Slashdot Mirror
PS2 Hard Drive Announced
An Anonymous Coward writes: "Sony has announced details on their hard drive for PS2 (in Japan, anyway)." It's listed at $150, which puts the PS/2+Hard Drive at around $400 (after rumored PS2 price cuts). All of this is going to matter big time when Microsoft's X-Box storms onto the scene. The article also has information about the keyboard, mouse, and network adapters that will someday also be tethered to PS2s around the world.
Raphael Gray, a Welsh hacker, managed to get ahold of Bill Gates' credit card and proceeded to send Viagra to his home! Now that's funny. Great hack.
Unfortunately, the Brits apparently are able to make diamonds by shoving coal up their ass and waiting six months. Whereas here in the U.S. this guy would be a hero and perhaps given a slap on the wrist, over there they are labelling him as mentally unstable with psychiatric problems.
Raphael Gray wherever you are, don't listen to them. You are the one who is sane, having a very healthy sense of humor. Do yourself a favor and emigrate to the U.S., where you won't have to put up with a bunch of asshole bureaucrats who can't take a fuckin' joke.
is this the first post *ever* without "large gaping hole" linked to our favorite web site??
Oh.. **OH**. "PS2" stands for "Playstation 2".. Oh, now i get it.
I sure am glad i read your post; up until here i had thought that when cdmrtaco said "PS2", he meant the UNIX environment variable.
I was *THINKING* it made no sense to attatch a hard drive to your secondary prompt.... damn. That was confusing.
Now i just have to figure out why those people in that other thread are obsessing about the PS1 art museum in new york and talking as if it were a piece of consumer electronics or something..
There is a large gaping hole in the back of the PS2. This hole is where the (internal) harddrive plugs into. You can buy the internal one, or the external one which uses a USB port.
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
I'm an intern for MS in the XBOX group. (Yes, it's XBOX. Not xbox; Not X-box; Not X-Box; just XBOX).
There will be no such thing as DX drivers, at least none that the user will ever know about. Microsoft is not that stupid people. Think about it - this is a gaming CONSOLE. Yes, it is certainly a CONSOLE, and not a PC. Sure, it's got the same brand name parts. However, it has a different architecture. It has certain constraints PCs do not have. It has certain benefits that PCs do not have (locked hardware, unified memory, etc.)
As was stated at a tech talk at MIT by J Allard, there is no real "operating system" for XBOX. All the code that drives the hardware is statically linked with a game executable. And since it's a Microsoft "OS," it has to be huge, right? As of now, this is under a megabyte.
There. It's a console. It's not a PC. It doesn't really have an OS. There's no such thing as drivers. And stop bitching about XBOX just because it comes from Microsoft. Look past the freakin' name for once and see that MS might just have something good on their hands.
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
CD-ROM's weren't a good media to ship software on, either, because "the average consumer didn't have a CD-ROM drive".
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
The word from the source
Xbox. No dash, not all caps either.
Except that Zaphod starts with a 'Z'...
"'Tis great confidence in a friend to tell him your faults, greater to tell him his." --Poor Richard's Almanac
How about:
Randomly generated maps / items / whatever
Opponent position
AI state data (depends on engine)
Past information (Wait, can't open this door until I flip switch C in room 32 5 levels back..)
Also, you are mixing Flash memory (non-volatile) with SDRAM (requires power to store information). Flash is a _lot_ more expensive.
"'Tis great confidence in a friend to tell him your faults, greater to tell him his." --Poor Richard's Almanac
Nope, but you apparently didn't see the demonstration at E3 did you.
Vermifax
Vermifax
Logout
Actually, the Harddrive doesn't hook into anything in the bay.(Other than sliding into the bay) The harddrive hooks into the modem/bba which hooks into that slot. At least that's the way they showed it at E3.
Vermifax
Vermifax
Logout
There are actually two ports on the BBA, one ethernet and one analog 56k.
Vermifax
Vermifax
Logout
Shown here
Vermifax
Vermifax
Logout
Xaphod BeeblebrOX
Now, every time you see an XBOX from now until you die, you'll think of your dear friend Xaphod.
You're welcome.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
It couldn't possibly be that. It's called the XBOX, not the ZBOX.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
$400 at the start, no, not 'expensive'. I guess I was thinking more in the long term after the planned obsolesence and proprietary add-on devices that BECOME NECESSARY. Suddenly it's all getting more expensive and those that are locked into it get to pay through the nose for it. Good luck :>
--
Delphis
Delphis
Man, you're just begging to be told 'GO USE LINUX' aren't you? :)
If you're serving files, using a windows PC is ludicrous.
