents/guardians did.
    2. Eidos doesn't employ programmers, or any game people at all. It's a cigar-chomping game publisher. Core Design are the authors of Tomb Raider et al, and even then they used to be the Amiga demo group "Anarchy".

  • Sony has a long history of being secretive Actually, Sony had an amateur-oriented dev-kit for the Playstation called Net Yaroze. It enabled anyone with £500 and sufficient skill to have a go at writing honest-to-god PSX software.
  • The import taxes on game machines and computers are different. By shipping these with this, SONY can claim that no matter what is is, the Playstation is a computer not a game console. Sigh, when can we all get together and not be honk around by the lawyers...
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • This has nothing to do with the strength of the British computer games industry.

    It appears to be a simple attempt to avoid import duty into the EU of 2.2% that would apply to video game consoles.

    The thinking seems to be that if it ships with BASIC this makes it a programmable computer, thus being eligable for another import catagory, which has import duty of 0%. Customs may not take the same view, so this could end up in the courts. (IANAL but used to work importing goods from Japan and the USA)

    If this is the case, then expect the BASIC app to be on all PS/2 sold in Europe, since UK customs duties are harmonised with the rest of the EU. (BTW the taxes on booze and fags that mean they are more expensive in the UK are excise duty, which is set by member states, rather than import duty, which is harmonised, and applies in this case)

  • Actually, didn't all non-Japanese versions of the PS2 have their DVD decoding moved from firmware to hardware 'cuz of that "Oops, we forgot the Macrovision!" debacle?

    Actually, they forgot the Macrovision on the American version. The day of the US launch, I tried taping a clip or two off a few DVDs that couldn't be taped off my normal DVD player. Sure enough, no Macrovision this time around either. Wonder if this is going to merit a recall. If it wasn't for the overwhelming lack of supply, they might have been able to make one quickly and quietly.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Sega's got semiconductors. They are using their own proprietary GD-ROM system, and of course like most other game systems only support native formats, you can't play N64 games on it? There is supposedly a system to play PS1 games on a Dreamcast, but that means Sony gets the game licence fee without loosing money on selling the game system itself, instead Sega looses the money.

    Frankly, IMO the average Sony product line is much higher in quality and usability than most other tech company's products, excepting the console or computer markets. Shameful capitalisim or not, the Sony products I own WORK. I'm not going to go out of my way to pay for a non-proprietary product that doesn't work as well.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • 10 PRINT "You are in a small room. There is a glowing lantern on the floor. You have a broadsword and a piece of cheese."
    20 PRINT "What will you do?"
    30 INPUT $A
    40 PRINT "You cannot ";$A
    50 GOTO 10

  • Buttered down "Net Yaroze" (Score:4)

    by Blackwulf ( 34848 ) on Monday November 20, 2000 @06:41AM (#612605) Homepage
    Now, granted, this probably isn't anywhere CLOSE, but Sony has already gone into amateur Playstation programming with their "Net Yaroze" deal. It was about a $600 product with a sleek black Playstation, two black controllers, two black memory cards, and a PC devkit. It had about two megs of RAM that you could store a game created on the devkit (no textures or FMV's, obviously) and you could upload it to their website (which no longer exists, it seems). It was discontinued in the US for lack of support, but the Japanese version is still alive and kicking, and they have yearly contests.

    I would have killed to have had the money back then for one of those. :> I wonder how much functionality this BASIC thing will have. Probably not nearly as much.

    Still, I feel like killing my friend in the UK and taking his YABasic. :>

  • BASIC Programming! (Score:5)

    by American AC in Paris ( 230456 ) on Monday November 20, 2000 @06:41AM (#612606) Homepage
    Cool! Now The Slashdot team can practice using recursion on the PlayStation2, too! [slashdot.org]

    10 PRINT "This is a"
    20 PRINT "Haiku program."

  • Nice of Slashdot to have an icon of an N64 controller, regardless of whatever console the story is actually about.
  • Chances are, this version of BASIC will make QBASIC look like a programmer's wet dream.

    You just convinced me. This has to be the best reason I've ever seen to buy a PS2...

  • Recall that originally C++ used the Cfront compiler to generate C code which was then compiled as normal. Also, NQC for Lego Mindstorms is a replacement programming language that surpasses the functionality of the graphical programming tool Lego provides. Perhaps someone will build a CFront-like compiler to generate YaBasic statements from a higher level language (such as Perl) allowing for more fully featured programming.

    Good point. BASIC seems so dated now, though I do remember the good ol' days of C64 and Apple II hacking. I guess we can be give thanks that they didn't choose COBOL. I'd love to see a Python front end to the PS2, just to play around with.

  • I find your comment incredibly offensive and ignorant. Is this because you are Chinese?

