Well, these came to my mind recently, and it seemed like a good idea to ask around 1-Did Sony ever charged a monthly/yearly fee for the NY member site after the first year? (IIRC they said they might do so, but AFAIK they never did) 2-Was there a storage limit imposed to member's pages? If so, what was it? 3-Did members have to share the source code of their games/apps? Or was this optional? 4-Did Sony remove member's pages that were inactive or not updated in a certain period of time? 5-Most (if not all) Net Yaroze games included in OPSM UK were in FPC format. Is there any information available on this file format? Is it just a container? 6-Was any Net Yaroze game included in OPSM US? If so, does anyone have a list? 7-Did any Net Yaroze game use Audio CD? (mainly asking for the ones included in OPSM UK) That's it for now; I may come up with some more in the future. PS: There's no "post icon" for a Net Yaroze (ie. black PS1)
As far as I know they did, but they only played the music which was included as CDDA on the Yaroze boot CD. The same goes for some of the audio samples that were included on it. Other than that they never used their own music, just the included sony tracks.
I'll have to double-check, but I don't recall seeing any audio track in the NY boot discs... Are you sure about that?
1: No, I've never paid anything after my initial purchase 2: Not that I'm aware of 3: No, at least half of the stuff was released without source code 4: No accounts were deleted by Sony due to inactivity (I'm pretty sure with this one because my account was active until the site were shut down) 5: I don't know FPC - AFAIR the gcc compiler was configured to produce ecoff binaries 7: Indeed, some NY games were able to play CD tracks. But you had to swap the boot disk after uploading the game with pscomutil/siocons. The bootdisk requirement was also the main reason that no NY game could use data from a burned CD (but you could stream additional data from your host pc via the serial cable)
Sorry, you are quite right. The usual Yaroze DTL-S3035 disc doesnt but... I have a OPSM UK magazine, in fact several.. at least one used CDDA. There was one, the number I cannot recall, that had lots of different games, one of which was from memory Terra Incognita, that played some CDDA. If you want the numbers I can check when I am back home, I have about 40 of the discs.
From what I read there are many OPM UK demo discs with NY games in them. I have 4 and all 4 have CDDA tracks, but I haven't checked yet if these are for the NY games, the demos, or both... I'll see if there's a way to find out if a NY game is using CDDA tracks, maybe by looking at the file in an HEX editor or something...
Good questions, here's my answers 1- Never paid for membership, I got mine in early 1999 (yes, the SCEE clearance sale, I saw on a demo CD in 1998), but yes it was meant to be an ongoing cost. 2-Yes, from memory it was only about 20-50 megs, I'd be surprised if it was more.. this was back in 1997! 3-Members didn't have to do anything, and most members did just that. 4-No, lots of empty users/sites 5-FPC format, never heard of it.. like @zementmischer said, ecoff binaries, which is just a DLL 6-I don't think so, same with YaBasic was only SCEE 7-We had access to play/stream CD audio tracks, requiring a the cd to be swapped, but we could use the NY music (midi) or use our own. Apparently there was a disconnect between the regions originally, ie couldn't access non SCEE sites and visa versa. When I started, I'm 99% sure that was still the case, but I did had access to all regions on the forums, SCEE/UK being the most active. It was (and still is) a good tool, to learn 2D & 3D console programming... optimisation! IMO the NY was a just university or student dev kit. Sony still has a university program today, it's just not retail like the NY was! A bit of a shame, but rightful so, people complained about the NY being too hard, lack of tools and too expensive.. instead of just hacking it lol
