I Await Sony’s Cease and Desist

this is a playstation 3. well at least it sort of is it does function as a ps3 but it would be better described as the decr 1000a reference tool it's two feet long weighs a whopping 40 pounds and it makes even sony's largest finished playstations look like fisher-price toys but where did this thing come from it was spring of 2005 and sony was producing the tools that developers would need to build games for their upcoming platform the earlier silver colored models were used by internal sony game devs while the later black models ours included were destined for third-party studios closer to the launch of the console that is as long as those studios had deep pockets the exact cost of each reference tool in those early days isn't known for sure but we've seen accounts that suggest they could have run up to 50 000 dollars per unit and that is on top of alleged early adoption fees the truly wild part though is that any decent sized studio would need a lot more than just one of them and then you can imagine the pain of dropping that kind of cash only to see the price for these plummet first to twenty thousand dollars each then to ten when they were released more broadly in 2007 by 2009 a dev kit with a much more traditional playstation 3 look could be had for as little as 2 000 it's almost like sony was having a heck of a time attracting developers in the early days so how did they use these hulking behemoths to craft games on the playstation 3 and what secrets lie beneath its thin steel chassis we're going to find out and we're also going to find out about today's sponsor build redux build redux makes it easy to configure your new gaming pc build with support guides to help you along the way there's no need to build it yourself when build redux offers pricing competitive to diy head to build redux dot com linus to start your new build today to start with this is not our hardware and out of respect for dev jeff the one who sent it to us we have agreed to obey a few ground rules first of all we cannot show you these two binders of documents only this one we cannot disassemble the ps vita we must shout out obscure gamers for providing us some software and we are not to touch buttons or switches on the ps vita's bare board ps vita you ask ah yes the ps3 dev dedicate is only part of the story today but we will get to that later first let's take a closer look at this thing because it is absolutely wild the ps3 went through several hardware revisions but even aside from the sheer size and girth there are a number of things that set the reference tool apart from all of them first up is io like the original playstation 3 fat you know the one that had four usb ports as well as an onboard playstation 2 it's got an sd card reader memory stick pro reader compact flash all that good stuff four usb ports a hard drive and a blu-ray disc drive but unlike that one it's got two more usb ports an entire additional freaking hard drive whatever the foot switch is actually that's really cool we're going to explain that later and oh flipping it around to the back excuse me not one but two network ports one for developer use one for regular use four analog audio outputs apparently this is for sound mixing a monitor port for your vga crt monitor and we look really carefully under this definitely super secure tape we can find two more ethernet ports these are apparently for low level debugging only for sony's use oh sorry sorry sony and it's got a lot more going on under the hood 512 megs of ram compared to the standard 256 in the playstation 3 extensive debug menus this was a lot less exciting that i was hoping do you know where everything goes if i just start tearing it apart are you able to put it back together cool that sounds like something for dev jeff to figure out this totally explains why it weighs so flipping much oh my god this is all just air ducting and daughter boards sorry i got distracted i was supposed to be telling you other cool stuff it's got extensive debug menus and get this no copy protection the firmware can be upgraded or downgraded at will and those drives in the front they're not 30 or 60 gigs they are 400 gigs so you can load this baby up also it should be noted that they feature no redundancy whatsoever oh i guess i can't open them right now while it's powered off so we'll have to show you that later if one of them dies you lose everything look at this power supply this whole freaking thing wait what hold on a second is this a thousand watt power supply is that right am i misunderstanding here or is this a thousand watt power supply why does it need a thousand watt power supply copper bases four heat pipes giant aluminum fin stacks and each the cell cpu and the nvidia 6 7000 series based gpu get one of these but what's the purpose of this daughter board here then because i see some older standard memory i see some kind of central processor of some sort a firmware chip and then what appears to be an fpga shut up it's a web server oh my god that makes sense it's right next to the dev lan port right here so that you can connect to and control and monitor all the elements of the rest of the system without actually