Is the PS3 trying to be a new Amiga?

[Marco]

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.

[Tomas]

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...

[Louis Dias]

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.

[hardlink]

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.

[adolescent]

@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).

[orange]

hmm, its possible.. many people have compared Playstation 1 to AmigaCD32, there was even a rumor that it was based on 'AGA2' chipset

[Tomas]

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?

[Darrin]

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.

[hardlink]

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!

[adolescent]

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.

[ptek]

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...

[Waccoon]

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.