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Playstation 3 a bargain?


mkreku

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  • 2 weeks later...

Okay, you can put Linux on PS3. Is there any practical reason to do this beyond the cool factor?

Murphy's Law of Computer Gaming: The listed minimum specifications written on the box by the publisher are not the minimum specifications of the game set by the developer.

 

@\NightandtheShape/@ - "Because you're a bizzare strange deranged human?"

Walsingham- "Sand - always rushing around, stirring up apathy."

Joseph Bulock - "Another headache, courtesy of Sand"

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Application development is very convenient on a GNU/Linux platform (completely my biased opinion, of course). For people that want to write, distribute and share homebrew apps such as games, media frontends and encoders/decoders, a familiar and powerful platform is a huge deal.

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Okay, that is a definite plus. If we could put Linux on the PS3 is there other OSes that could be installed or is Linux based material is it?

Murphy's Law of Computer Gaming: The listed minimum specifications written on the box by the publisher are not the minimum specifications of the game set by the developer.

 

@\NightandtheShape/@ - "Because you're a bizzare strange deranged human?"

Walsingham- "Sand - always rushing around, stirring up apathy."

Joseph Bulock - "Another headache, courtesy of Sand"

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Okay, I am convinced that I should, at some point, get a Playstation 3. Probably right after I get myself a HDTV and do a serious system upgrade for my PC.

Murphy's Law of Computer Gaming: The listed minimum specifications written on the box by the publisher are not the minimum specifications of the game set by the developer.

 

@\NightandtheShape/@ - "Because you're a bizzare strange deranged human?"

Walsingham- "Sand - always rushing around, stirring up apathy."

Joseph Bulock - "Another headache, courtesy of Sand"

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Okay, that is a definite plus.  If we could put Linux on the PS3 is there other OSes that could be installed or is Linux based material is it?

I believe Yellow Dog Linux (the "official" PS3 Linux distro) co-exists peacefully with the PS3 primary dashboard OS, and you can choose to boot either of the OS's during startup.

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Okay, I am convinced that I should, at some point, get a Playstation 3.  Probably right after I get myself a HDTV and do a serious system upgrade for my PC.

 

Yeah, I think the HDTV is the priority for me too. Nothing less than 40 inch. And at the rate prices are going down you'll probably be able to get a decent 40-50 inch HDTV for under a grand by next christmas.

The area between the balls and the butt is a hotbed of terrorist activity.

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It would be cool if we could install Windows on a PS3. If we could do that I would then ship it to Bill Gates. HA!

Murphy's Law of Computer Gaming: The listed minimum specifications written on the box by the publisher are not the minimum specifications of the game set by the developer.

 

@\NightandtheShape/@ - "Because you're a bizzare strange deranged human?"

Walsingham- "Sand - always rushing around, stirring up apathy."

Joseph Bulock - "Another headache, courtesy of Sand"

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I think the idea angshuman was talking about was that if the kernel is Linux-based, it'd be part of the numerous open-source licenses, such as the GPL, that Linux is distributed under.

 

As far as I know, there's nothing "Linux-based" about the closed-source driver that nVidia makes, outside of the fact that it's designed for Linux.

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I think the idea angshuman was talking about was that if the kernel is Linux-based, it'd be part of the numerous open-source licenses, such as the GPL, that Linux is distributed under.

Yes, but they don't have to modify the kernel source. Chances are that what they need is drivers for PS3-specific hardware. If implemented as loadable kernel modules, GPLing the code can be avoided. It is the practice used by many embedded Linux vendors.

 

As far as I know, there's nothing "Linux-based" about the closed-source driver that nVidia makes, outside of the fact that it's designed for Linux.

It is not that simple actually. There is a lot of controversy whether a kernel loadable module is a part of the kernel or not, because it "interacts with kernel in a very intimate manner" [Linus Torvalds]. I haven't been following this debate for a couple of years now, so I can't tell what's happening today.

Edited by Diamond
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While at Eurogamer I found this article:

 

http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=72081

 

>_<

Murphy's Law of Computer Gaming: The listed minimum specifications written on the box by the publisher are not the minimum specifications of the game set by the developer.

 

@\NightandtheShape/@ - "Because you're a bizzare strange deranged human?"

Walsingham- "Sand - always rushing around, stirring up apathy."

Joseph Bulock - "Another headache, courtesy of Sand"

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Yes, but the Brits gave us Bonnie Langford so they deserve to get ripped off. >_<

Edited by Sand

Murphy's Law of Computer Gaming: The listed minimum specifications written on the box by the publisher are not the minimum specifications of the game set by the developer.

 

@\NightandtheShape/@ - "Because you're a bizzare strange deranged human?"

Walsingham- "Sand - always rushing around, stirring up apathy."

Joseph Bulock - "Another headache, courtesy of Sand"

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The Playstation 3 seems to be having a few serious problems:

 

Sadly what he has said is something that anyone who knows me on these forums will know I have warned about ever since I began doing work on PS3 (I contract so sony can't really slap me with an NDA as I'm not affiliated with them, only certain projects I can't mention ha!).

 

The PS3 is great for small projects due to the hard and fast memory split, which doesn't hamper casual games.

 

PS3 needs to stream content for anything larger like resistance or motorstorm and as I've mentioned before, blue-ray is no good at that full stop. As a result we had to compress the sh** out of all graphics and then uncompress on the fly, before moving the uncompressed stuff to graphics memory and...yep we get framerate issues!

 

This will be true of any PS3 project. We are getting better at arranging the data on blue-ray to facilitate efficient streaming but, can do jack about the slow seek speeds of the disk drive itself. No wonder the British devs have been gagged. In the circles I move in we were all more than vocal about the crap sony have handed to developers.

 

It really does feel like they made a blue-ray player and then though oh heck it's supposed to play games too isn't it! The cell can actually play a blue-ray disk without even accessing the gpu so maybe this is why they thought the cell was all powerful. Not realising that de-compressing blue-ray movies and reading a disk serially is not what a games oriented processor needs to do! For games it's all about the texture storage, ai based on branching instructions, good predictive branching in short almost the opposite of what an spu does well.

 

Developers almost without exception (it depends on the game you write) have scaled up their projects from the proof of concepts that you see at shows like E3 (well did see anyway) simply don't fit into PS3 memory and then stall once you try to stream the data from the disk. Haveing done this myself, I bet there are developers at most PS3 software houses who have had to go to their boss and say "Er you know we said march, well er...no way that's happening. We couldn't get the big track to perform above 30fps when we streamed the data for it and did all the compression/decompression etc. etc. for the realtime game and 1080p er unless everything fits into 256mb of graphics memory well forget that too!".

 

For the record the 256mb for data is not a real restriction yet. I've yet to work on anything that was above about 100mb or so for actual game code (usually less than that even)

Looks like Epiphany might have been right about one thing.

Swedes, go to: Spel2, for the latest game reviews in swedish!

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