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Games Entertainment

SDL Has Been Ported to Sony PS2 89

Posted by timothy from the today-is-three-days-ago dept.
JigSaw writes: "SDL, the open source answer to DirectX, is a well-known cross-platform multimedia library designed to provide fast access to the graphics framebuffer and audio device. Sam Lantiga, the maintainer and SDL project leader, announced today on the SDL mailing list, that he ported the library to Playstation2 and it will allow to write and run SDL games (open source or commercial, as SDL is LGPL) on the Linux port for the PS2. Great to see Linux to become the source for a whole bunch of free SDL games (some of them with commercial-level quality), easily recompiled for the PS2 and run them without having to spend $49 USD for each game. This release will be even more significant in the near future, as SONY is planning to release the broadband adapter add-on, which will enable small developers (and even companies) to release free or shareware games, downloadable in binary or source format (most SDL games are known to have small sizes) from the web, and hop, to your TV!"
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SDL Has Been Ported to SONY PS2 More

SDL Has Been Ported to SONY PS2

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  • If I'm not mistaken, the $200 for the Linux kit in Japan included a 40gb hard disk, keyboard, mouse and network adaptor. It's NOT just the distro alone.

  • BTW: Did you know... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by root_42 ( 103434 ) on Saturday August 04, 2001 @10:52AM (#2111844) Homepage
    ...that Sam Lantiga left Lokigames and is now working for Blizzard? But he is still developing SDL, as it seems. Look here [linuxgames.com] for more details.
  • This is great news, except I can see one problem with it. The CNet article implies the only way to get Linux to run on the PS2 is to buy the $200 development kit -- since the Linux runtimes are proprietary, and presumably not freely distributable, this could definitely hamper the ability to play SDL games for most people. Obviously nobody can stop developers from circulating the kernel, but since the specs on the hardware are closed I'm assuming SDL has been built on top of these runtimes, and thus depends on them.

    Does anybody have information about whether or not developers will be able to redistribute enough of the Linux-based runtimes to make this feasible? Actual quotes from the license agreement(s) would be nice. (Or has the porter found some way around using the binary-only stuff?)

    • Actually I don't know if it works with the development kit. It's actually been ported to the Sony PS2 Linux Beta, which is only publicly available in Japan right now.

      --Sam @ Blizzard
    • Ok, I'm confused. What happened to the GPL and the requirement to distribute teh soruce? Has Sony developed proprietary run time libraries, independent of Linux, to let Linux programs run on the PS2?

    • Re:Linux for end users? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by JabberWokky ( 19442 ) <slashdot.com@timewarp.org> on Saturday August 04, 2001 @10:08AM (#2155914) Homepage Journal
      The CNet article implies the only way to get Linux to run on the PS2 is to buy the $200 development kit

      Realistically, I have no problem with this - maybe that $200 kicks the price point above where they will be making a loss (at least when they drop the price this coming holiday season). That way, Sony can keep the PS2 in market, even if people aren't buying licensed games.

      In other words, you have a choice - buy the PS2 below cost, and play only licensed games (which kick back to Sony, making up the difference), or shell out $200 and play free (both beer and speech) games. And neither will make Sony give up on the PS2 as unprofitable.

      Now, as to what the *actual* break even price for Sony is - now that's a different story. I imagine that they are making a profit on the actual unit (not counting initial R&D) at the moment; that may change when the PS2 price drops way down in the next few years.

      --
      Evan

      • Realistically, I have no problem with this - maybe that $200 kicks the price point above where they will be making a loss (at least when they drop the price this coming holiday season). That way, Sony can keep the PS2 in market, even if people aren't buying licensed games.

        Good point -- I had forgotten about the whole selling the hardware at a loss issue. Still, to the average gamer, who probably knows or cares little about free or Free games, $200 is an awfully high price to justify getting the ability to play SDL games.

        Sure, the Cool Factor is definitely there, but the $200 entry fee would probably be too high for anybody but die-hard geeks who want to play their SDL games on a TV mainly for the hell of it, which is a far cry from small developers being able to reach millions of gamers like some people had hoped for.

  • internet + binaries + flashable firmware == lots of visuses/worms
    Great idea Sony!

