I am currently working on an OpenGL/ES implementation for the PS3 running on SPU rather than requiring RSX access. A skeletal website is at spugl.org

You can now download the pubble installation package that contains everything you need to install pubble onto a PS3.

I have written a lengthier description about this release over at ps2dev forums.

There is a half hearted attempt at a pubble website, and there are installation instructions available too. Apologies in advance for the ugliness of these pages. They are just placeholders for now...

Finally! I've found a newish kernel that builds and runs! I've been trying to get a >2.6.20 kernel for some time to fix the reboot bug, and the current 2.6.22-rc5 on git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/geoff/ps3-linux.git works like a charm! The standard ps3 configuration (make ps3_defconfig) doesn't include joystck support, but it does actually boot and reboot unlike the previous time I tried about a month ago.

I've also managed to apply the hidd patch to get my wireless controllers operational, although there does also seem to be a ton of stuff being dumped into my syslog, so it's obviously still not perfect yet. Ideally, I'd like to try hacking the BT joystick support into the kernel rather than using the hidd stuff.

In other news, work on python-ps3 has been a bit slow recently. I'm hoping to do a bit more work on it this weekend, althoug I'm also contemplating approaching the whole blitting problem from more of a sprites angle and letting the SPUs direct the drawing with the PPU just maintaining a list of what to draw...

Python on the PS3

As you may know, I've been writing my PS3 stuff with a view to building up a library suitable for writing games and as I thought about it more the idea of using a scripting language for the game seemed the most logical way forward. I plumped on python as I'd used it before for a couple of small jobs and it seemed like a nice language with a lot of support. Plus, it has the advantage of being pre-installed on most Linux distributions and very easy to extend, and so the PS3 library for python was born...

Brief bullet points of the current build:

• Support for the PS3 frame buffer on a per pixel basis
• Support for blittable objects (solid, masked or alpha blended)
• Support for the PS3 controllers
• Easy integration with PIL for image manipulation and text rendering
• A proof-of-concept breakout game

Just to whet your interest, here's an example of how easy the code can be (taken directly from the test.py file):

image = Blittable(Image.open("miglu.jpg"))
for count in xrange(screen.height-image.height):
        screen.clear()
        screen.blit(image, (count,count) )
        screen.flip()
        screen.wait()

Read more on the Python on the PS3 page...

I've just been doing some experimenting after reading the IBM article on SBE performance and managed to almost double the achieved frame rate!

Also added some rudimentary user control, the right stick pans around the image, the left stick changes the julia set constant and the right triggers zoom in and out. The circle buttons exits.

Unfortunately, allowing the user to zoom in quickly shows up the limitations of an IEEE single precision float. Next plan is to rewrite using fixed precision (which is bad as the SBE only has 16x16->32 bit mutliply) or IEEE double precision (which is also bad as everything I've read in SBE literature suggests they're really slow).

My first experiment in PS3 development - an optimised julia set renderer that uses 6 SPU threads to perform the calculations and blitting to the screen.

Useful make targets are make test to see a nice demo and make time to run a time test in an area that mostly avoids bits of black.