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I'm looking to do some homebrew development for either the Wii, Xbox360 or PS3. I'll be developing from a Linux system. The programming language doesn't matter.

  • Wii - devkitPPC and libogc look fairly easy and complete
  • Xbox360 - Mono.XNA looks interesting but not very feature complete
  • PS3 - psl1ght seems interesting but I haven't been able to find out much

How homebrew friendly are each of these consoles? Is someone able to give a comparison of each of these scenes?

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    \$\begingroup\$ I am not sure I would call XNA homebrew, it is an officially supported channel for getting indie games on to the system (well the windows version any way.) \$\endgroup\$ – stonemetal Dec 21 '10 at 18:12
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Mono XNA will not run on the xbox, Its designed to allow windows XNA applications to run under mono/open gl rather than the .net runtime/direct x. Also,

Good luck running homebrew code that doesnt involve paying microsoft for an xna creators club membership on the xbox, Ive no idea about the other platforms as ive never looked into it.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Awesome info. Looks like the 360 is probably not for me then. \$\endgroup\$ – Brian McKenna Dec 21 '10 at 5:15
  • \$\begingroup\$ Yes the XNA path for mono WILL require Visual Studio 2008 (C# Express, which is free, is fine) or better. This means you will have to run under windows, or a windows like environment that will support C# Express + the XNA add-on. \$\endgroup\$ – Grant Peters Dec 22 '10 at 15:09
  • \$\begingroup\$ $49-$99 for XNA creators and a free version of Visual Studio and results run on all xboxes, not just rooted ones, while a recently price-cut dev kit for PS3 is $10.000... now, the PS3 Home dev kit I'm unsure of its status, it seems hard to get info on but last time I saw it it was version 0.1 and you needed specific expensive tools like Maya (sic) to use it... I've dubbed the xbox the "indiebox" so far - and imo you select your platform and operatingsystem depending on what tools and applications you want to run, not the other way around ^^ \$\endgroup\$ – Oskar Duveborn Dec 27 '10 at 11:20
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I can only address the PS3.

The ps3chain and ps3toolchain distros referenced by ps3l1ght are unsuitable for use with Game OS; they do not implement the correct ABI and you will eventually crash as a result.

AFAIK, there are no working compilers available for PS3 that aren't simply stolen copies of the official SDK.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Awesome. I don't want to have to use a stolen SDK. The technical reasons also means that PS3 is ruled out. Hopefully the Wii is a lot nicer. \$\endgroup\$ – Brian McKenna Dec 27 '10 at 10:22

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