Linux on Playstation 3 looks good...

[jj]

Excuse me if im being mental, but how on earth does stopping direct access to the GPU for hardware 3d, stop people pirating games?

By this do they mean, they dont want people running pirated games on emulators?

im very confused by this....

[itix]

Excuse me if im being mental, but how on earth does stopping direct access to the GPU for hardware 3d, stop people pirating games?

They dont want quality games appear without Sony license.

By this do they mean, they dont want people running pirated games on emulators?

Do you think Sony really cares about piracy? You can not boot from CD/DVD on unmodded PS2 unless you have applied copy protection to your disk. Of course there is only one company who can apply this copy protection and they ask money for this + royalties.

[_yak_]

@ Piru

Too bad Sony doesn't allow direct acccess to the hardware at all.

That's a bad news. So they have provided themselves a layer to control what's available for third-party OSes. Thanks for the link by the way.

[dillinger]

i think you'll find Sony do care a lot about piracy but only because it hurts their pockets just as much as 3rd party developers. they care enough to make psp homebrew damn near impossible, f.e. changing firmware every couple of months. don't forget all ps3 games will be licenced and Sony get a proportion of every unit sale. considering Sony will be making a loss on the actual ps3 h/w sales for quite a while, game sales are the only ps3 related profit Sony will see.

and, btw, all this media-hype about ps3 "homebrew" is just smart marketing by Sony. really, who wants to code on a game console via a build of Linux which can't see beyond that crippled Sony hyper-visor layer. zzzzzz. I would rather code my linux pc-box tbh. cant see why people are getting so excited about it really.

"oh, but it _could_ run MorphOS/AOS4!!" - yeh, and so could my x86 ibm-clone with FULL unrestricted h/w access, _if_ they were ported to it. big deal.

[hardlink]

>> crippled Sony hyper-visor layer

I think bypassing the hypervisor is only way this box would ever be interesting for alternate OS hacking. Sony is using the hypervisor as a 'HAL' so that they can modify the hardware builds in the future and older games will still run.

If OS4/AROS/etc. could run on the metal, they would scream, and the co-processors would be a blast to play with for audio/video/image processing, and 256 or 512 Mb RAM would be plenty!

If the *visor could be disabled by hardware modification, the PS3 wouldn't play games anymore, but I for one wouldn't care - I would live to have a $600 3.2GHz Amiga! Hey, I still have the receipt for my $1000 '040 Warp Engine, and it was just an accelerator.

[AJCopland]

hardlink wrote:
>> crippled Sony hyper-visor layer

I think bypassing the hypervisor is only way this box would ever be interesting for alternate OS hacking. Sony is using the hypervisor as a 'HAL' so that they can modify the hardware builds in the future and older games will still run.

Having looked into a little bit more now i'm thinking we're actually getting a little ahead of ourselves. Firstly the FC5 version that everyone seems to be seeing running on the PS3 is exactly that, a plain PPC FC5 build that's been patched with the CELL SDk tools.

Secondly, its only the 3rd party "Other OS"s that are unable to access the RSX directly and that dont have driver support, but even on the release above says that situation is only "currently" so could easily change in the future. It dont think it'd ever be an open source driver, but i'd expect a closed binary driver like the Linux nVidia drivers.

I think people should be rightly excited about getting hold of it as several of the SPUs appear to be available as well as the PPC core and that's with a lightly modified linux core.

just my opinion, i personally think that they've really opened it pu like this because their own internally developed tools and libraries are such a massive pain in the arse :-D

Andy

[Tomas]

They dont want quality games appear without Sony license.

I agree.. i think the piracy issue is just an excuse. I also guess they dont want people to emulate older sony consoles, since they want to instead sell the games again.

[Crom00]

[/quote]
I agree.. i think the piracy issue is just an excuse. I also guess they dont want people to emulate older sony consoles, since they want to instead sell the games again.[/quote]

Some greaet points made.

Won't PPC Linux allow us to emaulte the older systems (Amiga, Sega Genesis, Mame?)

 I have been able to do a great deal of things with an xbox. Run Linux, run stable Amiga Emulation, Emulate every game system to date, run an XBOX media center, and dvd player that is quite good. All homebrew on an XBOX.

Surely a PS3 using readily availabe Linux alternatives such as Myth TV, Mame, UAE and other PPC linux software can provide some great value. The odds of ayone producing a 3.2 G5 Amiga board with 256 megs are slim to none so for all but the most die hard developer.

A couple of years ago I ran Amithilon on a $600 pc with 512 megs... ran quite well.

