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...may it never reach my house.

Convergence usually implies corporate control

No thanks. Keep my meat well cooked and my hardware open and free.

With no competition, there is little incentive to actually innovate, and the prices for the consoles will go sky high as your monopoly spends more and more money muscleing out any possible competition from the field.

The console makes relatively little money for the manufacturer (and none for the people that produce games for it) compared to what they rake in on the games they sell for it. As far as I know, this is true for every manufacturer who has ever produced a console, or a game for said console. (I wouldn't mind seeing counter-examples, if anyone has any.)

Pick a game theme on one of those consoles, and consider how many different versions of it there are. Two or three of each type of sports game (football, basketball, baseball), four or five different racing games (some brand name like Nascar, others with different exotic twists), and some genres occur almost spontaneously, and breed like rabbits -- for a while on the PSX you couldn't spit without hitting some variant of a skateboarding game.

Even games which have no other manufacturers' prior art to sell their offbeat concepts, still have to compete with the quality of the staid classic games for the consumer's limited cash, and that means they have to innovate like nobody's business. (Mmmmmm... Incredible Crisis)

On any given single console, there is still a great deal of competition: Each and every development company is looking to take that console that someone's produced, and squeeze every bit of fun, action, adrenaline, and pulse-pumping excitement onto a CD or cartridge using the SDK the developer has shipped them.

And they have to do this knowing that everyone else has received pretty much the same kit -- the ultimate in leveled playing fields. The only thing they can do is compete.

The system can be nothing but bells and whistles, or it can be plain. Developers will still try to wring the technotes for every pixel of power they can get. This means innovation, ladies and gentlemen, even if there's only one platform worth noting on the market.

In some ways, this competition between software producers is more important than the competition between hardware manufacturers. One of the biggest selling points of any hardware is the software that runs on it. It may also be worthwhile noting some aspects of the strategies of the hardware manufacturers:

Sony , when developing the PS2, tried to innovate their asses off. They did things no sane person would want to do to graphic hardware in order to get the maximum 'polygon-pushing power'. Consequently, as has been mentioned many times around here, the thing is something of a beast to program, but theoretically, when someone hits the mark and programs it right, watch out. This will end up, they hope, producing truly eye-popping games which will better sell their system.

Microsoft wanted to give X-Box developer and SDK primarily only to those developers who wanted to play by Microsoft's rules (read: bend over and smile like a shark. R.I.P. Bungie) -- get the creme de la creme of producers producing the biggest, brightest, most innovative games on your system, and the consumers will flock (n. a collective of sheep) to it, even if it's a dog turd with joystick ports.

And Nintendo is going with brand recognition and their successful merchandising lines (like the Pokemon phenomenon which, although the bottom is dropping out of the trading card market, still seems strong) to sell their next-gen console. Sure, it's a merchandising angle rather than a software angle, but guess what? The software that ties into that giant marketing machine will only run on their system. They're also promising a very easy to program system, to attract those developers that get frustrated with Sony's beast or Microsoft's attitude.
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I'll stick with my Dreamcast and PSOne.

Why?

Shenmue, Samba de Amigo, Jet Grind Radio, F355 Challenge, Grandia 2, etc. and Gran Turismo 2, Reboot, and Ghost in the Shell. Dreamcast has more great games than I can afford and have time to play. Please don't think that I'm biased to Sega, 'cause I'm not. I'm biased toward good games and they just happen to be on Dreamcast at the moment.

Zdnet
CNN
and in case the 9th circuit site gets slashdotted, there's findlaw.
Naturally, Sony's pressreleases are conspicuously absent.

I've made a small list of what seems to be a pretty complete list of the new PS2 info. If I've missed any, feel free to add-on.

Sony of America

Sony of Europe

Sony of Japan

PSX Nation

IGNPSX

Gaming Age

Next-Generation

Gamespot

The Magic Box

And then I'd also recomend you check out the MB's connected with some of those sites because there are some very interesting discussions in there. Also expect the major news organizations (MSNBC, ZDNET, CNN) to pick it up sometime tonight too.

Yea, it's so fake, someone cracked both Sony of Japan's and Sony of Europe and Sony of America and planted all those pictures and stories.

The links that are in the article arent' the only ones that have news about it you know, try to do some checking before you automatically assume it to be false.

Just to remember what is the "Missing Graphics Chip", after all.

It is a customized Chip that integrates 4MB VRAM with 16 processors working in parallel, one for each screen section. I'd guess.


And all of that at 150MHz. That makes for the aclaimmed 75 million polygons per second and 48Gbps data transfer rate (within VRAM) announced.

Just check it at SONY's official playstation page.

This morning Sony Computer Entertainment cracked open the door to a new world of computer entertainment with the unveiling of its plans for the next generation PlayStation system. Combining never-before-seen graphics technology with complex real-world simulations, a new concept called "Emotion Synthesis" not only enhances the appearance of objects and characters, it allows them to think, act and behave as they would in the real world with real-time processing. Ever wanted to step into a real-time movie? You ain't seen nuthin' yet.

The new system (which will, of course, play games developed for the current console)will feature a DVD drive, a 128-bit CPU -- the first of its kind in the world -- and a rendering processor that beats the snot out of the most sophisticated existing graphics workstations. With a maximum polygon rate of 75 million per second, an enhanced Graphics Synthesizer produces images that are comparable to movie-quality graphics in real time. Welcome to the future where movies, music and computer technology converge into a new form of digital entertainment.

That new PlayStation will be what the real Amiga would have been if it had survived. The new "pretend" Amiga is like an X term with a web browser.

Looks like a rough row to hoe. I don't think there is much consumer demand for something like this because there are so many more attractive alternatives in competition for the consumer entertainment dollar. For example, DirecTV, Sony PlayStation, and DVD. With respect to bang-for-the-buck, DirecTV offers quite a bit of entertainment value, beating cable TV by a mile. From what I see, this AOL box is just another version of WebTV--something which has not really caught the consumers' eye (or pocketbook). With the coming mini-recession next year, I think it is an ill-advised time to venture into this market. Prediction: AOL stock will eventually tumble due to almost certain losses from this venture.

This follows reading a coupla threads, and doing a bit of looking around.

1. Backward compatibility: The I/O processor in the PSX2 is the old chip. They're guaranteeing no improvements to old games, 'cos they're just interfacing that chip it so that it will be running the old games (apparently). Not software emulation, good old 100% hardware. It'll take the old controllers, too; a lot of the demos were done with dual-shocks hooked up.

2. DVD capability. So far, they're still undecided about DVD movie support; It *does* have MPEG2 (used for texture compression, interestingly) and DVD-ROM, AC-3/DTS sound support, so it would certainly kick some serious hiney if they did, but they haven't implemented the interface and are unwilling to go on record either way yet. I'd imagine it would depend on how much they want to compete with their own products.

3. Interesting tidbits: it may not ship with a modem. But, I/O wise, it will apparently include PCMCIA (not sure about # ports or anything),IEEE 1394 (FireWire), and USB capability. Graphics: NTSC, PAL, HDTV and VESA compatible. Software-lib wise, they're also going to be trying to provide extensive physics libs for real time rendering, and avoiding motion capture. Criminy.

4. One comment had a Sony rep saying they'd be using their own proprietary stuff for internal OS, as they didn't want to use "inefficient" external stuff. Seems fair, they need a RTOS. Doesn't trying to make Linux go on that HW sound tempting, tho?

I hope I have only decreased the UD ratio.

Sources:

Australian Playstation Review Page- psx2 news

Gamefan

Sony Playstation pages

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