--
Delphis
Delphis
With the advances in graphics cards, PCs look better for gaming to me. Consoles make (made?) a big point about being simple and portable. Once you started adding more and more shit to them they just become very expensive proprietary PCs. Seems a bit strange somehow..
--
Delphis
Delphis
But I do agree with many of your points. I think really that the market has focused on being the coolests -- that is, having pretty graphics and slick features.
How many people here remember the Quest for Glory series (was also the Hero's Quest series) by Sierra? Wonderful games. Very fun, with relatively few bugs (well, terrible race conditions in QfG4, but those only surfaced several years later). Sadly, there will be no more QfG, as they lost a lot of money on QfG5. Why? Because they busted a wad on a fancy 3-D engine, and very detailed 3-D character models and other expensive artwork. QfG5 grossed more than any of the other games in the series, but it was just too expensive to code, debug, and produce artwork for.
The focus on fancy graphics is killing the PC gaming industry, yes. But isn't because there is anything inherently wrong with the PC as a gaming platform. I'd rather the quality of PC games increase. I have to have a fairly top of the line computer anyway for work. Going out and buying a console just to play games is an additional expense for me, not a cheaper alternative.
Gads. Where to begin?
First off, a meg is huge for an embedded OS. Hell, my boot image is a (fairly bloated, IMHO) 700K. Handles all standard IDE/EIDE devices, SCSI, AGP, a dozen NIC's, more filesystems than I can count, and 3-4 sound cards. All without any modules. It is by no means an embedded OS. You, however, need a freakin' meg to bring up your DVD drive? I mean, that's all your ROM needs to do, is bring up the disk and finish booting from that.
Second, there are too drivers. They just ship on the game media, and don't need to be handled by the user. So, I suppose it is true that there are "non that the user will ever know about". Of course, if a game ships with buggy drivers, then there is no way to fix that, so you're just screwed. And I don't believe for a minute that you can write totally bug free drivers for something as complicated as a DirectX implementation. At least not without cutting out all of the features that make DirectX a viable choice as a 3D graphics library.
Third, are you serious about calling unified memory a plus? There is a very good reason why only cheap PC's use unified memory: it is waay tooo slooow. I remember a benchmark about a year back analysing the performance hit a unified memory architecture gave. It was about 7% for standard stuff, and pushing 20% for graphics-intensive stuff. Unified memory loses so bad that I doubt that your statement is even accurate. There is no way you can have the GPU and the CPU competing for the same memory bandwidth and still get a decent framerate. If it is a "unified" architecture, then I'd bet that the GPU has so much cache/buffer on it that it really isn't unified in any way but name.
If you want to do any good for the XBox, you should leave the PR to the people who have been hired to do it. Or at least get a clue first.
Well, that is one way in which the XBox could make it all work. Since they are a 800 lb gorilla, I'm sure they can talk Intel into giving them chips with a low clock multiplier and a fast bus. They would need fast ram, and there is quite a premium for, say, 200 MHz SDRAM. However, from what I've heard, they are using a 133 or 100 MHz bus like everyone else.
Also, if they do fancy thing with dual-port RAM and whatnot, they increase their reliance on specialized hardware. Overall, they have a small handfull of devices (CPU, GPU, sound, DVD, controller) which are going to be competing for those resources. To get it to work well will complicate the design. They could have, however, just gone with a plain old non-unified architecture, and grabbed all of their parts off the shelf, or whatever special stuff they did design, would be equally applicable to PCs, and PC sales could help absorb the development costs.
Really, what I'm saying is that if you are 95% percent identical to a PC architecture already, you may as well just use a standard PC architecture. It works pretty damnn well, and while there is room for improvement in that you only care about 1 particular task (games), it isn't worth the extra design effort to deviate from standard. A commodity CPU on a commodity chipset with commodity RAM and a commodity DVD drive hanging off of a commodity IDE bus is pretty cheap, and can be made wicked fast at little expense. Yeah, you need nVidia's fancy new GPU, but nVidia is going to spread the development/manufacturing costs between MS and the PC gamer market, so it's just as good as if MS was buying a commodity video card too. Well, standard at least.
And stop bitching about XBOX just because it comes from Microsoft. Look past the freakin' name for once and see that MS might just have something good on their hands.
It doesn't matter.
I'd rather give Nintendo my money than Microsoft, just so I know my cash won't help finance a company that produces shite software and plans on extorting even more money out of users.
At least Nintendo's business practices are slightly less evil, and mostly confined to the toy market, anyway.
Besides, (IIRC)the Gamecube will cost $50-100 less, looks fucking killer, AND Nintendo is known for making some of the best games ever.
Microsoft can take their box (oh, sorry, BOX) and shove it.
