I Await Sony’s Cease and Desist - PS3 Dev Kit

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.

FOLLOW US
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MUSIC CREDIT
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Intro: Laszlo - Supernova

Outro: Approaching Nirvana - Sugar High

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

[Thoughtcloudart]

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.

[alexrosenberg_tube]

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.

[PixelButts]

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.

[krist]

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.

[dennisfahey]

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.

[jordanmcmillan]

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.

[supermahmoud]

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

[matthewashbaugh]

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

[Foas]

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.

[leggeddog]

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.

[TheRambutan]

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.

[RuruFIN]

As a Life is Strange fan, that dev build was absolutely interesting.

[antnil]

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.

[Defiant]

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.

[seanmurphy]

The absolute best thing about these kits is how they would build up static charge and shock you when you touched the case

[OfficialTruthT]

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

[dwatts]

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!

[HCH]

Linus and his team always find the coolest stuff

[evilc]

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.

[IntelliAli]

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