Retrieved February 7, The biggest difference between the Dual Shock 2 and the original… all of the buttons and even the digital pad offer analog support. This means that the d-pad, the four face buttons and the four shift buttons are all pressure-sensitive and have degrees of sensitivity. It is also worth noting that the Dual Shock 2 is a bit lighter than the original Dual Shock because it appears to have less in the way of gears for the vibration function of the controller.
March 23, Archived from the original on July 21, Retrieved November 11, Hennessy and David A. Microprocessor Report , Volume 13, Number 5, April 19, Microdesign Resources. Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach 3 ed. Morgan Kaufmann. ISBN Retrieved 9 April Archived from the original PDF on July 20, The biggest issue with the EE is that it has a very small on-die cache and relies on having a very high-speed memory bus, more on that later though.
A 16KB instruction cache is more than enough for the processor however the 32KB data cache leaves much to be desired. During its design phase the idea of having a fast 3. The power provided by these vector units is tremendous however their downfall is in their implementation. This is where the majority of the learning curve for developers came from when dealing with the PS2, especially considering that the PS2 shipped to developers without any C libraries. Writing assembly to control the interaction between these two units and the rest of the CPU is not an easy task to say the least and led to many frustrated PS2 developers.
The Xbox host CPU however is the very well known Coppermine derived core which although has the unfortunate limitations of the x86 ISA, also carries the benefits of being a very well known architecture with much ISV support.
The processor runs at a higher clock rate than the EE but we all know the meaninglessness of clock rate as a single performance metric. The new cards embed extra circuitry for security purposes referred as MagicGate , which enable games to block data transfers between different memory cards. The shell features some practical sections which allow to perform day-to-day operations, like manipulating the saves of the memory card. It also provides some exceptional options, like changing the current video mode.
It is unprecedented the level of popularity this system achieved during the noughties, at the end of its lifespan , after 13 years! What happened here is really impressive. On the hardware side, Sony provided studios with dedicated hardware to run and debug games in-house. The initial devkits were bare boards stacked together to replicate the un-released hardware of the PS2. The disc drive can read both DVDs and CDs, so games could be distributed using either format, but for obvious reasons you will find most titles in DVD format.
DVDs can hold up 4. GB in the case of DVD-9 dual layer version, less common. Due to the type of medium used, not only games could be played, but also movies.
Now, this requires a decoder to be able to read the DVD movie format, and for that, the PS2 initially included the required bits installed in the memory card after all, the card is just a storage medium but later models came with the DVD software pre-installed in the BIOS ROM. Similarly, game studios were in charge of providing the necessary infrastructure if they decided to provide online services like multiplayer. You obviously needed a Hard drive fitted in the console to install the Linux distro.
Linux Kit included compilers targeting the EE gcc 2. Overall, this sounds like an interesting environment. In fact, one of the research papers I read to write this article was carried out using this setup.
This section was particularly concerning for game studios, since this console used a very affordable format disc to store games and was at extreme risk of being pirated.
The commands specifically used to read the content of a game behave very differently from the rest of commands i. When the DVD is asked to read a game disc, it will always navigate through the disc using the map file, meaning that a pirated copy of a game, which could not include the map file, will be impossible to read.
This was complemented by a region lock system that prevented imported games from working in a console from a different region.
As any other console of its generation and previous ones using disc-based systems, it was a matter of time before third-party companies reversed-engineered the DVD subsystem. The goal here was to find a usable exploit which could force the driver to navigate through the file system without needing an out-of-reach map file.
This eventually happened in the form of modchips , which lifted the region locking restrictions as well. These enabled to defeat the region protection and use in-game cheats by patching the OS. I guess the best example to mention is CodeBreaker.
In the middle of the latest advancements, yet another trick appeared. This window of opportunity allowed users to swap the disc for a non-genuine one. Then Swap Magic, still loaded in memory, bootstrapped the main executable of the new disc, loading a real game at the end.
All of this is carried out while the driver is still thinking a genuine disc is inserted. However, depending on the model, the external case of the PS2 will have to be tampered to block the eject sensors of the drive. In some cases, placing cotton in certain places will do the trick.
When a PS1 game is inserted, the OS fetches the database file and loads the whole file in memory at a fixed address strike one. The information parser is implemented using strncpy , a function in C that copies strings chain of characters from one place to another. Luckily, this function contains an optional parameter that specifies the maximum number of bytes to be copied, protecting the copy from buffer overflows. After the slim revision was released, the exploit got patched I wonder how. With this, hackers realised that if they find a way to install particular software into the MemoryCard, then the BIOS would always load it at boot.
Additionally, this software needs to be installed somehow, so another exploit e. The same year after the release of Free MCBoot, another trick was discovered: Disguising games as DVD movies, effectively allowing unauthorised game copies to be read without requiring a modchip.
This only required to patch the game image by adding dummy metadata and partitions only used by DVD movies. However, with the help of a Homebrew program called ESR , the game could be kickstarted. Congratulations and thank you for reaching the end of the article! To be honest, there was so much to talk about that I wondered if readers would eventually get tired of Playstation-related stuff after finishing this. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.
You may use it for your work at no cost, even for commercial purposes. But I ask that you reference it properly. Please take a look at the following citation guidelines:. Copetti, R. Playstation 2 Architecture - A Practical Analysis. If this article has significantly contributed to your work, I would appreciate it if you could dedicate an acknowledgement section, just like I do with the people and communities that helped me.
This article is part of the Architecture of Consoles series. If you found it interesting then please consider donating. Your contribution will be used to fund the purchase of tools and resources that will help me to improve the quality of existing articles and upcoming ones.
I hope you have enjoyed this article! If you want to know more about the author tap here and if you would like to support him tap here instead.
0コメント