9 ms·

The PS2’s backwards compatibility from the engineer who built it (2020)

280 points by msephton 2y ago

mcflubbins 2y ago
> Luckily, I got the chance to learn how to program computers thanks to a training program that the company ran. The material was easy for me to grasp and I came away from that training feeling like I could program just about anything. After I was done with that training, I did a lot of odds and ends. I worry such entry-level positions and on-the-job training will start to disappear (if they haven't already.)
- msephton 2y ago
  I wonder if Sony still runs such things...
  - ramchip 2y ago
    I think so, it's common for large businesses in Japan to rotate employees through departments at the beginning of their career, and to hire people for engineering with a degree in another field. In the English language FAQ for instance: https://www.sony.com/en/SonyInfo/Careers/japan/en/faq/major.html#m01 https://www.sony.com/en/SonyInfo/Careers/japan/en/faq/major.... > Can I still apply even if my major and job course are not related? > Please do! Around 40% of our new recruits work in positions that are different from their university majors. Instead of narrowing your options by focusing on your major, please expand your thoughts and ideas to what you want to do at Sony. Pick job courses that excite you and motivate you to take on a challenge. In the Japanese website they mention that 300 engineers act as in-house instructors.
- lukevp 2y ago
  I think we’re a couple years out max from Peak Developer and a lot of the growth / entry level roles will start getting taken over by the experienced devs who can adapt to coordinating a set of AI agents to do the actual coding and testing and DevOps more efficiently, and it’s all downhill from there. So I don’t see an entry level, mess around directly writing code job, to exist in abundance in say 10 years.
  - suhastech 2y ago
    I can see that happening. However, I also believe that college or some form of structured education will step in to bridge the gap. Historically, education has played a role in transitioning people from knowing little to becoming workforce ready. With AI changing the landscape, the gap will undoubtedly be wider, but education systems may evolve to accommodate that shift. By the looks of it, AI could itself fill that gap.
    - bilegeek 2y ago
      That's the exact problem though. Companies have been outsourcing training to colleges for decades now, further and further reducing available career paths as mentioned and causing degree inflation, higher education costs for everybody, etc. It's also unlikely to change because it's just one more symptom of how companies are run these days, and that mindset has societal-scale momentum now.
      - scarface_74 2y ago
        Why wouldn’t they? Despite what idealists think that people should go to college to “expand their minds and be better citizens of the world”, most people can’t afford to spend tens of thousands of dollars and not expect to be ready for careers.
        bilegeek 2y ago
        I didn't intend to sound crunchy like that. College for practical means has long been the norm in the US vs. elsewhere, going back to agricultural schools in the 18th and 19th centuries. There is nothing wrong with that; what is NOT good is the whole-sale replacement of job training to colleges, as it cannot properly encompass every eccentricity of a particular job, leading to the problems mentioned before. College is about getting the knowledge to perform your field, not the knowledge of every particular procedure one could possibly expect to see. The modern emphasis on internships softens the blow somewhat, but it's a half-hearted replacement and is easily abused in many fields.
  - deleted 2y ago
- dclowd9901 2y ago
  This upsets me too. I always loved hiring inquisitive, energetic juniors who didn't know shit about software engineering but wanted to learn everything about it. I haven't been allowed to hire a junior in close to a decade.
  - jamesy0ung 2y ago
    As a Computer Science student, what should I be focusing on in order to get a job in this market?
    - dfedbeef 2y ago
      Edit: paid internships
      - burgos_thrw 2y ago
