Devkits fascinate me. It's just that mix of obscure old tech, something that at the time very few people would have access to, and insights into how games are/were made for console platforms.
There are many odd things in dev kits, some are indeed like seeing the previous version of the hardware where it still was built using off the shelf parts. The PlayStation 1 devkit is like that, aside from a CD emulator card it features a couple of ISA cards that plugged into a PC which contained discrete versions of the console hardware. The 2 cards seem just like a cludge to make up for the lack of space, as in practice the seemed to act like a single cards as they are linked with wires not only on the bus but by the other side of the board too, and a later iteration of the devkit called DTL-H2000 makes away with the twin cards and features a single main ISA board containing the PSX hardware, aside from the CD and sound cards. Some devkits for other systems are something so niche, as you say, that you could see that they were partially manually assembled, some even featuring your run of the mill bodge wire, because they made a mistake and didn't bother to make new PCBs. After FPGAs became cheaper and more powerful devkits began using them instead, and became much less interesting as a result.
I love how yellow the case already is despite the PSP not feeling SO old. A local TV channel had those devkits as well to showcase new PSP games to viewers which makes it just as memorable to me as the DS dev kits.
Some other memories of early PSP dev: The local wireless mode (called Ad Hoc Mode, I think) used wires in the first batch of dev kits so our QA team had these wires running across the room. Also, the first few iterations of the dev kits had very different screens. I think Sony was trying to figure out which screen to go with - viewing angle was the difference I remember the most. One challenge I remember is that all our development before we got kits was assuming the PSP would run at 333 MHz. However, soon after we got the kits we were informed that the PSP would be locked at 222 MHz due to battery life concerns. This sucked because we had to take out a lot of physics objects which weren't critical to the game but added some extra fun. At some point Sony opened up the PSP to full 333 MHz but it was too late for our launch titles. Also, if I recall, the PSP Dev Kit has 64 MB of RAM which could be toggled on or off using one of the dip-switches. The dip-switches were good for lots of things. I recall we used one for taking screenshots. We were working on a title for Japan launch and all the TRC documents were in Japanese so we had one staff member translate each new version. One scary part was that a TRC for "Sleep Mode" was blank for our entire development. We were nearing Beta and one of the engineers asked QA if sleep mode was causing any issues and the QA guy was like, "What's sleep mode?" Ahhhh! Who could blame him...the TRC was blank and nobody had mentioned it before then. Luckily we didn't have any major issues with sleep mode on that game. On subsequent games, sleep mode testing was a huge part of the QA effort, and a source of some of the most frustrating bugs to fix.
@@thisnamehaschangedthanksto8185 Sleep Mode is a switch on the PSP that you slide to pause the game and turn off the screen. The game is basically still running and comes back when you flick the sleep mode switch again. This video has an example: ua-cam.com/video/piGnrAMnfhg/v-deo.html The bugs were difficult because they were always timing-specific. Put the game into sleep mode during a small time window when saving: corrupt save file. Put the game into sleep mode during a small time window while loading into game: crash. Stuff like that.
I like that the devkit just looks like those regular old computers (instead of having a black case and a different design) It looks dope and that DVD option is dope too.
What do you expect from this guy? All he does is give us wikipedia-grade explanations of the consoles and simps send him shit like this to get their names mentioned. It's pathetic.
The PSP was such a good handheld. It proved with games like the GTA Stories and Metal Gear series that games didn't need to be huge in file size to look and run great. Now I need 100 gigs just to play online multiplayer.
To be fair PSP games were sometimes almost twice as large as Nintendo DS games because they had the space for more. Music video files and the like. Seriously 1.7GB is small by today's standards but back in the PSP days even 700MB games that were pretty sizable making us angry that we didn't own 4GB Memory Sticks. I remember when the 8GB stick was $400 USD... those were simpler times!
@@Humbird00 there was one shooter called Coded Arms, too, haven‘t played the first in that series since 2014 when my first PSP finally bit the dust. ;-;
One issue with the DVD drive is that the read-speed from DVD is much faster than from UMD. To compensate we created a "UMD emulation" mode that artificially slowed the read speed on the DVD build. One time we did a pre-submission to Sony and got our lot of UMDs and they all ran incredibly slowly. Yup, we submitted a build with the UMD emulation so we were artificially slowing the read speed of the already slower UMDs.
@@cemsengul16 so easy to custom firmware them and run games from the memory card isn't it! Love being able to play PS1 games that never got put on the Playstation Store on it. Also some great English translation patches for some of the Japan only games out there. Opens up a whole new bunch of games to play.
One of the best features of the Vita is that you can play PSP games. PSP got fantastic first party support that sony really dropped the ball with on the vita.
@@killmepete1 Yeah I own a Vita also and what a disappointment man. The PS Vita had a hard act to follow after the PSP. I only use my Vita as an Archos device because the OLED display is beautiful. I have two 512 GB SD Cards filled with my Blu Rays I ripped on to them. So when I go somewhere and I have to wait a long time, I pull out the Vita and watch movies.
I had such a love for the PSP as a kid, at one point I tried designing a console conversion of a PSP with a front mounted UMD drive just like this. The difference was that my knowledge of electronics was limited (I was 12 I think?) and I thought I'd need to use a parallel cable to be able to run all of the controller wires to the PCB. Needless to say I was absolutely astonished when I learned about this dev kit a few years later. Feels good to see someone covering it in the flesh.
