how you people know all this stuff anyway?

webbs · Post by **webbs** » Wed Jul 07, 2004 11:09 pm

I was just wondering how the people who wrote the first tutorials at ps2dev learnt how to program for the ps2? did they get documentation for each of the processors and piece all the information together? or did someone buy an official ps2dev kit from sony and share the information with everyone else?

Post by **blackdroid** » Wed Jul 07, 2004 11:16 pm

I cant speak for everyone, but the pdf's that came with ps2linux helped alot.

Post by **mrbrown** » Thu Jul 08, 2004 1:33 am

Presumably the people who wrote the first tutorials found on the web used an illegal copy of the official SDK as their reference. I'm referring mostly to information on the vector units and GS, where there was no other information besides the official SDK documentation. Other areas of the PS2 were discovered by reverse engineering PS2 games. This was long before the PS2Linux Kit arrived in Japan.

mr bob · Post by **mr bob** » Thu Jul 08, 2004 8:12 am

I was wondering why older versions of ps2lib often had the prefix of sce on many functions. Is this at all related to what mrbrown was saying? I'm not implying that anything is directly ripped out, but its possible that wherever the knowledge came from (including reverse engineering PS2 games) originally used sony libs. Things seem to have built up naturally (and legally) after knowledge from napalm, soopadoopa, and dreamtime was shared.

Post by **blackdroid** » Thu Jul 08, 2004 8:40 am

I actually dont remember where gustavo got his info from, but I do remember that at one time someone wanted the sce prefixes so ps2lib could serve as a replacement for sony's.

Post by **mrbrown** » Thu Jul 08, 2004 8:54 am

I was one of the main ones (can't remember who else) who advocated using the sce prefixes for functions that are direct replacements of sce functions. The reason was that the functions were 1:1 replacements, so what was the point of changing the name? If there was a legal issue, the issue would be with the code used, not the name. This was especially true in projects like ps2drv, where all we are doing is writing import libraries :).

AFAIK, the original ps2lib was reversed from one or more game and demo disks that shipped with full debug symbols. I don't believe gustavo used anything from any official SDKs - simply because it wasn't necessary when Sony libs shipped with debug symbols. About the use of the official SDK, I was responding to the question about tutorials, where for example one of those tuturials had listings of VU instruction mnemonics and other pieces of info that couldn't be found in any game or public website.