4 ms·
The PlayStation 2 is actually one of the original reasons I got interested in the computer engineering space. The EE chip is a sort of who's-who of optimization
by don-code 6y ago
The PlayStation 2 is actually one of the original reasons I got interested in the computer engineering space. The EE chip is a sort of who's-who of optimization techniques - hardware decoding, vector processing, VLIW architecture (for the VUs), memory bandwidth tailored to keeping the huge amount of functional units busy with a constant stream of math to do.
At some point I got a port of Debian (BlackRhino GNU/Linux) running on my PS2 - slowly, off a USB 1.1 thumbdrive, as I lacked the hard drive / network card adapter. Never got too far with it owing mostly to lack of the network, but in spite of being a 1999 console, it ran X11 at 1080i just fine.
- atgreen 6y agoNice. I have a Red Hat Linux port for PS2, but haven't booted it in almost 20 years thanks to missing a sync-on-green monitor.
- pheon 6y agoIndeed awsome hardware to code for. It was amusing when the Sony guys joked people are writing their VU assembler in Excel. To make it easier to mentally keep track of the instructions in each pipe.
- fisherjeff 6y agoThis is incredibly validating. I once wrote an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of register allocation in assembly and have felt ashamed ever since
- qbasic_forever 6y agoI got the official PS2 Linux kit on launch and even with the hard drive and all the accessories, it was still slow as molasses. There just wasn't nearly enough RAM to make a usable desktop environment.
- uyjulian 6y agoThere is a work-in-progress port of the newer Linux 5.x kernel to the PS2: https://github.com/frno7/linux https://github.com/frno7/linux