I remember a crazy setup I did where used homebrew and the video-out of a hacked PSP 2000 to basically play it like a console using a PC controller and a large TV. This actually worked beautifully! The way I accomplished this was to use a custom firmware plugin called RemoteJoyLite to feed PC controller inputs from USB controller hooked up to a laptop to the PSP over USB, and then I just used the PSP's native video-out to display the game on the TV. The irony of this was that RemoteJoyLite's primarily use was sending the PSP's video to a PC, but it also happened to have the ability to send PC controller inputs to the PSP over USB. You could disable the video feed and just use the controller pass-thru feature if you wanted. The reason why I used the PSP's native video-out was that it maintained perfect full speed game performance, likely because it was handled by dedicated hardware within the PSP. Using the plugin's video-out would often slow down the game since it was handling the video feed in software, and the PSP was already busy running a game on top of that.
Back in the day, my employer had the PSP-Movie DevKit. One of the main purposes of having the video output to a CRT monitor was to ensure the video encoding was correct. The PSP screen was able to playback video at 59.96fps but the CRT would playback at 29.97, resulting in the video frames being interlaced. If the video compressionist (back then authors did the video compression - I did at least) encoded the video with the incorrect field flag (top or bottom first), it would be very hard to notice on the PSP screen but on a CRT, it was glaringly obvious. An example of fields being encoded incorrectly and reaching retail is Rob Zombie’s Hellbilly Deluxe UMD.
I've created quite a few custom UMD movies. Last one I created was star wars VII. It was fun being able to make custom menus and add subs into the video iso. It is pointless, but it had it charms. I still have my custom UMD video iso stored on a drive.
The foot switch is from T-15Ks, mostly used for profiling so you can play the game and get it to a part that is dropping frames, then you hit the switch to start perf capture.
@@SerBallister because you need both hands to hold a controller to play the game. When trying to capture performance data for dips or stalls you have a couple of frames to react otherwise you miss the stall. The foot pedal allows you to play the game and then press the capture button without having to move your hands. resting your foot just on the pedal gives you a very fast response time. From memory the T-15Ks only recorded 7 frames worth of data. Since they already had the pedals they just kept using it on the PSP kits as well. However the system was retired for the PS3.
@@oziphantom9465 Thanks for the detailed response. It did dawn on me after posting that the foot pedal makes perfect sense when both your hands are holding the controller. I never saw a pedal used on ps2 devkits (we had around 5-6 of them) I guess it was optional?
@@SerBallister well only the T-15K had the perf hardware, the standard T-10K don't use the foot pedal. Did you upgrade any of your kits to the Dark Blue ones?
@@SerBallister Yeah, I was wondering what was up with the foot pedal, and then remembered trying to fumble-finger for Godot's break button even with both hands on the keyboard. I would not want to try that while trying to hold a controller. They make them in USB, if I ever get back into Godot or Unreal I'm kinda tempted to get one now... huh.
From what I know, the memory options ( 32MB and 64MB ) were there because the PSP 1000 only had 32 MB of ram while all the other revisions had 64 ( 2000, 3000, E1000, GO )
also there is what looks like a "retail" video output port on this kit, right under propreitary connector for the controller that should support component output like on 3000 and GO
I personally never used mine and I don't remember anyone else have theirs connected back in the day. The PS2 "Tool" devkits definitely had a similar foot switch so I suspect it was a Playstation thing. The theory was it was easy to break in the debugger when you hit your repro case but in practice it was easier to use breakpoints or just hit the necessary key on the keyboard.
I love the PSP! MVG's mod scene console was the OG Xbox, mine was PSP. Made themes, ported games, CFW for days. I own 7 of them all different colors. Removed the UMD drive and soldered cell phone batteries in them. There was a hack for a camera MS DUO adapter with that I had 256gb of Games and Emulators. So happy to see this. Brings the memory's back. May charge one tonight! Thanks MVG!
About Component output -- PSP actually did have an official Component (as well as composite) cable out to TV. I've been playing my PSP on TV''s for about 10 years with the component cable. It's pretty sweet!
The DECR-1000 (ps3 devkit) also comes with a footswitch (which incidentally is fully compatible with the DTP-T1000) Sadly, it appears no games (at least none released nor prototypes in the wild) made use of the footswitch (some did made use of the GPIO however)
Retrogametech managed to get hold of the PSP part of the kit, he took it apart to see if it was a full unit or just a display and controller, it was the latter.
The footswitch idea for halting execution is a very good one when you have both of your hands potentially busy while attempting to get the game in a certain state. Awesome material, as always! I hope someday a Super Emulator SE lands in your lap, bet it would be a treat for all of us.
Also the external screen monitor was also used alot for QA. Often at SCEE we would have to record the footage for bugs and the external output allowed us to do that. :) Don't miss lugging these around SCEE let me tell you!
The screen on that dev kit looked like it hadn't even remotely seen a speck of dust. That was impressive. On an unrelated note, firmware 6.61 was the final revision for the PSP. On a second unrelated note, the PSP is still my favorite handheld of all time. Anyway, thank you for this video. It was pretty awesome as always.
This reminds me, I created a few simple games on my modded PSP in Lua without any devkit. It was actually some of the first programming I ever did! You could say the PSP got me into it. Incredible find and a cool piece of history.
