ps3 linux = bmax ps3?

It's been confirmed by Sony that the ps3 will ship with a 60gig hd pre-loaded with linux.
Does this mean we could one day see BmaxPs3?

It's clear from past history that sibly dreams of a console only blitz language. First the jag, then xbox, never came to nothing but finally a truely next gen system on a os bmax is already out on.

Care to let us know mark if you plan to look into it? :)

In a word. NO! :)

Mainly because it's pretty much impossible to develop for any consoles without licensing and dev kits.

Not sure about Sony, but Microsoft are really pushing the indie scene on the 360. They even helped garage games port TGE/TSE over to the 360. Surely it couldn't be that hard to persuade them to allow max to be ported. Of course there is still the matter of obtaining a licence for each game you make so I don't imagine seeing many max games on 360 Arcade.
On the same note the Linux based GP2x is desperate for developers if Max could be ported for that too.

well, right here on this board somebody told us sometime ago he was able to install the xbox linux version, then run a bmax app in an autrun mode. So it that was true (I think it was) then it's easily possible to create games at least for the old xbox. Not sure how open-source and programmerfriendly the linux system on ps3 will be, but if they don't want people to access it then it may be pretty hard to hack. Nevertheless I am sure somebody will hack it the sooner or later. I doubt selling games will be possible/legal without to pay some fees.

Right now I remember even for the Jaguar there was an unofficial coder interface.

Are you aware you can buy a linux kit(hd, and monitor out for higher res display) for the ps2 for the very low price of 200 us dollers?
It includes a full blown ps2 sdk and full docs to the sdk.

I said at the time that it was just a prototype for what was to come in the ps3 and it appears i was right.(even a broken clock theory panning out)

How cool will it be when the day comes that you can type, "SetGraphicsDriver MaxPs3Driver()" into max and it not throw an exception :)

I doubt anything much will happen. PS2 was a joke even if you were a registered developer you got almost no support and had to use a SDK that was 2 builds behind the current one to have any chance of stabililty.

Made Darkbasics record look stellar. PS2 didn't even have a working video codec for several years.

Sony basicly suck, not that I wouldn't develop for any console that was legal to do so. wonder is sony will waive QA and licencing fees for indies who's games they want, as well as loan out the dev kits.

Garage games actually got to launch the 360 to the media at their game developer conference. Which was pretty cool for anyone developing with torque who went there. All the big gaming press were there checking out torque on the 360.

Apparently porting torque to 360 was a lot easier than xbox and the whole xbox live path was streamlined too.

They should just make a simple windows wrapper for 360 that indies can use if they want a lot of games though.

Unfortunately Marble Blast Ultra did so well on Live arcade that Garage Games are changing the pricing for a 360 torque license. Previously it was $10,000 to develop a indie title with torque. Their Marketing guy Jay moore said:



they sold over 60,000 copies of marble blast ultra about a month, and got to number 10 on xbox live overall, not bad when you consider the other 9 games were commercial ones.

February 10th there was a article on gamasutra about Xbox live arcade, with some interesting figures for indie games.



Since then Marble Blast ultra was reported having gotten almost 60% conversion rate, according to garage games.

There's multi-page article in the March edition of EDGE magazine about Xbox Live Arcade. Very interesting - sounds like a pretty sweet pie to get your hands on. Even the likes of Jeff Minter have jumped on the band-wagon.

Wait a minute... Jeff Minter involved in a potentially lucrative gaming platform? WTF's up with that!? He must have forgotten to take his 'pills'. :P

Considering the 360's bios features Minter's music visualizer, consider him already on the bandwagon...

As for Linux on Playstation3, best news ever!

I think it's safe to assume BlitzMax will be there with bells on.

Nope, that's the best news ever :)

Such is possible.
Until we look at the cost of dev kits.

I'd much rather develop something really awesome for PC that is good enough to cause a mass migration, thus finally destroying the irritating mob that is Sony.

Our Linux kit for PlayStation2 was little more than the price of the hd/keyboard/mouse you got with it. It contained documentation for all the hardware and from what I can tell setup only a small layer of resistance to hitting the hardware directly. The biggest problem is the only audience you have for any development is other PS2 Linux users, where as Sony are talking about Linux being preinstalled on the PS3 HD.

PS3 + Linux is the closest thing to a resurrection of home computing I can think of since it's death in 1994.

Yeah, but I was talking about the XBox Live Arcade bandwagon, specifically.

Well, there was the Net Yaroze (PSX)...

A mate who does PS2 programming says those PS2 linux kits are pretty restrictive on what you can achieve and you can't utilise the PS2's absolutely. Certainly no way near as bad as the Net Yaroze though, which was very limited.

I've used the PS2 Linux for about an hour at University and I had no idea how to use this at all. To be honest, I was really quite lost. The Gamecube Dolphin dev kit I played with for a bit longer, but still, I found that also pretty tough to work with, these dev kits though are certainly not something you can pick up and go with straight away unless you know quite a lot about programming, or are willing to sit for a long while without seeing much results.

It would be great if the next gen consoles REALLY did support programming that wasn't hampered in someway and also came as standard out the box, like you could do with the C64, Amstrad and Speccy. It really is stifling creativity in games.