C-X C-S
Am I the only person who saw that and thought "PS/2? Why would someone make a new hard drive for a machine that has been out of production for over ten years??"
I don't want no steenking hard drive for a IBM PS/2....
(Taco, take the hint, its PS2, not PS/2, but even then you should probably just stick to Playstation 2...its only a few more letters!)
-Julius X
-Julius X
remove "-whatkindofspamdoyoutakemefor-" from email to send
When I think of PC games, I think of games developed in the first half of the 90's.
And I think of games that were developed even before that. Games that were true classics like Sam & Max Hit the Road, Out of this World, Prince of Persia, Ultima IV, Wasteland, Wing Commander, Tetris, Pirates!, Populous, Gabriel Knight, System Shock, The Secret of Monkey Island, SimCity, and Alone in the Dark.
When I think back to the first half of the 90s I think of all the disappointments. I guess you don't remember Battlecruiser 3000AD, Phantasmagoria, Rise of the Triad, The Adventures of Willy Beamish, Cutthroats, The Daedalus Encounter, Lands of Lore 2. And those are just the ones I remember. I'm sure there are far worse ones that I've completely forgotten.
Games published today are typically very buggy (Anarchy Online), overly focused on graphics and glitz, very reliant on marketing, and very often disappointing despite long waits (Black and White?) or promising themes (Emperor: Battle for Dune?).
That has been the case for a very long time. There are plenty of truly excellent games that have been published after your "Golden Age". I would suggest you try playing Thief, Space Empires IV, Deus Ex, Baldur's Gate, Close Combat, Half-Life, Triple Play 97, Diablo, Starcraft, The Sims, Rainbox Six, Planescape: Torment, Everquest/Ultima Online, Unreal Tournament, Command and Conquer: Red Alert, or Homeworld.
Don't rely on your memory. It lies to you.
doesent the PS/2 have USB as well?
even though usb is IMHO, too slow for a hdd, what about keybord, mouse and ethernet?
When are we going to see some price drops? Sony is going to have to lower their price to be more attractive vs. the $299 xbox and the $199 nintendo. I just don't see the ps2 as that competitive at its current price of $289 (as seen on pricescan.com).
F.O.Dobbs
I have way too many devices on my SCSI bus, and all of my IDE controllers are filled up too. So just the other day I was wondering how I'd put a new hard drive in my system, I was debating getting a firewire controller.
Thanks to Sony, now I don't have to worry about that! I can get this new PS/2 hard drive and plug it right into the jack with a pass-through cable to my keyboard or mouse! This sounds great and all, I'm just not sure that the PS/2 bus could sustain enough bandwidth for that.
At Game Developers Conference 2000 MS was openly telling people that the XBOX would ship with just enough of an OS to initialize the hardware and start reading the DVD. Everything else necessary to run the game will come from the DVD. This allows them to update libraries, drivers, whatnot and have the developers distribute them as a part of their product. The end user never has to worry about system maintenence.
So, no. I don't think any NDA was broken by the mention of no driver updates and a small base OS.
You are so wrong. There were tons of succesful games that used R.O.B. the robot and the PowerGlove. Oh wait...nevermind.
Cool NES accessories page
-B
I think by "locked hardware" he means that all the XBoxen (I refuse to capitalise it all no matter what they say) have the same hardware so you don't have the problem normal PC developers have. If a normal PC developer writes a game that needs an 800Mhz P3 and a GeForce3 only a small amount of the PC user population would be able to play it, if they target P2-300s with Voodoo2s then anyone who has anything better won't be satisfied.
XBox developers can just write a game targeting the XBox and know that all the users will get the same experience.
This really irks me about my PS2. For some reason, the thing just will not boot games anymore. DVD movies work fine, and regular CD games work fine, but no DVD games will boot.
...
I read somewehre that this means the DVD laser is misaligned and that this is not covered under warranty. Anyone care to comment? It's three months old and never been dropped, this totally sucks
I saw Linux running on PS2's with pre-release hard drives at JavaOne. Sun has ported the Java runtime to work on the PS2 hardware, and was demonstrating that. They were running WindowMaker for their WindowManager.
See my comment above re: the Square/Final Fantasy effect on HD sales.
Also, with FFXI going online, you can bet your bottom dollar that the BBA/modem combo (for a mere $40) will sell like hotcakes as well.
-------------
I wish I had a kryptonite cross, because then you could keep Dracula and Superman away.
*sigh* Once again, not seeing the Square/Final Fantasy edge that Sony has in this particular case.
The HD and Final Fantasy X, which will require/make use of the HD (depending on who you ask) are both being released the same day in Japan. I'd say this is a good indicator of good future sales of the HD add-on.