Ouy of ANY system I have EVER wanted to own, THIS SPECIFIC one, is one I have always wanted to own. The PSP Amused me and Mesmerized me as a child. To own a development console would be absolutely bonkers.
I loved my PSP in the early 2010s and love it in the early 2020s as well :) Had almost 10 years break from it as I broke my old one but 2021 was the year I got another one!
MVG - Your audience really gets to know you well from your videos. Love seeing you talk about your interests in hacking, porting, homebrew, and tinkering with consoles. Your work on the OG XBOX was so great to experience back in the day. PSP was the ultimate portable homebrew machine... this thing was a big part of my life back in the day.
I’ve been to that store many times! The collection there is awesome, and the quality is excellent, yet the price is kinda high IMO. The store’s name is pronounced “Shí guāng Wu”, which means “Time House” in Chinese.
i like the boxiness of the devkit and the yellow front face with the sony in the top left corner with all the little lights just does something for me 🤩
The PSP was such a good portable console and modding them made them even better. Had good times playing games with my brothers. One thing I hate about Australia it's hard to get dev kits here would love to mess with dev kits.
@The tricky tick Nah mate, you don't understand. You know that wildlife that Australia is infamous for? Some of them love to go for expensive niche electronics, I've seen a case where a dropbear sniffed out some poor buggers Nintendo Playstation. Largest bit of him they found was a 4cm² chunk of femur bone next to the remnants of the Playstation's destroyed casing.
I always love watching these videos for two specific reasons: 1) Love the channel and information that MVG provides, simple enough for the commonfolk but also enough dev terminology and stuff for sw devs to enjoy the innards of them. 2) Comment section usually has a lot of messages from another developers and people in the business that share REALLY interesting data that you could never knew other way :D
I've been to that store! Their selection is awesome, I got a ton of Saturn stuff when I visited. There are actually a few really cool retro game stores in the Taipei Underground Mall, it was hard not to blow my entire travel budget when I visited
It would be great to get a Sony insider overview on how Sony salvaged and repurposed their mini-disc format into the UMD format. A young gamer or user who frequently played on Sony PSP using UMDs probably wouldn't know or realize the UMD started off right around when Mini Disc players were disappearing from market.
Sony seemed obsessed with building a media format monopoly back then, I guess they were still angry about VHS vs Betamax. They won with BluRay in the end, until Netflix came along :)
i used this kit daily when i worked for sony in san diego. We never played games that were not released on it on my team. but tested patches on new games and make sure they didnt have issues.
Ahh, this brings back a few memories. I was using these daily in the late 2000s. Fun times. Those handsets were a pain in the backside though, always getting knocked off the desk/nearly bringing the kit with it. A bunch of us put velcro on ours to stick it to the top of the kit when we weren't using it.
Heeeey! I remember these! I used to work in Sony's first party QA department. Had rows and rows of these things for testing first party titles in the various testing bays.
MVG videos cover the most fascinating tech on youtube, great work. I would like to see you make some hour long documentaries on this kind of tech like Gaming Historian style, though I'm sure it would take too long to produce without a team and large budget.
Interesting video for sure, but it was a nice bonus to see the Detective Conan movie posted for the scarlet bullet on the wall outside of the store, really made me happy!! lol
Thanks for this! I've always been curious as to what the development environments for various consoles look like and how they work. The foot switch is actually a really great idea. I mean, if you have both hands on the controller (which you would be, if you were play testing) and you're trying to catch an elusive bug, you might miss the exact right moment to halt the game if you have to take your hands off the controller and reach over and click a breakpoint button or something.
I'VE SEEN ONE BEFORE! 😮 Took me a minute into the video to realize this. Ages ago, I did game testing for a focus group. My mind was blown they had a room of these PSPs connected to computer-like hardware. Also blown away when one of the staff popped in a burned disc into the drive and the PSP booted the game from it. Don't remember the game name, but it was a FPS.
that shop is located in the shopping area of the underground of taipei station. some yrs before I got a scratched PS2 DVD that cannot be read from the console or PC. I bring it along with me in one travel trip to Taiwan. There is a shop providing a polishing service for my disc that I cannot find any of similar service in Hong Kong. I finally got the disc readable again and that is fantastic.
It makes me curious, this type of devkits are as necessary now days? I mean, it seems unlikely that indie developers, for example, would have access to this type of hardware, it seems to me that developing on PC and using retail hardware (with dev features enabled) would be good enough for most small projects
Unless you're doing first party driver development it wouldn't be necessary. Old consoles were proprietary tech with few if any compatibility layers, and engines were often custom made due to cost and scale/optimization concerns. It's not like today where you can run a premade engine like Unity, Unreal Engine, or something else on top of a shell that runs a basic graphics API like OpenGL or NVN. In a Switch you're just compiling for an ARM processor and using NVN. The internal firmware of the Switch handles things like internal flash memory access, networking, relative file pathing, and so on. Since you're using standardized hardware that the tools are already developed for and since the firmware handles necessary file and memory functions, that means you can just run the game engine on top and have everything else be handled by what's already on the system. You compare that to the Gamecube, which had no internal firmware other than what was used for the RTC and the memory/disc management. So you had to basically build everything from scratch, from the graphics API on up. You were interfacing almost directly with the hardware. Aggressive Inline for example uses a very specific hardware quirk built into the Gamecube by accident that allows it to play higher quality audio with almost no loading by tracking the audio very sloppily with pretty big sector sizes, since a DVD's sector sizes can only be so small. That same kind of trick wouldn't be possible on PS5 because a game is software run on top of the firmware, on top of the internal hardware management software, on top of the kernel. There's several layers of separation.
