Same here, still have mine too and sometimes play a bit with it for old times' sake. I still remember how mesmerised I was when an uncle let me play with his Spectrum, and how happy I was when I got my own for my 10th birthday and my dad made me work through the basic manual.
Thanks for that link, I've read something about that before but haven't thought about it since I've been prescribed it myself since March.
For me since then most of the symptoms in the list on that page have actually improved. The only thing my doctor (in The Netherlands) warned me about was the bad/vivid dream part, before Montelukast I could hardly remember dreaming but now I do almost daily (but I am also sleeping much better).
I did have that and the Yaroze (Sony's official homebrew development). I can't recall exactly how or why, but I do remember that compiling/running stuff with the Gameshark was easier than with the Yaroze.
i wanted a yaroze but they were $$$. like $600 or something in 1997 dollars iirc. a few years later i learned of this thing.
they also had some weird limitation. it might have just been that your program could only ever run on your yaroze... where the caetla hack meant you could "ship" stuff that would run on chipped playstations.
I have a yaroze. The kit was rather limited and the tooling was buged out. I also got the codewarrior dev kit which helped a lot. I never got further than some simple demo hello world style applications. I was more interested in my PC at the time. I mostly used it to just play PS1 games. I basically wasted my money on it and should have just bought a normal PS.
If I remember right the thing was region free though so I could play imports. I think you could precompile apps and upload them to the yaroze web board and download them but only to other yaroze kits. I think a couple of devs actually managed to get a real shipped game out of it.
Luckily since I kept the whole lot in nice condition they are going for a decent amount on ebay. It is funny keeping the cardboard boxes makes it worth more...
I also had the PS2 kit. Which was in my opinion was more limiting than the yaroze one.
PlayStation Underground: Volume 1 Issue 4 came with "Gasgar vs. Gasgar" and "Super Mansion", and were behind this wonderful warning screen: https://i.imgur.com/xntzcFk.png
Some other issues of PlayStation Underground and Official PlayStation Magazine (UK) came with other Yaroze games.
Correct. Yaroze programs could only run on other Yarozes, plus the worst restriction was that games had to fit entirely in Ram as Yaroze couldn't run burned discs.
that's right! or access the drive at all. that made it a nonstarter for me as i was trying to build a player for fat32 formatted cd-roms full of mp3s.
of course the bigger problem was that the r3k was too slow. (i ported mpg123 over to run in fixed point, but it still was many times realtime to decode a frame). i wish i'd known about this gte vector unit thing, that may have been a way to make it work... but ah well,
One thing the PS1 did have going for it was a MDEC jpeg decoder chip. Pretty much all of the FMV in PS1 games were MJPEG (a stream of independent jpegs). Between that and using the rasterizer to apply motion vectors and color interpolation, the machine was pretty well set up to do MPEG1.
The PS2 had an MDEC too. We used it in one game to do the pop-up talking head dialog between characters mid-gameplay with tiny RAM and CPU use.
layer 2 was significantly lower quality at lower bitrates, significantly less computationally expensive to encode or decode and significantly less popular as a format for storing music.
i wanted to be able to play mp3 collections from psx units attached to home entertainment systems. there really weren't many other options back then.
Me too. Recently I was visiting what should have been a "simple" site, but for some reason maxing out my cpu because of some refresh loop. Maybe a bug, but the whole site could have been static html.
For me too, got one for my 10th birthday (and got it working again a couple of years ago). For me it was my father who "forced" me to read the Basic manual before I was allowed to use it by my self.
The page says: "Enhanced Digital Downloads of the BBS Documentary series are planned. Please sign up here: sales@bbsdocumentary.com if you wish to be notified."
