Frederic Briere <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: I should first alert you that after trying to pick up development on PCSX, I found that the features that most people wanted (speed enhancements, etc.) were out of my ability, but I can still try to provide some help on this matter.
> [CC'ed to Matthew Dempsky, who's apparently working on PCSX] > > On Thu, Feb 19, 2004 at 11:39:58PM +0100, Robert Millan wrote: > > > The main problem I see with including PCSX in Debian is that it requires > > > a copy of the Sony PlayStation BIOS. (It might be theoretically > > > possible to use the free BIOS from ePSXe, but I doubt anyone would do > > > that.) > > My bad; it's actually PCSX that comes with a free BIOS. Sorta... The BIOS's that PCSX supports using are emulated/recompiled just like the PSX game code and then only the hardware interfaces are emulated. When PCSX runs without a BIOS, it instead captures the SYSCALL opcodes and just calls a C function. So, yes, PCSX can run without a proprietary BIOS, but, no, it's not done by providing an alternative BIOS. :-) > > That's not much of a problem. Does the free BIOS work at all? If it doesn't, > > Well, it works in that I can successfully boot and run a PSX game (until > I eventually get PCSX to crash or freeze <g>). Maybe Matthew has more > information on how well the included BIOS performs, compared to the > real thing. Most people seem to get better compatibility from native BIOS (for obvious reasons), but I think there's still decent performance from the emulated BIOS (from what I recall). > Now that I look at it, yes. P.E.Op.S. have a GPL'ed plugin for both > video and audio, although the video plugin is plain X11. (Doing 3D in > this matter sucks badly on my Duron.) There's also at least one GPL'ed > plugin for each of the rest, and even Pete's plugins would probably be > acceptable if he can clarify what he means by "The Plugin is free source > code". I prodded around for this for a while (getting official statements allowing us to use plugins and such)... you can find some discussion about the "public opinions" on the GPL emu/non-GPL plugins issues here: http://www.ngemu.com/forums/showthread.php?t=45525 I tried to email someone at gnu.org to get the official legal interpretation under the given circumstances, but I never got a response. > > For any of the non-free plugins, and specialy those who come without > > license, > > we can try to convince the author of re-licensing them. > > It's Pete's MesaGL plugin that's sorely lacking; I'll try asking him > what his licensing terms are, and if he'd be willing to GPL/BSD/whatever > them. I've talked with him about this -- he doesn't want to GPL it because he wants to keep control of the project, etc. > > > And there's also the fact that upstream has now ceased development; > > > others seem to have picked up the pieces, but PCSX is still > > > "upstream-less" AFAIK. > > > > Uhm.. what do you mean by others picking up the pieces? > > Matthew has posted a few times on the NGemu PCSX forum > (http://www.ngemu.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=57), indicating that he > was working on PCSX: [...] > I'm sure Matthew will be able to shed some light on this matter. I did in fact contact Linuzappz about this matter (evidencable by the fact that he added me to the sourceforge project's member list: http://sourceforge.net/project/memberlist.php?group_id=42644), however, he's mostly tied up working on PCSX2 and I never really got around to getting serious work on PCSX done. > > > (If anyone's interested, I maintain my own homebrew packages for PCSX, > > > plugins and such at <http://www.fbriere.net/debian/>. Feel free to > > > install them if you're a user, or to adopt them if you're a DM.) > > > > I could sponsor them if we sort out all the above problems first :> > > > > Btw, please retitle this to ITP and set yourself as owner > > (see http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/) > > Given that I've yet to get PCSX to run w/o crashing or freezing, often > before I get the chance to reach the first save point, I'd be reluctant > to package it officially just yet. (I'm not knocking down PCSX; I've > never taken the time to fully investigate the problem. If Matthew's > still working on PCSX, I'd be glad to lend a hand in debugging.) The one other issue you may have to worry about is the source code's licensing... a few of the files are under license other than GPL so I spent some time tracking down various authors to get their permissions (I got Kazzuya's for the XA decoding components, and also asked a few other people who'd stuck in code), but there were a few files that give no real indication of their source such as the plugin interface... I'll be happy to assist in guiding through the source code and issues I recall off hand from when I tried to carry development, but I can't promise how much help I'll be. -jivera
