Quote:
Originally Posted by theZee
Bah, can't be done for PC, unless I'm mistaken the coding would not be very different between the 3 platforms, PS3 and XBox are technically PC's after all.
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Actually, that's quite far from the truth. The PS3 is more like the Xbox and vice versa than they are similar to a PC. Hell, Mac's and PC's are more alike than any of those systems side by side.
The Xbox 360 uses a custom triple core
PowerPC processor (kinda like the old Mac's used to have) which is made/designed by IBM.
The PS3 uses the Cell processor which has a central
PowerPC based PPE "Power Processing Element" with 6 accessable SPEs "Synergistic Processing Elements". They're like mini cores that can be used for all sorts of different things but they don't run at the same speed nor have the same power as the main PPE. Actually, the Cell chip has 8 SPE's but on the PS3 the 7th SPE is reserved for OS level tasks and security stuff and the 8th is a backup incase one core fails during production. The Cell CPU is also made/designed by IBM.
So, the PS3 and 360 both use PowerPC based processors, their structure is radically different, but those CPUs have the same roots. Devs typically complain that the PS3 is harder to develop for because accessing and using the 6 SPEs is really difficult and unintuitive compared to most current (former?) development practices.
The PS2 and Wii versions weren't done by Lucasarts Game Studios at all, they were done by Krome Studios in Australia using Krome's own game engine, so totally different code there.
The code for the PS3 and 360 that Lucasarts wrote probably had a heap of PowerPC specific stuff that wouldn't directly compile to run on x86 processors. When it comes to programming, I wouldn't say anything is "not possible", more like "about as likely as hell freezing over cause we're too frick'n lazy to recode it all for you pirating aholes"