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PSX was an acronym used mainly by the videogame press. Sony of America's press releases (like this one) use "PlayStation", "PS" and "PS one" to refer to the original Playstation. They've been doing that at least since 2001.

AFAIK, after Nintendo dropped Sony's contract to create a SNES console with CD capabilities (which was referred as the Playstation), Sony decided to create its own console using the Playstation as its base, and this project was baptized as Playstation X. When the console was marketed the 'X' was dropped fron its official name, but the press still used the X in the acronym. Dunno why... maybe because it sounded cool?

I agree that Playstation X may sound unoriginal, but since Sony of Japan never used the name in a released product in that market I don't see much trouble. I think it fits - after all the PSX is more than a PS2, but it is not a new Playstation console. Of course, they might run a bit of a problem when they try to market a PS3 with added functionality... will it be known as PSX2? Or a PS3X, maybe?

There's some technical information on the PS2 here.

for those of you who don't know, 'genesis' is the north american term whilst 'mega drive' is the UK (and european?) term

here are the specs and some history

Meanwhile the PSP has two processors based on an R4000 core, each at 333MHz. Compare this to a Sony Playstation with a single R3000 at 33.8688 MHz (30 MIPS, bus bandwidth 132 Mb/sec), Sega Saturn with two Hitachi SuperH (SH-2) at 28.6 MHz (each 25 MIPS Plus 22.6MHz Yamaha FH1 24-bit DSP and a couple of video processor chips, and just for giggles, Playstation 2 which is harder to quantify from specifications but its Emotion Engine based around a 2-issue 128 bit MIPS design with 3.2GB/sec bandwidth to main memory, not to mention the couple of vector coprocessors more powerful (though less general-purpose) than the core. Oh yeah, and the same R3000 core (or something programatically the same) as the Playstation is tucked in there too. But, I digress. The PSP is slightly like a baby PS2. It has only one vector unit, but it still has one. The clock rate is basically the same (slightly higher, but not really worth mentioning) as a PS2. It should be a powerhouse of a system. My only regret is that it will probably be locked down pretty tight and I hate to support that kind of thing.

Nonetheless the PSP is a kind of revolution that puts it dramatically beyond today's handhelds, as today's handhelds are ahead of, well, some of the old handhelds. (You would have a hard time convincing me that a GBA is really that much better than a Turbo Express, for example, or even a Lynx, except for form factor.) Of course GBA is not a speed demon, but it wasn't trying to be. However the fact that the GBA SP is so wildly successful in spite of its lack of power does not show that there is not a market for a more expensive device that does it all. After all, Gamecube and Playstation 2 are both still doing quite well.

So basically, this is the Sega Nomad with built in games? With a limited amount of games for it, it might be better to just get a Nomad off of eBay with a bunch of games instead.

This machine could barely manage a few megahertz, yet it was scaling/rotating/blitting out hi-res graphics with millions of colors.

I think you meant 256x244@with 256 onscreen colors.

Maybe you are young and don't remember ;) The rotating was cool though. I always loved the Actraiser opening sequence. What a cool game.

Atari 2600: 1977 to ~1984 (~7 yrs)

Nintendo Famicom: 1983 to 1990 (7 yrs)
Sega SG-x000 (later Sega Master System): 1983 to ~1988 (5 yrs)

Sega MegaDrive/Genesis: 1988 to 1994 (6 yrs)
Nintendo Super Famicom: 1990 to 1996 (6 yrs)

Sony Playstation: 1994 to (1999, but now rereleased as PSOne today)
Sega Saturn 1994 to 1998 (4 yrs)
Nintendo 64: 1996 to 2001 (5 yrs)

Sega Dreamcast 1998 to 2003 (5 yrs)
Sony Playstation 2: 1999 to ?
Nintendo GameCube: 2001 to ?
Microsoft Xbox: 2001 to ?

The video game industry is well over 30 years old, with the Magnavox Odyssey released in January 1972. It is just plain wrong to say the video game industry is young.

As for this being the longer generation, that's a hard claim to pin down. You can't really say "X generation lasted Y years" because consoles are not released all at once. The 8-bit generation either lasted until the introduction of the Sega Genesis in 1988, or it ended when Nintendo began selling the Super Famicom in 1990? (Or you could even say it never really ended, since Nintendo was still producing Famicoms long after 1990.)

