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."

Comments

The Buck Stops

[the darn]

And for just $350, the problem can be yours!

Interesting...

[I_Love_Pocky!]

I wonder if games will start being released with battery life predictions on the box.

no disc streaming?

[Apreche]

If you can't access the disc often, that means only one thing. You have to load all the info off the disc into ram beforehand. That means, LOAD TIMES. Want to whip out your PSP in class for a quick game before the teacher gets there? Sorry, gotta wait a minute for it to load. Oh shit, times up! Not good for the PSP. Which was already looking bad with its much higher price tag.

Re:no disc streaming?

[xenocide2]

What about seek time? And how far will 32 MB carry you? Is it enough to store a 3d executable, 3d data, and your expectations for sound and music?

Games aren't made by stupid people, but every second they have to spend addressing this issue is time they can't allocate to extra features like multiplayer or a faster subroutine for something like antialiasing. Nobody is doing this now because nobody is doing portable rotational media until just now.

If you can't get more than 2 hours of movies out of it, then I have dismal hopes for the battery life from your average game maker. Just as not every game on the PS2 looks as great as Square's, there will be games that last longer than others.

Well to a certain extent this makes sense

[antifoidulus]

The PSP is a very complex machine(with a motor for the cd reader), and thus battery life will vary greatly depending on what you are doing(versus say a gameboy were battery life is easier to determine in general rather than per game) You want to load a lot of textures? That is going to kill your battery life. You want to have a lot of music? Going to kill battery life. A game such as quake will obviously take more battery power than puyo puyo pop. Sony did itself and it's devs a favor by providing this little kit.

hmm

[NanoGator]

Well the Nintendo fan-boy in me would like to predict doom and gloom for Sony's PSP. However, I think I'm missing the point of why this article is as negative about it as it is. It's not like Sony can put an optical drive in this thing and magically make it work forever on batteries. If Sony's trying to say "look, don't piss off our customers" I say more power to them. (no pun intended.)

Re:Sigh...

[FriedTurkey]

How about the virtual boy.... 9 AA's, and the GOOD batteries only lasted ~1hour, at best.

That was a saftey feature to prevent you from becoming blind.

What's a handheld for, then?

[KDR_11k]

That would be a desaster. Handhelds see much usage during short wait times, wait for the bus, wait until your train arrives, wait in line, etc. If the shortest you could play the PSP for would be, say, 30 minutes, you could only use the system during very long breaks (like lunch break). Those rarely occur naturally and you'd be limited to long trips and time you take yourself for the PSP. Most of that allocated time is in your free time, anyway and most likely those parts of your free time you'd spend with gaming are spent at home. And at home there's no need for a handheld. And even less need for a proprietary movie format that only plays on the miniature screen.