Wow. This is heaven to me. For some reason I'm strangely drawn to obscure video game consoles, especially development kits. My favorite is the Sony TOOL, which looks like a giant Playstation 2, runs Linux, and is used for PS2 and PSP development. Be still my beating heart! I love it when a lot of care is put into these ultra-limited-release items. The Sega Dreamcast dev unit isn't nearly as awesome.
posted by zsazsa at 8:41 AM on October 27, 2005

Yeah, this is pretty damn rad.
posted by cmonkey at 8:48 AM on October 27, 2005

OMFG...CD-i.
A former employer of mine was really interested in getting in on CD-i way back when Phillips was trying to get developers on-board and the thing launched. They sent me to a few CD-i conferences to check it out. Right from the get-go it was so obvious this thing was DOA. A solution looking desperately for a problem.
posted by Thorzdad at 9:26 AM on October 27, 2005

Wow, crazy stuff. And yeah, I want a PS2 TOOL, too.
posted by blacklite at 11:11 AM on October 27, 2005

Truly awesome post! That saturn.. 'mobile' thing is so sleek, so refined, so able to serve as a backup car bumper.
posted by eurasian at 1:06 PM on October 27, 2005

A solution looking desperately for a problem

But because of CD-i, I have the coolest mouse controller on the planet. It is the ultimate Centipede accessory.
posted by meehawl at 1:27 PM on October 27, 2005

But because of CD-i, I have the coolest mouse controller on the planet. It is the ultimate Centipede accessory.


Well...okay...there is that.
posted by Thorzdad at 1:31 PM on October 27, 2005

OK, let's talk about TOOL. It's the PS2 devkit, it has nothing to do with PSP. The PSP devkit is the white box to the right of that picture, TOOL is the big scary black thing to the left. Kinda looks like it should have an imperial logo on it somewhere. It has 128Mb of main memory, and 8Mb of IOP memory, that's 4x as much as the PS2 (there's no extra VU, GS or SPU memory though), which comes in very usefull when running debug builds. It also has a bare bones PC in there, running Linux, acting as a host environment for the PS2 board. The latest update plays games from any region, and discs you can burn with any DVD burner (and the requisite magic software). Most important of all, you can access its memory from a networked PC.

Also the article on Yaroze, misses the point that the program turned into the PS2 Linux kit, which didn't require a special version of the console. So far Sony has been pretty much the only console platform holder to give consumers a legal path to developing their own code.

Disclaimer: I develop for PS2.
posted by inpHilltr8r at 4:24 PM on October 27, 2005

Wow, I really want one of these sewing machine Game Boys. Seriously, I do quite a bit of sewing and I think it would really be enhanced by a Game Boy style interface.
posted by Jawn at 1:12 AM on October 28, 2005

inpHilltr8r, awesome! Thanks for the insight. After reading up more on the PSP and realizing how it didn't have much in common with the PS2 hardware-wise, I figured that TOOL probably wouldn't be used for PSP dev. I guess that's what I get for believing what Gizmodo says.

Man, I'd love to get pictures of the inside of a TOOL box. On at the Assembler forums, it looks like a few people have one, but none have posted any precious pictures.
posted by zsazsa at 6:43 AM on November 1, 2005