Java on Playstation 3

the RSX is still hidden so donno if there would be much point in porting lwjgl yet, but the cell is a powerful cpu, wonder if it would be good enough for 2d lwjgl games in software mode.

Haha, poke Elias, he seems to have more time than sense right now :wink:

Cas :slight_smile:

Well, you could port to MESA which they seem to be claiming has at least some hardware support, and hope that eventually MESA will grow to use the full power of the machine…

I bet BunnyHunters would run on the semi-software MESA 8)

Well, maybe there is not hardware support right now, but some guys are working on it.

http://www.hpc-consortium.net/projects/mesa.shtml

Sorry to bump an old thread, but I noticed that apparently even JEmu2 (the applet version) is working on PS3 via Yellowdog Linux, and with sound as well.
http://www.yellowdog-board.com/viewtopic.php?t=2082&start=15
If that works (JEmu2 is quite resource hungry), I’d say PS3 seems to be quite capable of running J2SE games. Now we only need good OpenGL access :slight_smile:

Didn’t have Yellowdog Linux have the performance comparable to the PIII ?

Having access to all PS3’s resources would be the ultimate, but having PIII comparable performance would still be quite enough for most java games.

Not going to happen. Firstly since it’s a custom nVidia chip they’d end up having to release internal details which they almost certainly want to keep secret. But mainly because by locking out the RSX they get a very robust way of preventing any kind of piracy - getting a copied game to run via linux is going to be impossible if theres no graphics card available.

At the moment the most practical way to get Java on a console would be to write some kind of emulation layer that’d provide a JVM on top of C# and XNA. It’d probably be possible to compile Java code down to C# bytecode, then port over the core bits of the standard library and write some kind of wrapper around XNA for hardware graphics.

PSN Home and user-created Java (or javascript?) minigames

Home is bringing some level of user-created minigames. This interview says Java minigames, but let’s wait for more detailed information. Eventually might mean just javascript minigames.

(pump up)
http://www.ps3hax.net/downloads.php?do=file&id=151

I made a quick test and was able to run BD-J apps Hello World and RSSReader from the USB stick. RSSReader uses a socket connection so some sort of multiplayer BD-J games are indeed easy(?) to implement. Turn-based boardgames should fit great.

note: I don’t have access to BD-J libraries or docs, but had an old dvb.jar from openmhp.org site. Using it and creating a mockup bdj.jar file did compiler happy.

This sourceforge project has dvb implementation so you could use it to provide org.dvb.* and javax.tv.* classes.
http://xletview.sourceforge.net/

QuickJournal article, Snake game. Well, its a start even so a very modest one.
http://ps3.qj.net/PS3-homebrew-Snake-Mod/pg/49/aid/122736

edit: openphp->openmhp, added xletview link
edit: ps3.qj.net link added

Sorry the link is in French, but it explains that it is possible to use bdjava to use homebrew to develop games on PS3:
http://ps3.gx-mod.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=1307

What do you think of it? It seems a bit limited.

well using BDJ for games is a pretty interesting entry point, but the unknown part is always the JVM which runs your app. It has multithreading etc. but you never know how it is implemented before you have written a benchmark (I have no PS3…). It is very unlikely that you get full access to the hardware from within a process which was intended to run bluray menus…

The PS3 has almost all the features of OpenGL-ES 2.0, it would be very interesting to have an access to this though Java.

I tried the snake game on my PS3, it worked flawlessly and very smooth also.

I’m downloading the BDJ.jar to try something more graphics heavy.

Heavy? Really? Can you give us some precisions about your project?

heh, I even saw a NES emulator running on PS3 using BDJ.

http://ps3.qj.net/PlayStation-3-homebrew-gets-NES-emulator-Filer-v0-0-3-UPDATE-/pg/49/aid/123264

JEmu2 for PS3 anyone? ;D

Yikes, I got JEmu2 running on BDJ on PS3 using a memory stick! :smiley:
Well, not everything works yet (most notably, sound), but the games that work run quite smoothly and easily fast enough, much to my surprise.

It’s a bit of a pain though. I’m not yet able to get any meaningful stacktraces from the PS3, and BDJ on PS3 seems quite restricted with some things. For example, trying to get the max heap using Runtime throws a SecurityException. I’ve also seen some plain weird things, like (i >> 0) throwing a totally off runtime exception (I sometimes write that kind of thing for readability).
Last but not least, I’m not aware of any good (and preferrably free) BDJ emulator to test things locally. I’m currently using xletview but many times things work on that but not on PS3, so it’s an endless excercise in USB stick juggling to test things.

But otherwise, BDJ on PS3 does seem like a very usable environment for games as it seems fast enough for many types of games.

oh that sounds amazing.

btw just curious is JEmu2 running with LWJGL on PS3?

No, it’s just using awt. It’s kind of like the applet version, but full-screen.

That sounds very cool. Did you do any benchmarks or can you tell me how fast it is compared to a PC? Is there that 64 MB limitation like in Applet mode?