        This. I mentored five interns across two companies (an faang and a pre IPO) all of them are on the great path and in great companies now. They didn’t know much but they had an appetite that you don’t see often in the people with 10+ years of experience.
    - _blk 2y ago
      Actual projects to showcase. Open source/Github helps but is not a strict must.
    - ahartmetz 2y ago
      IMO: Writing, extending and fixing bugs in nontrivial programs, collaborating with others, reading a lot of documentation of the things you use, discussing programming with other interested people. The scientific part is usually not at the fore in practice and your courses will be plenty for that. Working on some large FOSS project will teach you most of the skills, though maybe don't specialize too much. Some people seem to mostly fix bugs, others design and half-finish stuff before switching to something else, etc. It's best to know the full lifecycle in order to have relevant experience for all situations.
    - 2y ago
- Sakos 2y ago
  I haven't seen any entry level positions or on the job training at any company I've worked at. I've always been jealous of these training programs that Japanese game companies had, where you'd be working alongside future and contemporary greats.
- memorydial 2y ago
  If companies don’t invest in juniors because they 'might leave,' they’ll just end up with a team of burned-out seniors who eventually leave anyway.
  - xandrius 2y ago
    It's not necessary true. Not hiring juniors doesn't imply burning out the employees.
  - gosub100 2y ago
    thats exactly what they want, then they put on their sad face and tell congress "we just can't find anybody!" and voila, in rolls the H1B drones who work at 25% off.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- alt227 2y ago
  In the UK this is generally being replaced by schools. Kids start basics of logic early in primary school, and by their teens they are attending lessons in how to build websites with HTML and CSS. In 10 years everybody in the country will have this basic grounding in coding and so workplaces will not need to provide it at all.
msephton 2y ago
Previously: - 2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34944067 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34944067 - 2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22501566 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22501566
- dang 2y ago
  Thanks! Macroexpanded: The PS2’s Backwards Compatibility from the Engineer Who Built It - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34944067 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34944067 - Feb 2023 (48 comments) The PS2’s Backwards Compatibility from the Engineer Who Built It - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22501566 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22501566 - March 2020 (16 comments) Note to avoid misunderstanding: reposts of cool articles are totally fine after about a year (this is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). Lists of related links are just to satisfy extra-curious readers.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - msephton 2y ago
    No worries, as the OP I added the old threads simply for my own curiosity.
userbinator 2y ago
[flagged]
- dehrmann 2y ago
  Is AT keyboard signaling the same as PS/2?
  - kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
    Yes.
  - userbinator 2y ago
    Almost the same, but very different from XT/PC.
- darkwater 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - memorydial 2y ago
    Probably just knee-jerk downvotes from people who misread the title and assumed you were confused. Honestly, the PS/2 vs PlayStation naming overlap is fair—Sony could’ve picked a more distinct name!
    - darkwater 2y ago
      I guess you are being ironic. But downvoting because someone added a clarification well, seems childish
      - gosub100 2y ago
