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The story I heard was of a very, very heavily macro-based excel sheet that would automatically highlight possible problems including pipeline stalls in one of t
by p_l 6y ago
The story I heard was of a very, very heavily macro-based excel sheet that would automatically highlight possible problems including pipeline stalls in one of the VLIW units.
Been looking for confirmation or just a screenshot of that monster since :D
- phire 6y agoI found a comment from me speculating on how such a spreadsheet be set-up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12294472 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12294472 I can't find any evidence of actual spreadsheets. They probably would have been setup by each programmer for their liking and maybe shared between programmers on the private sony sdk message board. Or maybe I have an overactive imagination. But I have heard is that the leaked Playstation 2 SDK from 2005 does contain a windows program called "VUEditor.exe". It's a custom IDE for writing VU assembly and it kind of acts more like a spreadsheet than a text editor, allowing the programmer to shift highlighted columns of instructions up and down. It does show stalls and highlight issues. I couldn't find any screenshots, but one could find the sdk and try it out if they wanted.
- p_l 6y agoInterestingly enough, it could be that said VUEditor embeds Excel. These days it seems forgotten trick, but all of MS Office on Windows provides components that allow you to embed features inside your own programs