December Days 2021 #19: Hell in a Cell
Dec. 19th, 2021 11:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradept[Welcome to December Days, where I natter on about things organized around a theme (sometimes very loosely), one a day, for 31 days. This year, we're taking a look back at some touchpoints along the way of my journey with computing and computing devices.]
Much got touted about the Cell processor at the heart of the PlayStation 3, that it was a supercomputer kind of chip so everything would be awesome for games (and Blu-ray or other media playback), but it was also rumored to be difficult to program for compared to the other systems of the time with more conventional setups. In the early days of the console, installing Linux on the machines could make it possible to run them as a cluster computer. Early models of the PlayStation 3 had PS2 backwards compatibility and the ability to install other operating systems on them, like Linux, but as soon as those features could be used for system emulation or for ripping game discs to hard drives for play, and as soon as it turned out that early versions of the operating system used only one of the two available cryptographic hash checks, the one that could be reverse-engineered, to verify large chunks of what was going on in the system and discs, many of the early functions were removed in later versions of the console, and methods used to downgrade the firmware to versions that still used only the one verification function were patched out, blocked, and otherwise defeated, so as to lock out the homebrew community from doing things Sony didn't want done on the console. Most of these things were done in the name of combating software piracy, because that's the easiest justification to reach for when explaining that you're taking useful features away from your users. (Admittedly, a lot of the homebrew community is able to do their work by finding exploits and successfully executing privilege escalation attacks or similar means of gaining control that could be harmful if exploited by nefarious interests instead of curious ones.) By the time I got the PS3 revision I had, all of the custom firmware and downgrade exploits had been patched out of the base firmware shipping with the unit. The only real echo of what the PS3 had been capable of, before Sony decided they had to patch out basically all the functionality from the machine except for media playing and game playing would be when Person of Interest would use an unnamed video game console cluster to uncompress the Machine into when it became necessary to do so in the fifth season. Anyone who looked at those machines knew they were PS3s, but of course, you couldn't say that, because Sony hadn't paid for the privilege of having their name uttered in the show.
My particular PS3, like all of my gaming consoles during the time with my terrible ex, didn't get as much use as it could have, and spent its time going back and forth between being a proper game console (played in the basement) and being the basement TV's attached Blu-ray player. Given how frequently we were in the basement in those years (where I learned to mostly despise Windows Vista), I suppose the PS3 got sufficient enough of a workout as the media player, even if not as the game console. Also because of my ex's insistence on playing games together as much as possible, the games that got played in that era were mostly cooperative. That was often times frustrating to me, because there was a sufficient skill gap between us that I often had to figure out how to both direct the action and try to do my own part as well. And then try again in simpler terms or explicitly walking her through the buttons to be pressed or control movements to happen and doing my best to make her feel like she is participating and contributing to the gameplay. It could be tough, though, when we were playing the same stage of cooperative Katamari Forever for the fifth or sixth time, taking mainly the same route each time, and I still had to give direction in "forward, left, right," terms instead of "head to the islands" or "let's plow through these buildings." For all the many times that we played together (and I had to lead these sessions, since I was the person more familiar with the game and knowing where to go next) and achieved various scores, when my younger sister, who was equally familiar with the mechanics and rules of Katamari-rolling as I was, played that cooperative map, on the second time through, we set a new high score, and in not sure that my ex ever forgave us for doing it so easily thanks to our shared expertise (and ability to communicate in a more complex register). Eventually the frustration would lead me to letting her direct where to go, since I could understand her perfectly fine and do what she wanted to do. The scores were lower when she directed, since she didn't have the expertise to know what to pick up next, but those sessions absolutely ran smoother from the lack of additional cognitive load of having to control my half of the thing (or my character) and direct her in ways that she would understand and be able to execute. With hindsight, it probably would have been better to coach her as she played by herself, explaining the game and its controls and what to watch out for to play better, building up her expertise until we would be able to play together with a compatible communication system that didn't require every single thing to have to be broken down into its simplest components and then have everything explained about what to do and what to avoid. (This also suggests I would be bad at trying to explain how to play a game to someone inexperienced while trying to play it if there's an experience mismatch.) At a certain point, we mostly played either motion control games (fun times when you are tall enough that stretching means planting your full palm on the ceiling) or light gun shooters (fun times when you are sure you fired in the right spot, only for it to register where you actually fired instead. The Wii games, at least, were more than happy to give you a reticle so you knew where you were shooting when you missed. There were some of the same problems involved there, too, as I would start memorizing patterns and then have to explain where to shoot and where the weak points were on subsequent runs (and getting a little frustrated that the information didn't seem to be sticking between repetitions of the game).
