PS1 programming

[zoinknoise]

i didn't see this mentioned in the PS1 article, but i thought it was worth pointing out: the PS1 was the first major console that required developers to program in a high-level way, using the Sony libraries and C, etc. it was explicitly forbidden to write programs entirely in assembly language. the developer contract with Sony stipulated that the official libraries must be used for game development. this is of course in sharp contrast to the 8-bit/16-bit era where nearly all games were coded in assembly for speed and efficiency.

at the beginning of the PS1 era, it's clear simply by reading the SCEE BBS archive from 1995-1996 that many developers had trouble adjusting to this. the Saturn, by comparison, let developers program the "old" way, directly to the hardware, with full documentation provided by Sega. meanwhile, you can see the devs begging Sony repeatedly for low-level documentation for the GTE in these old posts. (Andy Gavin in his Ars Technica interview recalls doing exactly the same thing; he claims he succeeded.) these are all new problems that game devs had to face at the time, and it foreshadowed the future: it's safe to say that game devs generally no longer worry about hardware registers or program in assembly, and this method of programming started with the PS1.

none of this is mentioned in the article but i believe it's an important historical detail.