4 ms·

This might be the most complex hardware architecture of a home console ever.

by cubefox 3y ago

pjmlp 3y ago
Dreamcast and PS 3 are also quite close in complexity.
- msk-lywenn 3y ago
  I think you mean PS2 and PS3. Dreamcast was rather easy. One might even say, a dream to program for.
  - masklinn 3y ago
    PS2 was the tail end of the bespoke hardware, and Sony gave their chips very marketing names, but I don’t remember the hardware being especially strange. The SDK being ass would be a different issue.
    - msk-lywenn 3y ago
      Well the two vector coprocessors (vu0, vu1) each talking to a different processor (cpu or "gpu") was quite weird, imho.
    - mairusu 3y ago
      The PS2 was infamous to develop for. Most of the bottleneck came from the vector units. Most middleware eventually made working around the strange hardware much easier. When asked if they were weary about developing on PS2, due to its reputation of it being tough to code for, Sega devs famously laughed and replied that they already mastered the Saturn - how much harder could it get?
  - SunlitCat 3y ago
    I wonder how many games utilized Windows CE (which was a thing for it) on the Dreamcast.
    - Grazester 3y ago
      Not a whole lot. If you wanted to extract the full power of the system then you needed the native SDK. Sega Rally 2 was ported using CE and it has frame rate issues it really shouldn't have an this is attributed to CE
      - ac2u 3y ago
        I guess they had a porting job to do since the arcade hardware Sega Rally ran on wasn't Naomi(which was basically a souped up Dreamcast), and they figured if they used WindowsCE then they could use DirectX and get a PC port out of the same efforts. But yeah, for a flagship title they should have went for a port with the official SDK.
        Grazester 3y ago
        Naomi games ported over to the Dreamcast just fine. It was essentially a Dreamcast with more memory if I'm not mistaken. Sega Rally 2 used the Model 2 board.
        tuna74 3y ago
        Sega Rally 1 used Model 2, Sega Rally 2 used Model 3.
        mairusu 3y ago
        The goal was to prove to third-party developers that it was trivial to port an existing Windows game to Dreamcast. It was sort of a tech demo for the industry. The end result though was… demonstrating the Windows CE overhead.
- p_l 3y ago
  Not having developed for them, PS2 seemed the hardest of the latter generations, with PS3 having issues but at least not being designed with hand-written assembly in mind.
- geon 3y ago
  The ps3 cell processor with the 8 "synergistic processing element" co-processors was definitely weird. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(processor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(processor)
  - masklinn 3y ago
    The ps3 was incredible, not so much in what it could do as in what IBM managed to make Sony pay for.
    - kernal 3y ago
      IBM also made Microsoft pay for the Xenon in the Xbox 360.
      - breadmaster 3y ago
        And they had Nintendo paying 'em in that generation (and the one before) too.
      - masklinn 3y ago
        Xenon is a pretty standard SMP design, having 3 cores is basically the height of its oddity. It was a fine early-multicore CPU for consoles. The Cell was very much not that, the SPEs were unnecessarily difficult to use for a console and ultimately a dead end though they made for great supercomputing elements before GPGPU really took off (some people built supercomputers out of PS3s clusters as that was literally the cheapest way to get cells). The Cell supposedly cost 400 millions to develop, a cost largely borne by Sony. MS got IBM to retune the PPE for Xenon, but they'd likely have made do with an other IBM core as their base had that not existed.
