<story><title>Playstation 2 Architecture</title><url>https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/playstation-2/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kaveh808</author><text>While leading the software R&amp;amp;D team at Square USA (we made the &amp;quot;Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within&amp;quot; movie and one of the &amp;quot;Animatrix&amp;quot; shorts) our team got to develop some cool software both for the PS2 and the little known GSCube experimental machine.&lt;p&gt;The GSCube was 16 GS processors in a box, and could be configured to access the frame buffer as a 4x4 tile format or as 16 layers composited in real time.&lt;p&gt;For Siggraph 2000, we showed a demo of a shot from the movie running in real time, allowing the user to interactively change the surface materials of the character. The scene was Aki floating in zero gravity, and included individual hair strands.&lt;p&gt;My own memorable piece of geekery involved implementing Perlin Noise entirely on the VU1, and demoing a field of tall grass blowing in the wind.&lt;p&gt;Fun stuff.</text></comment>
<story><title>Playstation 2 Architecture</title><url>https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/playstation-2/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gumby</author><text>A correction: the “emotion engine” referred to (at least before launch — perhaps they changed it) the GPU itself, which was the only Sony-designed silicon in the original PS&amp;#x2F;2.  The TMPR and other silicon were designed and supplied by Toshiba.&lt;p&gt;Also notable: Original Playstation (AKA PS&amp;#x2F;1) compatibility was provided by simply putting a whole PS&amp;#x2F;1 on the board — I think it might even have been by then a single chip; if so likely Sony designed.&lt;p&gt;That was an insane project by an amazing team.  I see a comment by me is top of the previous discussion, if you want some more snippets.</text></comment>