The GPIO port breakout is nice, this allows devs to build not only custom software but also likely helps with creating hardware peripherals that hook up to their consoles through the expansion ports, and maybe allows some extra debuging/development capabilities in the devkit itself. Not sure about the PSP but the GPIO can used in other systems for things like communication to a custom debugging tool, or even more standard have a mode in which it acts as a regular serial port (SPI) where the devs could use for simple things like printing out logs from the PSP to a PC or even make an interactive console available like allowing control of a GDB session.
As a game developer, I used the foot switch on the PS3 devkit to toggle noclip or godmode on/off. Was really handy since that is something you use frequently during development.
I got to play with one of these during my second year at aie in 2010 we borrowed it off the 2k guys upstairs. It was insanely easy to get gl code running. I’ve been chasing that high my entire career.
Devkits fascinate me. It's just that mix of obscure old tech, something that at the time very few people would have access to, and insights into how games are/were made for console platforms.
epic profile pic my dude
I love how they sometimes have special looking systems, like with the PS5
There are many odd things in dev kits, some are indeed like seeing the previous version of the hardware where it still was built using off the shelf parts. The PlayStation 1 devkit is like that, aside from a CD emulator card it features a couple of ISA cards that plugged into a PC which contained discrete versions of the console hardware. The 2 cards seem just like a cludge to make up for the lack of space, as in practice the seemed to act like a single cards as they are linked with wires not only on the bus but by the other side of the board too, and a later iteration of the devkit called DTL-H2000 makes away with the twin cards and features a single main ISA board containing the PSX hardware, aside from the CD and sound cards. Some devkits for other systems are something so niche, as you say, that you could see that they were partially manually assembled, some even featuring your run of the mill bodge wire, because they made a mistake and didn't bother to make new PCBs. After FPGAs became cheaper and more powerful devkits began using them instead, and became much less interesting as a result.
GREAT WAY OF PUTTING IT
I love how yellow the case already is despite the PSP not feeling SO old.
A local TV channel had those devkits as well to showcase new PSP games to viewers which makes it just as memorable to me as the DS dev kits.
Giga?
@@MegaMeatGrinder sure
The PSP originally released around 2004. That's 2 more years and the PSP will turn 20 years old. That more than makes up for yellow plastic.
@@EximiusDux Well, yea but I was under assumption the yellowing is more an issue with plastics produced during the 80's and 90's.
Some other memories of early PSP dev: The local wireless mode (called Ad Hoc Mode, I think) used wires in the first batch of dev kits so our QA team had these wires running across the room. Also, the first few iterations of the dev kits had very different screens. I think Sony was trying to figure out which screen to go with - viewing angle was the difference I remember the most. One challenge I remember is that all our development before we got kits was assuming the PSP would run at 333 MHz. However, soon after we got the kits we were informed that the PSP would be locked at 222 MHz due to battery life concerns. This sucked because we had to take out a lot of physics objects which weren't critical to the game but added some extra fun. At some point Sony opened up the PSP to full 333 MHz but it was too late for our launch titles. Also, if I recall, the PSP Dev Kit has 64 MB of RAM which could be toggled on or off using one of the dip-switches. The dip-switches were good for lots of things. I recall we used one for taking screenshots. We were working on a title for Japan launch and all the TRC documents were in Japanese so we had one staff member translate each new version. One scary part was that a TRC for "Sleep Mode" was blank for our entire development. We were nearing Beta and one of the engineers asked QA if sleep mode was causing any issues and the QA guy was like, "What's sleep mode?" Ahhhh! Who could blame him...the TRC was blank and nobody had mentioned it before then. Luckily we didn't have any major issues with sleep mode on that game. On subsequent games, sleep mode testing was a huge part of the QA effort, and a source of some of the most frustrating bugs to fix.
that's an interesting piece of history thanks :) which games did you developed?
Does sleep mode work kind of like the devkit footswitch? Also, what kind of bugs could be caused by the sleep mode?
If you don't mind me asking what game did you develop for the psp?
@@thisnamehaschangedthanksto8185 Sleep Mode is a switch on the PSP that you slide to pause the game and turn off the screen. The game is basically still running and comes back when you flick the sleep mode switch again. This video has an example: ua-cam.com/video/piGnrAMnfhg/v-deo.html The bugs were difficult because they were always timing-specific. Put the game into sleep mode during a small time window when saving: corrupt save file. Put the game into sleep mode during a small time window while loading into game: crash. Stuff like that.
@@bigdumer8997 Yep, I know what Sleep mode does. But I wasn't sure if the way it works is similar to that of the footswitch
I like that the devkit just looks like those regular old computers (instead of having a black case and a different design)
It looks dope and that DVD option is dope too.
Looks like a slim desktop / small form factor pc, but in a classic white PC case. It's cool.
They don't age well lol
I wish you had shown a simple hello world example for showcasing how to develop games on the PSP Devkit. Nevertheless, great video as always!
Me too
Yeah that would have been nice. Maybe he'll make another video about that
Idk if you can even get the official SDK anymore
We would love to see this 😄
What do you expect from this guy? All he does is give us wikipedia-grade explanations of the consoles and simps send him shit like this to get their names mentioned. It's pathetic.