-------------
I wish I had a kryptonite cross, because then you could keep Dracula and Superman away.
You're confusing FF X with FFXI. FFX will not feature online play, FFXI will.
-------------
I wish I had a kryptonite cross, because then you could keep Dracula and Superman away.
And you, as well, are wrong. FFXI will feature online play, FFX will not.
-------------
I wish I had a kryptonite cross, because then you could keep Dracula and Superman away.
Ummm, except Square has stated that the HD add-on is going to be a virtual necessity in order to play Final Fantasy X. That might not sound like much here in the States, but that's a near-guarantee of gargantuan sales figures over in Japan. Besides, hasve you taken a look at the sales figures for PS2's after the announced price drop in Japan? Well-nigh equal to the sales figures of the Gameboy Advance over the same time period, no mean feat given the popularity of GBA and the price differential between the two. Square + necessity of HD add-on == virtual guarantee of sales on the HD.
-------------
I wish I had a kryptonite cross, because then you could keep Dracula and Superman away.
I swear, the next person that names a high-tech electronic device P S 2 with any combination of ., /, - is going to have to deal with me! I have to read half the article to figure out what the heck system someone came up with a hard drive for!
Next thing you'll tell us is the correct way to say XBOX sounds like exbo-X with a long O and accent on the X.
Do really dense people warp space more than others?
i was under the impression that (at least the ms mouse, maybe even only the *old* one at that) the 'microsoft' hardware was not actually made/designed by ms but only licensed and whatnot. :\)
i agree though, i love the ms natural keyboard and the ms optical intellimouse (the original one that they dont seem to make anymore
-=[ http://www.legos.org ]=-
i've got a regular optical mouseman with ifeel, and i just dont like using it as much as my ms mouse.
its more to do with the scroll button software though, i think ifeel would be pretty kickass, but i really like using the ms mouse because of how the wheel operates.
-=[ http://www.legos.org ]=-
you know i hadn't thought about the external ones that way and was planning on an internal hdd for my PSX2 but now that you mention it, that's a much better idea.
you're a genius! i will build a statue of you made of meatloaf.
...dave
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
Funny comment coming from someone with a .sig like that...
This post sponsored by Ninja Burger. "
Can I store MP3's on it?
As a matter of fact, I'm using a PS/2 keyboard right now!
Oh, wait...
It's nice to see that in 2001, Microsoft have finally figured out that case sensitivity *does* matter.
Well, I don't know about the mice, but I used a very generic USB keyboard ($25) with a friend's PS2 to take the bundled BASIC for a spin. It was quite fun (always nice with a basic that let's you draw Gauraud-shaded triangles with a single command, although that's of course pretty simple in C/OpenGL too). It seemed to lack any high-precision, as in <1-second resolution, timers though, which kind of killed it for me. Anyway, the keyboard worked just fine.
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
From time and memorial of console gaming, gadgets and nifty peripherals have traditionally been bombs. There are a few exceptions where a very popular game is so inherantly tied to the peripheral that playing it without just isn't playing the game(think gun games, DDR). Heck the keyboard for Dreamcast was a washout until PSO came along.
So while its nice to have a harddrive on your PS2 people are not going get it just to have a harddrive on your PS2. They need to have a "killer app" that does a "gee wiz I'm glad I have this thingy".
I don't own a console, so maybe I don't have the facts right, but it seems console makers make the money on the games. The $400 price tag seems great, adding a keyboard and mouse for another ~$70 still makes it a pretty good deal. The problem is that the games are likely to be more expensive than for a PC. It's also a pretty special purpose machine, why not spend a little more and get a PC. It'll run more software, you won't be using a TV for a display, unless you really want to. If you like the PS2 only games that are out there, then it still makes sense.
A lot of video cards have TV out, and this also takes care of the need for a DVD player. Of course you need a wireless input device of some kind, so we're upping the price of the PC a little bit.
Your point about proprietary extensions is a good one, but with high powered video cards becomming so affordable, you might be able to get better graphics without the extensions.
As you pointed out, the best thing about consoles is that they're all the same. This maens that games will work equally well on all of them so developers know the target system specs. It also means that a lot of the stupid driver problems that make Windows so unstable go away. Consoles still have a lot going for them
Microsoft does pretty well at making things like keyboards, optical mice, and other input devices. Maybe XBOX will follow this trend instead of that of their software business.
Massivly Multiplayer Online Gamse are becomming very popular. These games are constantly being patched to add new content as well as rebalance the game and fix bugs. Turbine, the makers or Asheron's Call (which is published by Microsoft), have already expressed interest in the XBOX. They have monthly patches to provide new content, so they will be making use of the hard drive. I'm sure Sony won't let Microsoft be the only ones with a MMOG on a console. If they're smart, you'll be seeing EverQuest for the PS2 for Christmass.