relying on the system itself so if you suffer some kind of catastrophic crash you're still going to be able to log those errors and well hopefully fix them i've been informed that under this daughter board is another daughter board would you call that a granddaughter board a second daughter board sunboard another fpga though so it's clear that they're doing some very custom shiz in here if you don't know fpgas or field programmable gate arrays are essentially chips that are a blank slate so instead of designing them fabing them and then them serving one fixed function you can program them in the field as the name would imply to serve any number of different functions they are much more expensive per unit so they only make sense in very small volumes but they're super cool and are actually how retro enthusiasts have managed to resurrect outdated hardware designs for the next generation of gamers i have to imagine that this is the original thermal paste and it's never been pulled oh it's really stuck that is definitely original thermal paste hey dev jeff i'm gonna do you a favor i'm gonna put some new thermal group on here for you all right one fun fact while we pull off the last panel here is that compared to the first generation fat ps3 the reference tool is actually missing a crucial feature it does not contain the dedicated playstation 2 hardware that enabled sony's up until now never before seen multiple generations of backwards compatibility this was only for developing playstation 3 games not for validating your old ps2 games on ps3 hardware because you didn't need to that hardware would be in the final units what is a cxd2973 agb-1 it's the southbridge oh okay uh-oh i think it had a back plate on it and i think it shifted no i got it i got it it's back in place okay i'm gonna screw that back on right now ah remember how i said i'd explain the foot switch this is super cool it was so that developers with their foot in case they were doing other things with their hands could stop code from executing like immediately we'll be using a wired ps3 controller by the way we don't have any ps3 controllers that still have working batteries which is why i always say double a's microsoft good job just get rechargeable double a's oh no i want to play with this hard drive mount first okay that's kind of cool actually okay pc case manufacturers i want to see that mechanism whoa it's not that loud which makes sense given that this would have to sit at a developer's workstation right so you don't want to have it be like freaking 85 decibels sound like a jet ticket wow that that was really fast to boot up was that supposed to be so fast wait this is running the latest playstation 3 firmware so like you could just run any modern game with this thing what all right uh debugger game output resolution oh okay you just set all kinds of different game output resolutions sure why not game output sound maximum number of channels fake other region i mean sure hdcp just see you later this is amazing and unlike the other developer kit that we looked at recently this one existed before the days of just you know remote kill switches sony apparently hasn't even locked out the ability of this thing to connect to playstation network it should still function as a full-on playstation 3. fake free space what is this sure let's fake some free spin fake system storage access speed oh cool slow mode 20 gig hard drive so you can just turn this thing into whatever you want it to be format blu-ray disc emulator hard drive that is awesome so you can just load isos on it you can do up to four games with that imagine if they just shipped hardware that was this good and this convenient to end users how much better of a world would we live in whoa transfer rate pacing for blu-ray disc emulator you can lock the blu-ray disc emulator to the equivalent of a blu-ray drive or you can run it at hard drive native for like presumably way faster loading times what if what's what if hold on a second is this a development build of what if oh shut up so you actually walk around wow we teleported a little bit there they have a level selector that clearly was not intended to make its way into the game like what is over this wall i want to know can i oh oh oh denounce nathan protect nathan um we'll obviously protect nathan oh cool i haven't played this game sorry but i can see what's happening here this game has a choice system so what it's doing is it's taking us through the previous one so we can play that version of the level okay well we did take a picture of victoria she's hot i i don't know i'm just making this up is victoria a love interest i come out and blame chloe okay now i now i play the level that is wicked town bus oh goodbye floor reload last checkpoint trip up oh no i'm in the bus oh bye buzz if you ever find yourself complaining that a game is super bug yet released let's all just remember this okay it could have been a lot worse oh no way little big planet deploy build that one hello this one's not even doing a thing forget it forget it i'm out fine we'll try we'll try the less broken little big planet okay so how do i go to the dev menu settings oh debug settings oh my god that is