Anyone code in MIPS Rxxxx ???

[rain_storm]

I was just wondering coz I came across a few sites that had demos that ran on N64, PS1, PS2, etc I was just wondering how easy / hard it was to pick up. Is it worth spending a whole lotta time on or is it yesterdays fab?
I was thinking of installin the Indhependence day thing on my PS2 and see what I can code up for it. But just thought I check out some unbiosed opinions first

[ninogenio]

to date ive only coded for arm 7/9 cpus but jims done ps2/psp stuff so im sure he knows quite a bit.

i dont thinks its that hard though if your working in c then coding for the ps2 psp is somewhat like coding on linux. asm is a diffrent story though

[rain_storm]

the Linux dev kit is a bit expensive for a test run. But I think I can get elf files (unix/Linux isn't it?) to run on my old bog standard PS2 it wont cost anything but time that is why I wanted to try it out I saw a video of graphic effects runnin on ps2 (rotating bmp with zoom in out) and that what got me interested in the idea

[ninogenio]

too be honest if you want to try some stuff out on ps2 like hardware id say go for a psp and set it up for homebrew.

the psp is very like the ps2 but probably easyer to code for.

[Jim]

MIPS is pretty easy, though, as with nearly all RISC CPUs, there's some daft stuff about how to load 32bit constants in to registers (all instructions are 32bits long, so you can't have a 32bit operand!).  But frankly RISC CPUs are easier in general to code in assembler than Intel ones because the instruction set is so much simpler and symmetric (all things can be done with all registers).  And, if I remember correctly, R0 is always 0.

PSP homebrew is practically finished, just a few of the popular projects still going - media players etc.  If you can get your PS2 up and running then that would be something.  Or you could get a DS and learn ARM instead   ARM, MIPS, SH are all pretty similar.

Jim

[rain_storm]

I will look into ARM I heard mention but dont know much about it well I think theres nothing to loose here I am gonna go for it and give it maybe a month if I make much progress I may stick it out for longer. I have always wanted to get a program runnin on the PS2 that was written in asm even as far back as when I was starting coding Yabasic on the thing.