        Respectfully, complaining about downvotes is childish (and IIRC against site guidelines). At the point I am reading this, I don't see any indication that (the post you asked about) has been downvoted. Maybe that's because your post influenced others to up-doot it, but I think HN (along with other sites) intentionally fuzz their voting for various reasons. Moreover, it's just a waste of time to complain about it. Some people aren't going to like the things you say, and it distracts from the topic and introduces noise to try to shine the spotlight on someone disagreeing and philosophizing about their motivations. Again, I am saying this respectfully and in the interests of how to run an efficient online discussion. I have no horse in the race regarding the PS2 acronym.
mouse_ 2y ago
What I wouldn't give to attend that 90's PlayStation R&D internal intro programming course.
- memorydial 2y ago
  Right? The golden age of game dev—low-level programming, custom hardware tricks, and figuring out how to squeeze every last drop of performance out of the PlayStation. I’d love to see those internal docs and training materials. Probably a treasure trove of lost optimization techniques!
  - xandrius 2y ago
    The golden age is always behind us. I personally believe that we are in the golden age right now: literally anyone can pickup and make games. Game dev is actually something you can learn on your own and do. Back in the 90s it was all locked up in licenses, expensive books or a handful of companies. Now you can open up Unity and make a game in a weekend.
    - Yeask 2y ago
      To me the 8-bit computer era is the golden age. Most published commercial games were made by a single 14 to 20 year old in few months.
      - xandrius 2y ago
        I'd say that it is still the same today but the same tools can be used to make AAA games. The sheer amount of games made by under 20s is definitely higher today than back then, and I'd argue the quality of it too.
        soulofmischief 2y ago
        The fidelity, definitely. I think quality is a harder sell. I do think we have more gaming history behind us now to draw from and I think we will be entering a new golden age soon but at the moment gaming feels like it's in a rut.
apt-apt-apt-apt 2y ago
20 years? Feels like not that long ago when I was able to leisurely rock out on the new Guitar Hero with that.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- doubled112 2y ago
  Part of me thinks it is because games haven't really changed in those 20 years. Time wise we are further away from the PS2 than it was from the Atari 2600. The move from 2D to 3D was massive. The PS1 and N64 made experimentation (and bad choices) possible. By the time PS2 came around it was all figured out, and we have what we have.
  - maccard 2y ago
    I think this is a bit of a myopic view. There’s a world of difference between the Aron games of 2024 and 2002. We didn’t really nail third person camera controls until Xbox 360/ps3 era, and the multiplayer landscape has changed massively - marvel rivals and hell divers 2 being two great examples of the last 12 months. The indie or AA scene is booming again - that certainly wasn’t true in the ps2 era and early days of steam, something like Balatro being a perfect example again. You’re also forgetting g the vast, vast amounts of absolute shovelware and drivel that came out and was tolerated on those platforms too.
    - 1970-01-01 2y ago
      I think your view is a bit myopic. Take Final Fantasy Online, Grand Theft Auto San Andreas, and all of EA Sports as evidence. Those games were best selling for a reason. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PlayStation_2_online_games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PlayStation_2_online_g...
      - maccard 2y ago
        I’m not saying there weren’t great games, far from it.
djmips 2y ago
I find it interesting that the Sega Genesis (Mega Drive) also was backwards compatible with the Sega Master System. Inside the Genesis they had the hardware for the Master System, which included the original Z80, the original sound chip. The Genesis graphics chip was evolved from the Master System and could work in Master System mode. You needed a cartridge adapater. The other surprising thing is that you could actually run the Z80 in parallel with your 68000 when running a Genesis game. We used the Z80 as a sound co-processor running MIDI and playing sampled drums without bothering the 68000. On the PS2 system's PS1 backwards compatibility this pattern is quite similar, not mentioned in the blog posts is that the IOP which acts as the PS2's sound co-processor contains an R3000 like the PS1 and it's underclocked to directly run the PS1 titles. Apparently on later editions of the PS2 Slim they removed the R3000 based IOP and replaced it with a PowerPC microcontroller! It had to fully emulate the R3000 and the SPU as far as I know to fufill the IOP duties including the PS1 emulation.
