Slashdot Mirror
Sony Fixes Back Compat Issues in PS3 Update
pl1ght writes in to say that that the much maligned PS2 back-compat issues the PS3 has been experiencing are now a thing of the past. The newest software update takes the OS from version 1.4 to 1.5, and in doing so seems to have cleared up the worst of the blurry and unreadability problems. There are apparently "still problems with specific releases that have yet to be addressed, but for the most part, your library of old releases should run no problem now -- and with higher clarity than was ever possible on the other machines, to boot." Nicely done, Sony.
They got to it faster than MS, I've gotta hand it to them.
Blerg.
What's the PS3 thing everybody is talking about?
Oh right, it's the new Sony gameconsole that is still not available in Europe (and a shit load of other countries).
Wow, some good news on the PS3 front! While I won't be running out to get a Playstation 3 right away, I'm very glad to hear that the graphics problems with legacy titles has been solved. The fact that the machines got out the door with such egregious issues is a testament to the time pressure Sony was under to launch the PS3. With some luck, the European launch will be a much smoother affair than the US one.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
Zonk said something nice about Sony. And damnnit, I was looking forward to the warm weather.
Or is it like PC console emulators, where they use some fancy algorithm to round the corners of the pixels? Or maybe they do nothing at all?
Help with some of Sony's problems selling the console. The ability to play your old games from the older systems in my opinion is one of the reasons to upgrade. Who would want to play a brand new console that forces you to plug in you old console in order to play your old games?
I know it's the mode to ridicule Sony for it's lameness on /.-- but this story (along with one I saw on Ars yesterday) is persuading me that perhaps the groupthink was too hasty to condemn the PS3.
A $320 (after potential price drop for 20Gig model) next-gen console with Blu-Ray? I was thinking of buying one just to run linux and to turn it into a MythTV "frontend" box with gaming capability... Admittedly the low end PS3 doesn't have wireless or the memory card readers, but it does give users the ability to swap out harddrives. Plus it will play all my PS2 games without too much hassle.
Like I said... maybe it doesn't suck as much as we think it does. From where I'm standing, the TCO for a next-gen console with high def capability is substantially lower for the PS3 than the XBox360.
(Yes, yes. I know there's another choice out there, but I've already got a Wii).
Okay, being that I don't own a PS3 and have only played one a grand total of once so far, can someone sum up the problem for me?
I was able to play a PS2 game (Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne) and it looked okay. Blurry, yes, but I attributed that to the fact that it was a 4:3 480i game being played on a 1920x1080 50" LCD with the display stretched to occupy all the available screen real-estate.
Does the PS3 now do anti-aliasing on PS2 games? Or any kind of improvement like the PS2 did with PS1 games?
Or was this just an issue with certain older titles that didn't render properly?
Help protect civil rights from abuse by the TSA - visit TSA News Blog.
http://www.tsanewsblog.com
FTA: (my emphasis)
one of the biggest annoyances out of the gate was the lack of pixel-perfect compatibility, despite being one of Sony's most touted features over Xbox 360, which has to software emulate each game in its back catalog.
I thought the PS3 had a whole Emotion Engine in it. Doesn't that mean that the entire legacy PS2 rendering engine is present? I figured the blurriness was due to a dirty bridge between the legacy and current hardware.
At release, too many supported XBox games where not "top-selling" at all and too many real sellers were ignored. They way they've handled BC at every step since then has been a joke with updates full of games I'm surprised anyone bought. Maybe they were right to hedge bets but at that point they shouldn't have promised any BC support. In essence, Microsoft seemed to promise nothing.
On the other hand, only a handful of PS1 and PS2 games don't work on the PS3 and mostly because of hardware constraints (light gun games, 4 way control taps, etc). In general, you put a PS1 or PS2 game into the PS3 and it works. I have one game that won't work and only because I can't plug the special controller into the PS3. But the issue is the way the PS3 rendering engine works doesn't handle what PS1/2 requires so it does some funky scaling to make it match up which leaves some less than desirable artifacts. Going way way way back, games like Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and Final Fantasy 7 work out of the box, no patching, no more requirements than the disk and a PS3. This patch appears to fix up the graphics so the artifacts are much less noticeable but anyone who has been playing PS2 games on a HD display knows, these games just don't look great no matter how your TV is setup. You've taken SD games and blown them up to fit a HD display.
So comparing Microsoft and Sony promises on this issue is apples to oranges. They may not look clean but least games worked in the PS3 while on the XBox 360 you had to wait to whenever someone gets around to looking into what it takes to make a game work.
What do you have against Sony Games? It's Sony Music that came up with the rootkit.