    Think before you post, moron.
  • I like it this way. Now I can do the whorin' while my sig does the trollin'.
  • Some people are suggesting that Sony is only doing this to avoid tariffs. Supposedly the UK has a lower tax on computers, so Sony wants the PS2 to be considered a computer. Including a programming language will furthur this goal.

    I have *no* idea if this is true, but if they include 2d & 3d engines (maybe textures & shiznit too) then I don't really care. That's tight.
    --
  • It's the whole of Europe.
  • [blip] G---
    [blip][blip][blip] GO--
    [blip][blip] GOT-
    [blip][blip][blip][blip] GOTO

    GOTO: ridiculopathy.com [ridiculopathy.com]

  • In my objects and design class that I took this summer at Georgia Tech, the professor told us that either Sony or Sega (I think Sony, but I am not sure) has licensed the Squeak programming language [squeak.org] for their game platform. Since you are not really writing standalone entities when you do this but really adding onto a OS-like image, he seemed to think any game you wrote would also fall under that license

    His take on it was that since Disney (The chief developers of the language, a modern, free implementation of smalltalk, which is really owned by Apple, but is cross-platform) is the one who asked for the licence, that Sony (or Sega) just gave it to them without really paying attention to what exactly Squeak is. Anyone know if its the Playstation or the Dreamcast that this license was granted for?

    --gte910h

  • But it doesn't 'call' the same 'function' (webpage). This makes it which makes it just a normal call, not a recursive one. Recursion isn't the right word.
  • Avoid import duty. It makes it a PC rather than a console.
  • I rather enjoy their digital cameras that use disks. All those flash cards are really really annoying

  • heh (Score:2)

    by grarg ( 94486 )

    So, anyone feel like porting DeCSS to BASIC?

  • With ASM all you need is to type in the bootloader for the CD you just burned yourself. The whole idea of a Beowolf cluster of these to render graphics might have just gotten easier.
  • This had been posted on /. a week or two ago or something.
  • Before I begin, I think the moderator today is a little score happy. Some of the posts aren't exactly 5 worthy!

    Now to the reply on this message.

    I agree. Although I'm pretty sure the levy tax is the real issue for creating this, I really think its a great idea to place a programming package on consoles to help out kids or anyone wanting to learn how to program. I got my start on a Magnovox Odyssey 2 with their Assembler. Then I went to the TRS-80 Color Computer with its Extended BASIC and the EDTASM+ cartridge.

    Kids I think can relate more to programming on a gaming console than a computer (at least initially).

    Chris

  • Interesting.. (Score:3)

    by multipartmixed ( 163409 ) on Monday November 20, 2000 @06:31AM (#612625) Homepage
    ...as long as they implement storage of some sort, along with PEEK, POKE and SYS calls this could be a useful addition, once the PS2 chipset is documented. Home users could actually write their own PS2 games, and make them fast enough with assembly-level support.

    Can anybody say "type-in games from Compute!s Gazette"? I thought you could. It's the C64 all over again!

    --
  • So, the net effect is that the import taxes will be changed. Computers will be charged the same taxes as game consoles.

    They may have sidestepped the issue this time, but that won't be a long term solution.

    I hope you Europeans don't mind paying extra for your imported computers...

  • Slashdot (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The repost masters of the Universe!

    Hey, their shiping YBasic! Why? So they can claim the PS2 is a home computer rather than a games console, and shirk the import tax which is higher on consoles than on home computers.

    So, it's a tax dodge. Nothing special.
  • What exactly can you do in BASIC for such a powerful gaming box? It would be really hard to make graphical objects in BASIC. I don't think this will be useful at all...

    The only thing I can think of would be when the warez doodz rip PS2 games. Instead of just releasing them on IRC, they could put a little BASIC program in front of it. "This game brought to you by so-and-so doodz." Would be cool for a few seconds.....

    btw, I've got a PS2, unopened & sealed, that I'm about to put on eBay. I'd rather not give eBay any money, I'd rather sell it to someone direct. If anyone would like to buy it, let me know.

    Trains stop at a train station. Buses stop at a bus station.

  • not much of an article, but REALLY COOL IDEA! (Score:3)

    by drenehtsral ( 29789 ) on Monday November 20, 2000 @06:44AM (#612629) Homepage
    I miss when old computers/consoles/whatever like the old TRaSh 80 COCO II computers had a BASIC you could play with if you wanted to =:-) It was fun, and it was also what got me to learn to program in the first place. I was a kid, with a computer that would boot into basic, and i wanted to make a text adventure. It was fun. I hope this does the same for some kid out there. I wish they had it in the US.
    I wonder if it'll be somethink like DarkBasic (which is a program designed to create a simple environment like all those old rom basic environments but allow the user to create 3d stuff and make simple games. Very cool idea, i find it a little limiting *understatement* coming from C, but for a beginner (read kid who wants to make a video game and learn something at once), it is a great system...
  • "I'm curious what you could do with BASIC on a PS2"

    Write the fastest game of tic-tac-toe on the planet.

