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US PlayStation 2 To Have A Modem & Hard Drive?
rit writes, "It looks like Sony is trying to beat Microsoft to the punch with the Playstation 2 - according to this article at CNet, they have announced plans to release the U.S. Version of the Playstation 2 with a modem and a hard drive. No details on modem speed or hard drive, but we can assume it will be at least up to par or close to what Microsoft plans to offer with the X-Box; giving Sony a one-year head start on Microsoft for gaining a stronger foothold in the gaming market. Now if only they'd ship it with an ethernet card...
"
Now, they just have to add a keyboard and a tape drive and they would have the Colecovision 2000.
I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they make as they fly by
I thought that the PS2 (as is) was supposed to be capable of handling anything Micro$oft would be creating. The Emotion Engine would slaughter the competition, hands down, and I wouldn't have to worry about what choice to make. Now they're going to throw a modem and a HD in there (which I am assuming will increase the already outrageous $300+ cost). The modem I understand, but a HD? Why? Developers for the Japanese PS2 must not have had a HD in mind, and I doubt the American developers did/do either. What the hell does this do to the games already in development? And why even put a HD in a system with these performance numbers, I would think it would just lead to *lower* performance. BAH!
_______
I just wish I could c:\format Internet
I don't see a reason to ship it with a hard drive and modem. The IEEE 1394, USB and PCMCIA ports should be a clue to anyone (who knows what they are) that it can easily support modems, hard drives, etc...
Shipping them with hard drives and modems will soon become obsolete. I hope sony takes the direction of making them optional accessories and not turn to a proprietary bus to market sony-only accessories (that's all we would need).
Personally I think they should leave it alone and work on developing a front-end for the Playstation (hmm - SonyLinux?) to make hardware support and driver detection so the hardware really has no limits to what is plugged into it.
- Detritus
"I never really liked computers, but then the server went down on me"
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It's not running Linux. Its OS is not open-source. It doesn't use a Transmeta CPU. It doesn't have Ethernet. They don't even talk about it on Userfriendly, and Hubble hasn't spotted one near yet.
Really, I wonder why any slashdotter would be interrested into it...
But... I WANT ONE!!!!
max
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.
The next PSX 2 in the US will have a modem, a hard drive,... In other words, il will be a computer with proprietary harware.
;)
I can't see the point of it : wouldn't a cheap console be better for simple gaming ? With a cheap PC next to it for Internet apps and word processing ?
OK, it would have an refreshing architecture compared to the usual x86 crap. But I'll be really happy the day I'll see a story about cheap PowerPC boxes, or something like this.
I mean... Real non-x86 computers with open hardware which aren't labeled as 'game consoles'.
Moderator : this is NOT flamebait nor troll... In fact, those are just my ideas
Stéphane
Instant Karma's gonna get you, Gonna knock you right on the head (John Lennon, 1970)
But where's the games for PSX2? No one's talking much about them that I've heard. It seems like if I want a box to just play games with, the Dreamcast is the way to go. I've got plenty of computers already; give me a gaming console for a change.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
According to here, the hard drive will be 8GB, matching that of the X-Box. IMHO, Sony is doing this for two reasons, to counter the onslaught of the X-Box as well as to strangle the Dreamcast out of exsistence. The only thing the Dreamcast had going for it was its modem, but with the PS2 now having a modem, apparently, you can expect Dreamcast sales to lag off. As for the X-Box, even with its launch well over a year after that of the PS2, Sony could still feel the heat from the fire. Sony basically doesn't want Microsoft to do to them what they are doing to Sega, having more features and thus strangling off sales.
SYSOP ('sih-sop) n.: the guy laughing at your typing.
Ethernet makes sense even for those without a permanent net connection (big gaming party in the house?). Also, most people with cable modems use Ethernet - the connection between the cable "modem" and your computer is often an Ethernet link. Add a cheap hub, and voilà!
GNU/Linux. The Freshmaker.
No, no, no! No offense, but you just don't get it. I used to be a hardcore console gamer several a few years ago. It might seem strange to the tech-heads here, but the way the console game industry works is different than the computer game industry.
As a console gamer and developer, if the system doesn't come with a harddrive or a modem or whatever peripherial, then they do not exist, period. Sure, Sony themselves could sell an official harddrive addon and an official modem addon, but almost every developer and gamer will act as if they do not exist. Its the all-in-one-shrinkwrapped-box theory of the console game industry.
They key to the console industry is that you have fixed hardware. So this pretty much rules out most peripherial components. I could name tons of examples with past console systems... but I will let you do your homework on that, if you need.
Lets all hope that the harddrive and modem for the PSX2 don't mean that console game developers will develop buggy games like most computer game developers.
"At last the console manufacturers seem to be catching onto the idea of online gaming. Everyone and their online dog know the future is broadband so it's not difficult to see how Sony can exploit this with their Playstation. Welcome
news indeed - let's just hope someone can produce some decent games."
Online gaming is something that really isn't a terribly good idea for several reasons:
1. Point of control/failure.
I don't like the idea of someone else holding my "game" and having to have control over it. I want to access my game from anywhere and without a net connection of any sort. If their server goes down, they go out of business, or make another product that superceedes the current one your our of luck.
