Console development stretched over both semesters in the second year as part of my degree and was by far the most challenging. The main focus of this module was to produce high performance code for an external fixed hardware platform. A huge part of this module was understanding the relationship between code performance and platform hardware architecture which meant looking much deeper into how computer systems work. The first semester was spent looking at low level programming and performance optimisation and really getting involved with machine level code whilst the second semester allowed me to test what I had learned and apply it to development on a PSP development kit. Having access to equipment and tools such as this once again shows Derby University’s amazing facilities for my course and demonstrates why it’s one of the best courses around for computer games programming.

The Project

The coursework for this module was not posted until the second semester and so the first semester was spend researching more theory based tasks and getting used to coding at a lower level than what we had been used using visual studios. Instead we worked through on-line MIPs tutorials on Mars’s Spin environment writing low level machine code working directly with registers.

In the second semester we were introduced to developing and profiling on the PSP platform before eventually being required to write a small 4kb raw data demo for the PSP. It is important to point out at this point that under no circumstances can I post or even discuss Sony’s code as it would be a breach of contract and could land myself and the University in trouble and so I will instead be discussing methods and approaches to solving problems I came across in my project.

For the first few weeks I spent most of my time re – looking at computer architecture and in particular binary operation, logic gates and computer pipeline structure. In the first year, computer architecture was one subject that I found really difficult to be interested in as I preferred coding and working in software rather than being involved with hardware. I understood most of the concepts and how hardware can play an important role in all manners of computing but if I’m truly honest, I just wasn’t interested in it. I knew that this module would be different as we would be working on the PSPs and so that changed my attitude towards hardware and eventually console development became my favorite module in the second semester.