I Await Sony’s Cease and Desist - PS3 Dev Kit
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- čas přidán 26. 04. 2024
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We got hands-on with a Playstation 3 development kit and an early prototype of the PS Vita. I promise this one will be interesting.
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CHAPTERS
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0:00 Intro & History
2:53 The IO
3:57 The insides :o
9:07 Does it still work?
11:00 Life is Strange dev build
12:19 Little Big Planet dev build
13:09 Xbox games... on a PS3
14:22 The PS Vita prototype - Věda a technologie
I've spent 15 years in game test.
The fake free space option is so users can emulate available free space conditions - such as what would happen if you attempt to overwrite a save file. Some save files would grow in size, so if you had no free space, your previous save file might be corrupted if the game doesn't check to see if there's enough free space first.
Same deal for DLC.
Love comments like this! Extra context is nice
Awesome informative comment
Thx
As a game tester I can confirm this person is on point with how the fake free save space setting works. We have a whole task set devoted to these specific fake conditions and save state tests.
thank you for your service
I worked at Sony through all those years, so there's a ton I could say....
The silver devkit shown was not the first. The CEB-1000 was the first and it was much bigger. So big in fact that it had forklift skids built-in.
The devkit you have was designed to be rack mounted, however most developers put them vertically on the floor under their desks. This resulted in a lot of them being destroyed by accidentally kicking the plugged in front USB cord for the controller.
That Vita devkit was very early and only a few dozen were made. It was pretty much solely designed for early evaluation of control schemes and was instrumental in cementing back touch as a hardware feature. That's why it had no significant processing of it's own and relied on a PS3 devkit.
Looking at the internal design and the fact that it has a Web server made me think it was made to be rack mounted.
@@Muscleduck It's much more than just a web server... it was a bit more like a BMC in a server in that it could power on/off the PS3 as well as handle all the debugging and profiler support.
@@alexrosenberg_tube Linus used the words Web server, but I assume it's more like a Dell IDRAC. Remote management.
CEB-1000 looks a lot like what a first devkit would look like. Reminds me of the Sony GS cube and old PS2 prototypes a bit. (Also appropriately codenamed Shreck lol)
Tell us something more! It's so interesting
It was a surprise to see my work on the Gears of War 3 PS3 build being shown off here. I know it's not the focus but I'm glad you showed it off. I put a lot of effort getting that running and the story in itself is wild.
Wish I got credited for that one, but considering I put it up publicly for everyone it's alright. Thanks a ton regardless, because now people will stop calling it fake.
Well, do go on! What's the story?
id also like to hear any tidbits you would like to share about your trials & tribulations with this! so cool my dude, also heck those guys who called your work fake.
Hmm interesting
@Von Hassen @Greippi10 back in 2011, a group known as Xbox Underground breached into multiple developers, primarily Microsoft and Epic Games and stole a ton of data, then put the data up for all to grab.
In it was source code to Gears of War 3, Project Nano, etc. However, over time it got fragmented and altered by people. Eventually I showed up, well after this happened, and learned of what was in it. Source code didn't really interest me, the pre-built one for PS3 by Epic on the other hand did.
Because most of the people handling this were 360 people, most didn't have access to a PS3 Devkit, or know how to handle the data built. After a few months of trying things eventually I got progress. This progress was only achieved after getting source code to run on a machine at all (it wouldn't work originally either, so 2 versions for PS3 exist but only one is official).
Part of the problem was getting it to run standalone on the devkit. Normally Epic's build process makes it run from a host pc over network and I did not want that to be the case, so i spent the extra effort to make it run without it. Unfortunately it was designed to be a disc-based game, but lacked the disc-based code to install to the hdd, so it would crash on boot. As a result of this issue I took a gamble and made it an HDD game through some resigning and restructuring of files, specifically to make it boot from the directory it would normally install from. This ended up working and skipped over the missing disc-based code.
What also sucks is that the devkit is REQUIRED. A normal retail machine thats modded or a testkit cant run it due to lack of extra ram, so this is a very key thing to focus on. Without the extra 256mb of ram, this runs out of memory on boot and crashes. There's also no real way to reduce it.
However, since it's unfinished, and it was built at a time where BINK2 video wasn't quite implemented yet, some FMVs dont play, but some do (BINK1), but also it was built at a particularly annoying timeframe where menu transitions were broken, hence the need for the keyboard. if you were to hit campaign and select the mission normally youd just hit a black screen and nothing would happen.
It's an unstable mess of a prototype of Gears of War 3, but it's special to me because it's the only one Epic themselves ever made, and it was made purely as an engine test from what Epic said (after I put footage up, asking for answers).
There's a good article on Kotaku about it, as well as a great video by Modern Vintage Gamer if you're interested. This whole thing is the crown piece of my work in-industry, and in my hobby work. The circumstances needed to have gotten this running are absolutely ridiculous.
I can keep going but we'd be here too long. It's wild, I didn't care about all the other goodies from that security breach all those years ago. This one little nugget of a prototype build was all I cared about and now everyone else can share a piece of it. Once emulation works a little better it should also be usable there without a devkit need.
@@PixelButts yo dude, for real thank you for taking the time to post this little write-up for us man! I only found out about the whole extent of the Xbox underground leaks/hacks, & subsequent full timeline following it within the scene, like within the last 3 months (peep the *** at the bottom of my reply, I could not recommend it enough)!
I was clueless when it was happening, the closest I got was my friend's uncle managed to get a Xbox dev-kit, which I recently found out was from one of the first batches of bare boards they found in the e-waste facility (one of the OG xb underground guys started selling them to randos around the time the scene started to spiral out of control - legally speaking). But I was totally clueless beyond 'bro you have a JTAG!!!1' & seeing him host modded lobbies on his normal modded Xbox at the time.
As someone who basically only became a software engineer because I owned an OG 60gb PS3 (CECHA01) & I happened to randomly stumbled upon the homebrew/custom firmware scene when I was 13 (after seeing the linux/install OS menu option in the early PS3 dashboard & googling it), hearing your story warms my heart in a very special way. You & your work are the perfect representation of all the best aspects of the hacker mindset IMO.