The PSP was such a good handheld. It proved with games like the GTA Stories and Metal Gear series that games didn't need to be huge in file size to look and run great. Now I need 100 gigs just to play online multiplayer.
To be fair PSP games were sometimes almost twice as large as Nintendo DS games because they had the space for more. Music video files and the like. Seriously 1.7GB is small by today's standards but back in the PSP days even 700MB games that were pretty sizable making us angry that we didn't own 4GB Memory Sticks. I remember when the 8GB stick was $400 USD... those were simpler times!
Imagine downloading 1.7gb games on 2005 internet speed
It's such a shame they fucked up the PSVITA so bad when it should have been a followup to a great system
I remember there was one PSP game called NOVA which was a lot like Halo, but it only took up 50MB
@@Humbird00 there was one shooter called Coded Arms, too, haven‘t played the first in that series since 2014 when my first PSP finally bit the dust. ;-;
One issue with the DVD drive is that the read-speed from DVD is much faster than from UMD. To compensate we created a "UMD emulation" mode that artificially slowed the read speed on the DVD build. One time we did a pre-submission to Sony and got our lot of UMDs and they all ran incredibly slowly. Yup, we submitted a build with the UMD emulation so we were artificially slowing the read speed of the already slower UMDs.
you were developing games for the psp?
@@shitoryu8 Yes, the PSP is the only system that used the UMD format.
@@Agret ironic that Sony called it "universal media disc"
a true "bruh" moment right there
As I read this, I can practically *hear* the hands hitting the faces..... Just... OOF.
My favourite handheld system of all time, still play my PSP regularly. Seriously cool to check this Devkit thanks MVG
The psp & ds we’re my childhood I played those more then my Wii/PS3 at that time
I still play my PSP 1000 to this day. You can now store all your games on a 128 GB SD Card.
@@cemsengul16 so easy to custom firmware them and run games from the memory card isn't it! Love being able to play PS1 games that never got put on the Playstation Store on it. Also some great English translation patches for some of the Japan only games out there. Opens up a whole new bunch of games to play.
One of the best features of the Vita is that you can play PSP games. PSP got fantastic first party support that sony really dropped the ball with on the vita.
@@killmepete1 Yeah I own a Vita also and what a disappointment man. The PS Vita had a hard act to follow after the PSP. I only use my Vita as an Archos device because the OLED display is beautiful. I have two 512 GB SD Cards filled with my Blu Rays I ripped on to them. So when I go somewhere and I have to wait a long time, I pull out the Vita and watch movies.
Had a great time sending this out to you!
Thank you Marco for sending this over and help entertain and teach us.
I had such a love for the PSP as a kid, at one point I tried designing a console conversion of a PSP with a front mounted UMD drive just like this. The difference was that my knowledge of electronics was limited (I was 12 I think?) and I thought I'd need to use a parallel cable to be able to run all of the controller wires to the PCB. Needless to say I was absolutely astonished when I learned about this dev kit a few years later. Feels good to see someone covering it in the flesh.
I remember a crazy setup I did where used homebrew and the video-out of a hacked PSP 2000 to basically play it like a console using a PC controller and a large TV. This actually worked beautifully!
The way I accomplished this was to use a custom firmware plugin called RemoteJoyLite to feed PC controller inputs from USB controller hooked up to a laptop to the PSP over USB, and then I just used the PSP's native video-out to display the game on the TV. The irony of this was that RemoteJoyLite's primarily use was sending the PSP's video to a PC, but it also happened to have the ability to send PC controller inputs to the PSP over USB. You could disable the video feed and just use the controller pass-thru feature if you wanted. The reason why I used the PSP's native video-out was that it maintained perfect full speed game performance, likely because it was handled by dedicated hardware within the PSP. Using the plugin's video-out would often slow down the game since it was handling the video feed in software, and the PSP was already busy running a game on top of that.
Back in the day, my employer had the PSP-Movie DevKit. One of the main purposes of having the video output to a CRT monitor was to ensure the video encoding was correct. The PSP screen was able to playback video at 59.96fps but the CRT would playback at 29.97, resulting in the video frames being interlaced. If the video compressionist (back then authors did the video compression - I did at least) encoded the video with the incorrect field flag (top or bottom first), it would be very hard to notice on the PSP screen but on a CRT, it was glaringly obvious.
An example of fields being encoded incorrectly and reaching retail is Rob Zombie’s Hellbilly Deluxe UMD.
I've created quite a few custom UMD movies. Last one I created was star wars VII.
It was fun being able to make custom menus and add subs into the video iso. It is pointless, but it had it charms.
I still have my custom UMD video iso stored on a drive.
Do you have the model number for the psp movie dev kit?
@@socommaster DTP-L1500
@@myagi20000 do you have one for sale?
The foot switch is from T-15Ks, mostly used for profiling so you can play the game and get it to a part that is dropping frames, then you hit the switch to start perf capture.
Seems overly designed and cute, why not use a clickable button or keyboard shortcut in the debugger like normal people ? :D
@@SerBallister because you need both hands to hold a controller to play the game. When trying to capture performance data for dips or stalls you have a couple of frames to react otherwise you miss the stall. The foot pedal allows you to play the game and then press the capture button without having to move your hands. resting your foot just on the pedal gives you a very fast response time. From memory the T-15Ks only recorded 7 frames worth of data. Since they already had the pedals they just kept using it on the PSP kits as well. However the system was retired for the PS3.
