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PS3 Price, Compatibility In Question
Lots of rumours out there right now about the next-gen consoles. It's in question, right now, exactly how backwards compatible the PS3 will be. Gamespot reports: "When responding to questions about whether or not the SCPH-75000's backwards-compatibility issues heralded similar problems with Sony's next-gen console, she demurred. 'It's hard to say the PlayStation 3 will be 100 percent backwards compatible but as we said earlier this year we aim to make it so as much as possible,' Sakamoto said," Meanwhile, 1up.com wonders exactly how pricey the console will be. From that article: "In the past months, the Japanese blog CoolGamer has been a dependable source of early information regarding the Japanese game market. Not once has their news turned out to be a false lead, so that's why it was pretty important today when the site updated with a small notice saying 'PS3 price set below 40000 Yen,' which is about $400 at current exchange rates."
Maybe there is something wrong with me, but I'm not very excited about PS3 or XBox360. I've seen too many console releases come and go over since the 1990's. Every single time a console comes out it usually takes about 6 months to a year before anything seems worth wild to buy and for the initial price to come down. I got a DS for Christmas and that thing was $150 and it took about 8 months for any must have games to come out for it. Now the thing is selling for something like 120-130 dollars. I should have just waited to buy the DS in July. I guess my point is that I'm not concerned about the PS3 price because if I buy one it won't be until next Christmas or even sometime in early 2007.
-Dipster
Wow, speculation that the price of a next-gen technology will be about the same as the price of next-gen technology that was already announced by a competitor, and speculation that there will be minor incompatibilities with older software on new hardware.
In other news, when the cloudiness clears up the sky will probably be blue.
Even the PS2 wasn't 100% backwards compatible with all the PS1 games. If the PS3 plays 75%+ of PS2 games and 50%+ of PS1 games, in my opinion that would be 'ok' with me. Even if Sony only hit those %'s it will already be much better than xbox360 compatibility with xbox games. I'm holding out on my opinion of Nintendo comparisons because they've only said it will play gamecube games, and haven't had any words on price for playing other past generation games (hopefully it will be free).
As far as the price I think PS3 will come out high, but by the holidays it should come down, as long as it comes out 6months before the holidays.
All this is just opinion with no real basis rather than what I preceive as reality.
$400 is a steal assuming Bluray Discs become the defacto HD format. Out of the PS3 and the XBOX 360, only one has a shot of playing HD video; HDCP (High Definition Copy Protection) only supports digital output (i.e. HDMI/DVI). The XBOX 360 does not have support for HDMI or DVI currently - Microsoft will have to make revisions to future models in order to play HD video. The PS3, however, does have HDMI output (in fact, it has TWO HDMI outputs) and ships with a Bluray drive already. I'd pay the $400 for the HD video player alone.
It's more like $350. Even google agrees. $50 is going to be quite a difference when it comes to console pricing too.
When the GBA was released, it was (and still is) touted for being able to play regular GB and GBC games. However, there were a handfull of games (I can't find the exact list right now) that were buggy or had sound problems on the GBA. This didn't matter, though, as the games were from the early GameBoy days and not that popular.
I think we'll see similar things with the PS3, with the same result. Some of the early PS1 games and a few PS2 games won't work quite right on the PS3, but as long as they aren't any of the popular games, no one will really care (except those that own the then-useless games).
You have some good plans, waiting for games you want to play before buying the console is a much better idea than snapping it up in the "OMG" phase at launch. However, "The only thing next gen consoles will have to offer is better graphics" is very, very wrong. Next gen, games are going to change a lot. The way developers create games is going to change, with middleware becoming the "way things are done now" so that they can concentrate on content over building game engines etc. This isn't just spin, this is the hard facts. Whether developers choose to use the time they will save to add more content (read, "more gameplay") into their games is another matter, but the days of great looking games that have only a few hours playtime will be numbered, no gamer will stand for it anymore. In fact, Sony just bought a big middleware company (don't remember the name) and they are really pushing the middleware side of things to developers to help them make better games and not spend all their money on stuff that goes behind the scenes. I'm very excited about the next-gen of console gaming, and suspect the PS3 will lead in a lot of areas. Xbox 360 is almost here though and already has some kickass games (Oblivion, anyone?). I heard most of this stuff in-person from someone in SCEE's Technology division, in case people think I'm just repeating PR ads.
I consider myself a pretty techie guy. But I'm not rich. I have an oldskool 26 inch tube tv (remember those?), a decent enough sound system ($250 at the time), and a sprawling DVD and video game collection.
While you generously provide the acronym meanings, that doesn't help me in knowing what the hell they are. What I'm saying Kaldaien is that you're a rare breed. I just don't see any of those acronyms and features mattering to that many people, especially the single mother looking for a video game system who just wants to keep her kid busy with video games while she cooks dinner, or any number of other casual gamers.
If you have a library of PS2 games, then surely you also have a PS2 to play them on, and don;t really NEED backwards compatibility?
I'll admit the backwards compatibility was a big influence on my decision to buy a PS2, but in reality I only used it 2 or 3 times to play old games, so this time round I'm not bothered at all.
I was actually far more impressed with (and spent more money on) the improved re-makes of N64 Zelda games for the non-backwards-compatible Game Cube.
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Both the PS3 and the Xbox360 have had questions raised about their backwards computability with the previous machines in their lineage.
This raises an question in my mind. As I understand it, the OS within the Xbox is a stripped down Windows environment, and the games are written to that environment, which is basically DirectX.
I've not seen anybody trying to hack Wine to provide that environment as a target, and I do not know if that is even possible. However, I do know that Wine has a DirectX layer that maps DirectX to APIs available under Linux.
The PS3 will run Linux.
So the question is, would it be possible to combine a modified Wine and a JIT x86 to Power compiler to allow the PS3 to run XBox games?
Because if the PS3 were to be more compatible with old XBox games than the XBox360 I would have to have my ass reattached after I laughed it off.
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