At least that's what the World Economic Forum intends to use them for, to disseminate vital health and other information to third-world countries.
read more at cnn...
Since when did game consoles become network computers?
It's a GAME CONSOLE. A toy that hooks to your TV and plays games. It doesn't matter how much crap you throw on it, it's still a game console.
When the PS2 can boot off the 'net and fire up X, it might be an NC.
Interested in weather forecasting?
"Ummm, except Square has stated that the HD add-on is going to be a virtual necessity in order to play Final Fantasy X."
Square making FF games that support the hard drive is still just a niche product. FFX will not require a hard disk for solo play, only for the additional online stuff. Only players who want to use their console to play the game online will need to buy the hard disk, and many will likely balk at buying said hard disk just to play SquareSoft games online when four other new games could be purchased for the same cost.
This of course assumes that Square makes online content people actually like. Don't forget that Square has had many games that flopped sales wise, examples being The Bouncer, Ergheiz, and their forgettable PS2 racing sim.
"Besides, hasve you taken a look at the sales figures for PS2's after the announced price drop in Japan?"
And those have what to do with the hard disk add-on?
This is not a good thing for Sony. While it is neat to have a hard disk, network adapters, etc. for the PS2, chances are it won't go over well.
Developers don't like console add-ons, because they facture the market and can lead to low game sales. Nintendo learned this in the 1980s, when their slew of add-ons for the NES in Japan (Even a knitting machine.), and a smaller number of them in the US, flopped. Sega experienced the same problems with their 32X and Sega CD add ons for the Genesis . Nintendo again had problems trying to add high-density media to the N64 system. When Nintendo created a RAM add-on for the N64, it sold well at first, but was eventually rejected with consumers, and the first game to require it ended up being packaged with one.
Console add-ons are just bad news. Sony will likely end up slashing costs and making crazy deals with developers to get the add-ons support beyond niche games. In the long run, they will fracture their own market and annoy customers. Microsoft will have these features prepackaged without an obvious added cost, and Sony will likely suffer for it.
Nintendo, of course, will get to sit atop the heap of game companies, leveraging their experience into a strategy that allows them to come out best (Albeit maybe not highest selling.) by marketing a simple, cheap gaming system without much hassle by a proven console company.
Go to www.xbox.com and you will notice they spell it Xbox, no dash mixed case.
Could you use a generic PC USB keyboard or mouse with the PS2, and not pay those inflated prices for them?
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
I grow weary of this argument that "console makers get it right the first time". Console games have revisions as well, you just have to pray that the bugs you suffer through aren't showstoppers. Sometimes they are (thanks Midway). Just because there are no rogue processes to step on a game doesn't mean no bugs exist. Hell, sometimes they change UPC symbols between revisions. I have had two exchanges blown because of this.
I love my consoles. I prefer them to PCs for gaming (save for Action Half-Life). But nothing is flawless.
"My God, this must be a truly remarkable corn chip, to be so widely and confidently touted."
Thanks for the clarification. The only bit question mark that remains is whether Sony is going to attempt to "lock down" linux behind a simple UI, or allow users full access.
Also of interest: the PS2's were running netscape 4.x on PS2 Linux. All attempts to get to a command prompt were met with hostility :-O
I thought you could only hook up keyboards and mice (and the occasional cuecat) to PS/2 ports.
note to moderators: i'm not this blatantly stupid.
-----
Basically I guess what I'm saying is that I want consoles to remain as "carefree" as they've always been. Of course the X-Box, I think is going to hurt that alot, especially if they make you upgrade DirectX drivers, download patches and such, but hopefully Sony and Nintendo will continue to cater to the CONSOLE market and not try to compete with MS in the "innovative" [sic] PC in a little black box instead of a big beige one market.
That announcement link also indicates that a USB mouse and keyboard would be available. Doesn't that imply that the HD is definatively USB?
If so, why is it not possible to plug one in right now?
I don't think that this is either good or bad, i'm just not sure it's necessacary. I mean, you can get 128MB pc133 on Pricewatch, and i can't imagine programming a game with so much bloatware that you need more than one meg to store VARIABLES!
I mean, when you get down to it, that's what a saved game is, right? Variables? So why would you need Gigs of text, when you could just market the End-all Be-all memory card for like $75, make $55 profit on it, and never require a new one. And it would be smaller, faster, and require less power.
I just can't imagine Gigs of
Gold=23316;
Exp=5299;
Level="AdvancedMage";
Xlocation=56; Ylocation=126;
etc, etc. Tha'ts a lot of text.
sig?