@@oziphantom9465 Thanks for the detailed response. It did dawn on me after posting that the foot pedal makes perfect sense when both your hands are holding the controller.
I never saw a pedal used on ps2 devkits (we had around 5-6 of them) I guess it was optional?
@@SerBallister well only the T-15K had the perf hardware, the standard T-10K don't use the foot pedal. Did you upgrade any of your kits to the Dark Blue ones?
@@SerBallister Yeah, I was wondering what was up with the foot pedal, and then remembered trying to fumble-finger for Godot's break button even with both hands on the keyboard. I would not want to try that while trying to hold a controller.
They make them in USB, if I ever get back into Godot or Unreal I'm kinda tempted to get one now... huh.
From what I know, the memory options ( 32MB and 64MB ) were there because the PSP 1000 only had 32 MB of ram while all the other revisions had 64 ( 2000, 3000, E1000, GO )
@@keras_ Yep, that's right.
also there is what looks like a "retail" video output port on this kit, right under propreitary connector for the controller that should support component output like on 3000 and GO
@@MrSurvivaller Nope, connector doesnt support video on this.
I remember seeing these when I did game testing for Sony in 2009. I always thought it was cool that it had a umd drive on the front 👍🏻
I've never seen or heard of the foot switch on these things, I'm guessing it wasn't widely used since it wasn't seen in any other kits?
Why are you subscribed to this guy? He's an xbox fanboy
@@MichaelM28 y not lmfao
I personally never used mine and I don't remember anyone else have theirs connected back in the day. The PS2 "Tool" devkits definitely had a similar foot switch so I suspect it was a Playstation thing. The theory was it was easy to break in the debugger when you hit your repro case but in practice it was easier to use breakpoints or just hit the necessary key on the keyboard.
@@MichaelM28 Oh no! Anyway
The wii had one and it was to pull up the line in code that was running in case that needed to be debugged
I love the PSP! MVG's mod scene console was the OG Xbox, mine was PSP. Made themes, ported games, CFW for days. I own 7 of them all different colors. Removed the UMD drive and soldered cell phone batteries in them. There was a hack for a camera MS DUO adapter with that I had 256gb of Games and Emulators. So happy to see this. Brings the memory's back. May charge one tonight! Thanks MVG!
About Component output -- PSP actually did have an official Component (as well as composite) cable out to TV. I've been playing my PSP on TV''s for about 10 years with the component cable. It's pretty sweet!
The DECR-1000 (ps3 devkit) also comes with a footswitch (which incidentally is fully compatible with the DTP-T1000)
Sadly, it appears no games (at least none released nor prototypes in the wild) made use of the footswitch (some did made use of the GPIO however)
Retrogametech managed to get hold of the PSP part of the kit, he took it apart to see if it was a full unit or just a display and controller, it was the latter.
He says this in the video
The footswitch idea for halting execution is a very good one when you have both of your hands potentially busy while attempting to get the game in a certain state.
Awesome material, as always! I hope someday a Super Emulator SE lands in your lap, bet it would be a treat for all of us.
I’ve never owned a PSP. But it’s still great to see how it’s games were made. Excellent work MVG!
Well, its time to own one now :D
The psp looked so futuristic, it would still fit today with an upgraded screen against the vita or switch while the de kit looks so ancient
There's an IPS screen replacement kit, that you can get for the first generation PSP. Afaik it gives better colours, viewing angles and battery life.
@@user-xu2pi6vx7o 1000$? JUST FOR IPS SCREEN?
@@fzr850 It doesn't cost 1K, it's an aftermarket IPS screen for the PSP 1K, otherwise known as the psp phat.
@@user-xu2pi6vx7o ah, thanks for clearing that up
Stock psp is better than the switch
Also the external screen monitor was also used alot for QA. Often at SCEE we would have to record the footage for bugs and the external output allowed us to do that. :) Don't miss lugging these around SCEE let me tell you!
The screen on that dev kit looked like it hadn't even remotely seen a speck of dust. That was impressive. On an unrelated note, firmware 6.61 was the final revision for the PSP. On a second unrelated note, the PSP is still my favorite handheld of all time. Anyway, thank you for this video. It was pretty awesome as always.
6.61 isn't on devkits
This reminds me, I created a few simple games on my modded PSP in Lua without any devkit. It was actually some of the first programming I ever did! You could say the PSP got me into it. Incredible find and a cool piece of history.
Intresting
Ouy of ANY system I have EVER wanted to own, THIS SPECIFIC one, is one I have always wanted to own. The PSP Amused me and Mesmerized me as a child. To own a development console would be absolutely bonkers.
What the •••• did I write that was bad YT?
I can't appreciate PSP I suppose?
YT is going to dogs•••!
Can confirm, that store in Taipei is great, the shop keep is very helpful!
I loved my PSP in the early 2010s and love it in the early 2020s as well :) Had almost 10 years break from it as I broke my old one but 2021 was the year I got another one!
I bought one too, waiting for it to arrive!
So, the devs could literally step through the code. 😁
I love you.
booooooooooo. take your upvote damnit.
Haha. I thought the foot switch was really interesting.
Brilliant.. You earned this upvote ;) Too bad there doesn't appear to be a means of stepping "into"/"over" the unit...
