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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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I wish I had a kryptonite cross, because then you could keep Dracula and Superman away.
As a matter of fact, I'm using a PS/2 keyboard right now!
Oh, wait...
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.
Consoles also make it much easier for developers to take advantage of proprietary "extensions". On a PC the developer can't make extensive use of say Nvidia specific extensions, without providing alternative support for non-Nvidia cards. The models can't be as tessellated as a GeForce 3 card will support without crawling on a Voodoo2. On consoles there is no compromising as all the systems are exactly the same.
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.
'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!
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
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.
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Yeah, but I would have laughed harder if this guy had a copy of Office XP sent to Richard Stallman. Or if he sent a framed copy of choice pieces of Transmeta class action documents sent to Linus Torvalds. Or if he had a few copies of FreeBSD (or BeOs, or Windows, or Solaris, or any other OS *not* Linux), sent to CmdrTaco, neatly wrapped with VA Linux share certificates.