  • Amen, brother. I've been doing quite a lot of programming as a kid, and I'll never be the same again.

    Warning to all kids of the world

    Programming in Basic will cause you to become like me...
  • This was posted on slashdot a while ago.

  • Nibbles and pong (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Finally, I can play nibbles and pong on my 52-inch tv screen. I can compose monotone music, and output it through my 75 thousand dollar speaker system.

    Actually, this is a good thing. This could renew interest in basic programming, spark interest in children and introduce them to a relatively easy programming language at a young age, and give them the ability to write their own games quickly and easily. I wonder how long it will be before we see 'programming basic for the Play station 2' on the book shelves (remembers books about basic for his TRS-80 and c-64)

    I wonder how easy sony has made it for users to share, save, and import files onto the gaming console.......
  • Back in the late 70's/early 80's I started programming using "Bally Basic" and a calculator keyboard (Red + 1 = a, Blue + 1 = b, Green + 1 = c, Red + 2 = d, etc)

    It had great graphics commands and allowed you to make games for that platform that could be saved on cassette. My first business was selling custom games for the Bally. There were only a few thousand of us with the basic cartridge, but it was a very fanatic base.

    There could be a whole new generation of programmers starting due to the PS2 at 8 or 9 years old.

    A nice intro would be to expand beyond the cheats present in every game and to allow people to program their own MODS ala UT/HL/Quake.

    BTW, when I finally got a Vic 20 I was so happy to have 4k of RAM instead of the 2k the Bally had.

    For those that scream how lame, etc basic is, it did teach me how to make something very cool with very little code.

    joe chip

  • Actually, he said "Can you see that I am serious?!", or, more accurately, "I am indeed serious!". Check out the 4F18 episode capsule [snpp.com] and search for 'disrespectful'.
  • So can us loosers in the US get YABasic to play with?
    ---- Sigs are bad for your health ----
  • I wonder how many people learned to program by chasing the inevitable bugs in transfering programs from Computes!s Gazette to computer? Thats how I learned to program.

    Sounds like a poll to me.

    dabacon
    "I ski therefore I am"

  • Oh, the days of type-in games.. I had an Atari 800 (upgraded to a 130xe when the thing imploded on itself) and I had all sorts of cool magazines (which I stupidly gave to someone who I never saw again in my lifetime) for it. Compute!, Antic, etc. Ahh, the memories..

    So, a few weeks ago I was on a nostalgia kick. Apparently, every single Antic magazine is now available on the internet, including all the software [atarimagazines.com], which made me dance a jig for a few days. It's a real blast to the past.

    I gotta admit, though, the Atari 800 emulator I had to dig up worked surprisingly well. Even the old antic music program worked great. (Some of you may remember Shock the Monkey being played on four channel square wave synth. I made an mp3 of it!) What's really sad is I actually remembered a great deal of atari basic and the various memory locations to peek/poke at. =)

  • My general advice for little kids and programming:

    LOGO [cowan.edu.au], for visual stimuli, for variables and procedures.

    ToonTalk [toontalk.com], for a graphical construction environment, teaching pattern-matching and declarative rule-based programming.

    Prolog and Java, once the kid is ready to forego the graphical environment.

    Why Prolog? ToonTalk is based on Prolog's inference concepts, and I advocate straight Prolog after that. I think too many kids start out with BASIC, Pascal and C, and are forever bent on the idea that procedural languages are all there is to programming.

  • Whoa! Talking about getting knocked out of my seat. I was thinking exactly the same thing after reading the previous post.
    Trying to start kids off by programming on a PS2 is nothing but a quick and easy way to turn the majority of them who try it off of programming. Quickly!
    As soon as they realize the next 'Resident Evil Ripoff' isn't going to sprout fully grown out of their TV's with a couple clicks it's right back to the real thing for them.

    I'm also not a ranting, old, frustrated 50 year old programmer. Even if I am older than 24 and started programming at around 10. Of course nothing serious until about 13. PDQ Pascal, baby!
  • From the look so far, I think they used this BASIC program to make the actual Playstation 2 games.
  • GORILLAS! The game that came with qbasic for MS-DOS long ago... its gonna make a comeback now that I can easily port it to PS2!

    If you have never played GORILLAS.. here is the premise. Two gorillas are perched up on top of big buildings on either side of the screen. Each player is gets a chance to throw a big ass bananna at the other player by inputing an angle and speed. First player to hit the other wins.

    Good to know that we finally have the technology to bring such a game to a home system.
  • --Gonna have to go with you on this one:

    My first program was a lame little ditty from Compute that converted a string into pig-latin... And I definatly learned while punching such in.

    I think any included language is great, but BASIC is somewhat nostalgic... And I still got some o those Compute s lieing around..

    Let's see Vampyr Graveyard..., Turtle Graphics for Basic: ooo- Turtle 3D...

    -THE Nate
  • 1st 3D demo!