I suppose you could say the Sega Dreamcast marks the start of this generation in 1998, and then if the first next-generation console comes out in 2006 it would make this the longest run without new blood. But wait, couldn't you say the Microsoft Xbox is "next-generation" along with the GameCube, having almost double the power of the Dreamcast and PS2?

Or you could ignore all of this, realize that we're all just waiting for "the next big thing" and start saving your pennies now. ; )

This site and Google are your friends.

Incorrect. The Megaman series of games and the Megaman X series of games are seperate and distinct from one another. The X in Megaman X is the letter X, not the Number 10.

The Classic Megaman series deals with Dr. Light's Boy Robot Megaman taking on the evil Dr. Wily's henchmen to save the world.

The Megaman X series takes place 100 years later, and details the adventures of X, the successor to Megaman who was sealed in a capsule for 100, and is the first robot with true free will, as he battles against Sigma and his henchmen.

While the games are structurally similar in gameplay and concept, the environments and storylines are distinctly different.

For more info, check The Megaman Network, quite possibly the most extensive source of Megaman info on the 'net.

If it does, then perhaps the Sony handheld is an attempt to cut into the handheld market by using a library of software developed on a console. That'd be a neat trick. And, in the sense that the GBA titles are ripping from the SNES library, is another interesting example of Sony using an idea already in use by Nintendo.

Sega did this a long time ago. They made a handheld called the Nomad that played regular genesis carts. You can even use a genesis A/V cable to play on the tv like that new gamecbe addon, but with this you still have a screen on your controller in case someone blocks the tv. Pretty cool system, I still have it.

Well, quoted from here, a ps2 has 6.2 gflops of CPU power in its FPU. There are 17,496 of these units. So that is roughly 108475 gflops of CPU power.

Quoted from a slashdot article here, there are "over 2000" Xeon 2.8 GHz in the render farm for ROTK. Pulled from google cache as intel's website is crap, here, I learned that a pair of 2.8 ghz xeons has 5.6 gflops of FPU power. Thus, 5.6 * 2000 is 11200 gflops of power for the render farm of ROTK.

Thus, take 108475 and divide by 11200 and those playstations equal roughly 9.68 ROTK rendering farms.

It may take a few weeks.

• The Hank Files -- Playstation, the SNES CD-ROM
• Console Database has the full story, with pictures.

The most important thing about video games currently is how they look. In the old days, games balanced user interface and graphics. Some games might have bad graphics but have great UIs, and some games might have good graphics and lousy UIs, but generally speaking there was a level of balance. Then came the whole "3D era" (which I actually consider the polygon era) which was ushered in by Nintendo and Sony (Sega were late to the party, adding "3D" capability to their systems at the last minute). In this period, the most important thing about a game was that it used polygons, not how it played. The fact is, I have yet to play a platformer or Street Fighter type of fighting game that was actually better because it was done in polygons. I also wonder what the point of doing certain types of games, like RPGs, in polygons when they seemed to work so well with detailed sprite graphics (I also think that polygons are detrimental to the appearance of RPGs).

Part of this is taste. If you like sprite graphics you aren't going to like polygon graphics until they look just like sprite graphics. It's sort of like the difference between people who prefer traditional cel animation to something like Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.

Marketing comes into this because the ability to push polygons and do math related to that became the benchmark that replaced bits. (It could have been worse, though, Sega wanted the benchmark to be how well a game system could do "Full Motion Video" see the large number of horrid FMV games for the Sega CD.) Even now, when people compare systems, they talk about things like polygon counts and bump mapping. (During the SNES/Genesis wars, bits and megaherz were the things people used, hence Sega's infamous "blast processing" marketing campaign.)

This is important because companies have been known to emphasize polygon games while giving short shrift to decent sprite based games. Sega suppressed Eternal Champions for Saturn because they didn't want that sprite based game to compete with Virtua Fighter. Sony has been known to suppress games that use sprite graphics in the US market for this reason. I'm not even sure if the N64 can do sprite based action games, although Ogre Battle seems to be sprite based.

Incidentally, I realize that some people (probably the majority) prefer polygon graphics to sprite graphics. It's a matter of taste, but I prefer sprite graphics. (Though there are a few polygon games I really like like Sacrifice and System Shock II.)

Because they saved a LOT of the videogames story. Project like
mame,
uae,
mess is simply amazing,
and thanks to any others that contributes.