On Sat, 4 Dec 1999, Ethan Bakshy wrote:

> still quite plain in my opinion. 

yeah, i s'pose so.  i don't see anything impossible about both artistic
and mathematical elegance.  but i don't see many examples of it, either.  
kind of discouraging.

> Not sure how happy Sony would be in terms of supporting the NetBSD
> project.

i was thinking more of buying some and cutting them open.  there are
emulators for most consoles including the PSX, all developed this way.  
Connectix had one they actually sold--they apparently rewrote the PSX
ROM's from scratch to avoid stealing them from Sony.  It seems intuitively
a port would be a lot easier than an emulator, in the sense that it's
easier to provide one case that works than it is to deal with 200 cases
and make them all work.

besides, if a mac68k port is possible, _anything_ is possible.

but, reverse engineering is a lot of work, and i'm not proposing to do it
myself.  i'm not sure how interesting this project would be, given that we
are likely to see a lot of smaller companies willingly cooperate with
NetBSD for set-top stuff in the immediate future (unless the corporate
world really is full of complete morons).

> Are there any well developed MESA/GL ports or anything to NetBSD?

cd /usr/pkgsrc/x11/xlockmore && make install

but, i was kind of figuring sound and hardware 3D would not be part of
this.  The point of the initial port would be to make the PS2 into a
computer instead of a game console.  If game developers wanted to use the
port, they could support the necessary sound drivers and Mesa work.
certainly, it could be worth their while financially to do so.  I didn't
think the most dramatic benefit to the project lies along this path.  
rather, running browsers and GNOME apps and USB toys on the thing.

-- 
Miles Nordin / v:1-888-857-2723 fax:+1 530 579-8680
555 Bryant Street PMB 182 / Palo Alto, CA 94301-1700 / US

ps -- sorry about that casper.Colorado.EDU messup, if anyone noticed.  i'm
always truly carton@ivy.net and that's it.