Overview of a Playstation 2 developers kit.

[Billnes]

Does anyone know what a "PS2 Devkit" actually consists of? I'm curious. Why are they becoming so difficult to come by?

ASSEMblergames.com on YouTube purchased several dev units that were still working. According to the videos voice over, he got them at liquidation, when Midway went bankrupt. If you watch the video carefully, you can see that it works on Red Hat Linux 5.2 Apollo. The dev kit requires two monitors. The first one to enter Unix commands and write the actual code. The second monitor is an NTSC resolution monitor that's used to view how the finished game code is playing. Until a username & password is entered into the Unix side of the system, the NTSC monitor shows a splash screen. The video shows that the dev tool has a CD/DVD-ROM drive and can be put into "Retail Mode" via a code entered at the command line. I'm going on the presumption that just like the Debuggers Unit, this tool would not be able to play DVD movies, even if it was in "Retail Mode".

Watch the first video from Assembler Games here.

In another YT video, ASSEMblergames.com disassembled a dev kit to illustrate how heavily customized the dev kit motherboard is.

The next video can be seen here.

The unit itself:


Size comparison:


I hope this helps. Take good care. Have fun.

Best regards,
William N. (Uncle Billy)
Long Island, New York

EDIT: I watched the first video again. I heard the voice over say "I can't program in Assembly." I was surprised by this. I was under the impression that the PS2, like all modern consoles, use C language. The only console I know of that uses Assembly, is the Sega Saturn. If anyone here know better, please feel free to enlighten us.