Ps2 programming without LINUX

Yea, sorta, this all i know about consoles. They natively (except for xbox) dont have a rendering api, so you either have to supply it or do it in software(something like that). Also they are not normal computers so you have to build them under differnt environments(i also dunno much about that). So yea its still c++ its just differnt includes. + your on graphics library. Do you have any experience in development for a system that is alreayd widely used, like a pc? Ps2 dont use the same files as a pc, im sure the games are not exe''s, so as far as a normal cd buring program maybe it will have to write the index differnt. There are ps2 tutorials and sdk''s you sould look into, some are very expensive though.

Google for PS2 homebrew development. There are people out there doing demos, emulators and media players, and they obviously don't use Linux. There are free tools out there that can compile code to the PS2, and some libraries too. Of course, you'll need your PS2 modded to run those, since you can't produce a booting CD at home without official (and expensive) Sony's dev hardware.

Look, I know how to use google! Whee!

And to honayboyz... the "rendering" in almost all consoles since the NES is *not* software-based!

The presence of DirectX/OpenGL has nothing to do with HW acceleration. Something is HW accelerated when it's done by the hardware, and not by your own putPixels() function.

The PS2, the Xbox, the GameCube, the Dreamcast, the original Playstation, the Sega Saturn... they all have dedicated video hardware that draws polygons to the screen. Even in the old 2D consoles... they didn't have buffers: you had tile and sprite layers, loaded the sprites, tilemaps, and the console hardware took care of drawing them to the screen.

For all those consoles there are graphics APIs, but they're the ones you find in the official libraries. It's also possible to write your own, given you have the proper documentation, since a game have far more acccess privileges in a console than in a PC (like accessing the video hardware directly). For the PS2, it seems there is a free library out there.

About compiling executables, each one of the consoles mentioned above have a different processor, so to get code running in one of them you need a compiler capable of compiling code that runs in that processor. Even so, you also need to know the booting proccess for the console you want to develop. All of them have rules an executable file must follow in order to be executed when the game is booted. That's why you *cannot* stick .EXE files into a CD and have they run in a Xbox, since it's executables are structured slightly differently (and there's some encryption involved).

[edited by - M3d10n on February 1, 2004 8:49:15 AM]