I would not run Photoshop on it... I would browse the web, play all my amiga games, mods, email...all under one system connected to a Walmart 37" lcd...

For serious development a MacMall PC or Mac provides better dev tools and value.


It's a good time to be a gamer especially if you're an Amigan.
 

[Tomas]

Won't PPC Linux allow us to emaulte the older systems (Amiga, Sega Genesis, Mame?)

Yes, that should work fine i think. I think there is already videos on youtube of ps3 running linux+snes emulator.
My guess is that it will be good for emulating anything upto the playstation.

[EvilGuy]

Floid wrote:

Because it's being output at TV resolution for a capture card.  (Now, the question would be, this being Sony, are you limited to displays that can authenticate themselves to the HDMI crapfest even when running Linux?

PS3 Linux Video

ps3videomode: switch video mode dynamically

This command shows current video settings such as resolution, frame rate, color space, and so on, and switches them dynamically.

usage:

    ps3videomode [options]

options:

    --help,  -h         print this message
    --video, -v    set video mode ID
    --full,  -f         use full screen mode
    --dither,-d         use dither ON mode

    Video mode ID:
      0:automode
      YUV 60Hz  1:480i  2:480p  3:720p  4:1080i  5:1080p
      YUV 50Hz  6:576i  7:576p  8:720p  9:1080i 10:1080p
      RGB 60Hz 33:480i 34:480p 35:720p 36:1080i 37:1080p
      RGB 50Hz 38:576i 39:576p 40:720p 41:1080i 42:1080p
      VESA     11:WXGA 12:SXGA 13:WUXGA

      full screen mode:

[koaftder]

Whoo Hoo, thats a real super computer thar. Can't wait to hack the gibson with it's beefy 256mb of ram.

[alenppc]

Is it possibile to connect the PS3 to a common VGA monitor? I mean one with no DVI inputs. I haven't got an HDTV but I would like to be able to hook it up to a normal monitor. It seems that such a cable is not on sale, at least not yet, but would it be possible to somehow make one, if we had the pinouts etc, like in the good old days with the Amiga RGB cables? :-)

[adolescent]

Tomas wrote:
I agree.. i think the piracy issue is just an excuse. I also guess they dont want people to emulate older sony consoles, since they want to instead sell the games again.

:crazy:  Why would you have to emulate, or re-buy old games?  The PS3 plays most PS1/PS2 games already.

[Tomas]

Why would you have to emulate, or re-buy old games? The PS3 plays most PS1/PS2 games already.

I have heard rumours about them offering downloads of psx similar to how Wii is doing it with n64 games.. With emulator you can play pirated games instead of buying a new..

[adolescent]

Tomas wrote:

Why would you have to emulate, or re-buy old games? The PS3 plays most PS1/PS2 games already.

I have heard rumours about them offering downloads of psx similar to how Wii is doing it with n64 games.. With emulator you can play pirated games instead of buying a new..

There is a rumored download of PS games for PSP, but I haven't heard anything about the PS3.

But, if someone is stupid enough to download a game they already have then that is their problem.  Regarding piracy, if they didn't pay in the first place they wouldn't be re-buying anything.

[Jupp3]

they care enough to make psp homebrew damn near impossible, f.e. changing firmware every couple of months.

And how exactly does "changing firmware every couple of months" make "homebrew damn near impossible", if I may ask? Those updates aren't installed automatically or anything.

Only problem there used to be was that every new unit had "newest at the time of manufacture" firmware pre-installed (for a while the "homebrew maximum" was 2.0, being the highest version capable of running rather limited homebrew and -more importantly- being downgradeable to v1.5 which is kind of "unofficial standard homebrew version")

Nowadays you can downgrade from much newer versions than 2.0.

What you might say next is "new games require new firmware", which is (kind of) true.

"In the old days" people were hacking iso images of games, replacing files from older 1.5-compatible games. That way you could get an iso image of a game running on 1.5 from memory stick. Nowadays there's this wonderful "anti-piracy tool" called "Dev-hook" that can run newer (upto 2.71, which indeed is "quite new". Additionally many "if version
I recently bought Guilty Gear XX & Judgement from the US (games aren't region coded) and it "requires" 2.71, yet runs just fine on dev-hook. Of course I wouldn't have bought it if it would not work :-)

Of course Sony is trying to prevent new games running on not-really-"upgraded" PSP's (and homebrew-users from buying the said games) but they have been failing in doing that for a long time. Already 1.5 was supposed to be "homebrew-proof", but it most definitely isn't.

It's not that they're not trying to prevent homebrew being ran on PSP, it's that they're totally failing in trying to do that.