2. Cost
When I buy a game I want to have that game for the rest of my life without extra cost. With these things they will most likely cost and I don't want that.
3. Interactivity dosn't take the place of a real isolated program that is done well.
Just because you can't code your way out of a paper bag dosn't mean that I have to look at some shitty program that just has multiplayer capabilities built into it.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
Quite possibly - as a matter of fact the PSX 1 development kit uses GCC as it's compiler! doesn't that mean there's already GPL code that targets the PSX. My bet is the PSX2 dev kit will ship with GCC also. I'm a little shocked no one has ported linux to their PSX. Although with a hard drive and a modem, it'll suddenly be useful to be running linux on it. :)
By the way: Screw hopes for an ethernet card by default - that can be bought seperately and use with the USB port. The important thing is that if the system comes with a default modem installed, more games will take advantage of it; then when you buy your ethernet adapter, there will games for it. If it doesn't come with either then games won't come with networking either. :(
Now if only Sony could figure out that a default of 2 controllers aren't enough. Not enough games come out with 4 player modes for the PSX because the system only has two ports standard. And a few too many games that say they support the 4player multitap don't work well with the tap!
Joseph Elwell.
Sony has stated in the past that they wouldn't be shipping a modem because it didn't make sense to slap such outdated technology on a machine as cutting edge as the PS2. They're waiting for more people to get DSL or cable modems.
The PS2 case has already been designed and is in production. Is Sony really going to start over on this now?
There's no purpose for a hard drive. The Sony Network isn't ready yet. No online games are in development. People are writing games for 32MB RAM and a huge DVD. What is a hard drive going to add to the mix that will justify the significant extra cost? It would be cheaper to just add another 32MB of memory, or to double the VRAM.
Hard drives are a consumer nightmare: relatively high failure rate, not suited to being kicked around in a console.
On the other hand, a US release date for the PS2 hasn't been announced yet, so anything is possible.
I had generally heard estimates of $300 for the US lauch of the PS2. But with this news, I have to think that the launch price will be closer to $400.
Although I agree that having some sort of on-line gaming ability built in is a really good idea, wonder how well that balances out against the loss in sales from the higher price. I think $300 is supposed to be the price at which the mass market generally starts accepting a component, and even though the PS2 looks fantastic there are probably a lot of people who won't buy one at $400.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yeah I guess I don't really know about that. See most companies like to betray people with massive inefficient code that breaks almost all computers.
What exactly is Half Life about? What makes it so good? What about online play is any different from the usual fare about having things where you see how quickly you can kill your fellow players and the like.
Playing online has never been very fun for me at all (when I can find a computer that isn't mine that can actually do anything). The whole idea makes me sick. I am tired of playing people who kick my ass 700 times before I fall to the ground. To me the concept of playing against others is a rather bad idea. I don't want to play a game I can't win. I don't want to fight a game that I never can do anything with.
A good example for you:
Starcraft. Ok I get the shareware version and play the entire thing all the way through in a college cumputer lab. That was somewhat challenging and I rather enjoyed it. Next I decide to try to play some multiplayer stuff on the net. Well after several days I hadn't won a single game with large ammounts of time dedicated to this.
I didn't win a damn one. Not only this but I wasn't enjoying it much at all (you should know how it feels to loose).
I tried almost every conceivable military tactical strategy that I had heard published and some of the stuff from the Art of War. Nothing helps. I almost never win anything.
Second example:
Quake III arena. This game obviously was on a better machine that I didn't own as well. I started playing the damn thing and for the life of me I never seemed to avoid death or deliver any death to almost anyone. Nothing worked at all. Seemed that it was an impossibility.
Now maybe I am "ignorant" but this dosn't seem like something I would want to do for free and especially not for a fee.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
For anyone that was paying attention, the Dreamcast has a modem which is attached to an expansion port. This means (put on your thinking caps) you can *remove* it and add an Ethernet or Firewire adapter to this so-called expansion port. Having an expansion port is a good thing because you can attach anything you like to it as long as you pack it with a driver disk. I think the expansion port is a much much better idea than hardwiring a modem into the DC for the very reason that more people are getting xDSL and cable access. If Sony has a smart set of fellows working for them they will do something similar, hopefully even make the hard drive an option. They could just ship the PS2 with an expansion bay you COULD stick a hard drive into, it would keep the price down and give them some room to expand.
As an aside I was thinking about Sony and what their plans might be for the future, I'm thinking after the PS2 has been out for a year or two, maybe three, they're going to start building VAIO PCs and laptops based around the EE (maybe with some modifications to make it a little more general purpose) and some of the PS2's architecture. Right now they are making a run for consumer's living rooms and the next logical step would be the office. The PCs they sell now are Intel's bitches and in many ways are being held back by Intel and x86. Don't give me crap about Itanium, the EE is out NOW not sometime next year. The EE would be a real boon to Sony in the audio/visual editing department considering audio and video filters are just a bunch of operations performed on the samples or pixels (the vector units on that puppy would tear through high demand video filters). The PS2 is primarily a gaming machine but I think it's secondary objective is to test out some architectural ideas. Sony might even try to poise itself as the next decade's SGI. That's just my five pesos.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.