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As a kid I always dreamt of coding for PS1 on one of those black dev console kits. As an adult.. boy I wish someone made a cozy Javascript transpiler to PS1 to

As a kid I always dreamt of coding for PS1 on one of those black dev console kits. As an adult.. boy I wish someone made a cozy Javascript transpiler to PS1 tool.

dijit 2y ago
I too remember being mesmerized by the image of the black PS1 “developer” kit. It truly captured my imagination and alongside the movie Hackers from 1995 is probably one of the reasons I ended up wanting to be associated with computers in my future as a child.
spxneo 2y ago
yaroze devkit costs upwards of $10,000 USD now
- sumtechguy 2y ago
  I just looked they are going from 800 to 10k. The 10k ones are the collectors ones where it is new in box (or at least complete in box). As long as you have the cables, console, and dev card you probably could get in at around 1-2k.
sumtechguy 2y ago
I have one of those yaroze things. I had all sorts of plans for it. Until I realized that the memory on the thing was identical to the size of the normal in store ones and getting at the CD for extra storage was basically broken at the SDK level. That made debugging 'interesting'. Even splurged for the codewarrior dev kit. It was a decent step down in tooling and memory that I could get on other platforms. Kind of fun for a bit.
- stuaxo 2y ago
  About 15 years ago, my friend got about 10 ps1s from a car boot sale, one of the ones from that day was a yaroze.
0xcde4c3db 2y ago
Same. As far as I know, though, the black PS1 didn't actually do anything special to enable development, it just allowed Sony to arbitrarily make the devkit incompatible with retail PS1 consoles. It still required a special memory card dongle and boot disc in addition to the special console model for some reason. I seem to recall that someone cracked the boot disc to run on retail consoles without the dongle, and the serial link just needed a level shifter like a MAX232 (though these days you'd probably use a USB UART like CP2102 or FT231).
ChrisRR 2y ago
Go on, challenge yourself. Learn C. You'll become a better developer from broadening your horizons

As a kid I always dreamt of coding for PS1 on one of those black dev console kits. As an adult.. boy I wish someone made a cozy Javascript transpiler to PS1 tool.

dijit 2y ago

I too remember being mesmerized by the image of the black PS1 “developer” kit. It truly captured my imagination and alongside the movie Hackers from 1995 is probably one of the reasons I ended up wanting to be associated with computers in my future as a child.

spxneo 2y ago

yaroze devkit costs upwards of $10,000 USD now

sumtechguy 2y ago
I just looked they are going from 800 to 10k. The 10k ones are the collectors ones where it is new in box (or at least complete in box). As long as you have the cables, console, and dev card you probably could get in at around 1-2k.

sumtechguy 2y ago

I have one of those yaroze things. I had all sorts of plans for it. Until I realized that the memory on the thing was identical to the size of the normal in store ones and getting at the CD for extra storage was basically broken at the SDK level. That made debugging 'interesting'. Even splurged for the codewarrior dev kit. It was a decent step down in tooling and memory that I could get on other platforms. Kind of fun for a bit.

stuaxo 2y ago
About 15 years ago, my friend got about 10 ps1s from a car boot sale, one of the ones from that day was a yaroze.

0xcde4c3db 2y ago

Same. As far as I know, though, the black PS1 didn't actually do anything special to enable development, it just allowed Sony to arbitrarily make the devkit incompatible with retail PS1 consoles. It still required a special memory card dongle and boot disc in addition to the special console model for some reason. I seem to recall that someone cracked the boot disc to run on retail consoles without the dongle, and the serial link just needed a level shifter like a MAX232 (though these days you'd probably use a USB UART like CP2102 or FT231).

ChrisRR 2y ago

Go on, challenge yourself. Learn C. You'll become a better developer from broadening your horizons