7 ms·
The PS2’s Backwards Compatibility from the Engineer Who Built It
- avipars 4y agoPlaystation 2 and not the PS/2 port
- dfxm12 4y agoWhat is the PS/2 port backwards compatible with?
- dfox 4y agoIt is the same weird backwards I2C-ish thing as an AT keyboard, only on smaller connector ;)
- zwieback 4y agoYeah, I clicked on it expecting something about the PS/2, not the PS2. Showing my age, I remember when the PS/2 was new.
- yamtaddle 4y agoI always kinda liked having AT for the keyboard. No confusing it with the mouse port. Nice and clunky and Serious feeling.
- zwieback 4y agoThose DIN connectors were used in the "Ueberspielkabel" of my childhood. Germany decided to use 5 pin DIN as stereo cables, two in two out with one ground.
- tpmx 4y agoAnd not the IBM PS/2. Speaking of: I just discovered that newly manufactured keyboards with PS/2 keyboard interfaces are now an oddity. I should have bought some "gaming keyboards" with PS/2 interfaces five years ago.
- dfox 4y agoNewly manufactured true AT and PS/2 keyboards were rare even 20 years ago. The cheap keyboards from even that time implement only the subset of behavior of true AT keyboard required for PC with OS that leaves the hardware in PC-like state. These keyboards tend to confuse the hell out from various 90's RISC workstations (SGI, DEC…) that also use PS/2 interface.
- rideontime 4y agoProps to everyone out there digging up, preserving and translating old interviews, articles, etc. Some others doing this work: Did You Know Gaming?: https://www.youtube.com/@DYKGaming/videos https://www.youtube.com/@DYKGaming/videos Shmuplations: https://shmuplations.com/ https://shmuplations.com/
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- corysama 4y agohttps://www.reddit.com/r/TheMakingOfGames/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMakingOfGames/ is about getting material like that in front of viewers who appreciate it. It's rare material. So, contributions are always welcome.
- lynguist 4y agoThank you for sharing Shmuplations. It’s an absolute treasure trove of (to me) unknown interviews with Japanese game designers from the past 40 years. I’m delighted.
- zoklet-enjoyer 4y agoFF7 spoiler alert
- highwaylights 4y agoBruce Willis was a ghost THE ENTIRE TIME In both cases, I think enough time has passed :-)
- autoexec 4y agoI agree, FF7 was a long long time ago, but the warnings are still nice and appreciated. New people are born, grow up, and get introduced to old things after all. Plus, some gamers are always playing a decade or two behind since prices become dirt cheap, games get re-released in more complete forms without a need for buying a bunch of DLC to access the parts they paywalled off, and most of the bugs and crashes will be patched out.
- zoklet-enjoyer 4y agoI started playing FF7 recently. I never had a PlayStation growing up and a remake came out a few years ago.
- highwaylights 4y agoThe remake by the way is brilliant in it's own right. The team made comments around making something sufficiently different that it wouldn't be seen as trying to replace the original, but that could sit alongside it as a retelling of the story. I think they absolutely nailed it in this regard and if anything, finishing FF7R has me wanting to play through the original all over again. Even at that, I wouldn't expect the spoiler we're talking about from the article to happen the same way in Rebirth, or possibly even at all. It's too good of an opportunity to surprise people that I think they take a dramatically different direction (my guess would be on the same story element happening featuring another major character, but this seems like lazy writing). Very excited for the next entry regardless.
- acchow 4y ago"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 and flow of those commands. So long as an emulator is fully tested, it should all work out in the end, even if that’s obviously the really tough part in practice." Sadly, that is the most technical part of the essay. The rest of it is just anecdotes. They talk briefly about a Crash Bandicoot freezing issue just before launch, which they got around by trying to play the game repeatedly: "All I could figure out was that as long as Crash kept moving, the game remained stable for whatever reason."
- outworlder 4y agoI'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.
- Wolfbeta 4y agoThis might be of interest. https://all-things-andy-gavin.com/video-games/making-crash/ https://all-things-andy-gavin.com/video-games/making-crash/
- bitwize 4y agoCrash 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.
- dangero 4y agocurious 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
- _trackno5 4y agoFascinating 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
- jdwithit 4y agoIt'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??
- beaned 4y agoI don't have any evidence for this but I feel like things used to work more this way in the future. Now we send everything to experts, people with licenses and degrees and years of experience. And I mean it works, but we pay in terms of lost creativity, and create fewer opportunities for younger and lesser experienced people to become experienced themselves.
- beaned 4y ago*in the past
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- astrange 4y agoLow-level programming isn't that hard if you've got all the docs. Hard part of emulator development is when you have to figure out everything yourself. Also, as part of backward compatibility the PS2 just has a miniature PS1 in it, so the hardware is fundamentally able to do the old things.
- RajT88 4y agoIn 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).
- rospaya 4y agoLoved the PS2 but it's hard to argue when the original Xbox is basically a PC.
- qqtt 4y agoXbox being basically a PC is interesting considering 20+ years later there is still no great emulator for it. xemu plays about 3% of games without minor issues.
- jamesfinlayson 4y agoWhat about cxbx? I remember that being the one like 15 years ago.
- monocasa 4y agoI don't think that ever got to the point of playing a single commercial game fully. Xemu has had a lot of work put into it recently though, and is a lot further along.
- kitsunesoba 4y agoI would agree, which is why a PS2 is on my list of consoles to acquire at some point, but it does have one significant nit: there is easily available no digital video output mods for them, which makes getting a decent picture out of them a challenge unless you already have a suitable CRT to pair with it.
- bitwize 4y ago> 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.
- rbanffy 4y ago> ou have to do these translations in a bug-for-bug compatible way, with strict timing constraints -- for the system's many components Not only that, but you need to catch the way the hardware is accessed on the emulated console by generating a fault or trap, then rearrange everything for the actual hardware, and then pass control back to the emulated code on a processor that had, IIRC, no provision for hardware assisted virtualization.
- matheusmoreira 4y agoI used to really enjoy byuu's detailed articles on the matter. They effectively demonstrated the effort necessary to accurately reproduce the behavior of these machines. > the raster nature of CRT displays, which allowed for changing the display in significant ways between frames or scanlines In case anyone would like to know more, this is a really good explanation of these concepts: https://youtu.be/Q8ph2OVqZeM https://youtu.be/Q8ph2OVqZeM > There's a reason why emulation is these days usually only undertaken by some of the strangest most terminally online people They could be perfectly normal people for all we know... A few days ago I saw a comment here from someone who worked with an emulator developer. Only revealed that fact to him after 4 years working together.
- 4y ago