What I've read about it the harddrive allows you run linux on the system. But it should be possible to run linux from a cdrom with a pre-installed port of mame, then swap cd's in order to access your own roms.
Has anyone been playing with this idea as well or perhaps has seen a cdrom only version of linux for the ps2?
That would kinda be like flying south from New Your to get to Boston.
So, towards that end, does anyone know of any sites that go into the internals of the power supply, or explain how to hack it to work off a battery? I don't want to buy one to take apart without at least some kind of reassurance that it's a doable project. If the power adaptor were external, it'd be real easy, but unfortunately not..
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Pretty standard stuff; the DreamCast, Saturn and, I think, PSone worked this way, and probably the PS2. The OS is on each disk; later games have later revisions of the OS.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Yes, but can it run Linux?
Yes.
My other
No, but the game boy color sold pretty damn well, and you had to buy a whole new game boy, which cost from 80 - 100 dollars. And it's not even like it was that much better, what did you end up with, 16 shitty colors? For another 80 bucks?
Also, keep in mind that Sony will be selling PS2's with the hard drive installed. If the improvement to the games is great enough, they'll sell. If all it lets you do is store some pictures, then probably not.
My other
Combat is the ultimate proof that graphics don't really matter. We love some Q3A, but a while ago my roommates and I got into a round of Combat and I have NEVER seen people get into a multiplayer game like that.
My other
I can buy drives in 1s and 2s for less than $90. Sony can probably buy them in bulk for what, $50? $40?.
If I were Sony, I'd wedge the drive into the case. If it doesn't fit, design a slightly larger case and market it as the "Sony Playstation II Deluxe" and sell it at the same price as the PS-II + cost of drive + same profit margin on the drive as the main unit (actually I bet the console is already sold at cost anyway). The redesigned case shouldn't take that long to pay for itself, and if I were in the market for a console I might be willing to pay $50 more for a unit with a drive.
On the flip-side of this, once they get the drives out there, how long will it take somebody to reverse engineer the interface and undercut the price? If it's a std IDE or something like that, not long at all.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
It has certain benefits that PCs do not have (locked hardware, unified memory, etc.)
Locked hardware is a benefit?! For whom? Certainly not for the customer. Maybe for those that love control, such as the MPAA and the RIAA, but not us, the customers.
It seems you have already been assimilated into the Borg.
Makes me long for the day when PS2 meant PS/2 and not PlayStation 2. (Maybe we shouldn't abbreviate PlayStation 2 like that, look at CSS, is it Cascading Style Sheets, Content Scrambling System or C Styled Script?).
Anyway, the PS/2 was somewhat of a closed system (IBM had been overly tight-fisted about controlling use of the MCA bus technology - it hurt them and they have learned from their mistake), but it was far more open than the PS2 game machine.
P.S. I am wondering, what benefits can game consoles have over PCs anyway? PCs have TV out for those that want connections to TVs and the frame rates are nowadays faster than human perception and the scan rate of any monitor or TV out there. Please let me know what I am missing. Granted they are cheaper than PCs sometimes, but not by all that much it seems. And anything with a hard drive is getting close to being a PC anyway... Heck, GCC can be made to run on it I heard.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Ahh, so we won't even have to whack Windows over the head first in order to boot Linux! Woohoo! ;-)
Your comment brought to mind an interesting point. For decades, console makers have practically been losing money selling console hardware, and making it back from licensing and add-on peripherals. I wonder if the hard drive unit is a money-loser or a money-winner for Sony. After all, it is a game-enabling device, so it would make sense that Sony could recoup it's money from the sale of games that require this addition. But then again, it's something that many users might not want to shell out money for (i.e. "I already payed for this piece of crap once and now I gotta pay MORE?"), and might require subsidizing the price of.
"Ask me about Loom"
hey, wait a minute....
In a related story, it has been reported that linux has been ported to the PS4 beta machines with minimal effort...
Soon we're gonna have a "Console" PC and a "Standard" PC. This could be the "death of the console", only not as most people envisioned it.
'Mods'
The biggest thing that is missing from console fps, has been mods. There has never been a way to play mods with the game, unless they were included with the game. Who wants to play Q3 on the dreamcast or ps2 if you are just limited to actually playing... Q3? I don't. Most gamers want more, and mods sell games nowadays. Game companies know this, and console makers are hopefully starting to realize this as well.
