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The PS2’s Backwards Compatibility from the Engineer Who Built It

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Re: The PS2’s Backwards Compatibility from the Engineer Who Built It

#11

Post by outworlder »

acchow wrote: post #8

"In my mind, I view emulators as a sort of converter in and of themselves, ones that primarily take orders designed for old processors and translate them into ones that the new target processor can understand and execute. In that sense, even if sound and graphics hardware have their fair share of differences, in the end, they’re both still fundamentally sending commands. All an emulator is doing is changing the shape…

I'm with you in wanting the nitty gritty details, but the personal anecdote is cool.

I still want to know what was wrong with Crash Bandicoot.

Re: The PS2’s Backwards Compatibility from the Engineer Who Built It

#12

Post by jdwithit »

_trackno5 wrote: post #10

Fascinating read, even if not very technical. That type of deep work must be a joy to do. Wonder if there are still places where one might get a chance to work like that, specifically on “low level” stuff

It's wild how often these "this was my first development job of any kind" stories crop up in the gaming industry. This seems like a deeply technical project requiring expertise in some very niche areas. Yet Sony trusted this fresh grad with zero experience to knock out one of their marquee features essentially on his own... and it worked??

Re: The PS2’s Backwards Compatibility from the Engineer Who Built It

#13

Post by Wolfbeta »

outworlder wrote: post #11
acchow wrote: post #8

"In my mind, I view emulators as a sort of converter in and of themselves, ones that primarily take orders designed for old processors and translate them into ones that the new target processor can understand and execute. In that sense, even if sound and graphics hardware have their fair share of differences, in the end, they’re both still fundamentally sending commands. All an emulator is doing is changing the shape…

I'm with you in wanting the nitty gritty details, but the personal anecdote is cool. I still want to know what was wrong with Crash Bandicoot.

This might be of interest.

https://all-things-andy-gavin.com/video-games/making-crash/

Re: The PS2’s Backwards Compatibility from the Engineer Who Built It

#14

Post by RajT88 »

In my humble opinion, the PS2 is the best retro console for tinkering.

So many of them were sold, they can be had cheaply, lots of aftermarket stuff for them (HDD/Network adapter), Crazy huge library of weird and interesting titles, vibrantly active homebrew community. And of course, the built-in backwards compatibility. Several interesting hardware revisions to play with as well (although the "fat" ones are the most moddable).

Re: The PS2’s Backwards Compatibility from the Engineer Who Built It

#15

Post by bitwize »

> All an emulator is doing is changing the shape and flow of those commands.

Maybe if you're SIMH and you're emulating an old CPU that was connected asynchronously to like RS232 peripherals. But I think this statement understates the complexity of emulating something like a console.

Emulating a console or home computer, or even something like an old console's GPU, is HARD because you have to do these translations in a bug-for-bug compatible way, with strict timing constraints -- for the system's many components -- and you have to take into account the raster nature of CRT displays, which allowed for changing the display in significant ways between frames or scanlines.

There's a reason why emulation is these days usually only undertaken by some of the strangest most terminally online people, and it can take even them decades to get the details right. Of course, this engineer worked at Sony and probably had the benefit of being able to talk to the developers of the graphics chip he was emulating, but that's still a daunting task.

Re: The PS2’s Backwards Compatibility from the Engineer Who Built It

#16

Post by bitwize »

outworlder wrote: post #11
acchow wrote: post #8

"In my mind, I view emulators as a sort of converter in and of themselves, ones that primarily take orders designed for old processors and translate them into ones that the new target processor can understand and execute. In that sense, even if sound and graphics hardware have their fair share of differences, in the end, they’re both still fundamentally sending commands. All an emulator is doing is changing the shape…

I'm with you in wanting the nitty gritty details, but the personal anecdote is cool. I still want to know what was wrong with Crash Bandicoot.

Crash Bandicoot was developed at Naughty Dog back when Naughty Dog was a a hardcore software development house. They routinely did clever, not-quite-kosher bullshit like unload parts of Sony's graphics library to free more RAM. If the backwards-compatibility people took an HLE approach and assumed the graphics library was a constant in memory, I can see the emulation going totally sideways. It could probably go sideways for a bunch of other reasons too.

Re: The PS2’s Backwards Compatibility from the Engineer Who Built It

#18

Post by dangero »

bitwize wrote: post #16
outworlder wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm with you in wanting the nitty gritty details, but the personal anecdote is cool. I still want to know what was wrong with Crash Bandicoot.

Crash Bandicoot was developed at Naughty Dog back when Naughty Dog was a a hardcore software development house. They routinely did clever, not-quite-kosher bullshit like unload parts of Sony's graphics library to free more RAM. If the backwards-compatibility people took an HLE approach and assumed the graphics library was a constant in memory, I can see the emulation going totally sideways. It could probably go sidew…

curious why you don't think Naughty Dog is a hardcore software development house now

they have their own state of the art game engine with cutting edge features

Re: The PS2’s Backwards Compatibility from the Engineer Who Built It

#20

Post by donky_oaty »

acchow wrote: post #8

"In my mind, I view emulators as a sort of converter in and of themselves, ones that primarily take orders designed for old processors and translate them into ones that the new target processor can understand and execute. In that sense, even if sound and graphics hardware have their fair share of differences, in the end, they’re both still fundamentally sending commands. All an emulator is doing is changing the shape…

They should have tried playing Stable Bandicoot instead.
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