  • fantastic but sony might not like it (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04, 2001 @10:03AM (#2127442)
    This is great news of course, but how will sony react? Hundreds of free games being released will hurt commercial sales of PS2 games, especially if someone ports the SDL versions of MAME, SNES9X, and that gbadvance emulator.
    • The problem is the PS2 has only a 294 MHz CPU and very high-latency RAMBUS RAM, so portable emulators will not run well on it. Ones written especially for it in MIPS that take advantage of the on-CPU scratchpad RAM will fare a lot better.

      • The problem is the PS2 has only a 294 MHz CPU and very high-latency RAMBUS RAM, so portable emulators will not run well on it.

        My old Cyrix 166-based PC had a lot less processor power than the PS2, much slower memory (remember 70ns FPM DRAM?) and less of it (only 16MB), quite apart from the fact that it had a video card that is prehistoric by comparison (an S3 Virge).

        Yet it played ~95% of all MAME games absolutely flawlessly, at full speed.

        Portable != Slow, as anyone who has used Linux on a MIPS box will tell you (it runs rings around the MIPS-only IRIX)

        You're not an assembler guru that's feeling hard done by optimizing compilers are you?

        • Whether an emulator works well or not depends entirely on what you're emulating. My old P120 handled lots of mid-eighties sprite-based games perfectly in MAME, but had major problems running e.g. Mortal Kombat and other more recent games in MAME.

          PS/2 users will probably be able to run most of the golden oldies, but I doubt it'll emulate modern hardware (recent arcade machines, consoles, whatever) very well. Luckily, the PS/2 doesn't need PlayStation emulation. B-)
  • Since when are `Open Source' and `commercial' opposites? According to just about everyone, including both the FSF (see their `words to avoid' list) and the Open Source Initiative (dunno where, but Google Is Your Friend) `proprietary' `closed source' or `non-free' is the opposite of Open Source / Free Software.

    Commercialness does not equal being sold for money just like free to air television isn't non-commercial. It is (according to every dictionary I've ever read) to do with the motivation behind producing the work, which in the case of apps like Zope, Red Hat Linux, VideoLAN, and many other projects, is (at least partially) to make money.

    Commercial software is fine and employs alot of people, and its even better for users if its also Open Source.

  • Commercial quality? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SilentChris ( 452960 ) on Saturday August 04, 2001 @12:23PM (#2137252) Homepage
    "Great to see Linux to become the source for a whole bunch of free SDL games (some of them with commercial-level quality)"

    Ahem. *cough* :) Someone's been going to the school of CmdrTaco's all-inclusive non-objective statements. I would hardly call a majority of the SDL games commercial quality. A majority are playful diversions (like minesweeper) and the few that are commercial quality ARE commercial (like Loki's wares).

    Don't get me wrong: I think SDL is a step in the right direction. But are you going to get Joe User to play these games when for $20 used you can get a decent copy of Final Fantasy for PS?

    • >>when for $20 used you can get a decent copy of Final Fantasy for PS?

      The amazon.com version of ff9 costs $40. But thats an exact copy. For a merely decent copy I would expect to pay $7-$10 and not a penny more.

  • PS2 hardware is an insane bunch of parralel units that in no way resembles your average 3d card. To get any throughput, you have to do careful custom coding. For example you can do procedural rendering on the suped up geometry transform engine (VU2). So how efficient is it? Can I bake chunks of level geometry and fire them off to well tuned assembly rendering loops, or do I have to call "Add_Vertex()" on each vert in the mesh?
    • 2D with SDL on the PlayStation 2 uses DMA to transfer images to the screen, and is fairly fast. SDL also takes advantage of hardware YUV -> RGB conversion and hardware image scaling.

      As for 3D, SDL just provides an interface to the native OpenGL implementation. There is a port of Mesa to the PS2, but as of the Public Beta, there were lots of features which hadn't been tested and some things which didn't work due to the way PS2 hardware works.

      If you want to use any of the other hardware, like the custom vector units, you'll have to program them yourself.

      In general, SDL speed is pretty good on the PlayStation 2. However, in my experience, games which require a lot of memory or lots of floating point will be fairly slow.

      SDL isn't a magic wand, you still have to take the advantages and disadvantages of your target platforms into consideration for the best performance of your game.
  • I am glad to hear that Sony has decided to go with SDL. I hope that Sony stands a chance with the Xbox, because I would hate to see Microsoft win in another market. We should give Nintendo and Sony our support.

