The PS3 was revolutionary just difficult to shift to programming.
That said a industry in saturated to declining stages of life should probably not make their product less accessible to those giving it value.
Everyone still tried to make it work on PS3, I cant imagine that drive will be there for the ps6 era.
thatKamGuy@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
The PS3 was the last ‘great’ console from Sony before their wholesale switch to PC architecture with a custom software layer.
I choose to die on this hill. 😅
Feyr@lemmy.world 2 months ago
It absolutely was, but thats in spite of choosing to launch it on an immature architecture with no developer tooling, not because of it. Imagine what it could have been if it wasn’t so hard to use!
thatKamGuy@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
We don’t even need to imagine, necessarily! The quality of games released towards the tail-end of its life cycle speaks volumes: Uncharted 2&3, The Last of Us, God of War 3, Metal Gear Solid 4 etc.
I don’t think there was anything actually wrong with the architecture per se, but rather just the lack of proper documentation and tools set potential developers back significantly.
It was definitely hubris on Sony’s part, thinking that they could do whatever they wanted given the prior success of both the PlayStation and PS2 consoles prior.
Those PS3 launch stumbles definitely were a wake-up call, however I do believe that because it was largely the US/Western arm of SCEI that lead the ‘rescue’ - they ended up wrestling control away from the JP arm, ultimately causing the PS4/5 to end up so risk adverse and largely unremarkable as a result.
DacoTaco@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Ps4 and ps5 are not pc architectures though. It has a x86/x64 cpu, yes, but that doesnt make it pc architecture. Afaik the ps4/5 does not have a bios, pch, ddr ram controller etc etc
thatKamGuy@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Every modern bootable device has a BIOS, as they are required for hardware initialisation before handover to an OS - which for the PS4 is called Orbis OS, and is based off FreeBSD 9. Which is a UNIX OS for desktop PCs.
While the PS4 does have a unified memory interface, which is very rare for common desktop PCs - they do exist, such as every single Apple Silicon Mac.
The PS4 and PS5 are just a very heavily locked down PCs, featuring AMD APUs not too dissimilar to what can be found in Ryzen notebooks, Steam Deck or ROG Ally, running proprietary operating systems with heavy encryption to try and prevent 1:1 emulation (think Hackintosh).
DacoTaco@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Youre thinking of bootrom. Embedded devices use bootroms because they dont need the flexability of a bios. It means that on power on, the cpu is powered on and its bootrom starts running code thats burned inside the cpu.
This is different from a bios, that is code separate from the cpu and tells the cpu what to execute and where in memory it is.
The os has nothing to do with bios too. Bios has to do with how the system powers up and starts the cpu, not the os and related stuff.
redshadowhero@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
It’s my understanding that the ps4 (and presumably the ps5) use bsd as a base operating system. BIOS or no, it’s a Unix system running on an x86_64 architecture.
DacoTaco@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Sure, but the wii’s coprocessor’s os was also unix/bsd based and that was nowhere near pc hardware. Actually, a few embedded devices (cheap routers, cheap toys,… ) use bsd (while they should run linux hehe) and are nowhere near pc architecture :p.
What makes a pc a pc is the actual hardware layout, hardware connections internally and how it boots. Im looking deep into ps4 and i can see why people call it a pc, but its a huge misnomer. If a ps4 is a pc, a raspberry pi( or any random sbc ) is also a pc because it has a usb or sata controller, cpu and pci bus while it has no pch/fch, no pc bios (which i can accept to not be relevant) or any of the pc hardware you cant think off ( spoiler, its a lot more ).
Hell, pc’s dont even have a southbridge anymore. We have the pch which is directly connected to the cpu over a bus that is nowhere near the old northbridge/southbridge design…