From MacEvangelist
”The Grinch Project” to bring PlayStation 2 emulation to Mac OS X Portables with Hardware Add-on.
David Allouch, a French native is better known by his hacker alias “Jimbo”. Author of the network security product Netect, Allouch is now working on bringing blockbuster games to the Mac with a product that promises to play Playstation 2 games and possibly even Xbox games in the future.
From MacEvangelist
”The Grinch Project” to bring PlayStation 2 emulation to Mac OS X Portables with Hardware Add-on.
David Allouch, a French native is better known by his hacker alias “Jimbo”. Author of the network security product Netect, Allouch is now working on bringing blockbuster games to the Mac with a product that promises to play Playstation 2 games and possibly even Xbox games in the future.
I caught up with Allouch who is currently in New York City.
Shane: Tell us how you got started with the Grinch?
David: A new startup that I was a part of created a PS2 debugger for MacOS X. It was during this consignment that we thought, “why not make a PS2 emulator?” Things has gone very well, we are seeing leaps and bounds in development and we are excited with the way things are going. We are now trying to work with Sony and Apple to release a fantastic product sometime in 2002. Our module based emulation can be use to emulate anything, and we have generated a lot of interest.Shane: Other Playstation emulation software has encountered legal action, are you not afraid of this?
David: We don’t want to fight with anyone… we hope to have a collaboration from Sony… even if we don’t think there is any patent issue with our software. We are not worried about possible suits because we are creating the emu in a fundamentally different way to what others have done, and we are doing everything without breaching any patents. We will very probably be using additional hardware on the Mac, and we are looking at making this work with PowerBooks as well as desktops. We can only do this with Mac OS X of course, it is a really good OS for emulation.Shane: What price should we be looking at?
David: The less dedicated hardware we need to use, the cheaper it will be of course. Currently we have no pricing details, but it will certainly be cheaper than a Playstation. With this software I don’t know one gamer that wouldn’t want to take his game with him on a trip… (can’t travel with PS2 and 20-inch tv)Shane: And when will we be able to buy it?
David: We want to hit as soon as possible. I plan an alpha in 8 months… to get the market team ready to hit in 10 months…Shane: So tell us a little about how the emu works.
David: First the data is read from the dvd/cd/media/disc image then it is analysed from what is call the “Risc emulator/Dispatcher” which is in charge of deciding which module to pass the information to. There are two kind of modules, hardware and memory. Memory call are pure memory stuffs… loading in memory data etc, hardware calls are commands to the joystick, network, graphic card… each on a module getting the commands… the big problem in an emulation is to know what call corresponds to what and to get the performances on the modules. There is some tricks we did in the code that could only be done on OSX… that make the emu faster than it would ever be on PC… We are looking at Windows or X box emulation possibly. the most important thing for us right now is to get the full support we need from Sony. So we will stay on this track for now…Shane: How many people do you have working on this?
David: we have 4 core programmers.
2 QA
2 Designers
Interface/installation/easy stuffs programmers.
Dan and Me, I debug fast, I read machine language, like I read English 🙂Shane: Thanks for your time David, one last question, how did you come up with the name?
David: well… PS2 games are for chrysmass 🙂 so we stole chrysmass