  • Language bindings (Score:2, Insightful)

    by JayKey ( 114884 )
    Another cool thing about SDL is that it supports various languages through its bindings. For example I tested the guile/scheme binding a while ago.. the code needed to get things on the screen was only a few lines... sorry to say, but it lacked some features and crashed in my face.. but at least in my mind it would be awefully cool to prototype effect/AI/ ideas etc using SDL and Scheme. Other people may already have some experience using SDL with other interpreted languages?
    -jk
    "Premature optimization is the root of all evil" - Don Knuth
    • > Other people may already have some
      > experience using SDL with other
      > interpreted languages?

      Are you implying that Scheme is an interpreted language? I think there are Scheme compilers.
    • Pygame is based on python bindings for SDL - I wish I had more time to mess with it so I could say something informative :(

      A decent port of Pygame for the PS2 would be a lot of fun to play with, with or without Linux underneath.

  • actually... (Score:5, Informative)

    by wct ( 45593 ) on Saturday August 04, 2001 @09:59AM (#2156123)
    ...it was ported to the PS/2 with the 1.2.1 release a few weeks ago. The port was done by some Japanese coders. The news here is that Sony has donated a dev platform for further development...so we can all hope Mesa is ported sometime :)
    • Actually, I ported it, while working for Loki.
      I have since added support for TV output.
      • > Actually, I ported it, while working for Loki.
        > I have since added support for TV output.

        Before this gets modded down as a troll, I'd like to point out that according to the comments in the source code, the PS2 code in SDL is written by Sam Lantinga (slouken@devolution.com), which is who the poster of the parent says he is. This is just to avoid rampant confusion like in the Tux Racer discussion yesterday, with people ignoring Patry's attempt to bring sanity into the discussion. B-)

        For further info on new features (such as the TV output feature (currently only in CVS)), see the ChangeLog [libsdl.org].
  • Needless to say, this is a very good thing.
    Indrema was going to be an open-source console before the project died... but now it seems the PS2 has taken its place! Quite unexpected.
    This could also end up being an excellent thing for Linux in general. Developers may be inclined to use SDL for their games and applications due to its portability factor. SDL makes porting from platform to platform very easy. It would be pretty hard to lose any portability without making it a concious decision.
    The only drawback I see here is that there probably isn't any OpenGL distribution for PS2... (I'd love for someone to correct me on that??) so developers will probably be stuck with SDL's rasterizer.
    This is still a major step forward though.
    • seems like every console will take up where indrema died. Linux for Dreamcast, PS2. Who's next? Does this prove that most gamers are linux enthusiasts to some degree, simply because of their interest in tinkering, inspired by gaming?
  • With the uppcomming XBOX release and the flame the PS2 has got for beeing hard to code for they where in need of a easy way to tap the flood of PC games and a good API. This is a great step for SDL & PS2!
  • on SDL coming to the Dreamcast? It has a pretty large homebrew community, and it's far cheaper to mess with than the Paystation 2 (at least for the near future). (Here's Marcus Comstedt's DC development site [mc.pp.se])

  • So Sony still has not released Linux for the US PS2... So unless you have a Japanese PS2, this won't do you much good yet.

  • Sign Sony's petition for USA PS2 linux release. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by nobodyman ( 90587 ) on Saturday August 04, 2001 @04:52PM (#2161139) Homepage
    SDL is nice, but I'd like to avoid getting a devkit via the grey market. SCEA has a poll [scea.com] going to gauge interest in the PS2. Let's get this thing released! --me

  • I code for the PS2 for a living. I hate to break it to people - if they think they'll be coding up demos that match performance of the games available - its not going to happen.

    The performance is going to be quite substandard. I can just see it now - everyone whining about how slow it is, meanwhile... its just unoptimal code.

  • Linux to become the source for a whole bunch of free SDL games (some of them with commercial-level quality)

    I guess commercial software is still generally higher quality than free software :(

  • What about Runix? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    What about the version of Linux that Runix [runix.ru] was working on? Will the SDL work with that?

  • Traditionally Sony has asked for NDA's for people who would try to develop on their platform. This is what stopped Crystal Space from porting to the original PS a year back or so (IIRC). Has Sony changed its mind and is now giving out it's SDK's royalty-free? They have to be, if all this is legal, because an NDA is anathema to a LGPL project like SDL.

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