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PSP to Get Classic Game Download Service
Krishna Dagli writes to mention an Ars Technica story about a classic game download service for the PSP. It's supposed to work with the PS3 as well, and will at this point mostly consist of old PS1 titles. From the article: "According to Kawanishi, the new service will work either through a PC with a broadband connection, or through the PlayStation 3 itself. The user will be able to download games designed for the original PlayStation 1, which according to the Sony head works well. 'As for emulation power there is no problem,' he said, although he added that some changes have to be made to the games because the PSP only has a single analog stick and fewer control buttons than the PS1. He did not mention which titles would be made available, but he mentioned how Amazon had a list of "all books," indicating that Sony probably wants to put a large number of games on the service."
Now I can play ps1 games on my already-backwards-compatable ps3!
It seems more and more consoles are providing classic game download services. This means that copyright holders will have a vested interest in shutting down ROM and Emulator sites, for these will take away business from the "legal" download service. So download ROMS while you can, before the packs of lawyers start searching for targets.
I don't know why Sony keeps getting such a hard rap. I haven't seen any of the other game makers providing innovations like being able to download old games.
In all seriousness though, there's a huge difference between downloading a game that's a few hundred kilobytes, and is not available in any stores anymore (Except ebay), and downloading a game that is the size of a CD, and is probably still available used at many B&M stores.
Sony fails again...
Why pay for some crappy (most likely DRMed) download while you can just play generic roms on a homebrew emulator?
perpetually dwelling in the -1 pits
...How can you use a ROM... If you cannot... Emulate?
Not only ROMs are potential targets; while emulators haven't received a lot of legal attention in the past, IP holders may also start attacking them as "adjuncts to piracy". Make sure you have a recent copy of MAME and other emulators, including their source code.
*looks about... whispers*
Legal.
Those who believe the Internet is private,
find their privates are on the Internet.
PS1 Games aren't "Classic" by my definition...
Actually, this is the one thing that [i]will[/i] make me buy it.
So users can either upgrade to 3.0 and play PS1 games, or stay on 1.5 and emulate SNES, GBA, Genesis, NeoGeo, or even (gasp) pirate PSP games (and probably get the 3.0 psx emulator sooner or later anyway) Sony aren't going to pull away the homebrew crowd so easily.
the PSP only has a single analog stick and fewer control buttons than the PS1
this is honestly a big deal, the lack of R2 and L2, as well as no right hand stick is going to flat out cut out a number of games from being played this way.
Meh, if they do this right (charge VERY little per game, and have some reliable way of backing them up), then more power to them!
If they are going to be charging horrible prices and including some horribly crippling DRM (I only say this as it is Sony), then there is another money sink for them.
And let us not forget that Nintendo anounced the VC a decent time ago. Now I am not saying that Sony copied Nintendo, but this is the second time they are anouncing a concept very simmilar to something Nintendo already did (the motion sensetive controllers being the first).
Oh well, it all comes down to how they pull it off, if it is done correctly, then I can see this realy boosting PSP sales (there are some GOOD PS1 games out there).
Do Or Do Not, There Is No Spoon, There Is Only Zuul. Everything in the above post is probably opinion.
finally the PSP gets original games that arent ports.. hmm on second thought.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
I read the original Japanese interview*(well kinda sorta, I'm not going to pretend my Japanese is good enough to grasp 100% of it, but I did get the gist of what he was saying). He goes on and on about whether or not the network will be able to handle all the data and states that they are compressing cd audio and whatnot to get the file size down. However, he didn't seem to address the fact that people's memory sticks are at most 1 gig. Are they going to be able to squeeze all that content onto a memory stick?
At any rate, the emulator was only a small part of the interview. Most of it focuses on the interaction between the PS3 and PSP. He went so far as to say that the PS3 will be like a home server and the PSP will be like a PDA/cell phone. He even said that users would store their movies on the ps3 and then could download the ones they want onto the psp. He also dismissed PC emulation but started talking about cell phones again.
In fact, he talked a lot about cell phones and how he envisions the future of portable media. So much in fact the interviewer asked him if he thought it would be possible to combine psp and cell phone technology and his answer was that "I think that is one possibility"(again rough translation). So I guess we won't be surprised if a few years down the road we see a psphone.
Monstar L
Hmm... this seems to be one of the best reasons to buy a PSP yet assuming that they have all of the Final Fantasies available. Of course, I would still need to shell out for the PSP only to then have to shell out more dough to buy copies of games I already own.
If this signature is witty enough, maybe somebody will like me.
it's Riiiidgee Raaaaaacer
(oh, great)
The big draw in the NES rereleases is the added content. Yoshi's Island had 5 extra stages. Super Mario World had a new coin you needed to collect in every stage. Metroid Zero Mission was completely overhauled in addition to the original game. Oh, and they're around 20-30 bucks. How much do PSP games cost?
The "classic NES series" emulated ports on GBA had no extra content. Some games on GBA were extended ports of SNES games or remakes of GBA games (Zero Mission, as you noted), but were not part of the Classic NES series.
But nothing has changed on the PSP exceopt a few updates. So why did it take this long to get cool stuff? Sony really has been having a hard decade. This sort of thing should have been worked into the initial PSP release and used to increase market share, instead of comming after all this time when the DS is kicking it's butt.
Warning: Teh poster of this messaeg is lysdexic
I am an IP holder; my IP is 69.246.213.81, leased from my ISP. If you are referring to copyright, say "copyright". And yes, I am a copyright owner as well.
