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No Hard Drive Bay On PStwo
Thanks to Gamespot for the notification. Sony has confirmed that the PStwo will not feature a hard drive bay. "...consumers who want and use the hard disc drive are typically the more 'hard core' gamers, ... we feel that a majority of those HDD interested consumers already have their PlayStation 2 units."
He said he felt that the main problem was the developers would start shying away from the HD due this... Which unfortuantely is probably true.
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
I would say that developers knowing that future PStwo systems will not have a HDD they will be less likely to support the add-on. I would say that, but to get less support for the HDD would be next to impossible considering there are what, two US releases with support? FF:XI which all HDD owners have because they are only sold together (the Linux kit HDD doesn't have the "browser" upgrade needed to allow games to access it). And Resident Evil: Outbreak. Which has such horrific loading times without the HDD that it should be required.
Does anyone know any other games that can make use of the HDD? Also what Japanese releases would use the HDD that have had the feature removed for US release? I would guess that FF:X did support it. After using HDLoader to copy the game to my drive, I found that the shattering screen that marks the start of combat actaully displays over the loaded battle area instead of a black screen if it can get the data into memory fast enough.
How many failed/vaporware add on's now does this make in the past few years? I know that FFXI and HD loader are around, but still. There's the 1394 port on the PS2, notable absent on later versions. The GC still hasn't used one of it's expansions bays. PS1 never used the parallel port (Officially) and barely supported the serial port. N64's disk drive system also MIA. This doesn't even include things such as light guns that are woefully under developed for. We could go on back much further... It just makes me wonder why doesn't Sony/Nintendo add some sort of incentive to get them to use available technology. Like 15% off licensing fees if it uses the HD/1394/eyetoy/whatever. It worked to get developers to release quality games for the NES.
because flash is still hideously expensive for the uses you'd use a hd for?(storing tens of gigabytes of data)
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
...and that it dies after 100,000 write cycles?
Because the current PS2 has a hard drive option and people who buy the PStwo (or whatever the hell they call it) might want to play Final Fantasy 11? But they can't. I guarantee this'll bite a few people in the ass... "Mom! I saw Final Fantasy at Bobby's house and it was an MMORPG, can we get it for our PStwo?" kind of situation.
Now if they were announcing the PS3 doesn't have a drive, then you might have a point.
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One other big problem is that the current Playstation 2s are notoriously unreliable. While a user may have already purchased their system as well as the HDD, the odds are fairly good that they will need to replace their system within a few years. If they have to after the release of the PSTwo, there is a good chance that they will not be able to get a replacement that will allow them to use their HDD. Unless they have some form of external drive support, this is a very bad move on Sony's part.
I'm assuming that each console has a reasonable amount of flash memory, say 512 MB from looking at current prices. That's enough for tons of saved games, patches and added features. The game disk has 9 GB of space, assuming dual-layer DVD. If that isn't enough, the game could be split onto two DVDs. How many of my customers have Internet connections, have their console connected to the Internet, and have a broadband Internet connection? If I want to release a major expansion pack, it's going to be on a retail packaged DVD, along with the current and tested version of the game. So what use is that "tens of gigabytes" of HD space? Don't say that it's for copying pirated games to the hard disk.
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Games consoles, in fact any consumer electronics are rediculously cost sensitive. To the point where I was *amazed* they felt it was OK to put a blue LED in the PS2 when it was launched in 2000.
Suggesting they spend another USD100 on a laptop hard drive in each of the remaining 10 million PS2's they're going to sell is a bit like suggesting they just kinda randomly give away a billion dollars for no apparent reason. As we all know there's only one company who'd consider doing something like that in order to win a games console dick war - and even they are starting to have second thoughts.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
I was thinking it might be like the EverQuest expansions for the PS2. The full game plus the new expansion was on the new disc. It could just checked to make sure you had a proper save files from the initial release.
I doubt it's the technology, more so how the save/recall API for memcard stuff is written. I suspect most of the current more-than-8Meg cards out there that are !Sony have hardware hacks that avoid issues many older games have with writing to 8megs, though there's still a few.
Of course, I'd have no problem paying $50-$70 for a 128M storage card for the PS2/two. But to continue to act like 8megs is enough, particularly when most current games have no idea about the 2nd memcard slot, is silly.
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I'm actually really disappointed that console makers aren't embracing the HD idea. A decent drive has a 9-12ms seek time compared to the 150-250ms seek times you see on a DVDrom. As is, far too many games ship with painfully long load times. Now I'll concede that the harddrive isn't a cure-all for that problem (look at Fable) but clever caching techniques could go a long way. Why not have a 20GB harddrive and allocate about half of it for use as system cache? Most people leave a single game in their system for weeks at a time, and if games could copy portions of themselves onto the drive when they wouldn't otherwise be doing work, you could really improve a game's overall feel.