awesome disable tutorials just don't bother with that see you later music if i don't care about that streamer friendly okay this is a long menu oh wireframe i want to play on wireframe yup oh that's hilarious grab yourself a keyboard a keyboard okay keyboard's plugged in now what do we do go to your unreal tournament looking one unreal tournament wait unreal tournament that says gears of war 3. oh no way so i have to hacksaw the mainframe to play this wait a minute gears of war 3. why did it take me so long to register that are we about to play gears of war 3 on a playstation is this like games industry drama that's well known that i just was not aware of was it was it going to be multiple platform and then because it still has the xbox button what push the tilde button that start gear game underscore p question mark chapter equals zero okay what it's only running at 17 18 19 fps but it's gears of war 3 running on a playstation honestly though it's impressive that this runs at all given how different the playstation 3 was compared to the xbox 360 which this game was designed to run on 12 fps yeah this is a very brown flashback 10 game oh okay how many of these guys do you have to kill geez and they blow up i mean that makes perfect sense and we saved the best part for last remember how i alluded to that definitely actually a ps vita thing at the beginning well believe it or not this ps3 dev kit was instrumental in developing for the ps vita and i'll show you how the early vita prototype dev kit units hooked up to it we've got the whole thing hooked up and here's how it works you've got a psp power adapter that powers this little breakout board then you've got a dvi input because this actually drives this guy right here which is going to be the display that we're using as a game developer there are actually some cameras as well we've got two cameras they sort of work and this back here that's a touch surface apparently developers would actually take this and like duct tape it to the back of a controller for development so that they could try out their control schemes pretty wild right then the way the ps3 dead kit figures into all of this is that dvi input over there that's actually coming from the hdmi output of the ps3 dev kit so we're essentially emulating the ps vita hardware here on the ps3 as for a controller we just plug that in via usb to our dev kit and we should be good to go unfortunately this is as far as we can get with this guy you need a special firmware in order to enable the back touch as well as the front touch screen and we weren't able to find any working ps vita roms that were able to fire up with our system here but it's still cool to see how developers had to had to build for this thing and it's cool to see our sponsor freshbooks if you're a business owner you know your time is valuable because you never seem to have enough of it spend less time worrying about your finances more time focusing on what your business truly is about with the help of freshbooks track every minute of those precious billable hours with the freshbooks time tracker so you're never left wondering where your day went keep everyone on the same page with their projects feature which makes it easier for clients team and contractors to collaborate share files and comment do you have forgetful clients that sometimes don't remember to pay their bills well use freshbooks automated payment reminders to make handling overdue invoices a breeze ugly invoices with vague item descriptions may confuse the customer freshbooks can help you produce professional looking invoices that thoroughly detail all the work you've done and when tax time rolls around it's important that your books are truly their freshest with a ton of reports to choose from you'll know exactly where your business stands and you can easily hand the keys over to your accountant so they can take over when it's time to reconcile everything at the end of the year choose a plan that's right for you and start a free trial of freshbooks for 30 days no credit card required at freshbooks.com linus if you guys enjoyed this video you might also enjoy the one where we checked out an xbox series x development kit it did end up being a bit more locked down but the hardware itself was very cool

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 2,965,343

Keywords: playstation dev kit, developer kit, next gen portable dev kit, ps3 dev kit, ps3 prototype

Id: 0Hr8aqGp5mk

Length: 17min 26sec (1046 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 04 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/Saber_Flight]

I was super confused about what subreddit I was in for a minute. Wasn't expecting to see Linus pop up here.

[u/DeeSnow97]

lol, Linus just casually making all the worst choices, although at least he does know Victoria is hot

also, interesting that [S1] taking a photo of Kate didn't pop up there

[u/ghost_zuero]

"Definitely protect Nathan. Yes take a picture of Victoria because she's hot"

I mean... I'm more of a Chloe or Dana type of guy but sure, some people think Victoria is hot

[u/Leseratte10]

One of the comments said that that debug build got archived somewhere, interesting ...