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Smaller Networked Sony "PStwo" Officially Announced
Asriel86 writes "Tokyo Game Show has
just kicked off, and with quite a bang. Sony just
officially
announced the PStwociting a stateside release date of November 1st, 2004. The
system will be 25% smaller than the current model, will feature a sleeker
design, and a built-in Ethernet port (no adapter required). Sony also says that
there will be 120 new Playstation 2 games with online compatibility by the end
of the year. That equates to thirty games per month or about one game per day
for the rest of 2004."
Thats 75% smaller, not 25%. Its top loading as well. Check Gizmodo.com or engadget.com for better coverage.
I want 2D games back.
See a couple of pictures here.
This BBC article says that it has been reduced by 75% and has pictures.
It does look a _lot_thinner. I guess this would reduce manufacturing costs, for sony. It might mean what you bought 3 years ago is old and out of date now, but hey, thats the tech industry for you.
External power supply
With that aggravating beauty, Lulu Walls.
You know that you can turn off the PS2 from the front by holding down the green LED button (until it turns red), right? That's what the symbol on the button means (it's in the manual, too). This puts it in a very low-power stand-by state.
The switch in the back is only for turning off the machine for an extended period, or before you unplug it.
Here are a official press release(pdf) and some images by SCEI.
It comes smaller and slimmer: 900g weight(-55%) and 230x28x152mm size(-77% !!). It also have a new feature, a network interface(100BASE-TX/10BASE-T) as standard.
And still more, SCEI also announced PS3 will adopt blue-ray disc(pdf).
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snowy
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They cost the same as the original console.
This is straight from the news wires, posted minutes ago. We'll have pictures for you shortly.
Tokyo, September 21, 2004 - Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCEI), announced today a completely new look for the PlayStation®2 computer entertainment system (SCPH-70000), which will become available in Japan, North America and Europe for the year-end peak selling season. The new model will be available in stores on November 3rd in Japan, and on November 1st in North America and Europe.
While inheriting the basic functions and design philosophy of the current PlayStation 2, the internal design architecture has been completely overhauled, resulting in a slimmer and more lightweight design. Internal volume has been reduced by 75%, overall weight has been halved, and thickness trimmed down to 2.8 cm (thickness of current model is 7.8 cm). Its size is almost as small as a hardcover book, making it easier to carry around and enjoy games and DVD videos anytime, anywhere.
Equipped with an integrated Ethernet port for network gaming, the new PlayStation 2 sets new standards in the fusion of design and functionality. In North America, approximately 40% (*1) of the PlayStation 2 on-line game users connect their PlayStation 2 to the networks through analog modem and reflecting the American users' preference, North American model is equipped with both Ethernet and modem ports. During the year-end peak-selling season, about 80 on-line game titles are expected for release in Japan, and 120 titles and 65 titles respectively for North America and Europe. With the launch of the new network ready(*2) PlayStation 2, the further expansion of the world of on-line gaming is accelerated.
Gaining an overwhelming support from a wide range of users from all over the world, more than 72 million units of PlayStation 2 have been shipped as of today. Strongly supported by software developers and publishers, PlayStation 2 is indisputably the most popular computer entertainment system in the world and the new design will position it for ever greater success over the next half of its life. In the run-up towards the launch, the new PlayStation 2, will be displayed at Sony Computer Entertainment Japan's booth during the Tokyo Game Show 2004, held from Friday, September the 24th to Sunday, the 26th, 2004, at Makuhari Messe, together with a rich number of exciting and attractive new titles scheduled for release towards the end of the year.
With the new PlayStation 2, together with the lineup of forthcoming new game titles, SCEI will continue to contribute to expand the market and to create a new world of computer entertainment.
(*1) According to SCEI's DNAS (Dynamic Network Authentication System) data. (*2) Internet Service Provider and appropriate Internet access (e.g. ADSL, cable, fiber, etc.) required. For further details regarding network connection, on-line games and peripherals supported with the new model (SCPH-70000 CB), please visit our customer support website (http://www.playstation.jp/info/).
What does all this mean? Here's a summary:
PStwo will release on November 1st in America It will be 25% smaller than the current model It will also be half the weight of the current model The system will have an included Ethernet port, no need for a peripheral device Also, Sony claims there will be 120 new PS2 games with online play by the year's end One hundred-twenty new online games before January? That equates to 30 games per month, or over one game per day until the end of 2004.
-Aaron Dunlap [POSTED: 9/20/04]
Support more choices in goverment-Vote 3rd party.
Are you trying to be funny or is this a serious question? There is a power switch on the back which is very similiar to the switches on most PC Power Supplies. It only needs to be turned off if you plan on unplugging the thing. The Power button on the front of the PS2 can be used to turn it on, Reset it, and if you hold the button down for 1 entire second, it turns it off.
