Zac Bowling’s Blog

I have to praise Microsoft for the move of making XNA free to develop with. For those that don’t know, XNA is a forked version of .NET 2.0’s runtime, where the class library is slightly stripped down with Managed DirectX deeply rooted as part of the distrobution. XNA makes it possible to develop applications that work on both the XBox 360 and Windows.

What is interesting is that this makes development for the XBox 360 consoles so much easier and much more of a licensed activity as comparied to homebrew mods and hacks to current 5th and 6th generation consoles to be able to run “unsigned” code. In the past, the only legal/licensed way to develop for these platforms was only with the use of some very expensive development kits. In order to get the development kits in the first place, it requires lots of paperwork, a few NDAs, and an agreement to only distribute under the vendors terms. It looks like the market is changing though. However, Microsoft isn’t abonding the idea of licensed SDK completely though and still requires you buy a license and SDK to write any unmanaged code for the platform (required if you want to reuse the same codebase to distribute a game on multiple platforms very effectively).

Microsoft isn’t the only one though, because Sony went an interesting route with the PS3 by allowing it run Linux out of the box. Sony still requires you to use their PS3 SDK to make offical PS3 games, but allowing Linux opens the door to some amazing possibilities.

Infact, I just got my hands on a PS3 yesterday, and I’ve already got it booted up on Linux. I love the fact the PS3 almost wants to run Linux (it just about begs you to), and I got Mono compiled and running on it in less then an hour. Before yesterday, I wasn’t aware that the new cell processor comes up as PowerPC processor. Now this gives a great new reason to help out with Tao’s Mono.Xna and get those XNA games running on the PS3.