- memorydial 2y ago
  [flagged]
- poke646 2y ago
  > The other surprising thing is that you could actually run the Z80 in parallel with your 68000 when running a Genesis game. We used the Z80 as a sound co-processor running MIDI and playing sampled drums without bothering the 68000. I always thought that was a key reason to include a Z80. A dedicated sound processor (often Z80) was a mainstay of arcade games from the mid-80s and onward and SEGA's engineers would surely have been familiar with such a design. It might even have helped when porting arcade games.
  - skywal_l 2y ago
    They were because sega was, at the time, an arcade manufacturer first. The Megadrive is the console version of the system 16 after all.
- MonaroVXR 2y ago
  Do you happen to have a source of this? (Copetti?)
memorydial 2y ago
The decline of entry-level roles is worrying. Companies are optimizing for immediate productivity but forgetting that juniors grow into seniors. No training, no pipeline, no future talent...
- relistan 2y ago
  Agreed. Boot camps tried to fill the void. Some were great, some were not, like anything. Most of the boot camp grads I worked with were good juniors with real world experience to bring to the table (designers, writers, etc). But, in general, the disdain boot camps were met with by many engineering orgs spoke volumes for how little value people place on junior engineers. If you won’t train people, and you won’t accept graduates of job training programs, it’s hard to see how you can ever have a sustainable pipeline. Many people would seemingly rather spend billions training AI than training junior engineers. (For the record, I don’t view these two options as exclusive)
  - andai 2y ago
    Isn't the end result exclusive?
    - relistan 2y ago
      Possibly
  - freedomben 2y ago
    I agree that many engineering orgs did not give boot camps proper chance, but I do think it is important to be realistic regarding them. Generally speaking, Someone coming with a computer science degree is going to be a lot more well-rounded with much more breath and depth then someone coming from a boot camp. It's not really a great comparison though in my experience. Typically, a good boot camp graduate will come away with a better ability to build real apps, but has a serious lacking in understanding algorithms, OS fundamentals, and many other things That important for Back-End development, especially. I'm not sure what the solution is to the junior engineer crisis, but I don't think the solution is boot camps. Those have a great place, but if anything a junior coming from a boot camp is generally even more Junior than a junior coming from a computer science degree. My hypothesis is that The computer science degree route is what will be most useful for juniors in the future. In a world where AI can do the basic coding and build the apps, I see the qualities in appreciating overall design and architecture, especially with regards to scalability. There could definitely be boot camps that teach that sort of stuff, but I am not aware of any that exists currently.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
trod1234 2y ago
https://archive.ph/qKNZk https://archive.ph/qKNZk
terrycody 2y ago
So is that emulation software-base, not hardware-base, or half half? If its half half, consider several games won't work, what's the big difference with real PS1 hardwares in terms of gaming experience？
- msephton 2y ago
  Originally half-half, then later fully software. I don't know all problematic games but the ones I do know of had some hard coded expectations for the hardware that the emulator didn't fulfill. Even going from original PS2 to slim PS2 some games (eg. Panelist) stopped working because the specs of the DVD drive changed. And similarly going from original PS1 to PSone resulted in minor changes in GPU behaviour which caused display quirks in some games.