    10 READ X,Y,Z,SHAPE$
    20 IF SHAPE$="END" GOTO 50
    30 PLOT X,Y,Z,SHAPE$
    40 GOTO 10 50 RENDER 640,480,32
    99 END
    100 DATA 50,30,20,"MA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBAQUABIGAuVvHniJkI83eCj1n bc0QFAuEsoGXnqeSyTAi"
    101 DATA 100,72,30,"EwJDQTELMAkGA1UEChMCR0MxEjAQBgNVBAsTCUN DUkEtQURSQzEPMA0GA1UE"
    ... 9231 DATA 0,0,0,"END"
    ---
    Inanimate Carbon Rod thanks you for your support. See you in 2004!

  • Re:Britain's history of amateur games development (Score:5)

    by RGreen ( 15823 ) on Monday November 20, 2000 @08:55AM (#612645)

    I can't read the Sony Management's collective mind, but I suspect that the strength of the British computer games industry is one of the reasons behind their decision to sell the PS2 with an amateur development capability. Not that different from the "Net Yaroze" version of the original Playstation, really.

    I was one of the people who worked on the YABasic project at Sony's Technology Group in London, where I worked on the documentation.

    The YABasic had two reasons for being done. One, the UK Government was trying to classify the PS2 as a game system only rather than a more general purpose computer to tax imports. Sony has always seen the PS2 as a general purpose machine, and in the future you will see a number of toys, add-ons, applications and software that is non-gaming on the system. There are some very exciting things going on right now that may be announced soon.

    The other reason that YABasic was written is that the Technology Group there is tasked with doing things that other companies don't have the time or reason to do. Games companies are busy trying to recoup their costs for the devkits and down-time from learning the system, so somebody had to show the world some of the more interesting things the PS2 could do. Sure, there is a history of hmoe enthusiast programming in the UK and that probably helped. Expect to see updates to YABasic and demo progras on magazine cover-disks and also the ability to freely swap programs on memory cards. We had great fun going retro and trying to recreate all those old-school demos - 8-Bit programs with 128-Bit fill rates!

    FYI, YABasic is a fully virtualised machine, so PEEK and POKE only set variables in the interpreter and don't directly address the underlying machine. *IF* management decide to release the specs for the underlying chipsets (and press releases from Sony do suggest that it's at least licensable), then YABasic may be changed to allow direct access to the GIF, DMAC and other chips. Heck, it's all memory mapped at the end of the day.

    - Robin Green
    Sony R&D, Foster City.
  • Recursion? You must mean [re]iteration.
  • I've got a PC^H^H console arriving in a few days; it'll be interesting to see what I pay for it (I probably could have found out at the time, but I was eager to just put down the deposit and ask no questions).
    But questions are what I now have...

    Will I get any of this cut in price, or does it all go to our Corporate chums?

    How the hell am I going to program in BASIC? Using a gamepad? That'll be fun.

    poke 35136,0 gave me infinite lives in Manic Miner. poke 35899,0 gave me infinite lives in Jet Set Willy. Does anyone know the poke for infinite lives in Tekken Tag?

  • It says in very small letters in the manual:"Any and all programs written using this console will become the property of Sony. By not having read this agreement you have agreed to the fact that Sony can barge into your house at any time in order to reclaim their property"
  • Hey kids! Just say NO! to GOTO!
  • Can anybody say "type-in games from Compute!s Gazette"?

    Yes! For your average 1984 BASIC shoot-em-up.

    I imagine that some of the 3D models in use on many of todays games would takes up an entire magazine by themselves. Even if all the graphical and audio data was supplied on a CD with the magazine, the code would still be huge for anything but the most simple of games. I imagine that the code could be included on the CD though, and an article in the magazine devoted to describing bits of the code and how they work as opposed to just a brute force listing - much more useful for the end programmer.

    Between this and the new Blitz Basic here [blitzbasic.com] a whole new world of BASIC programming games and stuff could occur. I feel that the fun might be returning to cumputing after a while away.

    Sure, BASIC is, well, basic, but in terms of getting something done it could be pretty good. No having to chase pointers through twisted evil C code anymore, just the ability to express and create your ideas quickly and rapidly.

    As long as it isn't interpreted. :-)

  • Chances are, this version of BASIC will make QBASIC look like a programmer's wet dream.

    More can be done with [Basic] [everything2.com] than you think. I was able to do write a complete TUI-based gambling simulation suite for Apple II (called place.your.bets) using only [Applesoft BASIC] [everything2.com] and two [6502] assembly subroutines [everything2.com].

    Still, at least they didn't try and release Perl on it. Then nobody would have been able to program the damn thing...

    • Slashdot was written in [Perl] [perlmonks.org].
    • Perl has a popular windowing toolkit called [Perl/Tk] [everything2.com].

