From: Emmanuel Marty <core@suntech.fr>
  To  : ggi-develop@eskimo.com
  Date: Tue, 04 Aug 1998 05:58:41 +0000

Re: Linux GameDev IRC meeting (fwd)

Jeff wrote:

> > * The commercial people will be interested most in *portable* APIs/SDKs/...
> > Itīs easier to convince them to use some new library if this lib
> > supports Win32 *and* Playstation *and* MacOS *and* Linux in a portable
> > way instead of *only* Linux.
>
> it is folly to try to support cross-platform to the PSX...I am a
> professional game developer (most of what I do is on the PSX, been
> doing that platform for about 2.5 years now) and it is so proprietary
> that it would be a large waste of memory and speed (which is sorely
> needed on a 2 meg 33MHz machine) to try to put a layer in between the
> game and the hardware API (which, given, sucks, but it's more in how
> it's laid out more than it's speed).  Concentrate more on going
> linux/win32/mac/un*x than trying to port to a console as well (never
> mind the NDA issues)...
>

I can't claim to have as much PSX development experience as you do, I
only wrote one game on it, but I would agree with you. The programmer is
already trying to cache what (s)he can in the 2 MB of memory (the 33 mhz
speed didn't really bother me at the time, except to get around the bugs
of the GPU, but I suppose that now it start to show its limits.. the CPU speed
of the playstation is more measured in joules than mhz anyway :).

Maybe we'll have to devise some cross-compile-time method of natively
converting libggi calls to sony API calls.. The only other option I can think
of would be to put libggi support in psy-q and the sony libs or so, and that's
science-fiction :)

--
Emmanuel