Sony PlayStation 2 Development Kit (2020)

A second-hand PS1 demo disk that I acquired had an advert for Net Yaroze, along with a little game made using the kit; as someone who had just started programming at this point, it was an exciting concept. I was rather disappointed to discover that they were no longer even sold by that time! Nowadays, I have rather mixed feelings about dev-kits: on one hand, having dedicated debugging hardware is fun, but since truly cross-platform game engines became a reality in the 2010s, these machines have little purpose except to facilitate gatekeeping on the part of console manufacturers. Writing a little OpenGL, Vulkan or now WebGL and compiling with open source compilers for a variety of platforms seems infinitely more practical than signing secret contracts with officious console publishers.

I remember those EB machines. I only ever saw a single one, in Japan, and never used it. We actually started working on the PS 2 before there was any hardware at all (even the Toshiba CPU had not been finished) and wrote the simulator so development could start before the hardware was available.<p>Oddly enough the first time I ever clapped eyes on a production PS 2 was at Fry’s, and it was a slimline (2nd gen) so that would have been five or six years after launch.<p>We were also working on the Dreamcast at the same time, but less deeply. Obviously there was no direct overlap. Luckily I never ended up visiting both companies the same day.

Pretty useless video. The dev kits had both a Linux PC and a PS2 target board in the same chassis. These guys never got past the Linux login prompt. Now the PS3 dev kits were more interesting. I used a second gen one, a stainless steel box about the size of 4-6 large pizza boxes stacked up. The first gen was twice that height.

I worked with one of these. I did an internship at SCEE in 2003 to port the Eyetoy camera driver to Linux to work with ps2linux. Sadly, it was nerfed by legal right after we released it as GPL. I fixed it up to keep the proprietary stuff in a separate kernel module, but alas I was gone at that point and it never got past legal afaik.

Does anyone know how many European PS2s actually shipped with Yabasic? AFAIK the tax ploy failed so they stopped at some point, and my slim PS2 doesn’t list any discs on the box content list. Although it was second hand so it could have gone missing if it was unlisted for some reason.<p>Edit: I was slight hasty, it does have some unlisted discs in the box, but neither “bonus demo 8 (you)” (©2004) or the “Network Access Disc” seem to have Yabasic on them.

&gt; The upgraded model DTL-15000 with the Performance Analyzer is especially rare and was a more expensive unit so developers tended to only have a couple and used them for debugging performance issues with their games.<p>I had a chance to work with one of these. It was amazing to get a <i>non-intrusive</i> profile that provided cycle-level data of all the chips in the Emotion Engine, as well as memory access and DMA state. The real take-away was how much more important memory access was to compute. Memory locality, cache preloading, and predictable control flow had a huge bearing on performance, and that&#x27;s true more broadly for high-throughput DSP-style workloads including that in high-performance gaming.

Can anyone explain why dev kits are always so much larger than the release product? I get that some shrinking may occur after the dev kit is released (board revisions) and that (possibly) the kits need to support more things inside, but they always seem comically large.<p>For another example, the Nintendo DS (Nitro) dev kit, for example, is also a relatively massive box, but with a full on DS still hanging off the side of it.

Ah yes, the TOOL. I did not have to deal with that thing directly, but the rest of the team hated them.

I made it almost 1:30 into the video. These guys are very annoying