  • Re:One thing you can do with BASIC (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    You don't need to access the memory registers numerically.
    For infinite lives in Tekken, try poke lee,eye

  • Why is PS2 considered a computer in Britain, but a game console in the US? We didn't get YABasic with ours. That definitely makes the tax break look like the real reason for the addition of the language and attempt to classify the PS2 as a general purpose computer.

  • I did a product for the Bally Arcade, circa 1979, that was a Tiny Basic programming cartridge. It used a keypad overlay to convert a 4x6 calculator keypad into an alphanumeric entry device.

    It had 1800 bytes of memory, graphics and sound commands, and ran at about 100 instructions a second.

    It was a big hit (for an obscure platform). A number of people used it to teach programming and stuff.

    I am delighted to see this idea come back. I was even thinking of doing something like this again myself.

    Here is a link to more info about it. [alteeve.com]
  • The US has a similar history... so do some other countries, but it is the tax break Sony is shooting for. However, if a community grows up around this (which is what did it for the computers you speak of, back in the good ol' days) then perhaps a simple programming language in a simple envrionment will inspire more kids to learn to program.

    One problem with current computing envrionments is that they are too complicated for many kids. My first programming language was BASIC on a Commodore PET, and after BASIC it was Assembler, then Pascal, then C... All in fairly simple environments (I was a fairly advanced programmer by the time DOS completely succumbed to Windows)... Could you imagine Visual Studio as your first programming envrionment? Many professional programmers consider it too "busy" to work with... A friend of mine who teaches kids to program uses QBasic because it's easy, then moves the kids up to more sophisticated environments, so they can concentrate first on concepts and algorithms - then on IDEs and foundation classes and so on...

    A simple environment in which to create games could be a great boon to teaching kids to program, it's too bad that Sony is not interested in promoting this system worldwide for this, and is just trying to dodge taxes (and thus will probably include lousy documentation and no support to discourage its use...)

  • New from Nintendo! (Score:3)

    by the_tsi ( 19767 ) on Monday November 20, 2000 @09:07AM (#612664)
    REDMOND, WA (AP) - Nintendo of America has just announced a new cutting-edge programming language: PikaLogo.

    "We feel we've revived a classic programming language by combining it with a recognizable character in contemporary America," stated company spokesperson Howard Lincoln. "Pikachu is one of the best-selling and most-recognized faces in electronic gaming today and by bringing the two together, we feel that children will be able to learn to program in a comfortable environment."

    PikaLogo, the first product in Nintendo's ProgramMon line, allows children to learn the elementary LOGO procedural language with the classic turtle replaced by the cartoon character Pikachu. Children enter a list of instructions for the character along with simple procedural control statements ("if A then do B" or "until C happens, do D").

    Shigeru Mayimoto was not available for comment. His secretary mentioned two other products, PascalAran (A Metroid/Pascal combination) and SuperCOBOLBrothers.

    PikaLogo will be released by Thanksgiving with an estimated retail price of $49.95. It has been rated E for Everyone.
    ...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...
  • The interesting thing to me about getting Basic on PS2 is the ability to write an MP3 player for it. A DVD-RAM disc can hold about 150 - 200 CD's worth of music -- if one could write an MP3 player which fit on a memory card, I think my PS2's usefulness would about double. As it is, I still need a CD jukebox. I'd definitely pay $35 dollars for MP3 software for the PS2.

    Developers, are you listening?

  • Foundation for a higher-level language (Score:4)

    by leperjuice ( 18261 ) on Monday November 20, 2000 @09:10AM (#612669)
    This may just be the beginning...

    Recall that originally C++ used the Cfront compiler to generate C code which was then compiled as normal. Also, NQC [enteract.com] for Lego Mindstorms [lego.com] is a replacement programming language that surpasses the functionality of the graphical programming tool Lego provides.

    Perhaps someone will build a CFront-like compiler to generate YaBasic statements from a higher level language (such as Perl) allowing for more fully featured programming. YaBasic may be a small step right now, but I can see technically skilled PlayStation2 programmers coming up with replacement (or at least a wrapper) for YaBasic (though Sony UK is not off the hook for supplying a cheesy language for their system).

    Note: I'm kidding about using Perl. Ugh [perl.com]... (shudder)

  • Ok, I think that is a great idea shipping a programming language. But why basic? There are lots of other languages that they could of chosen. Out of all of the languages I know (about 10+), basic has to be the worst. I can see them not shipping C, but I could easily see Java or pascal. Heck why not fortran, that's a joke to use!

    But basic is so counter-intuitive and teaches bad programming practices. Look what happend to microsoft... It could happen to you.

  • A lot! (Score:5)

    by Docrates ( 148350 ) on Monday November 20, 2000 @07:31AM (#612679) Homepage
    , I'm curious what you could do with BASIC on a PS2.