Despite all of that, I did get to play a fair amount of those many long hours games that I'm so fond of, including renewing my love-hate relationship with the stat-RPGs of Nippon Ichi Software. To this day, I've only full-cleared one of their games, Phantom Brave (suck it, Pringer XXX!), and only then because of the fusion mechanic that allowed weapons and characters alike to become insanely powerful and scale themselves along with the powerful superbosses that were available after the main story had ended. For games like Disgaea, where the characters need to gain absurd amounts of levels to get wickedly strong, the grind is much more painful and characters need to find immediate ways of powerleveling so they have a chance at getting the best equipment they can and surviving against the optional superbosses available after the narrative finishes. If you really like level-grinding through random dungeons or repetitions of specific maps to try and gain levels in the tens and hundreds at a time, the NIS stat-RPGs are definitely for you. Really, though, I was much more likely to be involved with two of the three Final Fantasy XIII games (although not so much with the postgame grind of the "have at least one of everything at one point" achievement in Final Fantasy XIII. Seriously, why does anyone think that's a good idea?) and exploring Rome in the third Assassin's Creed game. I obtained a greater software library near the end of the system's life, so I never got to play a lot of the games that I own for it, and I'll probably have to wait until emulation gets good enough and I have enough hard drive space somewhere to put game images on before getting to play those games. Which might not ever get to count towards my achievement list and progress associated with my online gaming account with them.
I also tried to take advantage of the PS3's ability to stream media from the internet and over the local network. There's were two major problems with that idea that pretty well sunk it before it would be able to fly. The first was that the PS3 never got more than 802.11g for wireless connectivity, which definitely isn't good enough to stream high definition material over the local network. We're would have had to connect the Gigabit Ethernet port to have a prayer of getting enough bandwidth to be able to stream over the network. That was definitely not happening, as the router and modem were in the office, one floor up and across the house from where the PS3 was. Things were sufficiently far apart from each other that the PS3 couldn't anyways reliably find and connect to the router because of the weak signal. There was no way there would be Ethernet cable run from router to PS3 just so that it could stream media over the network. I would have had to make the holes and run the cable myself, and I would have been just as likely to staple through a wire than wire things up correctly.
What happened instead was first trying to buy and strategically place signal boosters for the network so as to get a seamless mesh going and cover the entire house, but the bridges never worked correctly so that the machines ever had just one network name to connect to. Eventually, I came across Tomato, a custom firmware for certain Broadcom routers that I first used to boost the signal of the Wireless-G router I had, and then eventually used to transform that router into a massively powered wireless client that could connect to the 802.11n router that I eventually obtained. The client would then run connectivity to the PS3 over Ethernet as the final hop. Which certainly stabilized the connection between the PS3 and the router, but didn't actually improve the bandwidth available to the PS3 to the point where being able to stream in high definition was a possibility. If I wanted to play media, especially high definition media, on the PS3, I was going to have to bring it over on a flash drive or portable hard drive, which was certainly possible, but generally wasn't worth the time and effort to achieve. So it was, in the end, just a Blu-Ray player for media things (that worked most of the time), instead of the true multimedia powerhouse that it was vaunted to be.
The system itself came to a fairly ignominious end, where the optical drive refused to work consistently, and then just refused to work. And unlike the Wii, where I had been able to get some custom programs on it that made it possible to play games even after the drive died, the removal of functionality from the console meant that it became an expensive piece of electronic waste. I mentioned the plight I had to my brother, who sent over his PS3 that he wasn't using any more, and within a few boots of that system, it also died and refused to boot. Both systems were eventually recycled in the electronics recycling program one of our local computer shops participates in. I still have their discs as artifacts of a previous system and for the hope of emulation, but I feel like I didn't get nearly enough usage of of that system compared to what I would have liked. How much of that is due to the system and how much of that is due to the situation that I was in that discouraged getting good use of of the system is an exercise left to an informed reader, but man, my PS2 and my Wii still boot. What happened to some decent engineering?
It wasn't all a loss, however, as both of the Eye accessories are currently input microphones for voice assistant satellite stations, and I'll bet I could get those Move peripherals to connect by Bluetooth of necessary for some other reason, as well. Ask there was at least a little bit of good engineering going on there, just not in the console itself.
