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

📜 Hobby programmer, ROM hacker, retro computers & consoles, anime & manga fan, sometimes NSFW?
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giant PS2, PS3 Enterprise Edition, and "just a Power Macintosh G5"
Add a NetLink, floppy drive add on, and the BASIC interpreter disc and you’ve got yourself a web server going :v
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. :)
Why is it grey? Why is it a kilometer long? Who knows! Finding out will probably drive you mad!
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.
Kind of thing that makes you want to discover tool use and hit the other apes over the head with bones
Thanks; I spent three days reading through history & specs of Sega arcade platforms.
Lmao, feels very ironic that microsoft used a mac as a dev platform for the xbox 360
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.
Some Sony manager is like: "Hey, I know how we can use our old VCR cases!"
I would guess it's a combination of:
For #1, I didn't consider the fact that they'd get shipped beforehand to avoid "PS5 has no game syndrome"
For #3, what kind of stuff would that be?
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.
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.
Wait a minute, does this mean it's possible to virtualize Xbox 360 games and emulate only small bits and pieces of the hardware if the host is a G5?
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.)
just a Mac
oh so it's a GameCube devkit since that used PPC
Xbox 360
oh
dolphin.exe
wait
endlessly amused that the xbox dev kit is an apple... why 🤣
I hope you could rotate the PlayStation logo on the first one if you wanted to lay it down
Having played with one: unfortunately I don't think it did. (I was disappointed too!)