Once again, thank you for sharing & for being the way you are! I am definitely going to check out the Modern Vintage Gamer video & that article. I subscribed to your channel too just in case you ever feel like putting anything out, about this or literally anything you deem worthy of posting because I know it would probably be a banger too lol
*** : (Darknet Diaries: Ep 45 & 46, anyone who reads this should definitely watch it. He interviews so many of the people who were instrumental to the Xbox underground saga, with a heavy emphasis on the Xbox side of things. It is seriously the best butterfly effect type story I have ever heard, IMO. Which is another reason PixelButt's story is that much more enthralling to me)
Wow, what a flashback! I was lead programmer on a team contracted to port a PC/Xbox game to PS3. Took two months just to tear it down and be able to compile, then the long slog of making it...y'know, work. We got 'er done, despite the company that actually contracted us having serious doubts that it would ever happen. We had a couple of those larger kits, and our QA team had test kits that were essentially retail kits with a little extra memory (and, of course, no copy protection).
We also picked up a couple of Vita devkits a little later, when they were actual Vitas attached to a base unit, similar to PSP kits (which I'd also worked with). Sony likes their kits big, to say the least. PS5 kits oddly remind me of those big Tron dropships.
How big are the PS5 Pro Kits?
@@saladien9987 Find out in 15 years
@@saladien9987 There are no PS5 Pro kits (not as far as I know, not yet). But the PS5 Devkits are more square-shaped with rounded edges - they ditched the flat "server-style" design this time around. It's like a foot-and-a-half in length and width, and a little over half a foot tall. You can google them to see an image, it's the one with the V-shaped cutout for ventilation (or perhaps it's just for appearance).
Wow, your word flashback makes me feel really old, as I remember typing code on a trs 80 and saving(or attempting to save) to a cassette drive. The PS3 was my 6th generation console, beginning with an Intellivision.
What game?
The PS3 Cell Processor was a shitload of horsepower in the day. We ran a Linux variant and nettools on it to just get an idea of what it was capable of. It was stunning.
I did some intensive internet searching a while back to see if it was possible to compare the cell to a modern CPU. From what I could determine, the PS3 CPU is close to a Ryzen 3 2200G (but with the same power spread across more cores). In 2005, that was absolutely insane for the time. Unfortunately, almost nothing was able to use its full power as the cores didn't "talk" to each other.
@@joshjlmgproductions3313 It's so weird how the PS4/X1 has weaker CPUs than the PS3/X360.
@@MaxIronsThird I think the X1 CPU is more powerful than the X360, but yeah, the PS4 was a downgrade from the PS3 in multiple ways.
@@joshjlmgproductions3313 Xbox360 uses a variation of the Cell processor.
@@MaxIronsThird From what I've read, it uses a different CPU designed by IBM.
I worked at EA Burnaby in 2010. The asset management team said they were 40,000 CAD each. Developers working on online games would need two sometimes.
No wonder EA started cramming microtransactions down the consumers throat not too long after this
Can you fix BF2042? XD
@@chintan3957 with PS3 Dev kits?
Tried googling information, couldn't really understand what exactly EA Burnaby is. Is it another name for EA Vancouver, or what?
(also, what was your position?)
@@JudeTheCZcamsPoopersubscribe do you have any idea the roi ea has with their annual games
I'm a Senior Game Tester and I worked with many Devkits when I was at Ubisoft, I remember the Nitro devkits for DS, the 3DS, the Wii U, the Xbox 360, and the Vita one with an official HDMI output, that was awesome because the final product didn't have one.
Thanks for showing us this amazing PS3 devkit
how did you become a tester or get into the industry??
@@shortyglh03 after my computer sciences diploma I joined Ubisoft Casablanca as a QC Tester in 2008, I wanted to do Sound Design but It didn't work, they closed in 2016, I moved on to another smaller studio since then, always in the game :)
I'm a person who really loves tampering with whatever is in front of me, these devkits are the best way to see the behind the scenes of the console/games and some stuff that was later removed on the final revision
The absolute best thing about these kits is how they would build up static charge and shock you when you touched the case
I push my wife around in a wheelchair everywhere we go. The fing rubber wheels make it so anything I touch shocks me. I hesitate like a lab rat anytime I have to touch anything
@@NeoTechni There are solutions for that. Either a anti static strip that touches the ground or maybe special wheels
That "What If" Life is Strange build is very cool! I contributed to the fundraiser campaign to get it preserved a few years ago. Has loads of differences to the final game as well.
Wait the devbuild is publicly available? Can you point me in the right direction?
Does that also mean the devkit is from Dotnod?
@@dustojnikhummer The build is available, yes. This kit in particular I don't think came from Dontnod, it was loaded up with a variety of development and prototype builds that have been released in the past few years.
Most of the builds also work on emulator and modded retail consoles, with the exception of Gears of War 3, that needs the extra RAM this console has to function properly.
@@dildojizzbaggins6969 What the hell you smoking dude
@@max2themax Yeah it's pretty bad lol
@@max2themax LiS1 is either "love" or "hate" game. There is no in between.
10:37 completely agree, shocked at all of the straight forward and very functional options in there. Having "under the hood" options available (even buried into a "use at own risk" menu) is extremely useful.
I think it would be kinda cool if they sold a different version with all that unlocked for the people that would want it. Maybe add a small upcharge or something. Cause I would pay like 50 bucks extra to have all that stuff readily available on my console
@@timnone2924 then no one buys games for ever ahahah
@@fabiosequeira8844 And that's a bad thing why?
@@Johninadelaide2022 Because that's where 3/4th of the money comes from
@@mattsnotbanned yea, like setting the fan speed to 100 on a superslim. Not many know how powerful those fans ACTUALLY were. I could feel the exhaust airflow 10 feet away from the console at 100% fan speed. That thing went brrrrrrrr
Used a lot of PS2/3 dev kits back in the day. By the late 00s most proprietary game engines started running on PC as well as consoles so a lot of testing could be done on your workstation. But occasionally QA would find a platform specific bug and you’d need to boot up a dev kit. Usually either GPU or performance related.
like a pc backend for the game engine?
As a Life is Strange fan, that dev build was absolutely interesting.
yea the whole nathan thing was weird and interesting.
