I notice that development tools such as maya and ulead are close to 2000 dollars each., I wish to unify ten ps2 consoles for use as a render cube as an alternative low cost solution to computer graphic creation. Can you please provide a solution to this problem. never confuse luck with talent

There's no OS on PS2 nor any BIOS. They are both loaded at runtime when you insert a disc into the beast. If you want to get a (real) OS for your PS2 you'll have to buy the Linux Kit for PS2 online. And still I don't know if it's possible to use PS2s to create a render farm.
Btw, if you don't have the PS2s already you might as well go on buying Maya, since ten PS2s are worth 1990$ (10*199$/unit or so I've learned by news). And I haven't added yet the price of ten linux kits (for ten hardrives)... that makes 1999$ more since the price of a linux kit is 199.9$ (see on us.playstation.com).
Of course if you already have ten playstations at hand then go on for this solution. Otherwise you'll have to choose but there's no difference in the cost of the two solutions.

Edit : corrected my assertion that there's no OS on consoles and changed that to PS2 (does the Gamecube have one ?). Thank you guys for having made me realize I was wrong.

Second edit : okay once again I corrected my statement. Effectively it makes more sense that consoles have a mini-OS to allow developers to do their job with something else than pure assembly.

[edited by - trexmaster on May 30, 2002 10:19:23 AM]

You are still going to need a modelling program such as Maya to model the scenes. Render farms are just passed the scene data from the modelling program and produces the final rendered scenes.

Actually, I think the dreamcast runs on a form of windows ce

I believe the Xbox runs on top of a variant of Win2K.

>> There''s no OS on PS2. There only is BIOSes.

I think that it should be noted that although no OS is on the playstion 2 when you turn it on (neither is there on a PC for that matter) one is loaded when you insert a disk. In the case of the Linux kit it is Linux of course, but in the case of a regular game it is a stripped down OS that is optimized for speed - end-users never get to see it. Let me quote from the Linux-kit FAQ:

"
The final major difference between the two is the operating system. A licensed developer creates games for the PlayStation 2 which use a light weight proprietary operating system kernel. This kernel offers much less functionality than Linux, but has the advantage of offering slightly faster access to the hardware.
"

To my knowledge this the same with the other consoles.

Thank you., interesting information., my other reason for posting this was to come up with a more powerfull and less expensive alternative to rendering c.g. sequences than the render computers now in use., what advantage do you see in a ten ps2 setup versus a single render computer of comparable price., both systems using maya or ulead software.,
Also is Linux the only operating system that is viable on the ps2., say versus a simple sistem kernel made by me in another program language.
System kernel works the linked ps2s like an adaptive neural net.

never confuse luck with talent

I don''t know much about console architecture but I bet that, as they''re designed for running games, they don''t have much other capability, such as the possiblity to be used as a rendering farm. I know some software running under linux allows the usage of simple PCs (everything capable of running linux from 486 to latest P4/Athlon) as a render farm but I don''t know if they don''t require special hardware features that wouldn''t be available on PS2.

So were I about to try to get a render farm made of PS2 running I would start with just one PS2 with a Linux Kit. Then I''d test if it''s capable of running any software I need to get my rendering farm. If everything goes fine in this phase, the I buy a second PS2 with a Linux Kit and I try to make it work with the first one in a small rendering farm (two PS2s now). If the clustering works, then I make them render a scene that has the average complexity of what I intend to produce. If nothing goes wrong during the rendering process and the PS2s have supported the stress then I go on and buy the 8 other PS2s and Linux Kits I need to come up with a rendering farm of ten PS2s.

Advantages : if anything goes wrong you don''t spend money on useless thing, if everything goes fine you can even add more PS2s and also PCs to your rendering farm. If it works then I guess a rendering farm made up of ten PS2s would be fastest than a single rendering comp of equivalent price.

quote: Original post by russellburrows
Thank you., interesting information., my other reason for posting this was to come up with a more powerfull and less expensive alternative to rendering c.g. sequences than the render computers now in use., what advantage do you see in a ten ps2 setup versus a single render computer of comparable price., both systems using maya or ulead software.,

I can''t think of an advantage, really. A playstation only has a 300 MHz CPU. That''s all you''d get with Maya/ulead software renders (assuming you''d get the thing to run on a ps2 at all.)
You could buy a 1 Ghz Celeron PC for the price of a PS2 + linux kit. Why buy a 300Mhz PC?

quote:
Also is Linux the only operating system that is viable on the ps2., say versus a simple sistem kernel made by me in another program language.

You could probably hammer in your own OS by basing off of the sources for the PS2 version of the linux kernel. You''d still need to buy the linux kit for the hard drive, though.

quote:
System kernel works the linked ps2s like an adaptive neural net.

Huh? Are you pulling our legs? An adaptive neural net is an AI technique. It doesn''t have much to do with networking computers or distributed processing.