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Sony to PSP Coders: Battery Life Your Problem
AssaultOnBattery writes "The fine folks over at GamesIndustry.biz are reporting that Sony has found a unique solution to the problem of battery life on the PSP - making their game developers solve it for them. According to the story, Sony is going to give devs a battery emulator which will tell them if their game is within acceptable power consumption limits."
Sony is flying too high and it looks like they're about to get burnt. They're making all the same mistakes their predecessors have made in the hand held market. Battery life being one of the biggest ones.
the cosmos in 20 words or less: thumbuki.com
If I'm a PSP developer, do I try to make my game as pretty as possible by streaming media from the disk and suck the power, or make a less good looking but more power consumption friendly game? There is no choice - you have to make the best looking game you can and forget the long term effects on the consumer and platform. This is the same reason why big corporations don't naturally do environmently friendly things - the end customer doesn't care, even if the whole planet goes to pot.
OLED's wear out after 2 or 3 years. so if they do go OLED, its not goodbye-old-psp-say-hello-to-the-used-section-of-S oftwareETC
-ND
There's also a lot less random access on an audio CD. You spin up the disc, and then just read the data in serial. With a data disc the information needed is more likely to be spread out across the whole disc, meaning more read head movement. Additionally, most data readers are higher speed than a CD player which means the disc is spun faster, eating more power in the process. If you want an example of this in action, find a CD player with an anti-skip buffer, and compare the battery life when the buffer is on and when it's off. Anti-skip tech works by spinning the disc a higher speed to read ahead, and copying the data read into a memory buffer. It demonstrates very nicely how much power a faster drive eats.