The title is a bit misleading, the author did 15 days of AoC in a game creation platform for the PS4. I at first thought the title meant the author had done AoC on a PlayStation (as in PSX). Still interesting to see the demonstrations run.
I did some non-game programming on a PS2 Linux Kit and it wasn't particularly interesting. Just sitting at a normal Linux CLI with ancient versions of tools.
The title is easily read as being about writing code to run in a PSX emulator or on modded hardware, rather than being about using Dreams for it's mostly-intended purpose. We use the terms PSX/PS2/etc. for a reason, and that alone would clarify the title quite a lot. Mentioning Dreams in the title would help, too.
I have been almost single-handedly maintaining and expanding one of the largest open source PlayStation 1 SDKs [1] over the last year, adding all sorts of things from video playback to a dynamic linker. There are still plenty of bugs to fix and things to improve, but I think it can already be considered production ready for the most part.
Unfortunately, however, the tooling around PS1 development still has a long way to go; while there are e.g. several open source image or audio conversion tools, none of them are on par with old Sony tools in terms of features. In fact most people still use the official SDK complete with its 1998-era compiler, despite its bloat and heavy use of undocumented proprietary file formats.
Though I believe Sony made the graphics chip largely unavailable for use on the Net Yaroze (at least directly) as a opposed to a true dev kit where developers had access to the full hardware.
No, let's be fair to the author. It's a PlayStation in the sense it's named a Sony Playstation 4. Colloquially in the US (where the author is from), every generation is referred to as a PlayStation and has been since the PS2 days.
Nintendo's naming scheme greatly differs from the way Sony does it, and I don't think it's it's good faith to the author to act like they're being dense or stupid.
> No, let's be fair to the author. It's a PlayStation in the sense it's named a Sony Playstation 4.
So in the sense that it says nothing interesting about the article. The PS3 originally supported alternative OS ("OtherOS" feature), in which sense doing advent of code on a playstation is no different than doing it on any computer from circa 2005.
Do you consider calling a PlayStation 1 a PSX misleading since Sony released a PS2 + video recorder product actually called the PSX? [0] I don't, but the way folks in this thread are acting about naming conventions, maybe I need to, haha!
I can't believe how uptight and pedantic folks are in a fun thread where the author lays out exactly what's going on in the first sentence; it's like everybody was having a bad NYE and just wanted to take it out on this person who shared their fun, haha.
I get it that all the folks here want everything 100% right 100% of the time, but dang, I can't believe folks are so upset about it not being a PlayStation 1.
> I get it that all the folks here want everything 100% right 100% of the time, but dang, I can't believe folks are so upset about it not being a PlayStation 1.
It's not about everything being 100% right 100% of the time. It's about the title being complete bait.
It's not about doing AoC on a PlayStation, let alone on a PS1, which is the most reasonable assumption from reading the title. It's about doing AoC in Dreams.
You're right, it should have specified it was done in Dreams. My initial reply was mostly meant that it didn't feel fair or in the spirit of HN to dress the author down as if he was just some 90s stereotypical sitcom mother calling everything a Nintendo.
I'm honestly surprised I was the only one that found that insulting not only to the intelligence of the author but also mothers and the larger group of women. I normally just lurk on HN, but that felt meaner than normal to me, haha.
People feel mislead and they are allowed to feel that.
Clickbait is very frustrating.
The thing about being mislead is either it happened or didn't. And a significant number of people felt mislead. No matter how obvious it was to you it doesn't change those individual experiences!
I've never seen Ben's site on HN before, does he happen to post a lot of clickbait articles? If his site happens to be submitted a lot with of misleading titles, I'll gladly apologize and say I was completely wrong in giving him the benefit of the doubt of not trying to clickbait 90s gamers, haha.
I want to preface that I may get long winded, because I didn't expect my little comment to get so much attention!
I believe it's important to discern the author's intent before labeling it as clickbait and deeming them a misleading person. And maybe that's the part where the two of us differ on why this post is or isn't clickbait.
In my eyes, I treat clickbait as articles whose content is vastly different from any meaningful interpretation of the title[0] or containing purposefully shallow content[1]. Heck, I may even leave satisfied by the latter post, but deep down I know I was clickbaited, haha!
I say all that because I take a step back when I read personal blogs on HN to determine if they were written explicitly to get posted here or written for another purpose and subsequently ended up here (and that doesn't have to be and probably can't be a completely black and white scale). It seems disingenuous to expect authors to write a title covering every possible way to misinterpret something when their intention probably wasn't to get it posted on HackerNews. I've read through a few of Ben's articles since this comment chain started, and he comes across as talking to a specific audience of folks in and around the game dev, VR dev, and the Handmade game communities. Lots of overlap between there and here, but still a different group with different expectations and understandings.
In essence, it boils down to this author just wrote an article for a personal blog where the title is not close to a lie at all, especially when you consider the context of his audience, he follows it up with detailed and relevant content, and his other blog posts also seem to be made up of content he put effort into[2]. I understand it can be argued that the title should have been editorialized, and I wouldn't be angry if a [4 running Dreams] had been added to the title during submission; however, I wouldn't call it clickbait just because he said PlayStation instead of PS4, especially because I wouldn't want to be faulted by anyone for saying "Jak and Daxter was the first game I ever beat on my PlayStation" even though it was on a PS2 and the game was technically called Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy. It doesn't change that much for the group I would be talking to, just like how his title doesn't change much for his main audience.
With all of that said, it's hard for me to agree that Ben or the submitter azhenley were trying to clickbait or mislead anyone at all, and I hope I've made it more clear why I feel that way, because in the end feel it comes across as mean-spirited to insinuate the author doesn't understand that a PlayStation 1 existed almost 30 years ago and is therefore trying to clickbait and mislead everybody for some gain.
Ben & Austin - if you happen across this sometimes, apologies for having your post semi-derailed!
[0] - For example, "should you use an electric or gas powered mower in 2023?" and it's just a full page ad for a lawn care company with no pros/cons and no meaningful content related to the topic/question being discussed
[1] - All of those "how to do X in Y language" where the inner content consists of a link to an npm package and the rest of the content is just copy + pasted code from the project's readme.
[2] - And to cover my bases here, I didn't read every article, so who knows maybe there's one lurking that's just 200% clickbait, but I will say I thoroughly enjoyed the WASM article!
I’d like to add a word of support here. The author did, in the most literal sense, do Advent of Code challenges on a PlayStation (mind: not ‘the’ PlayStation, but ‘a’ PlayStation). Therefore, the title is factually accurate.
The fact that there are some graybeards conflating ‘PlayStation’ (the family of consoles) with ‘PlayStation’ (the first and namesake console of that family) is perhaps understandable, but no reason to accuse the author of intentional clickbait.
Consider also that the English Wikipedia page on PlayStation is about the brand, with the namesake console being relegated to ‘PlayStation (console)’.
To the author: thanks for the impressive and enjoyable article and videos.
Aside: does anyone know of any environment like this for other platforms?