Could Microsoft reasonably attack Bochs, claiming that it "enables" the use of unauthorized copies of MS-DOS? No, because FreeDOS (which recently turned 1.0) works on Bochs. Likewise, when I use VisualBoyAdvance to run my own programs and others', whose copyright am I infringing?
What about third parties who have made primarily arcade video games? Take Toaplan, the (defunct) developer of the side-scrolling shooter game Zero Wing. To whom are all our base belong?
Now all you Sony fanboys that pan Nintendo for rereleasing the same old games will stop talking!
/* No Comment */
A lot of games for PlayStation used either Red Book CD audio, which compresses by about 11:1 when converted to a 128 kbps ATRAC stream (where the sound effects cover up any lingering artifacts), or XA ADPCM audio (especially in Capcom games), which compresses by about 3:1, or VAG audio (especially in Konami's Dance Dance Revolution series), which also compresses by about 3:1. These games had 120 MB or less of data and the rest was streaming music.
wasn't this news in sony's E3 press conference?
Almost. Final Fantasy 1, 2, 4, 5, and 6 (as well as Chrono Trigger) have been rereleased on PS1. But Final Fantasy Adventure was Game Boy exclusive, and the remake titled Sword of Mana is GBA exclusive. The remake of Final Fantasy III is also Nintendo exclusive.
Because you get classic games on that with your Wii for a lot less money.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Yet, the PSP's sales are only off by about 10% from the DS's, despite the fact that the PSP is much more expensive...
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Jumping Flash 2: Escape from Little Moo .. that was the best PSX game ever; okay, best PSX game I played (I didn't ever play FF7.
anyone remember that game?
Oh, yeah. Those blew donkey turds.
The DS has sold more units than the PSP has shipped worldwide.
From what I've heard from friends and read on the Web, most people who've bought one either regret it or don't regularly use it.
Off the top of my head; almost every FPS game, almost every fighting game, almost every sports game, the Metal Gear Solid series and most of the platformers on both consoles.
Now if were talking about the much forgotten, hard to use, L3/R3 buttons, I'd have modded you up. (For those that forgot, the R3/L3 buttons are when you push the analog sticks downward, into the controller.)
I wish I could do it myself, but anyway. +1.
1) Total. The DS has sold 22m units, the PSP has shipped 20m units. Hence the 10% off bit.
2) The "shipped" vs "sold" distinction is one I've heard before, and one that reaks if idiocy. Do you know how expensive it is to keep unsold inventory around? There are entire classes management folks take on how to avoid standing inventory. Moreover, its not like Walmart will order more PSPs (causing the shipped count to increase), before it sells the ones it has. Thus, the number of units shipped should be very close to the number of units sold.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
And that's a representative sample, because?
I own a DS Lite and a PSP. The DS Lite is okay, but I basically only bought it for the new FF game that's coming out. I haven't found it nearly as fun as my PSP, and the lack of texture filtering and lack of an analog stick is driving me up the wall. Mario 64 is a shadow of its former self without those two features.
However, that's a point sample. It proves nothing. The only thing that's useful is sales figures, and they show Nintendo with a relatively marginal lead.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance .. reason why I bought DS .. althou now I have PSP but no good games on it :(
I hope by that they don't mean "a Windows machine with a broadband connection". I don't have a machine which runs Windows, and if Sony thinks I'm gonna buy a $600 PS3 in order to expand the range of titles available to my PSP, then they are seriously mistaken.
My PSP can connect happily to the internet by itself so I fail to see why would not be able to download these games in the same way it downloads firmware patches.
It's just the distinction between having your stock in the hands of customers, or the combined total off all units sent from the factory (including those sitting on the shelf). A retailer will stock up when they sell out of previous stock, before Holidays, or in the event of a major game release, they will bring more in house expecting to sell more. This will cause the # of units sold vs. shipped to fluctuate by at least 10%. Do you think there are fewer than 2 million PSP's sitting on the shelf currently?
Launch week for the PSP in North America Sony launched with 1,000,000 units available. Within 7 days they sold 600,000. There IS a difference significant enough to clarify between the number of units shipped and sold.
The launch stock is going to be much larger than the regular day-to-day stock, especially considering the PSP wasn't really in "shortage" mode at launch. Based on your numbers, it'd seem the maximum day-to-day stock is going to be somewhat less than 1m, which is not a difference I'd consider important in the big picture. 20m vs 22m or 19m vs 22m represents much the same thing --- a narrow lead for the DS, despite the massive hype it has on the internet.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
That's because Nintendo DS fans tend to be very zealous about their little gizmo. At least that's what I've heard from friends and read on the web. I would wager a guess that the PSP crowd might tend to be less "geeky", and more "joe sixpack". I have no backing for that statement, but that seems to be more of their target audience.
From a pure gaming standpoint, the PSP is a let down. If you're looking for all gaming, yes, it would easy to regret your purchase. However, I still use it every single day. If not to play games, then to stream music, do some emergency web browsing, maybe play a little snes, watch some family guy, etc. Currently I've got it hooked up to my stereo system streaming music via RSS feeds from my PC tucked away in the other room. I think the only feature I don't take advantage of on it is the UMD movie feature. Of course buying into that crap never made sense to me, even before I bought the unit. I still am extremely happy with my purchase, and there's no way I would trade it for a DS.
Exactly.
It isn't fair to compare the sales figures for the Nintendo DS and the PSP because most PSP owners don't use their PSP to play games.
thats strange. I must have imagined the 2 gig one in my psp...