i've heard that to program nintendos, you have to order a kit from them for a lot of money. it comes with a board that you stick into your computer that emulates the nintendo. then you program it as if you were programming a normal program. i am very unclear about it, however, so don't accept what i said as the truth.

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http://members.xoom.com/mutex0

There is a black Sony playstation called the >something, forgot it< which you can code for written in some kind of cpp, and then upload it with a parallel link cable. But if you want to make real games on CD´s you have to license the playstation devkit from Sony for a lot of $$$..

I am now working on a PS project. Guess i may tell something about PS.

To develop a PS game. U will have to get a development kit from Sony and the japs will ask u for $10000 for a piece.

And the next thing is a compiler. GNU and Codeworrior are 2 of the few choices. GNU is hard to use, and Codeworrior is full of bugs.

As to programming on PS itself. PS has 2M mem and 1M vram. The 3d capability is at about 0.3m triangles/sec. To get most out of it, today's PS programmers will have to write tons of assembly language(Mips R3000 cpu), especially for the displaying driver.

The only thing makes me a little bit comfortble is that PS has a vector processing unit which Sony calls GTE(Geometry Transformation Engine). Today in PC only high end display cards like Geforce256 have such a thing.

The reason why people still work for this thing is 60000000 PS's are out there in homes. And more than 3000 game titles are available.

So, the main differences between work on PS and PC are
1: Programming on PS is very much hardware relavent.
2: PS may offer better money.
3: Japs are PS's boss. You will have to pay "tax" to Sony for each copy of your game sold. (American should have some thing to fight back. - )

^ (In addendum to C32)
| The Black PSX is called the NetYaroze. Unfortunately, Sony isn't allowing new entries in to the development program (for the US at least) 'cause there aren't any more black PSXs (US vers?)

[This message has been edited by SonicSilcion (edited October 15, 1999).]

The problem with creating PSX games is that you need a license by Sony and Sony doesn't give them away to everyone. The SDK itself costs about 7000$, but you might not get it, even if you want to pay.

Sony is well known for the quality assurance, so, you might not be allowed to release your product if it's a bad one. As the other guys said, creating fast games on PSX is much harder than on PC, this will change with PSX2, but yet it is a hard job. You need to optimize anything and save memory where you can.

CU

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Skullpture Entertainment
#40842461

I maybe wrong, but I heard somewhere that the Dreamcast uses DirectX and the Windows CE API

I tried to develop for Playstation 2 and hit a wall. You gotta have big $$$ to write games for it. Basically you need to succeed in the PC market first and in a big way.

I think the professional development kit you get from sony is a BLUE playstation.. but I could be wrong. I also believe (but have not tried it) that all you really need is chip'd playstation, a MIPS compiler, some programming documentation, a (very cheap) interface cable and cd-burner. If you only want to do it as a hobby for yourself and not give it to a friend then you can leave out the cd-burner and the chip. you just upload the binary to the playstation before you want to test it out. But I could be wrong because I have never tried it, and I just sold my playstation while I could still get a good price for it.

The professional kit IS blue, the NetYaroze IS black (got one )... As for coding it, it's not a big deal on a hobby level (it's Cpp, and you don't HAVE TO code asm to get something working), but as has been said: If you want to publish your stuff it has to go by Sony QA, which means "Tekken quality" (good luck on that one ).

As for the other boxes, they are even more expensive, and none of them have a hobby version like the net yaroze. (Nintendo for one, I believe, requires a SGI workstation as the development platform).

And, NO, chances are you can't simply re-compile your game for a console. They generally have completely different run-time libararies. You CAN, however, if you design with care, limit the amount of code you have to change to get it to work (But that's a general portability issue, not particularly related to consoles).

A word of advice: Forget the console market until you've prooven yourself on the PC.

/Niels

But then again, You could always start programming the gameboy. Which is the perfect starting place for console development. All the software you need is free (using an emulator for testing) and for the real thing all you need is a bungxchanger which comes around 50$ i believe.

Jaap Suter