SN Systems Brings Internet Gaming Closer

Author: by Matt Barker

SN Systems Ltd. will be bringing its development tools to the console games industry with a recent announcement that put it into the field of providing improved Internet connectivity development tools for Sony’s Playstation 2. SN Systems' Network Development Kit (NDK) for Playstation 2 will allow developers to add networking capabilities to their applications. In addition, SN Systems also announced that it had teamed up with Conexant Systems and Lucent Technologies to develop dedicated USB modem drivers for the Playstation 2. Network Development Kit for Playstation 2 consists of the NDK TCP/IP Stack for building Internet connectivity into Playstation 2 software plus the NDK Analyzer, which allows Ethernet data packets to be examined on a development Windows PC across a LAN using the native DECI2 interface. The NDK TCP/IP Stack for Playstation 2 includes modem and socket APIs for the Playstation 2, optimized to run with a very small footprint. NDK Analyzer runs under any Win32 operating system. The NDK Analyzer will feature packet dropping, reordering, corruption, and bandwidth simulation, to test for application robustness in the event of poor quality or error-prone communication links. Network Development Kit for Playstation 2 requires an SCEI Development Tool DTL-T10000 and either SN Systems' ProDG development tools or SCEI's software library. No additional hardware (i.e. modems, USB Ethernet adapters) is needed as the NDK uses the DECI2 link to send data to the network.