- CPU: Cell microprocessor, made up of one 3.2 GHz PowerPC-based "Power Processing Element" (PPE) and six accessible Synergistic Processing Elements (SPEs)
- Memory: 256 MB of Rambus XDR DRAM + 256 MB GDDR3 RAM clocked at 650 MHz
- Graphics: nVidia RSX "Reality Synthesizer", max resolution 1920x1080 through HDMI output
- Sound: 7.1 digital audio, Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD Master Audio, allows bitstreaming of lossless audio codecs to an external receiver through HDMI
- Inputs/Peripherals: Bluetooth-connected motion-sensitive controller (most famously, the DualShock 3) with four shoulder buttons (L1, L2, R1, R2), six face buttons (Square, Circle, Triangle, X, Select, Start), a D-pad, and two analog sticks that could be pressed as buttons as well, Bluetooth-connected motion-sensitive controller (PlayStation Move) with two side buttons, five face buttons, and one trigger, Bluetooth-connected PlayStation Media Remote, PlayStation Eye camera, PlayStation Memory Card Adapter, IEEE 802.11 b/g wireless Internet connection, Gigabit Ethernet port, 2 USB 2.0 ports.
- Storage: 500 GB Hard Disk Drive BD-ROM Blu-ray Media Drive compatible with DVDs
- OS: XMB ("Cross Media Bar")
Much got touted about the Cell processor at the heart of the PlayStation 3, that it was a supercomputer kind of chip so everything would be awesome for games (and Blu-ray or other media playback), but it was also rumored to be difficult to program for compared to the other systems of the time with more conventional setups. In the early days of the console, installing Linux on the machines could make it possible to run them as a cluster computer. Early models of the PlayStation 3 had PS2 backwards compatibility and the ability to install other operating systems on them, like Linux, but as soon as those features could be used for system emulation or for ripping game discs to hard drives for play, and as soon as it turned out that early versions of the operating system used only one of the two available cryptographic hash checks, the one that could be reverse-engineered, to verify large chunks of what was going on in the system and discs, many of the early functions were removed in later versions of the console, and methods used to downgrade the firmware to versions that still used only the one verification function were patched out, blocked, and otherwise defeated, so as to lock out the homebrew community from doing things Sony didn't want done on the console. Most of these things were done in the name of combating software piracy, because that's the easiest justification to reach for when explaining that you're taking useful features away from your users. (Admittedly, a lot of the homebrew community is able to do their work by finding exploits and successfully executing privilege escalation attacks or similar means of gaining control that could be harmful if exploited by nefarious interests instead of curious ones.) By the time I got the PS3 revision I had, all of the custom firmware and downgrade exploits had been patched out of the base firmware shipping with the unit. The only real echo of what the PS3 had been capable of, before Sony decided they had to patch out basically all the functionality from the machine except for media playing and game playing would be when Person of Interest would use an unnamed video game console cluster to uncompress the Machine into when it became necessary to do so in the fifth season. Anyone who looked at those machines knew they were PS3s, but of course, you couldn't say that, because Sony hadn't paid for the privilege of having their name uttered in the show.
My particular PS3, like all of my gaming consoles during the time with my terrible ex, didn't get as much use as it could have, and spent its time going back and forth between being a proper game console (played in the basement) and being the basement TV's attached Blu-ray player. Given how frequently we were in the basement in those years (where I learned to mostly despise Windows Vista), I suppose the PS3 got sufficient enough of a workout as the media player, even if not as the game console. Also because of my ex's insistence on playing games together as much as possible, the games that got played in that era were mostly cooperative. That was often times frustrating to me, because there was a sufficient skill gap between us that I often had to figure out how to both direct the action and try to do my own part as well. And then try again in simpler terms or explicitly walking her through the buttons to be pressed or control movements to happen and doing my best to make her feel like she is participating and contributing to the gameplay. It could be tough, though, when we were playing the same stage of cooperative Katamari Forever for the fifth or sixth time, taking mainly the same route each time, and I still had to give direction in "forward, left, right," terms instead of "head to the islands" or "let's plow through these buildings." For all the many times that we played together (and I had to lead these sessions, since I was the person more familiar with the game and knowing where to go next) and achieved various scores, when my younger sister, who was equally familiar with the mechanics and rules of Katamari-rolling as I was, played that cooperative map, on the second time through, we set a new high score, and in not sure that my ex ever forgave us for doing it so easily thanks to our shared expertise (and ability to communicate in a more complex register). Eventually the frustration would lead me to letting her direct where to go, since I could understand her perfectly fine and do what she wanted to do. The scores were lower when she directed, since she didn't have the expertise to know what to pick up next, but those sessions absolutely ran smoother from the lack of additional cognitive load of having to control my half of the thing (or my character) and direct her in ways that she would understand and be able to execute. With hindsight, it probably would have been better to coach her as she played by herself, explaining the game and its controls and what to watch out for to play better, building up her expertise until we would be able to play together with a compatible communication system that didn't require every single thing to have to be broken down into its simplest components and then have everything explained about what to do and what to avoid. (This also suggests I would be bad at trying to explain how to play a game to someone inexperienced while trying to play it if there's an experience mismatch.) At a certain point, we mostly played either motion control games (fun times when you are tall enough that stretching means planting your full palm on the ceiling) or light gun shooters (fun times when you are sure you fired in the right spot, only for it to register where you actually fired instead. The Wii games, at least, were more than happy to give you a reticle so you knew where you were shooting when you missed. There were some of the same problems involved there, too, as I would start memorizing patterns and then have to explain where to shoot and where the weak points were on subsequent runs (and getting a little frustrated that the information didn't seem to be sticking between repetitions of the game).