    ...the same thing i did with a compumate computer sitting on top of my atari 2600 about a thousand years ago, learn to program!

    it's a great tool to inspire youngsters to learn computer programming.
  • I have one in a box in the attic somewhere, cool geek/dev toy if I ever saw one. Textures were possible with it as were semi-fmvish results. I ported the 'dancing baby' to it. It was discontinued in the US for lack of support and the program has been halted althogether worldwide because there are no more yarozes left. It was very popular in Europe. In the Uk there was a monthly competition to get your game/demo on magazine cover disc.. I've the honour of getting a demo and my game on a black psx disc.. :-) All in all I think Sony did a good thing with the Yaroze. And although a lot of technical specs were release to the public domain and it accelarated the rate at which the psx was finally disassembled, I hope Sony do the same thing with the PS2. I'll be first in line. Check http://www.codeworks.demon.co.uk for more.
  • You are very wrong. This is not for the programmers who code PS2, but for the home cosumer. Sony did this with PS1, they released Yaroze which was a C dev kit, the learning curve was a little bit higher, so they learned from it and made it basic. YES, it will be USEFUL, It is not QBASIC, it will support 2D and 3D libraries, so you can actually make real game! The great thing is that these libraries are done in C/Asm/microcodes, so it will be very fast, all you will worry about mostly is the logic code which is not CPU intensive.

  • "By buying a Sony product which has semiconductors in it, you are supporting their crusade to proprietarize the world and become a tech monopoly.",
    Ya, what computer did you use to post this crap, I am sure it has no semiconductors in it! You must be using those build a computer kit from matchbox and wire hangers kit from the early 50's.

  • Re:Who knows (Score:3)

    by segmond ( 34052 ) on Monday November 20, 2000 @07:13AM (#612697)
    I am sorry but you are very wrong, misinformed and totally clueless. As an avid PS1 Console hacker, I can tell you that this language will do useful things. You will get 2D and 3D libraries written in C/asm/microcodes, so all you need to do is write your game logic in basic, create textures and you are ready to go! Of all the Console makers out there, Sony is actually the most open! If you call Sony secretive, what will you call Nintendo or Microsoft? I don't know much how Sega is, they might be open as Sony, obtaining the saturn devkit was an ease, tho sonydevkits was much easier (underground wise). Anyway, when I was mucking with psx around 2 years ago, I got to talk to some sony developers in .jp, who even ported the devkit then to FreeBSD and shared it!

  • Sony is really bad about proprietary hardware.

    • Memory stick - couldn't use the standard compact flash that everything else uses. They had to make a more expensive version in a different shape.
    • ATRAC3 and MD - I think we all know about this.

    Those are just the ones that have been really annoying me lately. Anyway... I wisht there were some standarsation. It's rediculous that for every single device there is a different peripheral for it. My digital camera uses nice cheap compact flash. Why can't a I get a standard palm top (read: PalmOS) that will use compact flash? You'd think that companies could show that they use the same things as everyone else and push that as a value add, however currently Sony just forces it down your throat that they put a memory stick read in every damn thing they make.

  • Re:heh (Score:2)

    by Gid1 ( 23642 )
    Or, how about porting gcc to BASIC? With one language, you can build the compiler for another. Hmmmm...

  • Spawn a new generation of coders? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Perhaps this will spawn an interest in coding for the kids with Playstations? Back in the "old days" of Apple ][ et. al. We had these great magazines and books that you could buy with the BASIC source code for games. Just type them in and play them. As a little kid I learned a lot about coding from typing in those programs.

    For a while I've felt that the current lack of those kinds of magazines and books is a great loss. Perhaps having BASIC in a game console will ping the creative side of these console game playing kids and spawn an interest in coding.

    That wouldn't be a bad side effect.

  • Idea (Score:5)

    by Auckerman ( 223266 ) on Monday November 20, 2000 @07:14AM (#612701)
    10 IF POSTED = ALREADY THEN GOTO 20

    20 POST ARTICLE_AGAI N [slashdot.org]

  • The PS2 has USB support, so you should be able to use any standard USB keyboard/mouse.
  • yes, but it is a widely known fact that BASIC is a poor language to get someone started on. It teaches poor everything :)

    I wondered for a while if anyone really cared about programming anymore.. Would kids really want to sit there and write their own games or is it going to be mostly dorks like us that are reliving our C64 days?

    Let's hope it opens up a new world for many kids :) They will actually get something more out of their blackbox than a brain tumor from sitting in front of Coolboarders99 for 16 hours a day :)
  • Hell, in grade 11 I programmed a blackjack game (with graphics for dealing cards etc). I was really proud of the "score calculator" subroutine. It was a little twisted to figure out which aces were 1 and which were 11. Anyway, the entire thing was original code, and I'm sure with a little bit of reading now, I could get mouse support and make it fully GUI, instead of "h"(it) and "s"(tand).

  • Britain's history of amateur games development (Score:5)

    by The Dodger ( 10689 ) on Monday November 20, 2000 @07:43AM (#612707) Homepage

    Some people out there are probably wondering why this is getting released in the UK in particular.