It was indeed very interesting.. And very broken. :P
Looks like initially they called it "what if", probably because of the choice making system in the game.
Same with LBP
@@wadewilson6628 damn bro so cool and edgy
I remember those. they would generate quite a lot of heat and they would bring a whole circuit down in the studio when they were plugged in the wrong one. the extra ram made it quite nice to debug the OOM errors testers would get on closer-to-retail Test kits.
Obvious PSA is obvious, but don't clock on the fake LTT link posted by the spammer.
@@prerunnerwannabe Unfortunately, common sense is not as common as one
would like so the PSA is necessary
With a 1,000 watt PSU, that doesn’t surprise me.
I'm pretty sure the main reason the dev kit dropped in price so much was that by 2009 (when it dropped to $2k) it was just a retail PS3 with some extra RAM and connections.
Correct, when I worked in the industry, I had a fat PS3 with dev options that could do 95% of what this one could do. It was enough for most companies, and you get a couple test models that were even cheaper but could load your games.
These days, you can flash a PS3 retail kit into a devkit
fun fact... there is a "devkit" out there that can be installed on certain model ps3s if they were jailbroken and have most if not all of those dev options
How would one do that
@@kennydeane with a fair amount of technical know how, a PS3 console that is able to be jailbroken(not all of them are), the ability to take apart and put a console back together, and a special flasher tool to flash the cpu. Essentially there was a certain firmware of the PS3 console where you had complete access to do essentially whatever you wanted with the console. Then in firmware update 3.56, this option was removed. Jailbreaking allows the firmware to be downgraded to 3.55 which allows full access to the machine and you can install basically whatever you want on it.
@@matthewashbaugh9254 Your info became outdated 2-3 years ago. If your PS3's minimum version is lower than 3.56, you can now use BGToolSet to install this without hardware tinkering.
The og 60gb fat PS3 with the four ports. Pre 3.55 firmware if I'm correct
@@ItzJigz187 can even jailbreak a ps3 slim iirc, just not the "super slim" that had the sliding cover.
I was working for Sony / Psygnosis at the time the PS1 came out. The dev kits at that point were two full length PCI cards that plugged into a PC, replete with DMA / IRQ jumpers - they were a bit of bugger to set up.
I must have been spoiled to be working for Sony in the PS2 era, with the big old dev tool PS2. Step/breakpoint debugging on hardware like that was real handy.
The ps1 was easier to program for than both the ps2 and ps3 right?
@@califaern3sto I wouldn’t say that. The ps2 had more memory, more sophisticated dev tools. Ps2 did have more interesting architecture,
Source: trust me bro
Wow psygnosis. Now that's a name I have not heard for decades.
This was one of the coolest and most interesting episodes I've seen in ages! I want a follow-up episode that really did into some more of that weird dev software on this thing!
Best video from Linus in years in my mind. I absolutely love content like this!
I had one of those next to my desk for years as a game dev.
Alongside the Gamecube, Nintendo DS, Wii, Xbox 360 and 3DS dev kits.
Yeah i needed a lot of space.. which i didnt have.
The way these kits worked, was that you were essentially streaming the game from your PC, onto the devkit and could debug live on it. The kit was basically a Server and a console all-in-one, so when you crashed, you could dump the entire memory stack onto the server.
I had half of those on my desk. I joked that I had a bigger desk than the CEO of the company I worked for. It was fun, and fortunately, I didn't have to deal with that model, I got the next generation one that looked like a regular fat PS3, with dev capabilities.
It was nice to work with, since otherwise, I had to deal with the Wii devkit, and it was a love hate relationship.
@@florentcastelli do you still develop games? How is it now?
@@mrjellow I do not, but when it comes to PS4/5 or Xboxes, retail hardware works just fine in most cases. Things have changed a lot. I do not have any knowledge of the current Nintendo devkits.
@@florentcastelli Interesting. Not sure the gaming industry is a nice place to work though.
@@mrjellow it's hit or miss. The US gaming industry is a shitshow, but I'm in Canada and we have much better labor protection
Just gotta mention how I love how the way the ads are in this channel it doesn't feel intrusive just straight to the point and on unlike the minute long ones, really appreciated
That same debug menu is also in a cfw / jailbroken ps3! Basically after installing a cfw, it unhides that debug menu in any ps3 console the cfw us running on.
I played around with nearly all those options in debug menu. Its pretty cool
Linus and his team always find the coolest stuff
;)
They have a huge audience so get lots of good opportunities from the community and connections
Linus how can you live without playing Life is strange 2 ?
So do LGR & Gamers Nexus..others too I'm sure. Love seeing cool niche hardware 👍
@@boydsmith2732 for real, love the series
In 2008 I had an internship at a game studio that was using these PS3 Dev kits. One day some guy who came by to talk to someone was leaning on the side of the desk next to mine and somehow he accidentally pushed the dev kit out of the desk sliding and falling to the ground where it made such a loud and dense metallic sound with some rattle sounds from the inside of it. Oh my....we witnessed the soul of that guy leave in front of us when he realized he just dropped a 40K device and everyone around heard it knew exactly what just happened :D Thanks for the video. For years I wondered what was inside one of those dev kits as they are so heavy and big. It was surreal using one of those dev kits to be able to test out and see my own work inside a game engine. Very cool experience.
What happened to the guy after that?
@@Wubsy96 They hid his remains inside the huge dev kit
@@dazednconfused31337 Rest in PS3.
@@Wubsy96 The person in question was from another department and was gone from the company after the show was over. He knew he screwed up an there were multiple witnesses. But I have no knowledge of what if anything happened to him.
@@froctavio Thank you very much for the response! I hope he managed to bounce back after that....
Ah the good ol’ days of video-game development. These really take me back. Now you’ve gotten me thinking about all the hassles of life working with those ancient kits and tools (not just for PlayStation 3 but for most platforms, especially Nintendo, who forced us to use CodeWarrior as an IDE with constant license updates) and how glad I am we have mostly moved past that as an industry.