I'd be amazed if BMax came to the PS3, I'd certainly be there. :)

Such is NOT possible. Well, it is, but only technically. Everyone is forgetting the PS3 uses a new brand of CPU, which would require a massive core (bcc.exe) extension and patches throughout the entire module base. And we couldn't do it ourselves because bcc.exe is locked up tight. =] I've tried =]

Sure it would require a new pipeline, but then bmax already has four pipelines(X86,MacOs,Linux,And Intel Mac) so it's not so far fetched.

Marks already experimented with bmax multi-threading so it could be his next big project after max3d. ThreadMax, then BmaxPs3.

Then the amiga Mark 2 is born and the world rejoices.

From my understanding the PS3 processor uses a standard PowerPC instruction set and some fancy DMA instructions in order to communicate code and data to its 7 coprocessors which will require specialized programming expertise that will be of concern/interest to the physics and graphics engines/APIs, not a program's main logic.

from what I understand it has 8 coprocessors but yields aren't high enough, so you will only be able to use 7.

I wonder if they will patch the system to allow 8 when manufacturing yields are higher.

I thought the 8th coprocessor is reserved incase if one of the others failed... Well either way, Id love to see a Bmax game on PS3!!

Blimey, that's a bold statement if ever I heard one. Does 'Linux on PS3' really mean that the end-user will have access to it, or is it all going to be hidden and used for internal tasks?

It's hard to say, Ken Kutaragi comes across as a bit of a loon at the best of times.

However their track record in these matters includes supplying the Yaroze on PS1 and a full working Linux on PS2 to encourage homebrew development and use in educational institutions so I'm pretty hopeful myself.

I personally think Blitz for consoles would be very nice however I have serious doubts as to if Blitz Research would be willing to employ any more staff to help out, they don’t even have enough stuff to write proper documentation for Blitz MAX. I think Blitz on consoles is a nice idea, possibly a brilliant idea, and one that could fly but I doubt it’ll ever become a reality.

I doubt that BRL can afford the cost of developing a console version without charging huge ammounts like garage games. Garage games are going to be charging $25,000 per indie title for 360 soon, and $50,000 for per commercial title.

MS will actually forward $10,000 against royalties for indie games they want, and waive QA testing and loan out dev kits.

Then you also had some ports on an Atari 2600 that some guy did... If any of you ever visited 3D Realms' website, you may have noticed an old cartridge port of Duke Nukem Forever (yeah, completely different topic here), but I'm quite sure that if you tried, an Atari 2600 port of a Blitz game could be somewhat easy if you program a 2D game. Maybe a basic 3D game, just as long as it's not too intensive, it may work. Check this out:

3D Realms Port of DNF on an Atari 2600

whats the latest on gp2x and blitzMAX?
it sounded promising but from what i found on the search its not as yet.

BTW according to the devs from my old work the linux kit for PS2 wasn't a full blown PS2 SDK as used by licenced game developers. It was mostly just a toy for people to play with and didn't let you get at the heart of the system and make anything competitive. It also wasn't supported properly by sony and full of bugs, no surprise really when you consider the bug ridden low quality tools and libs that licenced developers had to use. Lets hope they did better this time around.

Apparently the Linux distro included with the PS3 will be Yellow Dog:



http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/products/ydl/delivery.shtml

Still no mention of how it's implemented. Let's hope it will be possible to run BMax on it.

Ahem, are you forgetting the NET YAROZE?!

believe XNA is supposed to cover this quiet nicely. As for bmax on PS3. Sounds intriguing. Wish the linux IDE wasn't so sub-par compared to the windows one :<. The GDK maxGUI ide seemed to hold promise though last time i checked it.

according to Garage games Jeff Tunnel the a 360 live arcade game typicaly costs $100,000 - $300,000 to develop. And almost $100 was required just for QA testing Marble Blast Ultra which cost in the higher end of that range to develop.

Thats Jeff Tunnel talking, and Allthough the torque engine is mostly based on outdated tech the cost of developing seems quite prohibitive even without buying their engine.

Not Sure where his game dev blog is, but he has several articles about the state of Live arcade development.

ok here's the blog about Live arcade development

http://www.makeitbigingames.com/

I'm not sure why they'd go to the trouble of adding a sizeable harddrive plus linux o/s and then turn around and not allow the user to make use of it. It seems that they want the whole system to be as multimedia as possible and to provide all the features of a real computer, which they wont be able to do if they censor the whole thing and hide the o/s away out of sight. It'll have to have a regular linux desktop and all the o/s functionality, I don't see why you wouldn't be able to develop regular software on it, blitz or otherwise. Since Max already compiles for linux I don't think it'd be a big issue to make it work on the PS3. What would be nice is they have a nice efficient and complete OpenGL driver which, itself, is the part of the o/s that distributes the processing and handles the other processors, leaving the main Max app to run on that main cpu.

BMax only support Linux on x86. Yellowdog Linux is PPC based.
You can't run x86 linux executables on PPC linux, so... not gonna work.

@xisior - BlitzMax supports G4/G5 PPC based machines, so I'm sure that it is possible to rework the pipeline.

Since they got intel mac to compile when it was originally ppc i dont see why it'd be difficult to make a ppc linux compiler.

Except the PS3 is Cell based.

Looks like it's happening,

http://www.playstation.com/ps3-openplatform/index.html

with a downloadable boot cd and instructions for installing redhat on some ftp site, goodness.. what next, MacOS support???

Pretty sure the nvidia chip will be unavailable so no polygons but 2d emulator fans I'm sure will rejoice.