The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers • Hacker News Board

Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers

#151

Post by HeadsUpHigh » Sun, Dec 08, 2019, 12:18 PM UTC

grogenaut wrote: post #18

rvz wrote: post #8

This was the moment that Sony could have made something useful out of themselves here for allowing Linux to be used on a popular games console at the time, as in improving the accessibility of installing Linux on a computing machine. (Or even basing GameOS on Linux). Instead they cowardly remove it due to a 'hack' by Geohot and locked it down for 'security purposes' and potential researchers, scientists and those wit…

(I'm sure I'll lose karma for explaining Sonys side, since some people just want to be mad) Linux support was not removed due to Geohot. It was a driver and business priority issue. Geohot just sealed the deal. Having worked there during the kerfuffle, I can confirm their reason was valid for not supporting Linux going forward. It was a non trivial effort and they wanted those engineers to make it support the new har…

The notion that it is more reasonable to remove a feature that you advertised for instead of losing drm just blows my mind.

Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers

#152

Post by eitland » Sun, Dec 08, 2019, 1:10 PM UTC

hyperman1 wrote: post #75

grogenaut wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I'm sure I'll lose karma for explaining Sonys side, since some people just want to be mad) Linux support was not removed due to Geohot. It was a driver and business priority issue. Geohot just sealed the deal. Having worked there during the kerfuffle, I can confirm their reason was valid for not supporting Linux going forward. It was a non trivial effort and they wanted those engineers to make it support the new har…

I am taken aback a bit by this characterisation: And then a bunch of the community responded as petulant children and Sony supported linux in public, people bought their hardware for it, and then, without warning, sony janked the rug from under them. Of course people tried to take back their hardware, for which they paid. The blame here is 100% on Sony. Sony has a massive internal conflict of interest by being both a…

> Sony supported linux in public, people bought their hardware for it, and then, without warning, sony janked the rug from under them. Of course people tried to take back their hardware, for which they paid. The blame here is 100% on Sony.

I hadn't bought any Sony hardware at that moment so IIRC I just decided right there and then that there was no reason to send money Sonys way or feel sorry for them.

First Sony console I bought was a used PS3 sometime after PS4 was released. And I was enthusiastic about PS when they first released the console with Linux support.

I guess I'm not the only one.

Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers

#153

Post by rat9988 » Sun, Dec 08, 2019, 1:11 PM UTC

grogenaut wrote: post #138

hyperman1 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am taken aback a bit by this characterisation: And then a bunch of the community responded as petulant children and Sony supported linux in public, people bought their hardware for it, and then, without warning, sony janked the rug from under them. Of course people tried to take back their hardware, for which they paid. The blame here is 100% on Sony. Sony has a massive internal conflict of interest by being both a…

When you have a legitimate beef or problem with someone, you don't take illegitimate and illegal actions against them. I'm all for reverse engineering. That's fine. Extorting a company by threatening them with release of an exploit if you don't get your way is not legitimate, that's blackmail or extortion. All of the hackers attacking Sony for months, disabling PSN, is not legitimate, and should never have been suppo…

>you don't take illegitimate and illegal actions against them.

What sony did is illegal.

Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers

#154

Post by eru » Sun, Dec 08, 2019, 2:27 PM UTC

voldacar wrote: post #96

ljm wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a shame in a way. I remember the reports about the Cell architecture for the PS3. By all accounts it wasn't easy to program for, but that was a hell of an innovation only to fall back to the standard PC arch. Impressive as hell but it took game devs a long time to make the most of it; and then they did in spades. You only have to track the trajectory of Uncharted in the space of a console generation to see what…

The homogenization of compute hardware is indeed very depressing

The rise of ARM via mobile devices is a nice antidote.

The different ARMs don't even share a common instruction sets, I think.

Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers

#155

Post by eru » Sun, Dec 08, 2019, 2:30 PM UTC

rasz wrote: post #128

DCKing wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree any of them were underpowered. The PS1 and PS3 arguably produced the nicest graphics of their generations - the PS1 because its competition was compromised in their own way, and the PS3 due to sheer brute force. The PS2 for sure was less powerful than the more conventional architectures of the GameCube and Xbox, but it was released 18 months before either of them in a time when Moore's law was still extrem…

Did you just call wobbly fixed point vertex no subpixel precision no transparency no perspective correction mess full of gaps on PS1 a nicest graphics of their generations?