My biggest fear of hard drives and consoles coming together however, is fear of the 'release now and patch later' syndrome that seems all too frequent with pc games these days. Until now, console makers had to get it right the first time. There was no way to patch a game, and if a showstopper was found, the only thing that could be done was a recall. I have a serious fear that hard drives on consoles will lead to the same sort of problem. Hopefully it will be used more as an avenue for add-ons rather than a crutch when companies run out of time
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
Hard drives on game boxes pretty much proves the (in general) worthlessness of the whole diskless Network Computer idea.
Now the important question is, will someone port USB-to-ADB-adapter driver software so that i can use my original Apple Extended keyboard?
ourpla.net is your planet
Did you break NDA by telling use the size of the OS and about certain constraints and no DX components? or is that publicly available...
Waiting until MS comes and asks CmdrTaco to remove the post...
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
Now I just need to install Samba on it, and I'll have another node in my mp3 fileserving cluster :)
I gather that MS has very strict guidelines as to what developers can and can't do with the XBox hard drive. As I understand, it's primarily to be used for savegame info and for cacheing the CDROM. Downloading patches, plugins, etc... is definately not allowed.
I wonder if Sony has similar requirements. Given the profusion of MMORPGS, and the coolness of being able to download new gfx resources and objects on the fly, I think a hard drive opens up a whole load of possibilities.
Strags
Well I think the problem for Sony is that "piece of shit vaporware" will be coming out on November 8, 2001, and it will come with a hard drive, and it will also come with a built in ethernet adapter, all devices that the Playstation 2 were lacking. As more people end up with cable modems, etc.. being able to play games over a network will be of greater importance. Having a hard drive just makes sense, rather than having to switch out CD's, a 40 GB hard drive could give games some room to spread out. All things that Microsoft gave some thought to, and now Sony is doing the same. I'm glad to see Sony is taking this step, competition breeds innovation, or at least some more add-ons I guess...
bbh
Willy
Consoles slipped into the background somewhere during and after the PlayStation's reign, and heads turned towards the PC. Personally, I hope this trend finally ends, and consoles come back to the forefront as the must-have systems for gaming.
Face it, PC gaming has gone down the tubes. When I think of PC games, I think of games developed in the first half of the 90's. Games like Quake, Doom2, Master of Orion, XCom, Master of Magic, Tie Fighter, Monkey Island, Civ, Warcraft II, etc. Games today don't match up, in terms of playability and commitment to gameplay over all else.
Games published today are typically very buggy (Anarchy Online), overly focused on graphics and glitz, very reliant on marketing, and very often disappointing despite long waits (Black and White?) or promising themes (Emperor: Battle for Dune?).
So, I honestly hope that the PC gaming industry experiences some sort of wrathful purge. Put the PC games back at the rear of the software store, just the way it was in the pre-doom days. Maybe then PC developers will think "oh no, if we want to actually sell our game, it needs to be playable and relatively bug-free!". Yes, what a revelation...
I bought a GameBoy Advance recently, and believe it or not, its the most fun I've had since I was hooked on Half-Life/TFC and running the radium map sites. Its cheap, the batteries last long, the games are good, and the console is just weak enough that developers have to make sure games are FUN, because the graphics alone won't sell the game.
So, some reasons I'm all for consoles at this point:
1) Hassle-free - Put the disk/cart in and play. No installation, no patches, easy controls, etc.
2) Stability - Wow, NO BUGS. I sure do miss that. Pay for a game and know it will run.
3) Cheap - Yes, far cheaper. My PC is still an overclocked Celeron 300A with a TNT2. I'm sick of having to pay hundreds (or thousands) of dollars a year just to keep my machine in a state suitable to run a game off the shelf well. Its ridiculous. Does a game really need to make my computer sweat blood to be fun? Hell no.
---
Because my Original Nintendo, Genesis and Saturn all work flawlessly, where as my PC (whose ONLY job is to serve files to my Macs) had an incident a few months ago where it decided C: was also D:, E:, F:, and finally G: and Norton didn't know what the hell to do with it.....
Burn Hollywood Burn
Absolutely right. In fact, Microsoft has already declared the XBOX as an integral part of their .NET strategy. I think Sony knows it too, and that's why they're trying beat MS to the punch. Why else do you think that they're announcing the Hard Drive (with NIC, according to some reports), keyboard, and mouse at the same time?
It's a known fact that Sony hates Microsoft. Ken Kutaragi, the president of Sony Computer Entertainment has been trash talking about the XBOX for a while now and Nobuyuki Idei, the big boss himself, has done all but declare open warfare. They've probably got a good idea of what Microsoft is up to, and want to nip it in the bud.
Here's another fact to chew on. Be has been trying to remake themselves into an imbedded OS provider. Rumour has it that there's been a lot of hush-hush discussion between Be and Sony, and Sony has already released a BeOS device. Maybe I'm smoking crack, but combine all those facts together and it's not a big leap of logic to predict a BeIA based web client for the PS2 this fall. The XBOX might have some real competition on it's hands.