280 points by msephton 2y ago

> Luckily, I got the chance to learn how to program computers thanks to a training program that the company ran. The material was easy for me to grasp and I came away from that training feeling like I could program just about anything. After I was done with that training, I did a lot of odds and ends. I worry such entry-level positions and on-the-job training will start to disappear (if they haven't already.)

msephton 2y ago
I wonder if Sony still runs such things...
- ramchip 2y ago
  I think so, it's common for large businesses in Japan to rotate employees through departments at the beginning of their career, and to hire people for engineering with a degree in another field. In the English language FAQ for instance: https://www.sony.com/en/SonyInfo/Careers/japan/en/faq/major.html#m01 https://www.sony.com/en/SonyInfo/Careers/japan/en/faq/major.... > Can I still apply even if my major and job course are not related? > Please do! Around 40% of our new recruits work in positions that are different from their university majors. Instead of narrowing your options by focusing on your major, please expand your thoughts and ideas to what you want to do at Sony. Pick job courses that excite you and motivate you to take on a challenge. In the Japanese website they mention that 300 engineers act as in-house instructors.
lukevp 2y ago
I think we’re a couple years out max from Peak Developer and a lot of the growth / entry level roles will start getting taken over by the experienced devs who can adapt to coordinating a set of AI agents to do the actual coding and testing and DevOps more efficiently, and it’s all downhill from there. So I don’t see an entry level, mess around directly writing code job, to exist in abundance in say 10 years.
- suhastech 2y ago
  I can see that happening. However, I also believe that college or some form of structured education will step in to bridge the gap. Historically, education has played a role in transitioning people from knowing little to becoming workforce ready. With AI changing the landscape, the gap will undoubtedly be wider, but education systems may evolve to accommodate that shift. By the looks of it, AI could itself fill that gap.
  - bilegeek 2y ago
    That's the exact problem though. Companies have been outsourcing training to colleges for decades now, further and further reducing available career paths as mentioned and causing degree inflation, higher education costs for everybody, etc. It's also unlikely to change because it's just one more symptom of how companies are run these days, and that mindset has societal-scale momentum now.
    - scarface_74 2y ago
      Why wouldn’t they? Despite what idealists think that people should go to college to “expand their minds and be better citizens of the world”, most people can’t afford to spend tens of thousands of dollars and not expect to be ready for careers.
      - bilegeek 2y ago
        I didn't intend to sound crunchy like that. College for practical means has long been the norm in the US vs. elsewhere, going back to agricultural schools in the 18th and 19th centuries. There is nothing wrong with that; what is NOT good is the whole-sale replacement of job training to colleges, as it cannot properly encompass every eccentricity of a particular job, leading to the problems mentioned before. College is about getting the knowledge to perform your field, not the knowledge of every particular procedure one could possibly expect to see. The modern emphasis on internships softens the blow somewhat, but it's a half-hearted replacement and is easily abused in many fields.
- deleted 2y ago
dclowd9901 2y ago
This upsets me too. I always loved hiring inquisitive, energetic juniors who didn't know shit about software engineering but wanted to learn everything about it. I haven't been allowed to hire a junior in close to a decade.
- jamesy0ung 2y ago
  As a Computer Science student, what should I be focusing on in order to get a job in this market?
  - dfedbeef 2y ago
    Edit: paid internships
    - burgos_thrw 2y ago
      This. I mentored five interns across two companies (an faang and a pre IPO) all of them are on the great path and in great companies now. They didn’t know much but they had an appetite that you don’t see often in the people with 10+ years of experience.
  - _blk 2y ago
    Actual projects to showcase. Open source/Github helps but is not a strict must.
  - ahartmetz 2y ago
    IMO: Writing, extending and fixing bugs in nontrivial programs, collaborating with others, reading a lot of documentation of the things you use, discussing programming with other interested people. The scientific part is usually not at the fore in practice and your courses will be plenty for that. Working on some large FOSS project will teach you most of the skills, though maybe don't specialize too much. Some people seem to mostly fix bugs, others design and half-finish stuff before switching to something else, etc. It's best to know the full lifecycle in order to have relevant experience for all situations.
  - 2y ago
Sakos 2y ago
I haven't seen any entry level positions or on the job training at any company I've worked at. I've always been jealous of these training programs that Japanese game companies had, where you'd be working alongside future and contemporary greats.
memorydial 2y ago
If companies don’t invest in juniors because they 'might leave,' they’ll just end up with a team of burned-out seniors who eventually leave anyway.
- xandrius 2y ago
  It's not necessary true. Not hiring juniors doesn't imply burning out the employees.
- gosub100 2y ago
  thats exactly what they want, then they put on their sad face and tell congress "we just can't find anybody!" and voila, in rolls the H1B drones who work at 25% off.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
alt227 2y ago
In the UK this is generally being replaced by schools. Kids start basics of logic early in primary school, and by their teens they are attending lessons in how to build websites with HTML and CSS. In 10 years everybody in the country will have this basic grounding in coding and so workplaces will not need to provide it at all.

msephton 2y ago

Previously: - 2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34944067 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34944067 - 2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22501566 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22501566

dang 2y ago
Thanks! Macroexpanded: The PS2’s Backwards Compatibility from the Engineer Who Built It - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34944067 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34944067 - Feb 2023 (48 comments) The PS2’s Backwards Compatibility from the Engineer Who Built It - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22501566 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22501566 - March 2020 (16 comments) Note to avoid misunderstanding: reposts of cool articles are totally fine after about a year (this is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). Lists of related links are just to satisfy extra-curious readers.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- msephton 2y ago
  No worries, as the OP I added the old threads simply for my own curiosity.