For my work as a senior graphics programmer on Final Fantasy XV at Square Enix, we just used just a single instance of Visual Studio for all 3 platforms (PlayStation */Xbox *, and Windows), and not only have the tools been mostly unified, so have the API’s we have to use-similar graphics function calls and similar shader languages made it fairly easy to write the same thing for each platform. But back in the day, every company (Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft) wanted to do their own thing, not just with hardware but with their coding environments and SDK API’s-it was painful.
Ah the bad ol’ days of video-game development.
I'd love to hear more!
@@sugarhieroglyph Which part?
@@Video-Game-OST-HQ about final fantasy xv development. What did you contribute?
@@sugarhieroglyph I did the shadows, clouds, dynamic resolution, and lots of optimizations. I also worked on the toolchains to improve texture quality throughout the whole game massively.
I used to act on Japanese TV, movies, and commercials, so they let me do motion capture. I did the motions captures for a lot of NPC’s and a bunch of miscellaneous motions for the main characters (except Prompto). The one you will see most often is Noctis’ sitting animation. When you sit next to the bird statues and Noctis puts his hand on his right leg and his elbow on his left leg, that’s me.
Actually someone made a Wiki page about all of this.
[…]://gfaqsff.fandom.com/wiki/L_Spiro
As you can see there I was also responsible for the double-sided cover in the initial release.
@@Video-Game-OST-HQ wow! That's so cool, i recently bought the game on steam for my laptop but have only played for an hour or so, i like it a lot though. I'll look out for that pose you mentioned! About how many people worked on the game? How long did it take you guys to make it? What was it like in the starting days? Was there any gameplay ideas or features that you guys removed? Sorry, i just find this super interesting! Thank you for sharing! :)
It's always AWESOME to see these early game dev builds
I wish companies would should more of their games in these very early stages
Back in the day I remember frustrated devs trying to ask other devs for help about these wonky HW configs while trying to not violate their NDA's. It was equal parts frustrating and hilarious. We all knew it had to be PS3's (or PS2's when that was the thing) but they couldn't admit it.
2:31
4:13 4:21 4:30 4:38
7:25
First Xbox, now this, I'd love to see what other prototype or dev kit units you guys can get your hands on :)
Personally I would really like to see a wii dev kit.
@@matatouile Nah, that would attract Nintendo's lawyers
@@aleksandrtrohhatsov3383 Hard for Games and ModernVintageGamer has shown dev kits from Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony and no legal issues occurred. It’s probably the “active” systems that’ll get into legal trouble, like the Switch, PS5, and Xbox Series systems.
@@Blood-PawWerewolf LTT's relationship with Nintendo is rocky as is. Don't think Linus would want to anger them in any way XD
@@Blood-PawWerewolf Ninatendo's ninja's will jump on anything.
Considering how balls to the walls the dev kits of early 2000's consoles are, imagine the kind of dev boards they are making for current consoles now. I would love to see what a nintendo switch dev kit, or PS5 dev kit looks like.
Me tooo
much less extreme and useful. look at the recent xbox dev kit on the channel, practically the same as release console
PS5 Devkit images leaked back in the day.. had *ridiculous* styling, with _huge_ intake vents on top in the shape of a "V" (roman numeral for 5)
360 Dev Kits were literally just 360s which makes sense considering the console is bulky anyway.
xbox is basically the same and switch is basically the same also most nintendo consoles (with some exceptions) had devkits that were basically just like the console
Awesome that you guys could get your hands on this!
You dont see these dev machines too often.
Devkits are the dream machines of people who like to tamper with stuff (like me) my fat ps3 died bc of ylod but it was all modded up
.... That psvita dev method makes so much sense for how cludgy the games were. The devs really stood no chance
Such a shame
Yeah no wonder ps vita didn't succeed. 😀
@@nebulous962 psvita just too ambitious and waay too ahead.. it has all the control scheme you can imagine.. it graphically way to good for its form factor and for the cost of the game.. compared to simple cost effective 3/NDS
Lol, that PS VITA Dev Kit was surely very early. Didnt they eventually become similar to the retail unit but with more features and connectivity
That's a very very early prototype, they had proper kits later on
I've been working in gaming for 15 years and to this day, this kit was the biggest pain in the ass I've ever had to deal with
well in what time frame would a ps3 clock in compared to others?
Why?
Same could be said developing games themselves to work on this unorthodox tech 😂 just ask Bethesda
@@MJ-uk6lu the hardware was unconventional and was unlike anything that anyone would have had any experience with and also Sonys Development Tools software was unintuitive and difficult to use.
@@nickhowatson4745 Isn't that's like exactly every other console until they just gave up and started to use computer parts?
I'll admit, this is definitely one of the most interesting and entertaining videos I've ever seen on LTT and it technically isn't about computers. Great job guys!
" technically isn't about computers " WTF are you talking, that thing is literally built like a server, it is a computer in all sense of the word.
@@monad_tcp Proof consoles are the children of PCs, entirely built, coded, developed, tested, designed, then finally sent to production.
I saw a PS4 version of this back in the days at Ubisoft Montreal. It was in a very plain metal box and screwed down on a desk with special screws. The box was plain metal color and only had a few holes in it to let the wires and controler come out of it.
Your version is much more advanced than the 1st version of that PS4 we had. I think we eventually had new models along the way but that was very very very early models.
Cheers... from Montréal, Canada ;)
"Imagine if they shipped that kind of hardware to end users"
I wouldn't want to be a tech support for Sony.
I wouldn't want to pay $50k for it either :p
I still have my original "Fat Boy" 60GB but I replaced the optical drive (old one had lasers that died), I put CFM on it, re-pasted both chips, 500GB HDD and all my disc games installed on it with other emulation. It has been one of my favorite projects tbh.
Think I will have to be doing that to mines soon. The disc drive has issues reading PS2 and 1 games, but PS3 works fine and games work fine when in-game. Likely the head jamming.
@@Hunnter2k3 My friend at the time had the same kind of console I had but his GPU died in it. He bought a slim and gave me the old one for parts. In that aspect I was lucky.
I have one as well. A look of work but it's my primary PS2.
I heard that there's noticeable input lag when playing PS2 games with the fat model over HDMI. Is this true?
@@psycomutt I heard that there's noticeable input lag when playing PS2 games with the fat model over HDMI. Is this true?