To the 50 - "blah blah blah how will they make 120 new games in 3 months, blah blah blah".
9
Here is a copy of the offical press release: http://www.gamegossip.com/pressrelease.php?id=995
And if you don't want to RTFA:
"During the year-end peak-selling season about 80 online game titles are expected to be available in Japan, with 120 titles and 65 titles respectively in North America and Europe. With the launch of the new network-ready(*2) PlayStation 2, the company expects to continually expand the world of online gaming in this generation."
I almost prefer people just copying other peoples work when submitting a story to reading something out of context and passing it along to the masses.
The original Playstation 2 did not have an ethernet port, therefore consumers were required to buy an add-on adapter to enable online support.
I think they improved that with the model I got (December 2003), actually. They also removed the firewire port in that one.
1) no FireWire; 2) a built-in IR receiver for the DVD remote; 3) progressive scan capabilities (okay, maybe you won't see that).
Check out http://www.broadq.com/qcast2.htm
Supports MP3, Ogg Vorbis, AC3, MPEG-1/2/4, Divx 3,4,5 OGM and more...
Most PS2 games are free to play online. Only the MMORPGs actually cost money to play.
For more information, click here.
A better development kit isn't going to fix that. PS2 developers can code in C++ and a higher level graphic sdk, but that isn't going to get them anywhere near good performance.
a tions/PSP/HowFarHaveWeGot.pdf
The problem is the very ambitious architecture of the PS2. The GS (graphic synthesizer) got just 4mb of very fast ram. While that enabled Sony to have extremely high theoretical fill rate by embeding the RAM into the GS and connecting it with a 2560-Bit bus, it is also not nearly enough to store all the textures and the framebuffer. That results in the PS2 having to spend a lot of time transfering textures between GS and regular RAM. Because changing out the texture takes a lot of time, you need to order your triangles in a way that minimizes the texture changes, which is a lot of trouble and hurts performance for sure. The PS2 EE (the main CPU) also got just 16kb cache, which is clearly not enough. Memory access to stuff not in the cache is extremely expensive and the Rambus RAM with its high-bandwidth but also high-latency access profile isn't going to help. Because of that a PS2 coder needs to spend a lot of time on optimizing algorithms for ordered local data access and rewriting stuff in assembler to be able to fit the whole routine into the cache.
A interessting document from Sony about PS2 performance is here: (PDF only sorry)
http://www.scee.sony.co.uk/sceesite/files/present
While marketing said 66 million polys/second, even after all these years the fastest real world Sony seems to know about is 125k polys @ 60 Hz, which translates into 7.5 million polys/second while the average recent game seems to do just 3 million polys/s
Better SDKs aren't able to help here. The problem are hardware limitations. And while the hard-to-optimize-for design will sure enable programmers to squeeze out quite a bit of additional performance, but it will never be able to reach the real-world performance of XBox and Gamecube.
And Sony even has better DevKits now, but as you can see their feature isn't C++ or something similiar to DirectX but instead tools to analyse how the cpus is stalled by cache misses etc.
Imho the PS2 is similiar in design to the first Pentium 4, ambitious, marketing-driven design with very high theoretical peak performance but low real world performance.
BTW: Gamecubes marketing is exactly the opposite, Nintendo claimed 7-12 million polys/second while one of their launch games 'Rogue Leader' was pushing 15 million polys/second in some scenes.
Jan
PAL is partly to blame - different frame rate, different framebuffer size (using more video ram). As a PS2 developer, doing a PAL port is a headache i'd rather not think about.
I'm using the Qcast Media Player (actually now marketed and sold as the GameShark Media Player). I can tell you that it's a great little app. It plays back just about everything wonderfully. It has a little trouble with XVID encoded AVI files - the video tends to freeze - I think there's too much info coming down the pipe and the buffer is getting overrun. I use it as a simple TIVO - watching MPGs mostly- of TV shows I download using Bit Torrent. It is nice getting the HD broadcasts of some shows because it's like watching a DVD of a show, rather then a simple broadcast. I don't see any reason why the Qcast wouldn't be comptible with the new PSTwo... Gotta love it! --*Rob
if you read other sources, this new ps2 isn't even compatible with all games. it has compatibility problems on top of not being able to use the hard drive. see ign or something for more details.
Uh, no major game company releases their big game _after_ the Christmas rush. The 10 games a day is actually somewhat believeable if you've looked at the release charts from now until Christmas with every developer trying to get their 3/4 finished game out the door and on the shelves before mommies everywhere try to find something for their kids.
I read the internet for the articles.