userbinator 2y ago

[flagged]

dehrmann 2y ago
Is AT keyboard signaling the same as PS/2?
- kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
  Yes.
- userbinator 2y ago
  Almost the same, but very different from XT/PC.
darkwater 2y ago
[flagged]
- memorydial 2y ago
  Probably just knee-jerk downvotes from people who misread the title and assumed you were confused. Honestly, the PS/2 vs PlayStation naming overlap is fair—Sony could’ve picked a more distinct name!
  - darkwater 2y ago
    I guess you are being ironic. But downvoting because someone added a clarification well, seems childish
    - gosub100 2y ago
      Respectfully, complaining about downvotes is childish (and IIRC against site guidelines). At the point I am reading this, I don't see any indication that (the post you asked about) has been downvoted. Maybe that's because your post influenced others to up-doot it, but I think HN (along with other sites) intentionally fuzz their voting for various reasons. Moreover, it's just a waste of time to complain about it. Some people aren't going to like the things you say, and it distracts from the topic and introduces noise to try to shine the spotlight on someone disagreeing and philosophizing about their motivations. Again, I am saying this respectfully and in the interests of how to run an efficient online discussion. I have no horse in the race regarding the PS2 acronym.

mouse_ 2y ago

What I wouldn't give to attend that 90's PlayStation R&D internal intro programming course.

memorydial 2y ago
Right? The golden age of game dev—low-level programming, custom hardware tricks, and figuring out how to squeeze every last drop of performance out of the PlayStation. I’d love to see those internal docs and training materials. Probably a treasure trove of lost optimization techniques!
- xandrius 2y ago
  The golden age is always behind us. I personally believe that we are in the golden age right now: literally anyone can pickup and make games. Game dev is actually something you can learn on your own and do. Back in the 90s it was all locked up in licenses, expensive books or a handful of companies. Now you can open up Unity and make a game in a weekend.
  - Yeask 2y ago
    To me the 8-bit computer era is the golden age. Most published commercial games were made by a single 14 to 20 year old in few months.
    - xandrius 2y ago
      I'd say that it is still the same today but the same tools can be used to make AAA games. The sheer amount of games made by under 20s is definitely higher today than back then, and I'd argue the quality of it too.
      - soulofmischief 2y ago
        The fidelity, definitely. I think quality is a harder sell. I do think we have more gaming history behind us now to draw from and I think we will be entering a new golden age soon but at the moment gaming feels like it's in a rut.

apt-apt-apt-apt 2y ago

20 years? Feels like not that long ago when I was able to leisurely rock out on the new Guitar Hero with that.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
doubled112 2y ago
Part of me thinks it is because games haven't really changed in those 20 years. Time wise we are further away from the PS2 than it was from the Atari 2600. The move from 2D to 3D was massive. The PS1 and N64 made experimentation (and bad choices) possible. By the time PS2 came around it was all figured out, and we have what we have.
- maccard 2y ago
  I think this is a bit of a myopic view. There’s a world of difference between the Aron games of 2024 and 2002. We didn’t really nail third person camera controls until Xbox 360/ps3 era, and the multiplayer landscape has changed massively - marvel rivals and hell divers 2 being two great examples of the last 12 months. The indie or AA scene is booming again - that certainly wasn’t true in the ps2 era and early days of steam, something like Balatro being a perfect example again. You’re also forgetting g the vast, vast amounts of absolute shovelware and drivel that came out and was tolerated on those platforms too.
  - 1970-01-01 2y ago
    I think your view is a bit myopic. Take Final Fantasy Online, Grand Theft Auto San Andreas, and all of EA Sports as evidence. Those games were best selling for a reason. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PlayStation_2_online_games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PlayStation_2_online_g...
    - maccard 2y ago
      I’m not saying there weren’t great games, far from it.