This
It took years of effort to turn dull PCs into game machines; nowaday people found challenges to do the opposite.
"Hey look I run an Oracle database server on my PS3!"
"Can you give me a break I'm trying to get this Final Fantasy XX running on my 10GHz P5."
eat shit and die, Bambi!
All you people saying that add-ons de-value the console and developers dont like them dont get the big picture. As Nicholas Petreley pointed out in his opinion piece, m$ has seen the NC light. The xbox is just another NC. Coupled with .NET, it becomes a full time player in m$ vision of windows software services. The more competitors out there in various sizes (watch, cell phone, pda, NC, desktop, etc), the less likely that m$ will be able to dominate. Start writing your http based web service apps now.
Embrace the wrevolution!
Er, I thought it was Zaphod Beeblebrox...
It occurs to me that perhaps by making game consoles more and more computer-like, we are in effect creating a sort of gradual learning process for the average clueless computer user. Console users are generally very willing to learn all about what it takes to operate their system; through enough design similarities, maybe this motivation can be made to spill over into computers (at least at the Windows level)?
The coolest voice ever.
-Mark
-Mark
Dovie'andi se tovya sagain.
----
Capt' Trips
grep >= ! == $your
Sony is looking to change this by releasing Metal Gear Solid 2 before the XBOX even comes out. They pushed up the release date and now the game will ship in America before Japan. You can read it here: http://ps2.ign.com/news/36323.html. This game is unbelievable and if you haven't played it yet, rent Zone of the Enders just to play the MGS demo.
What rock have you been sleeping under!?!
The PC Is the utimate platform for creative games desgin It offers unparlled flexibility and POWER, can make use of many diffrent platforms and accesorys, best internet machine. And anyone can publish any thing they want for it, as long as they have the tools and time, with console due to rolites only big games make it, the down side is theirs alot of crap for the PC, theirs also alot of really cool stuff from small time devlopers, and experimentle games pushing the limits of technology, look at Serous Sam. Aside from that, how can you have a really sopisticated game with a wimpy game pad??? A keybored and a mouse is by far the best controler ever aside from flight games!
____________________ Congrants, I have just wasted 2 seconds of your life.
That point could be debated endlessly
____________________ Congrants, I have just wasted 2 seconds of your life.
A hard drive is nice, but I think I'm going to wait until Sony caves in and releases a highly demanded 5.25" floppy drive.
I don't think that its coincidence that everyone who assumes that the HD for consoles will be used for patching, drivers, etc. are the same people who do not keep up with console gaming news. It's been announced that games will be using the HD for caching purposes only. They don't want to turn console gaming into the PC market because it just wouldn't be idiot proof (which is what most console designers try to do, aka Nintendo). Also, patching, drivers, etc. will be unfeasible because no games are actually installed onto the HD... the only thing that will be stored there are textures, background, etc. to keep the game running smoothly. Console games have a much wider genre of playable games, unlike the PC market. Driving, fighting, sports, action/adventure, etc. games have a much better feel than their PC counterparts. PC games excel in strategy, fps, and mmorpg games, but consoles excel in every other area. As you can see, I'm a big proponent of console gaming, but I also use my PC extensively for gaming as well, so I do know both sides of the issue, unlike other SlashDotters.
My karma is -1 because I don't use AC posting. LOL.
Then why bother with a PS?
PS To PC USB Adapter
PS Emulator or countless other places
TV Out Adapter
and open your eyes to general news...
this is, like, seriously old news... shi, it's in this months EGM; anything in print is seriously old...
- colin
If there's any reason I want to go with PS2 over the PC it's the uninspired game design I see with PCs. If it's not a game that repeated and built behind the last 10 designs behind it then it's a rare find. Console Games (not all of them, but many) approach sophisticated game styles I have not really seen attempted on PCs.
oops, wrong thread. sory.
It it just me or has anybody else noticed that the Playstation2 has failed to live up to the hype? Currently, there are still no _good_ games out on the market. It is most certainly not up to the caliber of other systems such as the Sega Dreamcast or even the Super Nintendo (possibly the best console ever made). The more I think about it, the more I regret my purchase. Currently, the Playstation2 is a DVD player that happens to play games instead of the other way around. Maybe with time it will change, however, 90% of all console accessories ever released failed. N64 released it's video ram expansion and added an option on some games to run them in high-resolution mode. Imagine my surprise when I ran a game in "hi-res" mode only to discover that it skipped frames and was essentially unplayable.
I think, therefore I am an Atheist.