        kernal 3y ago
        This claim that the SPEs were difficult to use and maximize may have been true in the early years, but all of the major engines were optimized to quickly abstract them. Naughty Dog, a key contributor to the PS3 graphics libraries had optimized them so much that porting PS3 games to the PS4 was "hell" in their words. >I wish we had a button that was like ‘Turn On PS4 Mode’, but no,” Druckmann said. "We expected it to be hell, and it was hell. Just getting an image onscreen, even an inferior one with the shadows broken, lighting broken and with it crashing every 30 seconds...that took a long time. These engineers are some of the best in the industry' and they optimized the game so much for the PS3’s SPUs specifically. It was optimized on a binary level, but after shifting those things over, you have to go back to the high level, make sure the systems are intact, and optimize it again. "I can’t describe how difficult a task that is. And once it’s running well, you’re running the [versions] side by side to make sure you didn’t screw something up in the process, like physics being slightly off, which throws the game off, or lighting being shifted and all of a sudden it’s a drastically different look. That’s not improved any more; that’s different. We want to stay faithful while being better.”
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
masklinn 3y ago
The Jaguar was pretty out there. The thing had two custom RISC chips which could be used as CPU (one with additional GPU capabilities and the other with DSP) plus a 68000 devs were not supposed to use.
- MBCook 3y ago
  Plus the custom chips were buggy!
  - JohnBooty 3y ago
    I always wonder what the Jaguar would have been like if not crippled by buggy hardware. Probably still a failure but I bet the games would have ran better. You know what's also funny? I've never heard anybody complaining about the Saturn being buggy. It's legendarily hard to code for, but seems like it was at least pretty solid. Even the Genesis was sort of "buggy." I think there was one particular design choice that crippled digital sound playback. Also the shadow/highlight functionality is kind of weird, not sure if "buggy" is the right word, but weird.
    - alexisread 3y ago
      The best thing Atari could have done was release it at launch with the CD, that would have made it much cheaper for devs to launch a game - ROM order pricing would kill many devs. Bundling an SDK would have helped massively as well. There are lots of quirks with the hardware which point to Atari interfering with the development - the 68K was never supposed to be there (and an 020 would have uncrippled the bus by allowing it to run at full speed, see the arcade board), not using the dual RAM buses, having an object processor (Flare majored on DSP and Blitter, the object processor looks like a 5200/7800/Amiga/Panther throwback mandated by Atari) necessitated having a 2-chip solution where 1-chip would have been faster to develop and better. Having said that, the Jag VR looked amazing for the time.
      - JohnBooty 3y ago
        You seem really knowledgeable. Any insight into why Atari made those fateful decisions?

