Squenix abandoned the FF7 and FF8 Redo.. so I guess we'll NEVER know. I wonder if this is because the PS2 is such a PAIN to develope for?
I seem to recall that when MGS2 got released, the DVD it came with had an interview with Kojima, and he was explaining why the playstations grpahics are not as good as thy could be, due to the fact it is *that* difficult to program for. But then again...Look what they did with MGS2....I thought when it came out the graphics were the best. EVER. I wasn't even interested in the game and thought the graphics were crap because, as everyone knows, magazine shots NEVER to a games graphics justice.
Typical developement time for PS2 is 2.5 years, this is VERY expensive. A game like FF8 released in 2001 had been in developement for 4 freaking years already. 6 months can mean as much as $500000 or more in a budget. Longer developement times means a LOT of problems. The Playstation was much easier to develope for by comparison.
Halkun can detail it better than I, as he had PS2 linux.
Even with a dev system and a mounted disk image across a network, the big time waster is going from code to test. Thus far that elusive easy code game console has eluded most people.
Cyb