I remember working with the original grey box devkits on one of the ps3 launch titles. They were super loud, and we had a ton of them. During the day you'd practically have to shout over all the fan noise. When we finally switched to these obelisk type ones the difference was night and day.
Later I also got a chance to work on a psvita launch title, though I never saw those earlier devkits. We did most of our development on ps3 and emulated the touch surface via mouse cursor/clicks until we got what amounted to a retail unit with a devkit dongle.
Thank you so much for showing this to us. Such a special video and so damn cool. Definitely boarded the Nostalgia train!
I remember in college we had some of these. When we had our class on embedded systems programming, they gave us a strict warning not to bring in any discs or flash drives, or we were immediately expelled from the school.
Modern Vintage Gamer has a great video as to why GoW3 is on there. TLDR it's so Epic could test features for cross-compatibility.
Thats so cool, what did they teach you guys in that class with these machines?
Also, what do you mean why Gow3 is on there? They didnt talk about gow3 in the video here afaik
@@MONKEYDUDE2701 yes they did talk about it in the video, watch it again. Linus plays it.
@@martuuk8964 oh he means Gears of War 3 hahaha as a lifetime playstation player i thought he means God of War 3 😂
@@MONKEYDUDE2701 Yes, I meant Gears of War 3, forgot that it also stands for God of War 3... too similar.
Pretty much taught us how different it is from x86 programming. Difference in endianness, architectural differences (sub processors and SPU event queues), and graphics / peripheral handling.
This thing was a powerhouse in its heyday. The fact that they were using supercomputers to test the Cybercode feature for Eye of Judgment before release, and that the military used these for compute clusters really said something.
@@me0262 damn thats so cool, what university did you go to?
I wish my university, the Technical University of Hamburg would teach us such cool things 🥲
The foot switch thing brings back some memories. Back in the Microsoft DOS days, there was a program / add in board, called Periscope, that had a push button that would throw you into DOS debug so you could tell where your ONE running program, no threading back in those days, was locked up. Man do I feel old...
6:41 Damn I want some field programmable Gatorades now
Me too
I did QA in the game industry for a while and I remember running on 360 devkits. It really was wild to see how they looked nothing like finished 360's, even well into the 360's generation, making a game for it was just more stable on the devkit. Was kinda wild and fun. Think we also had devkits for WiiU and PS3, but I don't specifically remember the PS3 one.
That "HDCP on/off" gets me every time 😀
"sEe ya lAtEr!"
How many times did you watch it?
@@eadweard. probably on floatplane too?
HDCP? 🤨
@@xehP High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection is a form of digital copy protection developed by Intel Corporation to prevent copying of digital audio and video content as it travels across connections.
Linus goes from breaking his tech to breaking the law
i think thats called good content before getting cancelled
Not really breaking the law
Anything for that sweet, sweet content.
If anything is breaching a contract and don't think they would be sued, the person that gave them the machine would be the one in trouble. At the most Sony could take the prototype back from them and I doubt they still have it, they most likely gave it back already
Lol so true
I enjoy this combination of a history lesson and how it was used. Very cool!
Considering the price of Sony products on the professional side, 50k almost seems like a good deal. They charge more than that for some monitors.
And that's exactly why the 360 was doing 10x better in the early days
The Gears of War 3 bit has an interesting back story. From what I understand, the dev environment was setup to compile versions of games for other systems automatically when a new version was uploaded to the servers. The devs literally had no idea that versions of every GoW had PS3 builds.
And that is how you make cross-platform games the right way.
As opposed to all those "We don't support Linux because its too much work".
Modern Vintage Gamer has a video all about Gears 3 on the PS3.
Real reason is not that. There are 3 Gears of War 3 PS3 builds out there. One called GearPS3[2011-05-1915.29] (which is in this video) was compiled to test the Playstation 3's abilities with the PS3 having only 256MB of RAM for gameplay, while Xbox 360 has 512. You can tell it's this build because it has the UT3 logo, and the menus are broken with controller. You have to manually enter a new map.
The other two builds which were compiled from a Gears of War 3 source code leak, which someone manually code fixed a lot of stuff (menus work, lot of back end stuff), additional maps that were scrapped added in. First version had the UT3 logo, and the other was polished with the Gears of War icons and PS3 controller buttons. The only way to make the game run faster, is to lower the RAM usage, which means decreasing all the textures to a lower amount. I have two firsts running in 2016 on my channel.
@@hubertnnn Linux Is too much work Is reality
@@EpicErrorjack Both PS3 and Xbox 360 have 512 MB of memory. The big difference is that the PS3 used a PC style Nvida GPU with 256 MB of dedicated Video memory and 256 MB of RAM while the Xbox 360 had a unified memory model with all 512 MB shared between both its cell derived CPU and ATI/AMD GPU. Most games used well under 256 MB of memory for the game state allowing the Xbox 360 a graphic advantage by allocating more than 256 MB as video memory allowing higher resolution textures or bigger/more frame buffers than possible with the PS3.
The likely reason for the poor performance with the PS3 in this case is the cell processor. Beyond a doubt the cell processor is terrible for games, being a single core processor with 7 much weaker, slower cores to back it up. We all know how easy it is to make games take advantage of multiple cores, especially slow ones, given it is 2022 and still AAA budget games suffer massive scaling issues beyond 6 cores. Microsoft was less silly and instead ordered their cell derivative processor to just have 3 big cores giving it much better, usable and more PC like general compute power even at the cost of theoretical floating point performance. Games optimised for the Xbox 360 likely expect 2-3 performance processors and so perform poorly when forced to run on a single powerful processor and 7 much weaker processors, which might not even be trivial to use to begin with. Games optimised for the PS3 often resorted to demanding physics to find a use for all the smaller cell processor cores or leveraging the bulk capacity of the Blu-ray to try and give an asset quality lead over the xbox 360's DVD.