This might be the most complex hardware architecture of a home console ever.

pjmlp 3y ago

Dreamcast and PS 3 are also quite close in complexity.

msk-lywenn 3y ago
I think you mean PS2 and PS3. Dreamcast was rather easy. One might even say, a dream to program for.
- masklinn 3y ago
  PS2 was the tail end of the bespoke hardware, and Sony gave their chips very marketing names, but I don’t remember the hardware being especially strange. The SDK being ass would be a different issue.
  - msk-lywenn 3y ago
    Well the two vector coprocessors (vu0, vu1) each talking to a different processor (cpu or "gpu") was quite weird, imho.
  - mairusu 3y ago
    The PS2 was infamous to develop for. Most of the bottleneck came from the vector units. Most middleware eventually made working around the strange hardware much easier. When asked if they were weary about developing on PS2, due to its reputation of it being tough to code for, Sega devs famously laughed and replied that they already mastered the Saturn - how much harder could it get?
- SunlitCat 3y ago
  I wonder how many games utilized Windows CE (which was a thing for it) on the Dreamcast.
  - Grazester 3y ago
    Not a whole lot. If you wanted to extract the full power of the system then you needed the native SDK. Sega Rally 2 was ported using CE and it has frame rate issues it really shouldn't have an this is attributed to CE
    - ac2u 3y ago
      I guess they had a porting job to do since the arcade hardware Sega Rally ran on wasn't Naomi(which was basically a souped up Dreamcast), and they figured if they used WindowsCE then they could use DirectX and get a PC port out of the same efforts. But yeah, for a flagship title they should have went for a port with the official SDK.
      - Grazester 3y ago
        Naomi games ported over to the Dreamcast just fine. It was essentially a Dreamcast with more memory if I'm not mistaken. Sega Rally 2 used the Model 2 board.
        tuna74 3y ago
        Sega Rally 1 used Model 2, Sega Rally 2 used Model 3.
      - mairusu 3y ago
        The goal was to prove to third-party developers that it was trivial to port an existing Windows game to Dreamcast. It was sort of a tech demo for the industry. The end result though was… demonstrating the Windows CE overhead.
p_l 3y ago
Not having developed for them, PS2 seemed the hardest of the latter generations, with PS3 having issues but at least not being designed with hand-written assembly in mind.
geon 3y ago
The ps3 cell processor with the 8 "synergistic processing element" co-processors was definitely weird. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(processor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(processor)
- masklinn 3y ago
  The ps3 was incredible, not so much in what it could do as in what IBM managed to make Sony pay for.
  - kernal 3y ago
    IBM also made Microsoft pay for the Xenon in the Xbox 360.
    - breadmaster 3y ago
      And they had Nintendo paying 'em in that generation (and the one before) too.
    - masklinn 3y ago
      Xenon is a pretty standard SMP design, having 3 cores is basically the height of its oddity. It was a fine early-multicore CPU for consoles. The Cell was very much not that, the SPEs were unnecessarily difficult to use for a console and ultimately a dead end though they made for great supercomputing elements before GPGPU really took off (some people built supercomputers out of PS3s clusters as that was literally the cheapest way to get cells). The Cell supposedly cost 400 millions to develop, a cost largely borne by Sony. MS got IBM to retune the PPE for Xenon, but they'd likely have made do with an other IBM core as their base had that not existed.
      - kernal 3y ago
        This claim that the SPEs were difficult to use and maximize may have been true in the early years, but all of the major engines were optimized to quickly abstract them. Naughty Dog, a key contributor to the PS3 graphics libraries had optimized them so much that porting PS3 games to the PS4 was "hell" in their words. >I wish we had a button that was like ‘Turn On PS4 Mode’, but no,” Druckmann said. "We expected it to be hell, and it was hell. Just getting an image onscreen, even an inferior one with the shadows broken, lighting broken and with it crashing every 30 seconds...that took a long time. These engineers are some of the best in the industry' and they optimized the game so much for the PS3’s SPUs specifically. It was optimized on a binary level, but after shifting those things over, you have to go back to the high level, make sure the systems are intact, and optimize it again. "I can’t describe how difficult a task that is. And once it’s running well, you’re running the [versions] side by side to make sure you didn’t screw something up in the process, like physics being slightly off, which throws the game off, or lighting being shifted and all of a sudden it’s a drastically different look. That’s not improved any more; that’s different. We want to stay faithful while being better.”
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

masklinn 3y ago

The Jaguar was pretty out there. The thing had two custom RISC chips which could be used as CPU (one with additional GPU capabilities and the other with DSP) plus a 68000 devs were not supposed to use.

MBCook 3y ago
Plus the custom chips were buggy!
- JohnBooty 3y ago
  I always wonder what the Jaguar would have been like if not crippled by buggy hardware. Probably still a failure but I bet the games would have ran better. You know what's also funny? I've never heard anybody complaining about the Saturn being buggy. It's legendarily hard to code for, but seems like it was at least pretty solid. Even the Genesis was sort of "buggy." I think there was one particular design choice that crippled digital sound playback. Also the shadow/highlight functionality is kind of weird, not sure if "buggy" is the right word, but weird.
  - alexisread 3y ago
    The best thing Atari could have done was release it at launch with the CD, that would have made it much cheaper for devs to launch a game - ROM order pricing would kill many devs. Bundling an SDK would have helped massively as well. There are lots of quirks with the hardware which point to Atari interfering with the development - the 68K was never supposed to be there (and an 020 would have uncrippled the bus by allowing it to run at full speed, see the arcade board), not using the dual RAM buses, having an object processor (Flare majored on DSP and Blitter, the object processor looks like a 5200/7800/Amiga/Panther throwback mandated by Atari) necessitated having a 2-chip solution where 1-chip would have been faster to develop and better. Having said that, the Jag VR looked amazing for the time.
    - JohnBooty 3y ago
      You seem really knowledgeable. Any insight into why Atari made those fateful decisions?