I was unable to find really detailed infos on it... i've heard that it made possible to people with limited programming knowledge to make some demos or small games... i was wondering wich kind of language people would program to it, how much could be actually accomplished, if it is possible to port games from the yarouze to regular PSX games one's creations... what tools and documentations were provided? and lastly how difficult and costy are these to get? thanks in advance, karsten
Limited programming knowledge is a bit vague, as you have to know C to program on it... The main limitation as far as I remember is that your code must fit in the ram of the machine, something like 3 or 4MB. The tools provided include a regular gcc linker/compiler, some utils to convert images, 3dformat, and sound to a ps compatible one, and a soft to upload your code to the yaroze through the serial cable. All the sony tools run in dos command line, no windows app for the braves! 3 manuals are part of the package, see them below: The codewarrior tools were sold separately, as well as a special version of lightwave, but only available in Japan, unless someone prove me wong... And not to forget, on the sdk cd, there two "awesome" demos, one prints "hello world" in the siocons shell, and the other one prints the same thing on the tvscreen! If you want to see what has been accomplished on it, some yaroze games were available on various issue of the playstation mag cd, or search for the netyaroze collection disc. karsten, PM sent!
The games had to fit within 2MB (main system RAM I guess). How costly is a complete set these days? I remember them being quite expensive a few years back.
a complete set in good condition should be 500$ upwards last time I checked ebay. The Net Yaroze is optimaly used with an Action Replay from what I recall, even if you don't have the proper mem-card ding-dong.
Any ps1 with the parallel port will do then, no need for the black one... Right now, there is one on ebay for 132£ and one on YJ for 50,000yens
I wouldn't say that not much could be accomplished. Like all programming stuff, if you've the skill and dedication.... When the Yaroze was released, Sony stated that the original Ridge Racer could have been made on it (the whole game fit into system RAM), so the machine has the talent if you do....
One of my favourite games is Robot Ron http://www.hermitgames.com/rron.html An excellent shooter in the style of Robotron (you see what he did there?), one nice touch is that it is Analogue stick compatable. If you are lucky enough to have a Yaroze kit or a debug Playstation 2 then you can download it and play it (you will have to burn the game to a CD-R for the PS2 Debug).
Wasn´t there something about the special memory card was dumped, so you could copy the special memory stuff over to another normal memory card , and some other stuff too ? I seem to remember an old thread about it. And Johnny I think, even a modded PS2 would work. But here am I maybe out of reach with the technical stuff.
Are you saying that if you have a Parallel PS1 and an Action replay you can accomplish anything a Yaroze can?
The only trouble is to find a Xplorer/Xploder cartrdige.. but I can guarante that it's cheaper then buying a Yaroze ;-)
hmmm this is what I have found in my search about net yaroze, when it comes to this forum. http://www.assemblergames.com/forums/search.php?searchid=116782 http://www.assemblergames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=11668 So perhaps, we should concentrate the PSX dev, and the net yaroze in one thread ? Since there are almost heaps of threads about the Net Yaroze here.
The Net Yaroze system also has a special BIOS and slightly different hardware to a standard PS1. If you do buy it, make sure you get it with Code Warrior, or at least obtain it seperately. A special edition of Code Warrior (a dev environment) was made available when the Net Yaroze was launched and you sometimes still see it on eBay. It might also be available for download these days, I am not sure. The stuff that comes with the Yaroze is enough to get you started and there are code examples on the dev discs that come with the machine which you can tinker with to get basic stuff working, such as Pong and so on. It is quite a capable system and some good stuff has come out of the project. Unfortunately a lot of the really good websites no longer seem to exist. The cheapest option, as already stated, is to buy one of the larger memory version parallel port cheat devices and reflash it with 'caetla', a special version software that allows you to send and receive data over the PC Link card (ISA slot based card) via the parallel port. You don't even need to have a system with a working CD drive to use it, just a parallel port version of the Playstation. Important - you have to get one of the later cheat cards and there is a FAQ out there on the 'net somewhere to explain the procedure of re-flashing better than I can, but it has to have enough built-in memory to contain the caestla BIOS. Some of the earlier ones had too little memory to allow this, but the later ones I believe work fine. http://www.geocities.co.jp/Playtown/2004/psx/ny_e.htm < used to be a good site but the information is now very old and the links no longer work. I had a better selection of links once but unfortunately they were lost after several PC changes.
I have one of those parallel port cheat devices. It's a Gameshark V2 version though (came with the other PS1 i got recently). I'm going to search for more info about this. You guys got me interested on it.
The action replay cartridge needs a pc isa board but the xplorer fx can be connected directly to the pc parallel port. Taucias, a link like this one http://dev.paradogs.com/
The BIOS is standard, the only difference is the CD controller. It will boot any region of PlayStation CD ( but still no CD-R ). There is no reason for this as far as the Yaroze system is concerned, I think they just wanted something extra to justify the high cost. You can boot the yaroze software on a standard PSX. You only need a memory card and serial cable. There are schematics of a serial cable you can build yourself on the net. So it's down to the software and the card. There is a hacked version of the CD that doesn't need the card, but of course you then need a modded PSX ( or a debug ). AFAIK the card isn't like a memory card and can't just have it's contents copied across. Generally caetla allows you to do similar job to a yaroze. Most of the time you just download your code and graphics into the PSX ram. I've never tried it but you can load files across the parallel port, I'm not sure how fast/reliable it is. Once your assets are ready to be burnt to a CD you could load them up from that if you have a modded PSX ( or a debug ). Although frankly anyone working on a game on their own is unlikely to get to that point ( but alot of games were mostly coded using caetla or ezoray ). Then someone with a devkit can stitch the parts together. Game engines can't be that big as otherwise you won't have any space to load a level. When you are testing code, you want to have small test levels, to avoid having to spend too long testing. Only when the engine is done do you bother loading up the full size real levels. smf