It had nothing to do with their inability to attract developers. It had everything to do with their inability to produce functional custom chips like CELL In anything resembling quantity. That thing was $50,000, because that’s probably what it cost them to roll that chip out early on. Another reason why the PlayStation 3 was initially so expensive was that producing blue lasers in quantity was a real issue, they were costing as much as $100 apiece at the factory to roll off the line because only one in 10 was actually good. This was happening at the same time as the console launched
They have always charged out the wazoo for these, even after consoles shipped. There is always need for added hardware level debug which these consoles can provide, especially later in the release cycle and you will pay a premium for it. Sony probably aren't ever making money on these even later on. The engineering, support and tooling needed for these is done for the value it adds to the platform.
@@dorbie Yes but that doesn’t represent $50,000. What is $50,000 represents is that they only got a couple of good chips off of a wafer. This is all part of developing hardware
@@jeffkleist9679 ~10% is considered a bad failure rate, not a good production rate. I understand the competition of the console wars was fierce, but that clearly indicates they needed to step back. In the end, it appears they had another team do that since the price dropped alot. I still remember people saying that the PS3 was teh cheapest blu-ray player and it was infinitely better to buy one of those even if you had no intention oof playing games on it. I also noticed that blu-ray players dropped in price within a few months as well.
@@kohlrak The format launch of Blu-ray was rushed due to the launch of hd dvd. It’s one of the reasons why HDDVD tried to go with red lasers until the bitter end. This was an industry wide problem. Sony froze out most standalone player manufacturers. Only Samsung got one out for launch
@@jeffkleist9679 Pour one out for OpenGL vs DirectX
This is the first console devkit I've ever seen. That was a fascinating explainer video, LTT! Thanks for sharing! :D
3:35 You can divide the surround sound into 4 outputs(4.0 like). 3:50 They are a remnant of the prototype. They were used to connect multiple devices into one network without disconnecting the device from the Internet. You can make them work with pre relese firmware build.
Pls show m & kg again in addition to feet or pound. That was something I always loved about this channel 😊
It's great for all the non american viewers
it weights about 18 kilograms
Well, you should remember that in order to develop the Cell processor, Toshiba, IBM and Sony began work using POWER4 processors which was the first process to merge the PowerPC and the PowerPC AS (for the AS/400 mini computer) architectures into one.
The only computers available with POWER4 were eServer iSeries and RS/6000 1U and 2U servers, about to be awfully renamed the eServer pSeries.
I've worked with dozens of those systems running AIX and they are not desktop. Long had gone the IBM PC RT or the early RS/6000 which were basically IBM PC with steroids.
7:10 An FPGA basically lets you program how the transistors are wired together so you can make a custom processor. They are really cool!
Do you know how they actually work? I can't wrap my head around it.
I know we say program how the transistors are wired but unless the transistors are physically being altered I don't understand what that means. In the Intel lab visits they just did, he said they can physically alter the chip after it is fabricated but it requires a laser or something.
@@deoxal7947 Each logic unit is a general purpose gate, there are extra wires for programming and a few bits of control memory next to each one to select its function (whether it acts as an AND or OR gate etc although they are typically more complex than just one gate) and which neighboring units to react to. They are wired as a grid but they only respond to particular neighbours depending on the way they are configured. They also have dedicated blocks of RAM and other useful things like multipliers on board, sometimes entire CPU cores.
@@gdclemo Ah thank you
I had one of those bad boys at my desk when I worked at a company called Slant Six Games back in 2006. A studio owned by Sony that unfortunately wasn't around too long. Man this video brings me back.
Lmao Navy Seals Tac strike was my shit bro
Had me racking my brain as to where I heard of that studio from. From my fuckin' childhood
Fireteam Bravo 3 and Operation Raccoon City 💪🏻❤🍻
I remember seeing these dev units at E3 2006. I remember 10 of these bad boys stacked on top of each other and in locked glass cases. Some of the units were glitching out (virtual tennis, specifically) and some of the plastics were even melting
imagine having a ps5 development kit unit
The Hard Drive caddy mechanism is the exact same Apple was using in the Xserve and Xserve RAID back in the days... nice to see :)
Why tf was he holding a mini switch controller?
Edit: I have concluded it's some sort of prompter, press a button on the controller, moves some off screen notes, that's super cool I'd love to see the video production behind these videos.
As a former Qa tester who worked on 100s of devkits and several generations of consoles, I never had the privilege of seeing one of these behemoth ps3 devkits I did however get to see the much larger ps4 pc emulation devkits which were really cool
It really is amazing how much developers go through so we get the games that we do.
@niduoe stre tbh i feel like they should give this thing to MVG.
Yeah, and people complain non stop
And also how many hoops the manufacturers jump through to nerf the abilities of the end product so they can artificially drive up sales...
@@MrLuisMiguel1 well sometimes games are released unfinished like cyberpunk. So sometimes justified
All of that dev-stuff could be done on a decent PC, but the console manufacturers set up all those hurdles intentionally.
Dude I absolutely love these dev kit videos! Always so cool to see them in detail
You need these dev kits early on when there's no final hardware, but not EVERY dev needs it as cross platform code can bridge the gap for gameplay etc. So typically a couple of engine folks might port / optimize / rearchitect whatever code base you have. Some game title guys might optimize early on as advice for the art team solidifies and trickles out. Work doesn't all ramp up on a title at the same time, early titles might keep a foot in previous gen. Later on you can develop on systems that are a lot more like the real hardware but have a bit more ram and are unlocked. At that point dev kits can help with esoteric capabilities like detailed hardware level debugging but they might get respun, there can be a lot of additional debugging hardware in dev kits but it might not be final in the initial box. This changes a bit with every console and between companies so this might be out of date.
Aw man I always wanted to see inside one of these. I used to do QA for Sony and before they had standardized their test kits for PS3 all our testing bays were kitted with these monsters.
Edit: wow, it's so nostalgic seeing all those debug menus .
Yes! More videos with console development kits, please... This stuff is super interesting...
Oh hey! Was great helping you with this.
Cool
Ah
I totally agree with that controller battery statement. Well, the solution is slapping in a phone battery to the controller. I changed mine with some nokia batteries 8 or so years ago and didn't need to charge it since!
omg seeing UE3 commands takes me back lol, remember feeling like a hacker learning a few commands in the console haha
For reference, the reason the Reference kit has the additional HD slot is not for game stroage or redundancy it was so that developers can test builds quickly without the need to burn them to a disc. They would develop on a standard PC, copy the code to a HD drive them insert that drive into the devkit/refernce kit and run the code on that hardware to test. It makes things so much easier, not to mention faster than disc. Also, most studios did not actually develop code on the reference kit/devkit, they would only use them to test code on close to retail hardware.