Despite all of that, I did get to play a fair amount of those many long hours games that I'm so fond of, including renewing my love-hate relationship with the stat-RPGs of Nippon Ichi Software. To this day, I've only full-cleared one of their games, Phantom Brave (suck it, Pringer XXX!), and only then because of the fusion mechanic that allowed weapons and characters alike to become insanely powerful and scale themselves along with the powerful superbosses that were available after the main story had ended. For games like Disgaea, where the characters need to gain absurd amounts of levels to get wickedly strong, the grind is much more painful and characters need to find immediate ways of powerleveling so they have a chance at getting the best equipment they can and surviving against the optional superbosses available after the narrative finishes. If you really like level-grinding through random dungeons or repetitions of specific maps to try and gain levels in the tens and hundreds at a time, the NIS stat-RPGs are definitely for you. Really, though, I was much more likely to be involved with two of the three Final Fantasy XIII games (although not so much with the postgame grind of the "have at least one of everything at one point" achievement in Final Fantasy XIII. Seriously, why does anyone think that's a good idea?) and exploring Rome in the third Assassin's Creed game. I obtained a greater software library near the end of the system's life, so I never got to play a lot of the games that I own for it, and I'll probably have to wait until emulation gets good enough and I have enough hard drive space somewhere to put game images on before getting to play those games. Which might not ever get to count towards my achievement list and progress associated with my online gaming account with them.
I also tried to take advantage of the PS3's ability to stream media from the internet and over the local network. There's were two major problems with that idea that pretty well sunk it before it would be able to fly. The first was that the PS3 never got more than 802.11g for wireless connectivity, which definitely isn't good enough to stream high definition material over the local network. We're would have had to connect the Gigabit Ethernet port to have a prayer of getting enough bandwidth to be able to stream over the network. That was definitely not happening, as the router and modem were in the office, one floor up and across the house from where the PS3 was. Things were sufficiently far apart from each other that the PS3 couldn't anyways reliably find and connect to the router because of the weak signal. There was no way there would be Ethernet cable run from router to PS3 just so that it could stream media over the network. I would have had to make the holes and run the cable myself, and I would have been just as likely to staple through a wire than wire things up correctly.
What happened instead was first trying to buy and strategically place signal boosters for the network so as to get a seamless mesh going and cover the entire house, but the bridges never worked correctly so that the machines ever had just one network name to connect to. Eventually, I came across Tomato, a custom firmware for certain Broadcom routers that I first used to boost the signal of the Wireless-G router I had, and then eventually used to transform that router into a massively powered wireless client that could connect to the 802.11n router that I eventually obtained. The client would then run connectivity to the PS3 over Ethernet as the final hop. Which certainly stabilized the connection between the PS3 and the router, but didn't actually improve the bandwidth available to the PS3 to the point where being able to stream in high definition was a possibility. If I wanted to play media, especially high definition media, on the PS3, I was going to have to bring it over on a flash drive or portable hard drive, which was certainly possible, but generally wasn't worth the time and effort to achieve. So it was, in the end, just a Blu-Ray player for media things (that worked most of the time), instead of the true multimedia powerhouse that it was vaunted to be.
The system itself came to a fairly ignominious end, where the optical drive refused to work consistently, and then just refused to work. And unlike the Wii, where I had been able to get some custom programs on it that made it possible to play games even after the drive died, the removal of functionality from the console meant that it became an expensive piece of electronic waste. I mentioned the plight I had to my brother, who sent over his PS3 that he wasn't using any more, and within a few boots of that system, it also died and refused to boot. Both systems were eventually recycled in the electronics recycling program one of our local computer shops participates in. I still have their discs as artifacts of a previous system and for the hope of emulation, but I feel like I didn't get nearly enough usage of of that system compared to what I would have liked. How much of that is due to the system and how much of that is due to the situation that I was in that discouraged getting good use of of the system is an exercise left to an informed reader, but man, my PS2 and my Wii still boot. What happened to some decent engineering?
It wasn't all a loss, however, as both of the Eye accessories are currently input microphones for voice assistant satellite stations, and I'll bet I could get those Move peripherals to connect by Bluetooth of necessary for some other reason, as well. Ask there was at least a little bit of good engineering going on there, just not in the console itself.
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Date: 2021-12-20 03:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-12-20 04:12 pm (UTC)