sirocyl

sirocyl

@sirocyl

noted computer gremlinizer

working on a @styx-os.

 

laptop.
                                                                                                     

"accidentally-vengeful telco nerd"
—Tom Scott

platform sec researcher, OS dev, systems architect, composer; Other (please specify). vintage computer/electronics nut.

I am open to tag suggestions - if there is something you want me to tag on my posts, leave a comment. <3

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sirocyl
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EpsilDelta
@EpsilDelta
sirocyl
@sirocyl

I'd like to introduce my other favorite devkits:

giant PS2, PS3 Enterprise Edition, and "just a Power Macintosh G5"

EpsilDelta
@EpsilDelta

PC Engine Dev kit. You just slide the lil dude on in.

sirocyl
@sirocyl

Eerily reminiscent of the Famicom prototype.

Also known as the "Card Cage", this is essentially a 6502-based modular-bus computer (left) and a peripheral chassis for the PPU (right), with all the components of the APU (for sound, in the left assembly), PPU (for graphics, the entire right assembly) and the memory and other control and I/O logic, out on discrete components on cards that slot into the chassis.

It would be an interesting project to build one of these from scratch!

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in reply to @QuestForTori's post:

sirocyl
@sirocyl

This box - the Saturn Address Checker, a chassis by SI Electronics - has one (presumably SCSI) interface port on the back. Another devkit, the Sophia Systems Saturn Programming Box, has SCSI proper and an RS-232 port, which probably makes it better suited for server stuff. :)

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neckspike
@neckspike

The HST-3220 (2nd hardware revision, the model with the round buttons) came in white (Sega), grey (Victor), or black (Hitachi). The original model with the oval buttons came in grey from all three manufacturers.

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in reply to @sirocyl's post:

in reply to @sirocyl's post:

dog
@dog

The PowerMac G5 was available in a similar CPU configuration to the 360, and also had a very similar GPU available. There weren't very many PowerPC G5 workstations available, and the PowerMac G5 was the most readily available and cheapest. They used it until they had their own dev hardware available.

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nortti
@nortti

I would guess it's a combination of:

  1. the design is not fully finalized and packed into the smallest possible space yet, so you get larger protype parts
  2. these are more one-off, so you may want to be able to service them
  3. they contain additional hardware not included in the retail version, especially for older consoles
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modulusshift
@modulusshift

Additional RAM so you don't have to optimize prematurely, diagnostic readout versions of key pieces of hardware, especially networking, extra slots so that if you're developing some kind of peripheral you can talk directly to the CPU, easily removable hard drives so you can unplug, move to your coding/compiling computer, copy in the new version, and slot it back into the dev kit as quickly as possible... lots of stuff. These are usually basically full computers that happen to be able to run console code.

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sirocyl
@sirocyl

Mostly this. The devkits usually have close-to-finished retail hardware. Early prototype devkits aren't uncommon, and some are very large, like the 3DS target board or the CellBE (PS3) "Cytology"/"Shreck" boxes; but they rarely get used past the console release.

Many development units have an extra single-board computer (Sony for example) which is used for networking (remote debug/program upload), instrumentation (e.g., JTAG, UART, GPIO), media emulation (for discs/cartridges), and activation/licensing (to keep them from being used by pirate groups... usually unsuccessfully.)

Other development units (e.g., Nintendo until the Switch) make use of a specialized board, built from the components of a retail console (CPU, RAM, misc. hardware) but with additional instrumentation built-in (like video capture, network emulation and remote debug facilities, additional RAM, FPGAs to handle the above) and the handhelds in particular usually have a "remote" which is in the chassis of the handheld, and connected to the unit with an umbilical cord carrying video, sound and input.

The PS3 DECR "Reference Tool" is a special case in a way - it has two disk drives (one for the PS3 system, and one for BD emulation; both connected to the main machine though, emulation is handled by a hypervisor driver iirc) and a massive cooling setup for the BE CPU, and the RSX GPU. It looks for all intents and purposes like a 2U server chassis.

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sirocyl
@sirocyl

Not quite; the hardware differs quite a bit between retail and the G5 protos. Games can be compiled to run on either kit, but an existing XeXDK-ready game would not easily run on the G5 without extensive rework (iirc most of the important libraries, like the DirectX graphics pipeline interfaces and system call library, are statically compiled; and the G5 is not powerful enough to emulate these and run the game program at an appreciable speed. This and, the G5 is dual-processor, the Xenon is tri-core and equipped with eDRAM that the G5 does not have.)

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