More like this please! I love these dev kit breakdowns. You might consider getting in contact with ModernVintageGamer as he has a long history with console development, emulator development and console hacking.
I know they've collabbed with MVG in the past on TechQuickie a couple of times, so it's not out of the question...
The fact that you had a dev build of Life is Strange was so cool
Thanks for shouting out the MiSTer project!
If anyone's curious, in the book "Game Engine Architecture", one of Naughty Dog's engine developers talks about some of the software they used to test games on their PS3 devkits and just how much of a pain the cell architecture was to optimize for.
But they proofed how powerfull the ps3 really is
@@Galax2000 For sure, Naughty Dog has always had a history of pushing Sony hardware to it's extremes and they've made some pretty incredible stuff because of it
The Life is Strange dev build was SUPER INTERESTING. wish we could've learned more.
There is some videos out there for this build, I guess obscure gamers loaded this one up with builds that have gotten leaked. So thankfully linus wasn't risking anything with these builds as they were already archived on the internet.
@@FAKEAXIS indeed they are released already
Linus... Thank You for Providing so Much Breakdown!!! That PS3 Experiment Server RACK was a Glimpse of What is Comming in Our Future!! OR PAST...... Either Way, Love ya man!!
Very good vid. I can't wait for u to get a ps4 dev build and show that off. Keep up the good work!
Fun fact: the daughter board underneath the main daughter board is the step-daughter board. Careful though, she tends to get stuck in the dryer quite often.
"what are you doing step pcb o:"
From what I understand, the various Sony Dev Kits always remained the property of Sony and at any point they could take them back. In fact, after the project was finished, I believe they should have been returned. The developer simply rented them and access to software tools and documentation under license / NDA. It’s likely they have a unique serial number so Sony could trace who had the unit originally.
Yeah, I think MVG said something about this when exploring some dev kits.
It makes sense that they would want to keep strict tabs on who may have this rather powerful hardware, and I mean power as in knowledge too. It's these kits falling into the "wrong" hands (or right if you want to look at it another way) that could allow commercial units to be backed to run 3rd party code.
All it takes is 1 loophole, or one entry point (as we have seen) and boom.
@@DukeDudeston I have never seen a PS2 bootleg from China. I think all NES consoles bootlegs were using software emulation. I have never had a ps3 because the consoles easily get ylod just like xbox 360.
When I was trying to bootstrap my own studio, you could buy the devkit and the lease was avalible as well for smaller studios.
But purchase was limited under a lot of agreements and Sony could still retract them with partial refund, and you got money back for returning the units, hence a large part of the hefty price tag.
@@humanistwriting5477 I wonder if the high price was partially artificial, simply to encourage devs to return them for the partial refund or avoid the "non-return" cost if just leasing, especially if early when the kits weren't as common and sony would want them spread around.
@@lelsewherelelsewhere9435 oh definitely
I've been looking for this for so long, thanks man
I rescued one of these out of the skip a few years ago but I've never known what to do with it!! Ty Linus!
I remember two main things about those devices - firstly upgrading the firmware was an absolute shitshow, especially at first - it was a complicated process and one wrong step could entirely brick the thing and you'd have to send it back to Japan. Secondly people in our studio were always accidentally breaking the USB ports, I think because if you had it on the left side of your desk it was so big that the usb cables would hang over the edge of the desk and then you'd accidentally bump in to it one day.
I had experience with one before and yea, 9 times out of 10 you'll have 2 usbs junked. it becomes a guessing game seeing which units online will have been a victim whenever one is listed.
Linus, the only man to be sponsored by AMD, Nvidia, Intel, Samsung, Microsoft, and more... All at the same time
Nice to see that (I only got the slim PS3 devkit by the end of my time in the industry). But since you guys are in the business of blowing thousands on Retro hardware, I'd really like to see the earliest devkit of the N64 which, to my knowledge, was actually a cut down set of libraries (emulated runtime environment) running on Irix 5.3 (I think) on the Onyx workstation. According to LucasArts, the emulated environment was so close to the final hardware that they didn't have to modify "Shadows of the Empire" (much) to run on the next iteration of the devkit (which was a $7-10,000 standard SGI Indy and an FPGA board that had video out and Rj-45 sockets for controllers).
The third iteration was already an N64 with a funny cartridge that connected via ethernet or SCSI to a normal PC or an SGI O2. On all three iterations the SDK came with it's own compiler and library which is easy to come by these days...
Except the Onyx emulated environment.
I did some work adding in outlets at a streaming company. They had a bunch of stuff like this for the Ps4 and XBOX One.
7:05 Can confirm, FPGA's are super cool. I got to do a hands-on with one in a college Circuit Design course and it really is what it claims to be; a fully reprogrammable circuit. We made a traffic light system, and countdown machine
I would absolutely fucking love for yall to cover more devkits, this was so interesting
I still have an even older PS3 dev kit with some of the e3 demos such as the leaf tornado demo where every leaf can have its own audio cue. The version I have uses TWO, yes, TWO cell chips. This was before Sony partnered with Nvidia.
No such console exists (or if it does its not documented anywhere)
The ceb-1000 from 2004 already used a NV45GL "Quadro FX 3400"
If you indeed have a dual cell ps3 please document it thanks
Linus, I think you're a bit younger than me, this isn't related to gaming but some of the copy protection and region stuff gave me flashbacks to the early 00's to the Apex AD-600A DVD player. There were many of us that made a KILLNG flipping these things back in the day. See if you can get your hands on one and check it out. Don't know if it's video worthy but some of us would enjoy.
This is probably my favourite LTT video so far. I love anything to do with the PS3. It has such a weird history as a game console, and I find all of it super cool.
Here's some interesting facts about the PS3:
The cell is about as powerful as a Ryzen 3 2200G, but almost nothing was able to utilize its full power (you had to essentially code for each individual core).
