Net Yaroze

~ the last words ~

Console manufacturers spend enormous effort making sure nobody can run their own code on the hardware, and in June 1996 Sony did the opposite on purpose. Net Yaroze was Ken Kutaragi's idea, sold by mail order only, for around $750 in the United States and about £550 in the United Kingdom. Yarouze means roughly let's do it together. The name was spelled Net Yarouze at first and changed late in 1996.

The box held a black PlayStation with different boot ROMs and no regional lockout, two matte black controllers, a serial cable, an access card that had to sit in the first memory card slot before anything would run, and a CD of development tools built around a C compiler and a debugger. You supplied the PC. The manuals documented the PlayStation libraries in detail and assumed you already knew how to program, which was an unusual thing for a consumer product to assume in 1996.

I was twelve when it launched and living in a country where a $750 mail-order development kit was not a purchase anyone I knew was going to consider. It also arrived two years before I got online at all. The part I recognize from a distance is the shape of the offer, because the thing being sold was not a tool so much as permission, and permission was exactly what everybody outside the licensed studios wanted and could not get.

~ the record ~

~ the black console ~

The restriction that defined Net Yaroze was that it would not boot a burned disc. Sony was not going to hand hobbyists a piracy machine or a way around the professional SDK, so programs were loaded over the serial cable and had to live entirely in memory. That meant 2 megabytes of main RAM holding your code and every asset it touched, with 1 megabyte of video RAM and half a megabyte of sound RAM alongside. A licensed developer had the disc to stream from. A Yaroze owner had whatever fit.

The kit also lacked the hardware debugging and the telephone support that came with the real SDK. What Sony did provide was community infrastructure, which in 1996 meant private Usenet groups restricted to members and homepage hosting on Sony's own servers. Access was partitioned by region, so a Japanese member and a British member could not easily work together, which reads today as an odd choice and at the time was just how territories worked.

~ what got out of it ~

Games written on Net Yaroze reached the public through magazine cover discs. From 1997 to 2004 the Official UK PlayStation Magazine and its counterparts across the PAL region carried Yaroze titles on their demo discs, which is how anyone who never owned the kit encountered it. The final issue of the UK magazine, number 108, closed with a compilation of them. SCEE also pressed a thousand copies of a promotional disc for PAL Yaroze owners that will not run without the access card.

Some of it went somewhere. Mitsuru Kamiyama, who wrote Terra Incognita on a Yaroze, went on to direct the Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles series at Square Enix. Chris Chadwick won a 1998 development competition run by Scottish Enterprise with Blitter Boy. Timeslip, first written on the kit, was reworked and released on Xbox Live Arcade in February 2011. Magic Castle, pitched to publishers in 1999 and never picked up, was finally put online by one of its own developers in 2021, twenty-two years late.

~ the last server ~

There was no announcement that Net Yaroze had ended. Sony stopped selling the kit as the PlayStation 2 approached and never built anything equivalent for it, offering Linux for PlayStation 2 and a BASIC interpreter as the nearest replacements. Direct support wound down through the early 2000s. The servers stayed up on their own for years after that, which is the ordinary way this happens.

In June 2009 SCEE told the remaining members that the European Net Yaroze server would be shut down the following month. Paul Holman said Sony would make a copy of the site available to the people who had been on it and that there might be a gathering. Thirteen years after Sony sold hobbyists a black PlayStation and a compiler, the last thing keeping that group in one place was switched off, and no console maker has offered the same deal since.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »