To be fair, the game consoles were not a walk in the park either. PS2 VU programming was in some senses more complicated - on NUON you just had to stuff as many

To be fair, the game consoles were not a walk in the park either. PS2 VU programming was in some senses more complicated - on NUON you just had to stuff as many slots in a packet as possible e.g. you could write a jump to self and had like 20 slots for instructions in there (the jump packet itself and 2 delay packets, each was 6 or 7 instructions possible if memory serves) but on PS2 you had to be more clever with hiding latency between dual pipes. A loop on PS2 would be processing several items at once, eg stage 1 for the current idex, stage 2 for the previous index and the final stage for the current index - 2. Programmers at the time were okay with this and it was actually fun. The tools though were much better for the competition, on PS2 I could set break points anywhere (even on memory reads) and see the DMA streams in the debugger, on NUON it was pretty much debugging with prints except you had to write the print yourself :)