The PS3 originally was an all-in-one home system. Entertainment, computing, gaming, everything. The original price was very competitive with BluRay players of the time, and you could install a version of Linux on the system (called OtherOS). It also had a PS2 slapped inside, so you could play all 3 generations of games (but fat PS3s tend to struggle with newer PS3 games).
There were several PS3 supercomputer clusters, one of which was operated by the US Army.
Sony eventually pulled support for OtherOS, which resulted in a large lawsuit.
Slim models removed the PS2 hardware and now only ran PS1 games via emulation (and PS3 games natively).
Because the PS3 was built at a time where computer technology was advancing rapidly, the original process node was 90 nm and the latest super slim model had gone all the way down to 28 nm. Most of the original girth was for cooling.
interesting
You can't quite quantify Cell's processing power (of the SPUs specifically) in the same way as you would a processor like Ryzen, so you can't really compare the two. It's specialized hardware, much like compute cores on a GPU or a media encode accelerator.
@@xan1242 Yeah, it doesn't directly translate, but in terms of raw compute, that's about as powerful as the cell is.
Wait why do fat PS3's struggle with newer PS3 games? I know Sony revised the hardware many times but I thought a PS3 was a PS3 at the end of the day.
@@captinsparklezremix I'm not sure the exact technical reason(s), but in my experience, fat PS3S like to freeze on loading screens and overheat in long gaming sessions.
Ahh, I remember ps3 /IBM cell tech was supposed to bring a lot of multi-threading tech to games for more players and better AI.
Also featured on Person of Interest as a way to host their AI with a PS3 server farm.
If that was their goal, it definitely worked with some games. I recently found out that Black Ops 2 continues to scale across my cores on my 3950X, which is awesome.
You can run Folding@home on it too
That server farm is actually completely realistic in practice. It can be done at any scale, which is why the Cell architecture was so cool. And, as in real life, Root had to use never-opened, never-sold, never-connected PS3s with older firmware because the newer firmware was constantly PSN connected and would not enable clustering anymore.
Oh man I miss so much Person Of Interest! One of the best TV series ever ❤️
Nice I had one of these on my desk working on NFS the Run. It was a pain in the ass to use lol
@9:08 there was a laptop by Compaq called the Armada. The hdd was was in a cartridge, just like this. Very unstable devices, but cool idea anyway. This chassis reminds me of a server
It's been a while since Linus has been excited about a 400GB hard drive
We made a traffic light system, and countdown machine
It's hard for me to think of PS3 as legacy hardware, but that's where we are at. I like these sorts of dives in to what is now a lot of our history. I wonder if there are other similar devices for older consoles (PS1/2, etc)? Perhaps not, just because of the nature of the older hardware, but it'd be interesting to see more of a teardown and analysis of these consoles! Damn, those are retro now huh?
For some reason my brain keeps telling me the ps3 is a recent console, crazy that it's already been 15 years since release.
There are, "PS1 dev kit" and "MW.3", "PS2 dev kit"
lookup ModernVintageGamers channel he has some dev kit coverage, the GameCube being one of them.
sega katana (dreamcast devkit)
that life is strange demo is amazing!
linus Thanks I just start watching your show and I actually learning appreciate how you do it Electronics it gets me a help in figuring out how I do it thanks
This thing is extremely interesting, but you know what would be even better? The story of how they got that! I'm imagining some sort of spy movie with Linus dressed as James Bond and driving an Aston while escaping Sony security team
I can totally see an intro like that and I know there is much more effort involved but would turn up this video to 11
Hi there,
I have mumps currently is there anything i should eat or avoid?
Likely a disgruntled indie developer who had one laying around because Sony axed their game.
They probably got it from a developer who no longer needed it as PS5 has no backwards compatibility.
Although that would be cool. I bet it's something lame like it had been sent to them by a guy who probably collects these things, or is a developer of sorts... I dunno let's just call him Jeff for arguments sake, who has let them tinker around as long as they follow some ground rules on showing the kit.
About that Gears of War build: Unreal Engine 3 was basically built around Gears of War, so when Epic started porting UE3 to PS3 it made sense to just port the game together with the engine as a test case for a real game with real world requirements (and of course it's a debug/unoptimized build, that thing is probably printing hundreds of log lines over the debug console)
Gears of War 3 came out 4 years after Unreal Tournament 3.
And Unreal Engine 3 started development 4 years before the first Gears of War was released.
Reminds me of the Net Yaroze Ps1 dev kit. They should really bring that back there are so many amateur game devs who have so many great ideas for games that AAA studios just aren’t interested in even entertaining nowadays.
Talk about a throwback, jailbroken ps3's have all the same options and more let alone the mark up in price after jailbreaking one was a very easy money maker👌
Awesome Video! I worked at EA and Atari/InfoGrames and we never had something like that. Instead we had developer kits that took on the look of the end console. This was an incredible insider look of the PS3 developer kit. Thanks for sharing.
Pls show m & kg again in addition to feet or pound. That was something I always loved about this channel 😊
That's an interesting way of combining server based tech with dev kit tech. Adding an iLO module and also giving it a server chassis makes me think it was more meant to be plopped into a server rack, and plugged into a KVM for network access.
Two feet wide means five inches too wide for a server rack, though.
@@teh-maxh oh... yeah... I forgot about that.... I'm dumb
If placed under any objects the 1000W system with insufficient cooling had a tendency to melt plastic.
0:45 HALLSTATT! 😍 Such a beautiful town
Linus: Get a C64 or C128 and a Final Cartridge III. With a little luck and or cash the required hardware should be easy to get. If you enjoyed PS3 dev this much, you´ll love the FC3 and all its functions. There is even a freeze button (pedal mod?) in addition to all the crazy modes and funtions inc. access to all registers and even a windows like desktop mode.. Just try - for once - holding on to the parts until they are installed or placed on a level surface. In a controlled maner that is. There is no shame in asking for help.
We used pine tar for grip when playing handball. If you by chance are able to find some other resin, sap or tar from a tree, it should do fine. I hear maple trees have some kind of sticky goo in them. Probably tasty too. Pine sap not so much. Tastes awful... like paint remover or retsina some how.
0:24
🤣🤣🤣
CUT 🎬