Amiga.org
The "Not Quite Amiga but still computer related category" => Alternative Operating Systems => Topic started by: iamaboringperson on December 15, 2006, 11:04:49 AM
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Think about it. It's a console that 'expands' into a desktop computer.
It's a reletively expensive machine to play games on.
It's pretty much the most powerful around at the moment.
(You could almost say that the PS2 was like the Amiga, because of all of its custom hardware)
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No it is not.
The company behind it wowed to end homebrew or anything related to it.
Commodore on the otherhand was more tolerant to it, which was maybe a mistake. Homebrew led to piracy, led to software companies not making profit, software companies leaving the Amiga platform, and death of Amiga. Sony seems dead scared about all this and doesn't let anyone but registered developers to be able to develop something for the platform. And you know companies behind the game consoles doesn't make profit from unit sales but games sales after all, so they have to keep a firm stance against piracy.
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The alternative to banning homebrew would be to make a profit on the hardware and developer's kits.
Homebrew has not killed Microsoft Windows, afterall...
It comes down to a question of what someone is willing to pay. Would you download OpenOffice or buy Microsoft Office? There are plus' and minus' to both.
Commodore made a profit on hardware and peripherals. Published "some" software.
I believe the C64 was $1000 at launch. A few years later, my family picked it up for $400. That was 1984. Looking at those numbers, the PS3 is a steal, but not so "homebrew friendly".
Piracy can be stopped via custom media. Sony has the right idea in the patent where media is sold on a writeable that locks itself to that particular machine. Homebrew could still be allowed, but you wouldn't allow it to run off the BR-drive so nothing would come close to commercial quality 50GB (potential) titles.
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What made the Amiga relevant back in the day makes it irrelevant now. Custom hardware was a necessity back in the day. Today it's not. A 1985 strategy today just means vendor lockin to todays software developer.
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It's pretty much the most powerful around at the moment.
That statement is not universal.
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Amiga "supposedly" has gone the way of SEGA as software only. However they only half-assed it by requiring licensed hardware to run OS4.
If a univeral intermediate language for applications (similar to MS's .NET common language runtime) was developed for it, then you could port the OS to any platform and as long as applications are scalable(gui), everything would work on every platform... Ah to dream...
Heck, if this became an opensource project ported to AROS and Linux, and heck even Windows... Everyone wins...
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countzero wrote:
The company behind it wowed to end homebrew or anything related to it.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought Sony had approved Linux for use with the PS3... I can't see how that correlates at all with saying they're trying to end home coding....?
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Good thread,
I don't think that Sony are trying to make the PS3 like an Amiga at all, but there are definitely similiarites, which make it an attractive machine for Amiga (and ex-Amiga) users.
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Sony seems dead scared about all this and doesn't let anyone but registered developers to be able to develop something for the platform.
Every single PlayStation console and game has been cracked so far. But piracy is not the point.
Commodore's business was building and selling hardware. Sony doesn't work like this: they are game publishers.
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the last thing they want to be is a faild computer... but they may end up there!
I think they just want a mainstream console, if running linux brings more users and SALES to them, they will take that!
:-D
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@countzero
Lots of mis-information in your message. You can install Linux out of the box on the PS3. So, anyone willing to pay the entry price can develop homebrew for the console. There's some limitations in the hardware access right now. But I'm sure they'll be lessened in the coming months.
Sony is the ONLY console manufacturer that has supported homebrew on each of it's home consoles. PS = Net Yaroze, PS2 = PS2 Linux, PS3 = PS3 Linux. Microsoft has opened up XNA to the 360. Nintendo never has.
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@adolescent
you forgot about he PSP. Sony realy kinda made that hard to deal with homebrew on there. Do you remember how sony was busted this year for intallling trojan horses on music cd's!
Sony is very serious about controlling what runs on there property. More so than microsoft. Knowing what I do about how sony functions I would go with microsoft over sony as the lesser of two evils, and I HATE morcosoft! Still I lust for a ps3.... I'm so conflicted!
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@guru-666
I didn't forget the PSP, I said home consoles.
I believe the homebrew issue with the PSP is that enabling homebrew also enables piracy. On the PS, PS2, and PS3 they were seperate issues. (ie. a Net Yaroze didn't allow you to play CD-R copies, just as the PS2 and PS3 Linux don't allow you to.) Also remember, the 1.0 PSP didn't have ANY protection.
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Not at all. It is still closed down like other consoles are. It is no more of a computer than the ps2 was. It is not a computer for me unless it comes with keyboard + mouse and is open for bedroom programmers. Sony seems to have closed it down so that linux cannot take advantage out of the 3d accelerated gfx and so on..
(You could almost say that the PS2 was like the Amiga, because of all of its custom hardware)
Isnt that the case with most consoles?
It's pretty much the most powerful around at the moment.
The performance tests so far suggest that it is really slow compared even to the cheapest pcs of today. Though the code is not yet optimized, but i doubt it will make that much of a change.
Do not believe the hype! The ps2 was also claimed to be powerful enough to do realtime graphics of the same quality as that days 3d rendering programs. And yet it was less powerful than the modern pcs of that day?
