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."

Comments

Wait for it.

[Mr.Dippy]

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.

Masters of the obvious

[ivan256]

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.

Re:Masters of the obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't speculating that the PS3 is going to be the same price as the Xbox360. The PS2 launched in Japan for something around 39,000Y, which is close to $400US. Exactly the same as the PS1 launched for in Japan, and what the PS3 is rumored to be aiming for in its price point. Here's the thing: Sony also launched those two consoles in the US for $299. If this trend was followed, it would make a fully capable PS3 cost less than a fully capable Xbox360 (and don't nod to the crippled $299 version, since that won't even be able to play all next generation games).

How was this modded as insightful?

doesn't need to be 100%

[FadedTimes]

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.

The price is very reasonable.

[Kaldaien]

$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.

Compatability, and a question

[wowbagger]

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.