No permanant storage and insufficiant RAM? Who designs these things?
Hard drives have a manufacturing cost floor. It's probably around $25-$30 to make the platters, the head, the voice coil, the casing and so on. Doesn't matter what the minimum capacity is, you can't beat those physical costs. Now, the hard drive manufacturer takes their profit and sells the device to the console maker. The console needs a few dollars more in parts (thermal, electrical, shock mounts etc) to integrate the drive. Altogether it's a significant amount of money against the wholesale price of the box.
Microsoft are hurting like hell right now because they have to pay that cost on every Xbox they sell and Sony doesn't. This is why Sony came up with that PSX console/PVR hybrid - they could offer a lot more functionality, charge much more for it and more than cover the extra manufacturing cost.
The 'sufficient' amount of RAM for a console is a function of many things. Sustained read speed from the optical disc, system bus bandwidth, processing power of the CPU and GPU. No point filling memory with data you can't express on-screen or that can't contribute to your simulation of the world. People also don't want to wait 2 minutes for memory to fill from the disc. If all of the other things could scale up, RAM would too - but then the system would be even more expensive.
As for the caching, Xbox already provides scratch space for games - 3 sets allocated on an LRU basis.
Graham
Not a bad idea from their perspective. Right now, only 1 game requires the HDD (FFXI). If I might have missed 1 other game, my point still stands. Other games that USE the HDD can run just fine without it. Other than possible speedups, and possible large gamesave areas, there might not be other use for the HDD. Those two factors are actually not terribly compelling for a HDD. People will still buy games despite not having those features. In return for dropping the HDD, Sony can save a little bit more money on manufacturing. Every tiny 2 cent part adds up to dollars in the end per unit. Finally, Sony can try to do damage control on the HDLOADER fiasco that allows mass-pirating of games on systems that support the HDD. Sony won't lose customers for not including the HDD support. Maybe new FFXI players will have to scrounge old consoles. HDLOADER/ADVANCE users were primarily warez0rs so thats no loss to Sony. Overall, this is a win for Sony. People will still buy this console. I will.
I mean, how are you supposed to refer to this thing if you want to distinguish it from the PS2? Should we call it PS word two and call the PS2 PS number 2? Or maybe we should pronounce it Psstwoh or something like that.
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PS2 has USB1 (unless the mini-PS2 has a boost), the hard drives will be about the same speed as the DVD drive. That'll be fun, at least for loading times. The only hope for an external hard drive really is if theres still some sort of higher speed expansion port.
In Japan they did release (or at least show) an external hard drive at one point, as eary PS2 models didn't have the hard drive bay, but they still plugged into the back of the console.
10 PRINT "LOOK AROUND YOU ";
20 GOTO 10
I think a major reason behind the lack of hard drive on the new unit is due to the release of HD Loader over the summer. The HD Loader software allowed you to install a hard drive in the PS2 and run games from it without a mod chip. No soldering was required and the case did not have to be opened so the warranty was not violated. The hard drive attached to the network adapter and fit in the expansion port. Sony moved quickly to have the distributors shut down, but not before a lot of people had obtained the software. They were afraid of people copying friend's games or rentals to their hard drive.
I bought HD Loader and found many legitimate uses for it. I have young children and using HD Loader I copied all of my original games to the hard drive so they do not have to handle the game disks and take the chance of scratching them. I just leave the HD Loader disk in the tray so that everytime they boot they are presented with a menu of games to run. Load times have noticeably decreased. One of my kid's favorites had nearly a minute load time between levels. Running from the hard drive that was reduced to less than 10 seconds.
As always, the decision to drop support for the HD bay and by extension the HD itself, in the PStwo is just about money. No, it's not really about stopping people from using HD Loader. Most console users are not interested in or technically capable of using the various tools that, among other things, make playing pirated games possible. If that were the case, Sony would have done something a lot sooner.
The likely fact is just as it was said earlier, the consumers with interest in the HD already have it. They've milked it for all they can get, so continued support at this stage would cost more than what it is worth. Why? Because they had plans for the PStwo all along as a stop gap between now and the PS3 release. The PStwo gets the platform back in the news in time for XMas. They'll pick up some new sales and some repeat sales as either gifts, spares, or replacements. And best of all, for Sony, the PStwo hardware is probably going to sell at a profit for them. To make this possible they had to drop everything that would increase the cost of making the console, so bye bye HD.
This probably also means that those HD using goodies that were promised will not be coming, at least not to North America or Europe.
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