SDL Console support

I was wondering if anyone is familiar with what it takes to make a playable Playstation 2 DVD, or maybe knows a good site for info?


I'm not sure if you are familiar with SDL but it is a cross platform multimedia library that supports many platforms including playstation 2.


You can't do it - at least not for a unmodded PS2. And even then,
you'll find it difficult to get hold of the tool to make a bootable
DVD. There is a tool to make a bootable ISO which Sony provide - but
they only provide it to signed developers. The reason the tool exists
is so that you can burn your game and run it on test kits - which are
a whole lot cheaper than full-blown devkits.

It wouldn't entirely surprise me if you could find it on P2P networks
but you won't be able to get hold of it through legal channels, so the
official answer would have to be that you can't do it. Sorry!

I think, but don't quote me on it, that SCEE charge £500 for a test
kit. SCEA probably charge $500 for a test kit, so that's the price
you'd be looking at to get something bootable - and I think as an
unknown, you'd have a big problem getting anything from them. You'd
need to be signed with a publisher and, well, if you can do that then
this wouldn't be a problem you'd be facing. Plus they'd probably
expect you to buy a devkit from them first else the test kit would
be useless!

The PS2 is not the easiest machine to develop for - far easier would
be to convert it to the Xbox. Though that would mean getting hold of
the XDK (I don't know how far along the Open XDK is these days) - but
making a bootable disk (at least for a modded machine) would be as
simple as placing your default.xbe (XBE meaning XBox Executable) at
the root and create a xISO. It wouldn't work on a non-modded Xbox
because the XBE would need to be signed by MS. You just don't have
many options!

One could use the linux kit to allow you to then do development on it in
cpp / X / etc and save to the hard drive.

linux kit I think costs about USD$150-ish and fits into the original style
PS2 (you get 40Gb HDD plus linux DVD, keyboard, mouse and network adapter).
There are a few good forums connected with this, although I'm not sure how
active they are lately.

http://playstation2-linux.com/

Essentially, you stick in the Linux PS2 DVD, which then tells the ps2 to
boot of its hard drive instead of a game DVD, and then you have your
Xwindows enabled PS2 to play with. There's a fairly good community of
developers for this but, you are only developing games here for other people
with linux-based PS2's. I know that's not really what you are after, but
just thought I'd put this out there as an alternative for developing on the
PS2.