Well, if you like textures, then yes.

The most serious competition at the time was the Nintendo 64, and it lacked storage.

Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers

#156

Post by giobox » Sun, Dec 08, 2019, 4:04 PM UTC

dehrmann wrote: post #106

DCKing wrote: post #49

The Playstation 1, 2 and 3 are each in their own way Sony's take on an alternate history of computer graphics. It was Sony's intent with all three consoles to put the "special effects" (that in 2019 are performed using shaders) in the CPU , and not the GPU. As a result, the PS1, but especially the PS2 and PS3 were engineered to have amazing vector capabilities in the CPU. The PS2's Emotion Engine had extremely high p…

> As a result, the PS4 and Xbox One have PC hardware. Does this mean the Xbox was pretty revolutionary for showing that you really can make a console with commodity hardware?

It was as much a pragmatic choice as an inspired one; commodity pc hardware was obviously getting close to cheap enough. Others have suggested Microsoft lost money with this move, even if so it was probably still a pragmatic choice. Microsoft were entering a market that has been notoriously unfriendly to new entrants and spending more on hardware to ensure a successful launch of such an ambitious brand could be argued to make sense, with consoles able to recoup hardware loses in software revenues.

It was likely more about making it easy to port existing windows directx based games quickly and cheaply. Similarly, it granted a development stack that a great many developers would already be somewhat familiar with. All good things for a new entrant to a tough marketplace.

Presumably it also allowed them to get to market faster? Much less custom silicon?

Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers

#157

Post by opan » Sun, Dec 08, 2019, 6:10 PM UTC

sandov wrote: post #78

zanny wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To play devils advocate, you can sell games without building perfectly viable general purpose compute hardware and then locking it down with DRM to make it useless as such. Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo are not developing game consoles out of anything but an incredibly evil greed - they are wasting insurmountable amounts of raw materials making computers that cannot be used as computers. The consoles that existed in…

I would have loved SteamOS to be a general purpose Linux OS with Steam preinstalled instead of the... thing it actually was.

I haven't installed it myself, but isn't it just a slightly tweaked Debian? I thought you could leave the Big Picture Mode-style UI and get to a desktop where you could install additional software.

Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers

#158

Post by philistine » Sun, Dec 08, 2019, 6:42 PM UTC

zanny wrote: post #43

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To play the devil's advocate, Sony is in the business of selling games, their cosnoles were just a means to that and since they were selling the hardware at a loss, selling more of it to people who will never buy games was bad for their business model.

To play devils advocate, you can sell games without building perfectly viable general purpose compute hardware and then locking it down with DRM to make it useless as such. Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo are not developing game consoles out of anything but an incredibly evil greed - they are wasting insurmountable amounts of raw materials making computers that cannot be used as computers. The consoles that existed in…

Nintendo is exactly that, a toy maker. That their toys run on commoditized hardware is a side-effect, not a voluntary choice. They will never ship a general purpose computing device.

Are you saying we should force them with laws?

Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers

#159

Post by Dylan16807 » Sun, Dec 08, 2019, 6:45 PM UTC

mewse wrote: post #141

Dylan16807 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And even if everyone were a super smart 10x-developer like you surely are That's not called for. They never implied they were even above average. Just that a bunch of game devs were somewhat lazy.

> Just that a bunch of game devs were somewhat lazy. That's not called for. You don't know those developers, you don't know what work was on their plate or what constraints they were toiling under.

It is completely fine for you to say that opinion is unjustified.

But they still weren't calling themselves some kind of better-than-everyone dev.

Though if you're using "developers" to mean that entire section of the company, including management, then what was on their plate and the constraints are almost all self-inflicted.

Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers

#160

Post by lostgame » Sun, Dec 08, 2019, 6:49 PM UTC

zozbot234 wrote: post #65

vvanders wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If consoles were sold at a profit what you say may make sense. However building an open platform means you need to devote resources to it both from a capital perspective and opportunity cost. Driving demand towards the hardware, instead of software and licensing costs on a negative margin product is a pretty sure way to run a company out of business.

Why can't console hardware be sold at a profit? Make up for the increased sale price by bundling a rebate on the first X officially-published games the customer buys. Then everything after that is pure profit for the console vendor.

This used to be called ‘pack-ins’, no? Like when Sonic was included with a Genesis?