    Well, the UK has a long history of amateur games development, a legacy of home computers like the ZX-80, Spectrum, Commodore, BBC Micro, etc. Teenagers learnt how to program in their bedrooms on computers they got from Santa, then grew up to found and work at companies like Psygnosis, Codemasters, Silicon Dreams, Eidos, Ocean, Rare, etc.

    I can't read the Sony Management's collective mind, but I suspect that the strength of the British computer games industry is one of the reasons behind their decision to sell the PS2 with an amateur development capability. Not that different from the "Net Yaroze" version of the original Playstation, really.


    D.

  • within a week we'll have trin00 and netbus for playstation

  • titbit of information: (Score:3)

    by GC ( 19160 ) on Monday November 20, 2000 @06:34AM (#612717)
    I heard Argos have hundreds of playstationos as they omitted to put them in their christmas catalogue so most people don't realise that they're selling them.

  • Don't be swayed by the devil. (Score:3)

    by AFCArchvile ( 221494 ) on Monday November 20, 2000 @06:34AM (#612719)
    Sony is trying to appeal to the programmers who were initially outraged at the PS2 because it was the physical manifestation of everything they oppose (the DMCA, the MPAA, shameful capitalism, and so on). And now they announce a form of BASIC for the console, as though that's going to be useful for anything.

    My suggestion? Either get a Dreamcast or avoid console systems altogether. By buying a Sony product which has semiconductors in it, you are supporting their crusade to proprietarize the world and become a tech monopoly.

  • I can't disagree with you more. I learned C64 BASIC before I learned algebra. Because I learned C64 BASIC, learning ANSI was so easy: for loops, variables, print statements, logic analysis, just made sense in C after using BASIC. My only big glitch was learning pointers; that really threw me.

    Besides, C++ is a horrible first language to learn. It's akin to teaching a first time pilot how to fly a jumbo jet; there's just too much to learn before hand. Give them a simple language to cut their teeth on; the rest will follow.

    I agree, a kid with C++ skills *is* better than a kid with BASIC skills, hands down, almost everytime. But: a kid with BASIC skills is far better than a kid with no programming skills.

    As for the industry standard language and OS, you obviously are looking at a pretty narrow field (Windows programming). C is still a standard for most low level devices, and rest assured, C and C++ are not standard across platforms, or even within platforms (try Borland/Visual C++ porting of the same code for the same OS).

    Teaching someone a language like BASIC is great idea for a first language for so many reasons:
    1) They *have* to change languages is they want to do anything useful. If someone learns Visual C++, they can moan and bitch that they don't want to change, and throw together a half-assed arguement defending their viewpoint (like you did). Not so with BASIC!
    2) Basic stuff is covered in BASIC. Most of the important ideas of programming can be learned on BASIC. Looping, variables, memory access (POKE and PEEK), subroutines, etc. Advanced topics have to be covered in an advanced language, admittedly, but why would I have to know about inline functions or pointers or external variables now? Plenty of time to learn after I learn C!
    3) It's EASY TO LEARN! One line of program is all you need to run a quick program! 10 PRINT "Hi" No "include"s, no boilerplate, no pre-processor directives, no semi-colons at the end! It's simple!

    Well, that was an interesting lunch break...
  • Actually, Sony released it in the UK only, in order to get around higher taxes on what was percieved to be a video game console. (Perish the thought!) There are lower taxes on computers, so they are trying to push it as one.

    That's why you aren't going to see this anywhere but in the UK.

  • It's just like in TV & movies. Regardless of what video game system it is, it will always sound like the Atari 2600 version of Pac Man or the Atari 2600 version of Donkey Kong.

    Don't belive me? Listen to the latest Circut City ad.
  • I come from an almost identical situation...I had a Commodore Vic 20 (with a cartridge slot, for f*ck's sake). It was my main impetus to go from:

    10 PRINT "I'm bored!;"
    20 GOTO 10

    to coding my own text-adventures. By the time I traded up to a brand-new, sleek sexy Tandy 1000 (I know!), I had already grown frustrated with the lack of complex data structures in GW-BASIC (I was trying to make a D&D adventure, and couldn't figure out how to keep track of stats for multiple characters during chargen). I was about 9 at the time.

    I hope this little tack-on will do for the next generation of k3wl kidz what the Tandys, Commodores, and TRS' did for us.

    Geekhood is a burden and a privilige.
  • as long as I dont boot up and see "BASIC IN ROM. 38911 BYTES FREE" on a cyan screen...
  • All these "home computers" were mostly used and bought as game boxes, but their build-in basic interpreters gave a generation a chance to discover that programming can be fun.
  • Hey kids! Just say NO! to GOTO!