djmips 2y ago

I find it interesting that the Sega Genesis (Mega Drive) also was backwards compatible with the Sega Master System. Inside the Genesis they had the hardware for the Master System, which included the original Z80, the original sound chip. The Genesis graphics chip was evolved from the Master System and could work in Master System mode. You needed a cartridge adapater. The other surprising thing is that you could actually run the Z80 in parallel with your 68000 when running a Genesis game. We used the Z80 as a sound co-processor running MIDI and playing sampled drums without bothering the 68000. On the PS2 system's PS1 backwards compatibility this pattern is quite similar, not mentioned in the blog posts is that the IOP which acts as the PS2's sound co-processor contains an R3000 like the PS1 and it's underclocked to directly run the PS1 titles. Apparently on later editions of the PS2 Slim they removed the R3000 based IOP and replaced it with a PowerPC microcontroller! It had to fully emulate the R3000 and the SPU as far as I know to fufill the IOP duties including the PS1 emulation.

memorydial 2y ago
[flagged]
poke646 2y ago
> The other surprising thing is that you could actually run the Z80 in parallel with your 68000 when running a Genesis game. We used the Z80 as a sound co-processor running MIDI and playing sampled drums without bothering the 68000. I always thought that was a key reason to include a Z80. A dedicated sound processor (often Z80) was a mainstay of arcade games from the mid-80s and onward and SEGA's engineers would surely have been familiar with such a design. It might even have helped when porting arcade games.
- skywal_l 2y ago
  They were because sega was, at the time, an arcade manufacturer first. The Megadrive is the console version of the system 16 after all.
MonaroVXR 2y ago
Do you happen to have a source of this? (Copetti?)

memorydial 2y ago

The decline of entry-level roles is worrying. Companies are optimizing for immediate productivity but forgetting that juniors grow into seniors. No training, no pipeline, no future talent...

relistan 2y ago
Agreed. Boot camps tried to fill the void. Some were great, some were not, like anything. Most of the boot camp grads I worked with were good juniors with real world experience to bring to the table (designers, writers, etc). But, in general, the disdain boot camps were met with by many engineering orgs spoke volumes for how little value people place on junior engineers. If you won’t train people, and you won’t accept graduates of job training programs, it’s hard to see how you can ever have a sustainable pipeline. Many people would seemingly rather spend billions training AI than training junior engineers. (For the record, I don’t view these two options as exclusive)
- andai 2y ago
  Isn't the end result exclusive?
  - relistan 2y ago
    Possibly
- freedomben 2y ago
  I agree that many engineering orgs did not give boot camps proper chance, but I do think it is important to be realistic regarding them. Generally speaking, Someone coming with a computer science degree is going to be a lot more well-rounded with much more breath and depth then someone coming from a boot camp. It's not really a great comparison though in my experience. Typically, a good boot camp graduate will come away with a better ability to build real apps, but has a serious lacking in understanding algorithms, OS fundamentals, and many other things That important for Back-End development, especially. I'm not sure what the solution is to the junior engineer crisis, but I don't think the solution is boot camps. Those have a great place, but if anything a junior coming from a boot camp is generally even more Junior than a junior coming from a computer science degree. My hypothesis is that The computer science degree route is what will be most useful for juniors in the future. In a world where AI can do the basic coding and build the apps, I see the qualities in appreciating overall design and architecture, especially with regards to scalability. There could definitely be boot camps that teach that sort of stuff, but I am not aware of any that exists currently.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

trod1234 2y ago

https://archive.ph/qKNZk https://archive.ph/qKNZk

terrycody 2y ago

So is that emulation software-base, not hardware-base, or half half? If its half half, consider several games won't work, what's the big difference with real PS1 hardwares in terms of gaming experience？

msephton 2y ago
Originally half-half, then later fully software. I don't know all problematic games but the ones I do know of had some hard coded expectations for the hardware that the emulator didn't fulfill. Even going from original PS2 to slim PS2 some games (eg. Panelist) stopped working because the specs of the DVD drive changed. And similarly going from original PS1 to PSone resulted in minor changes in GPU behaviour which caused display quirks in some games.