This comment needs more recognition
DevKits are so cool! I'm happy that I get to have a look at these awesome kits through your channel.
MVG - Your audience really gets to know you well from your videos. Love seeing you talk about your interests in hacking, porting, homebrew, and tinkering with consoles. Your work on the OG XBOX was so great to experience back in the day. PSP was the ultimate portable homebrew machine... this thing was a big part of my life back in the day.
There are versions of retail psp with 64 mb ram, the first versions had only 32mb. So that is why you have a switch on the dev kit!
I’ve been to that store many times!
The collection there is awesome, and the quality is excellent, yet the price is kinda high IMO.
The store’s name is pronounced “Shí guāng Wu”, which means “Time House” in Chinese.
I tried to help him say it.
@@MarcoGPUtuber thanks for sending this kit to MVG. It’s pretty cool!
@@tyraelhermosa thanks!
@@yanghao8351 Not really, still better than zhuyin. At least someone is not completely blank when shown pinyin.
@@yanghao8351 Well, I’m not intending to teach anyone how to pronounce, just want to bring it up if anyone is interested in it.
7:31 latest PSP FW is 6.61. Sony released that update in 2015 (lol)
Did they also release that update for devkit?
i like the boxiness of the devkit and the yellow front face with the sony in the top left corner with all the little lights just does something for me 🤩
The PSP was such a good portable console and modding them made them even better. Had good times playing games with my brothers.
One thing I hate about Australia it's hard to get dev kits here would love to mess with dev kits.
@The tricky tick Nah mate, you don't understand. You know that wildlife that Australia is infamous for? Some of them love to go for expensive niche electronics, I've seen a case where a dropbear sniffed out some poor buggers Nintendo Playstation. Largest bit of him they found was a 4cm² chunk of femur bone next to the remnants of the Playstation's destroyed casing.
Love the name.
Just one thing you hate about Australia?
Your pf name wtf?
@@looeegee Try quoting LOL! Who are you talking to? WHICH pf name?
0:11 "Hot-ing up?" The man is so into the 2000's golden age he straight up forgot grammar existed.
I love these dev kit vídeos, from all systems. Problem is, I'm still waiting to see someone actually developing a game using them.
Just when I was curious how psp games where developed and tested, the notification poped up
Nice timing as usual MVG :)
This is one of my favorite channels by far. Every video is informative.
The footswitch for debugging is just such an hilariously interesting oddity. XD
These uploads are getting better and better. Good work, kiddo !
The development kits are really interesting to look at
It is always interesting to see these kits in terms of their size. Vita is a handheld device, and this thing is literally a PC case.
Just going to say, that is a lovely looking hardware package, a small capable beige box, very early 00’s and late 90’s aesthetic.
Boy, do I love the PSP. I think it's my favorite portable console to this day. Three GTA games and many emulators game me TONS of stuff to play.
I always love watching these videos for two specific reasons:
1) Love the channel and information that MVG provides, simple enough for the commonfolk but also enough dev terminology and stuff for sw devs to enjoy the innards of them.
2) Comment section usually has a lot of messages from another developers and people in the business that share REALLY interesting data that you could never knew other way :D
I've been to that store! Their selection is awesome, I got a ton of Saturn stuff when I visited. There are actually a few really cool retro game stores in the Taipei Underground Mall, it was hard not to blow my entire travel budget when I visited
It would be great to get a Sony insider overview on how Sony salvaged and repurposed their mini-disc format into the UMD format. A young gamer or user who frequently played on Sony PSP using UMDs probably wouldn't know or realize the UMD started off right around when Mini Disc players were disappearing from market.
I still have a minidisk player lol.
MiniDisc is a magneto-optical rewritable disc. The UMD is neither. They're not related.
Sony seemed obsessed with building a media format monopoly back then, I guess they were still angry about VHS vs Betamax.
They won with BluRay in the end, until Netflix came along :)
@@SerBallister they also forced memorystick.
@@RinaldoJonathan Yeah, any third party manufacturer needed a license for a magic gate chip for that, so they could tax manufacturers too
The last segment showing that store, love electronics stores like that. Never know what you're gonna find.
This brings back memories working at Sony QA in Foster City, CA.
I remember having a psp 3000. What an amazing system for the time
i used this kit daily when i worked for sony in san diego. We never played games that were not released on it on my team. but tested patches on new games and make sure they didnt have issues.
I'm irrationally angry that he couldn't be bothered to show what the backside of the psp looks like.
That's actually a really cool piece of retro tech.
I wanna see this gem retrobrighted.
Wait, hold on. I had a dream of being in that store myself. I dreamt about it months ago. Bizarre that it's actually real
that is actually amazing
Ahh PSP, home of many obscure and awesome JRPGs that never left Japan
Ahh, this brings back a few memories. I was using these daily in the late 2000s. Fun times. Those handsets were a pain in the backside though, always getting knocked off the desk/nearly bringing the kit with it. A bunch of us put velcro on ours to stick it to the top of the kit when we weren't using it.
Heeeey! I remember these! I used to work in Sony's first party QA department. Had rows and rows of these things for testing first party titles in the various testing bays.
I'd love to see more devkit videos from you! These are so interesting
Wow! This is the History Channel I need!!! Amazing video man, just amazing!!! 👍
Wow , bless the ppl that create such great technology in the past
Ive been waiting for this video for a loooong time
That devkit looks absolutely vintage. Pre-2000s.