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lou_dias wrote:
I believe the C64 was $1000 at launch. A few years later, my family picked it up for $400. That was 1984. Looking at those numbers, the PS3 is a steal, but not so "homebrew friendly".
$1000 was a bomb in '82, I quote the - ever reliable ;) - wikipedia:
Wikipedia wrote:
Introduced by Commodore Business Machines in August 1982 at a price of US$595,
Hell the A500 was only about £500 in '87, and that was a hell of a lot more computer for the money than a C64.
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spirantho wrote:
countzero wrote:
The company behind it wowed to end homebrew or anything related to it.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought Sony had approved Linux for use with the PS3... I can't see how that correlates at all with saying they're trying to end home coding....?
But they also added big limitations, like restricting the access towards the hardware. The ps2 could also run linux...
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Marco wrote:
lou_dias wrote:
I believe the C64 was $1000 at launch. A few years later, my family picked it up for $400. That was 1984. Looking at those numbers, the PS3 is a steal, but not so "homebrew friendly".
$1000 was a bomb in '82, I quote the - ever reliable ;) - wikipedia:
Wikipedia wrote:
Introduced by Commodore Business Machines in August 1982 at a price of US$595,
Hell the A500 was only about £500 in '87, and that was a hell of a lot more computer for the money than a C64.
How much was the tape or disk drive? Without storage, it's just a console. I know at one point, the 1541 disk drive cost as much as the C64. Both contained 6502 processors....
http://www.devili.iki.fi/Computers/Commodore/articles/Beyond_the_1541/
Found it! $600! A PS3 comes with a hard drive for storage already. A C64 with no means for storage is just a toy.
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Tomas wrote:
But they also added big limitations, like restricting the access towards the hardware.
More like completely preventing direct access to ALL of the hardware, and not even indirect access to some of the hardware. Linux is being run top of a virtual machine running on and hogging one of the co-processors, making the actual hardware irrelevant. You might as well be running the virtual machine on a much cheaper IBM clone and running Linux on top of that. But doing that would be stupid and pointless, not being able to get to the hardware and all; and so it is with the PS3 hardware, too.
Now if they released ROM Kernel Manuals and Hardware Manuals like was done for the A1000, and shove their virtual machine where the sun doesn't shine, that would be interesting.
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@hardlink
Why would a homebrew developer need direct access to the hardware? Even the official development kits use libraries to access system functions (speaking from PS2 experience here, but I'd assume they are doing the same for the PS3).
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hmm, its possible.. many people have compared Playstation 1 to AmigaCD32, there was even a rumor that it was based on 'AGA2' chipset
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adolescent wrote:
@hardlink
Why would a homebrew developer need direct access to the hardware? Even the official development kits use libraries to access system functions (speaking from PS2 experience here, but I'd assume they are doing the same for the PS3).
What is the point when the performance will suffer badly? Why not just get a cheap x86 instead?
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I believe the C64 was $1000 at launch. A few years later, my family picked it up for $400. That was 1984. Looking at those numbers, the PS3 is a steal, but not so "homebrew friendly".
$1000 was a bomb in '82, I quote the - ever reliable ;) - wikipedia:
Wikipedia wrote:
Introduced by Commodore Business Machines in August 1982 at a price of US$595,
[/quote]
I upgraded from my VIC-20 to the C64 soon after it became available and I'm sure I paid £200 for it. The cassette drive was another £50, but I already had one from the VIC-20 that I could use. Later the 5.25" floppy and the MPS-801 printers were going for £200 each, but Toys-R-Us had a sale one Xmas where they boxed them both together for £200! Bargain!
Still, my original A2000 cost me nearly £2000 with the 1081 monitor and extra floppy.
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adolescent wrote:
Why would a homebrew developer need direct access to the hardware?
* To make it do things the designers never thought of or the company never thought it could do? There was another machine like that once ....
* To allow development of a non game oriented abstraction layer to sit directly on top of the hardware, umm, AGA maybe.
* Pure evil geeky hacker antisocial do-anything-you-can-think-up fun!
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Tomas wrote:
What is the point when the performance will suffer badly? Why not just get a cheap x86 instead?
Because, then you're not developing homebrew on a PS3, you're developing it on a "cheap x86". I'm hoping that the GPU will be available in future versions. I feel there reason for not exposing it now is timing issues with the launch.
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What killed the Amiga wasn't piracy. It was the "brillant" minds behind the marketing and the decision of never release a low end Amiga with a HD and CDROM as standard, at a time when I was urgent and game companies were evolving from floppy disk to HD install games...
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First, the PS3 needs to try harder at being a PS3.
Consoles can never be computers. The business models are not compatible. Refer to Microsoft's licensing woes with nVidia over the original XBox hardware. With the lack of tools and documentation, the only things you'll be able to do with the hardware will be roughly equivalent to budget x86 hardware, anyway. That goes for all consoles.
There isn't much in the way of community involvement, either, which is what really defined the Amiga. Public Domain (the only truly free kind of software) was the best thing about the Amiga long before Shareware and Linux became popular in the PC world, and the people who wrote the software usually had some decent design experience. Everything these days, even the GPL, has strings attached, and it's all just about code, rather than what you can do with it.