    While in general, I agree with that as a rule of thumb, there are some places where using a goto is better than not using one. And just as a point of reference:

    /usr/src/linux% find . -name '*.c' -exec egrep goto {} /dev/null \; | wc -l
    5736

  • Humble Beginnings (was: not a good thing) (Score:4)

    by drenehtsral ( 29789 ) on Monday November 20, 2000 @07:49AM (#612736) Homepage
    Hey, you have to start somewhere. Is it a reality to expect a hole slew of 8 year old kids to want to start programming when Hello World is 5 pages of code full of magic numbers and linked against 3 or 4 different libraries? Kids will outgrow BASIC all by themselves. They will feel cramped by the lack of solid data structure support. They will yearn for the greener fields of malloc() and free(). They will want their code to run faster, and they will _want_ to link to those libraries to get at their functionality. These things will happen on their own. I say make the beginning environment as unintimidating as possible, turn off this snobbery and remember that _everybody_ has to start at the beginning. Raise no barriers to who may enter, and let those with the curiosity and drive to learn more do so at their own pace, driven by their own curiosity. Those are the people who will become good programmers, because they are looking for better solutions, and are not satisfied with what they have if they know there is something cooler out there.
    There is no need to jumpstart people and drop them hungry, cold, wet and naked into the world of modern programming, i think it's healthy if they get there themselves, at their own pace, starting from their own comfortable beginning. A little preachy, but i think it matters. I tried a lot of langages out before i settled on C and C++ as my two languages of choice. If i'm working with a sane and well written class library, i'm happy. On the way though i tried out BASIC, Pascal, Assembly language (for 3 different processors), Object Oriented Pascal, Forth, and even Perl.
  • I think this is the perfect answer to my AskSlashdot Article Is Early Exposure to Computers Good for Kids [slashdot.org]. I question the benefit of computers if all kids are doing is playing games. When I think about it, my first experience with computers was playing Hard Hat Mack on our Apple IIe. Less than a month later, I came out with the wonderful gem of a program:

    10 print "My brother is a jerk!!!!!"
    20 goto 10

    From there it was a short hop to making real programs that did useful and/or fun stuff. This is what people being introduced to computers need, an easy way to express themselves on a popular platform. It will give them the incentive and opportunity to explore more how things work, rather than bragging about how many frags they got on Quake.
  • I doubt very much that Sony will allow this language to do anything useful, especially if it's just a tax shelter.

    Sony has a long history of being secretive, I would be surprised if this was anything beyond a token appease the legals implementation.

  • 10 HOME
    20 PRINT "This is already more useful than..."
    30 PRINT "X Box!"

  • The future of ps2! (Score:4)

    by clinko ( 232501 ) on Monday November 20, 2000 @06:35AM (#612746) Journal
    "Gotta admit, I'm curious what you could do with BASIC on a PS2. "

    20 years after atari, the ps2 comes out. Able to do graphics that make your head spin. It's first challenge: Pong in Basic


  • Why get geeked about the PS2 and this thinly supported/implemented/considered Basic?*
    You can buy the Indrema [indrema.com] and use the devkits [indrema.com] for free... Im willing to bet there will be some serious independent development for the L600 when its available - this Sony Basic crap is a simple effort to thwart UK tax law, shame on the $ony Corporate $WHORES$ who would purposely screw the tax laws in that country... The government should quickly add a clause to the tax laws to fuck Sony back - the bastards.

    Who'd have though Sony (the proprietary crap consumer product kings) would do such a thing... puhleeze

    *If anyone thinks that this Basic is going to be anything even remotely central to the PS2: Why isn't It being released everywhere? And at PS2 launch?
  • "...The land of hack-er ya-yas,
    the land where you can't write code,
    the land where large SCSI drives still hang proudly,
    like testicles from RAID controllers..."

    --K
    Sorry. First thing I thought of. :P
    ---
  • The PS2 can use a standard USB keyboard and mouse, today. Just try it with Unreal...and other games support it too.

  • Errr true, but not the reason. As was pointed out the last time this story was run (about a week ago IIRC), it's all to do with money (surprise surprise). Basically the EC impose a 2.5% levy on games consoles being imported into europe, but not on computers. So Sony are trying to make PS2 look like a computer not a console, to save themselves the cash. Unfortunatly for them most commentators (including various officials in the EU) have said it's pointless, because the PS1 is classed as a console and as far as they're concerned this is basically the same.

  • Ok this does a few things.
    (1) it allows them to classify the thing as a pc not a console and avoid a tarif.
    (2) it gives the ps2 more of a 'neat' factor which it needs now that everyone realizes the graphics aren't as amazing as we thougth they would be(they're good dont get me wrong but i heard sutff like bugslife quality in realtime.)
    (3)it gives people who may have been waiting for another overpriced console (xbox or gamecube) and reason to buy the ps2. sure you will probably be able to develop for the xbox on your pc in C++ but YAbasic will likely be so much easier. add that to the need to burn stuff on to CD in order to debug it and youve got some serious reasons to buy a ps2.

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