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PSP Developer Interview
zmcnulty writes "Over at TechJapan, we've finished our three part translation of Game Watch's interview of Mr. Izumi Kawanishi, one of the PSP's lead designers. New details revealed include a few about the USB interfacing (with both PS2 and PC), a small hint about the elusive battery life, and best of all, that game saves can indeed be copied from Memory Stick to PC by using the PSP's USB interface. Here's part one, part two, part three, and the original Japanese interview."
Well, at least for those of us who prefer something that has lots of business utility, as well as gaming utility, and think of Sony as part of the Evil Empire(TM)
Plus, the Zodiac is out now!
www.tapwave.com
I think two portables could end up coexisting if a strategy were put into place. Right now (i.e. pre DS or PSP), portable gaming is pretty much "short simple fun little games".
No, that's not always the case. Gameboy Advance games have approximately the same length as SNES games, which weren't necessarily simple at all. The Advance Wars games, for example, are extremely challenging and lengthy, and kept my friends occupied for many months.
The matter of whether or not UMD+-RW drives are available is irrelevant, as seen from previous cases of console piracy.
The Dreamcast GD-ROMs weren't readable by a PC, but that didn't stop pirates from setting up a serial link from the DC to PC, and writing a program that would dump the disc image to a PC hard drive. As if that wasn't bad enough, the final nail in the Dreamcast's coffin was that an unmodified console could be booted from a CD-R. I don't see the PSP being compatible with common mini-CD and mini-DVD discs, so there's no real worry there.
The Gamecube uses another proprietary format which is unreadable by PCs. A couple of years passed, and somebody found an exploit in Phantasy Star Online that allowed unsigned code to be uploaded into the Gamecube through the broadband adapter and executed. First, just like the Dreamcast, somebody figured out how to program the Cube to dump a disc image to the PC's hard drive, but with a LAN connection instead of the Dreamcast's slow serial link. However, pirates still haven't found a way to burn readable media on a modified or unmodified console. That didn't stop them though. Soon after dumped disc images started appearing on the internet, so did "streaming server" applications that allowed Gamecube games to be streamed from a PC over a LAN by dynamically patching the disc-read commands to networking commands.
In theory, with hacked firmware, it would be really easy to set up this type of streaming server/backup device with a PC, a PSP, and a USB cable. The game data could be streamed from a PC/Laptop into the PSP. Of course, not too many portable gamers would go this route because it would leave them anchored to their PCs just to play games. However, there's another way I could see them pulling it off.
IIRC, the storage capacity of Sony's UMD is ~1.8 gigabytes. Currently, you can purchase Memory Sticks ranging from 128MB to 2GB in size. With the right firmware hacks, somebody could easily store an entire PSP game on one memory stick, or more if the game required multiple discs, and load it from a boot menu embedded into the PSP's firmware. The real prblem for Sony if this was to catch on, would be that people would most likely prefer playing their games from a memory stick due to the increase in battery life loading from solid-state media Vs. a UMD.
Although it would be great for geeks like us, being able to load Linux into the PSP and play around with it, among other things, the asshat pirates always have to ruin it for everybody else, and it would be used more for mass piracy than something really useful.
"Soon after dumped disc images started appearing on the internet, so did "streaming server" applications that allowed Gamecube games to be streamed from a PC over a LAN by dynamically patching the disc-read commands to networking commands."
Piracy is really only a problem if burned discs are being sold on the streets of China. As long as it requires the home networking setup of an affluent western citizen with too much time on his hands, they can still sell games.
I'd agree the PSP is pretty wide open on the USB and Memory Stick fronts... how long until Lik-Sang is selling a PSPPod based on a cheap 2.5" hard-drive?
Have you ever heard 'public key cryptosystem'? Sony has a private/public keypair and signs a firmware with its private key. Then PSP checks the validity of the firmware by checking it with the public key of Sony.
Yeah, except how much does a 2 GB memory stick cost? How many UMD games could I buy legitimately for that much? Yeah, piracy doesn't make a lot of sense. There won't be lost sales to people pirating these games.
I don't know about Grandparent, but I did. I pieced it together from two quotes:
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First, as you so thankfully dredged up:
Of course, that's the mimimum requirement. The battery will last quite a bit longer than that.
Second:
It will depend on the software being used. There are many different uses for this device - for example, you could watch a lot of movies or use wireless lan a lot - and the battery life will change quite a bit depending on how it is used
I imagine that games will be a fair bit more processor intensive than simply watching a movie, and will bring a corresponding drop in battery life. Considering that lots of games will also use the wireless lan at least intermittently, and you're looking at about two hours of good gameplay.
The hard drive based digital media players out there (iPod, Nomad Zen, Dell DJ, etc) should probably have a battery life of less than half an hour if they used their hard disk continously, but instead, they have circutry to read in information from the disk only when necessary, and cache it.
The same will probably be true for the PSP. Therefore, it really _will_ depend on how the developers make the games, and what caching scheme they will use. Just by having a console use optical media does not mean that all games _must_ have voice acting and full motion videos that must be read continously from disc, but they could have games similar to the DS that can first be cached to ram before played (read disc once).
It is without question that optical media will always be less expensive than solid state media. Even if it's a simple game that can fit entirely within the unit's ram, it's cheaper to fabricate discs than cartridges.