u/yojimbo_beta

I am a pretty "modern" software engineer but one of my passions is the original 1994 PlayStation. From time to time I've dabbled with PSX development but I'd like to hear what it was like from industry veterans

What I understand is

• most devs worked with devkit boards that would slot right into your PC. How did they work exactly? What was the process for building and playing the game?
• Most people were using GCC and plain C89. Were you ever aware of people using more exotic languages? How often did you have to write assembler?
• Could you "flash" the dev console with changes? was it easy to debug?
• From what I've read about the PSX's development, the Sony SDK was pretty bad. What was Sony's attitude to devs circumventing their SDK?
• With the PSX how much did the 2mb limit bite? That's quite a low amount of memory by the late 90s
• Did studios and projects share any code? How did that work back in that era? Did you officially license libraries or was it just, Bob shares a snippet of C on a bulletin board?
• Were you ever jealous of devs working on different systems? N64 etc?
• What were the IDEs like back then? Were they any good?

I have been doing some of my own homebrew largely as a way to learn C. But working with an emulator and modern tooling is a very different experience.