MVG videos cover the most fascinating tech on youtube, great work. I would like to see you make some hour long documentaries on this kind of tech like Gaming Historian style, though I'm sure it would take too long to produce without a team and large budget.
I've been to that mall in Taipei, it's really cool, like all of Tokyo's Akihabara in one mall.
PSP is the most underappreciated PlayStation in my book.
Love the PSP and the DS as well.
I still have my good ol’ PSP 3004 to play games on. And it still works like a charm.
YES GREAT TIMING IVE BEEN INTO PSP VIDEOS LATELY
really enjoy these dev kit vids! thank you!
What a great console, it must have been a blast to own.
Interesting video for sure, but it was a nice bonus to see the Detective Conan movie posted for the scarlet bullet on the wall outside of the store, really made me happy!! lol
Thanks for this! I've always been curious as to what the development environments for various consoles look like and how they work. The foot switch is actually a really great idea. I mean, if you have both hands on the controller (which you would be, if you were play testing) and you're trying to catch an elusive bug, you might miss the exact right moment to halt the game if you have to take your hands off the controller and reach over and click a breakpoint button or something.
Great show as always! Thank you MVG
I'VE SEEN ONE BEFORE! 😮
Took me a minute into the video to realize this. Ages ago, I did game testing for a focus group. My mind was blown they had a room of these PSPs connected to computer-like hardware. Also blown away when one of the staff popped in a burned disc into the drive and the PSP booted the game from it.
Don't remember the game name, but it was a FPS.
that shop is located in the shopping area of the underground of taipei station. some yrs before I got a scratched PS2 DVD that cannot be read from the console or PC. I bring it along with me in one travel trip to Taiwan. There is a shop providing a polishing service for my disc that I cannot find any of similar service in Hong Kong. I finally got the disc readable again and that is fantastic.
I highly enjoy seeing the old devkits 👍🏻
Thanks for sharing this is awesome to see 😄
Definitely checking out the store soon. Never felt so blessed working abroad in Taipei 🤩
that foot pedal is so tactical, I love it
the footswitch to stop the code execution is awesome! reminds me of a emergency stop in heavy industry machines. 😅
First modded device which i have presented on my school. Love it.
Thanks for showing it, that's really cool!
It makes me curious, this type of devkits are as necessary now days? I mean, it seems unlikely that indie developers, for example, would have access to this type of hardware, it seems to me that developing on PC and using retail hardware (with dev features enabled) would be good enough for most small projects
Unless you're doing first party driver development it wouldn't be necessary. Old consoles were proprietary tech with few if any compatibility layers, and engines were often custom made due to cost and scale/optimization concerns. It's not like today where you can run a premade engine like Unity, Unreal Engine, or something else on top of a shell that runs a basic graphics API like OpenGL or NVN. In a Switch you're just compiling for an ARM processor and using NVN. The internal firmware of the Switch handles things like internal flash memory access, networking, relative file pathing, and so on. Since you're using standardized hardware that the tools are already developed for and since the firmware handles necessary file and memory functions, that means you can just run the game engine on top and have everything else be handled by what's already on the system.
You compare that to the Gamecube, which had no internal firmware other than what was used for the RTC and the memory/disc management. So you had to basically build everything from scratch, from the graphics API on up. You were interfacing almost directly with the hardware. Aggressive Inline for example uses a very specific hardware quirk built into the Gamecube by accident that allows it to play higher quality audio with almost no loading by tracking the audio very sloppily with pretty big sector sizes, since a DVD's sector sizes can only be so small. That same kind of trick wouldn't be possible on PS5 because a game is software run on top of the firmware, on top of the internal hardware management software, on top of the kernel. There's several layers of separation.
i really like the way that computer case looks.
The GPIO port breakout is nice, this allows devs to build not only custom software but also likely helps with creating hardware peripherals that hook up to their consoles through the expansion ports, and maybe allows some extra debuging/development capabilities in the devkit itself. Not sure about the PSP but the GPIO can used in other systems for things like communication to a custom debugging tool, or even more standard have a mode in which it acts as a regular serial port (SPI) where the devs could use for simple things like printing out logs from the PSP to a PC or even make an interactive console available like allowing control of a GDB session.
I wish people still developed games for this console using these Dev Kits. The games are worth playing and worth to stay in the market as well.
As a game developer, I used the foot switch on the PS3 devkit to toggle noclip or godmode on/off. Was really handy since that is something you use frequently during development.
I was hoping you'd do a PSP Dev kit since you did the NDS. Having had both consoles, I love seeing how similar and different the two brands do things.
cool that deve kit looks like a old computer I used at school... your the best MVG
Nice to see a piece of hardware history for the PSP. It could use a little retrobright treatment to make it new again!
Amazing. The kit seems very resourceful.
Thanks for sharing.
thats AWESOME!!! - hopefully you can make something on it and show us a lil demo or something :D
Bought a used PSP Go two years ago. Still a very neat device with lots of cool games available on ROM sites.
TIL about the phrase "hotting up."
I dig it
Awesome! Love the PSP! Thanks for this feature!
I got to play with one of these during my second year at aie in 2010 we borrowed it off the 2k guys upstairs. It was insanely easy to get gl code running. I’ve been chasing that high my entire career.
Dev kits are crazy cool! 🤩👍✨
I've never seen a dev kit before. This was a very interesting video.