Not buying Sony music? Check. Not buying Sony games? Why?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
And word on the street is, Zonk saw his shadow. We all know that means 4 more weeks of winter weather...
The partial abbreviation to 'Back Compat' actually made me think of the Newspeak in George Orwell's 1984. I'm sure the Slashdot crown is all too familiar with the lingo, as it gets dragged out for every YRO article. :)
I may make you feel, but I can't make you think.
Sony's share of Sony BMG Music is privately held by Sony Corporation. If Sony BMG loses money, Sony Corporation has the ability to route earnings from Sony Computer Entertainment to keep Sony BMG afloat. Besides, many of us are still peeved at Sony Computer Entertainment's persistence in its cat-and-mouse fight against PSP homebrew.
<disbelief>Who are you? And what have you done with Zonk?</disbelief>
I see a wii little Mac mini computer on apple.com for 600 USD, plus 20 USD for the adapter to plug it into a TV, plus 15 USD for a cheap Logitech gamepad, plus 130 USD for a PlayStation 2 slimline console to play commercial games. The total is 765 USD plus shipping and tax, but at least you get more RAM in the Mac than you do in the current version of Linux for PLAYSTATION 3 that can't see the RSX's VRAM.
Third-party developers are going to write for the greatest common denominator, and for the forseeable future that includes rumble.Controller sounds (Wii) and rumble (Wii, Xbox 360) can be faked by playing them in the surround channel.
Then I say Castlevania: Circle of the Moon. I say Super Puzzle Fighter II. I say Mario Kart: Super Circuit. I say Balloon Kid. I say Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins. All five of these games are playable on Nintendo GameCube with Game Boy Player; none work on Wii.
Ok. Where do you plug in your Guitar Hero Guitars?
The Virtual console has about 40 games on list so far, but he wasn't talking about them.
He was talking about all the Gamecube games he can play with the original controllers, and the original memory cards with progressive scan (if they originally supported it) from Day 1. As a bonus it works without buying adapters.
The fact that Sony released a fix should not get them any kudos. The fact that Sony pushed PS3 out the door with this issue should cause everyone to raise their brow and ask "Why was it even an issue in the first place?" I think Sony has (yet again, see SWG for the same thing) pushed a product to the population that is not ready. Further evidence of this is seen in the games that are currently available. They did it because they were losing revenue. It makes sense from a money point of view but it's bad for consumers. I'd urge anyone looking to buy a PS3 to wait just 3 more months, 6 or more if you can contain yourself. By then PS3 will be where it should have been the day of release.
Ok. Where do you plug in your Guitar Hero Guitars?
While the PS3 hasn't been released in Australia yet, this is one of the main reasons I'm in no rush to pick up the PS3 when it does get released. There's only a handful of games that I play on my PS2, and GH1 and GH2 would be at the top of the list. As there is currently no way to plug the guitars into the PS3, I think I'll just stick with the PS2 and my X360 (which will have Guitar Hero 2 on it in March).Same. In fact I haven't seen my Dual Shock in over 6 months. It hasn't mattered either. I'm hoping the 360 GHII has the ability to download the first game (for a fee of course), so you can get the better tracks (of GH) with the better multiplayer (of GHII).
Nyko is releasing an adapter next month that will solve the GH issues, or at least that is what their press release says.
Don't tell me that the lack of a controller port for GH guitars creates a bigger net loss of backwards compatibility than the lack of a high-speed port for Game Boy Player. Rhythm games for PlayStation (NTSC U/C) and PlayStation 2 (NTSC U/C) that use a custom controller number two dozen at the most; all I can think of at the moment are seven DDR titles (USA, Konamix, MAX, MAX2, Extreme, Extreme 2, Supernova), Aerobics Revolution, In the Groove, Beatmania, Taiko Drum Master, and the two Guitar Hero titles. The rest of the custom controller games are light-gun games such as the Time Crisis series. I'd bet the Mario and Pokémon franchises alone encompass more titles than those.
Word has it that Guitar Hero 2 on the 360 will let you download (for a fee) most of the bonus songs (all but 3, from memory) from the original game. I was saddened to learn that Cheat on the Church wasn't one of them, but I think I'll get over it. Plus there will be future content released online, as well as the 10 new songs (including Iron Maiden's "The Trooper") that the PS2 version didn't get.
Flawed anti-aliasing algorithm created multi-pixel blocks of video that were horizontally-inverted in a predictable pattern. This particular flaw has been fixed, but another issue remains: The PS3's over-agressive anti-aliasing smears color and reduces detail on fine lines and color patterns with PS and PS2 games, despite the fact that the games are not being upscaled to a higher resolution to acommodate the anti-aliasing without losing detail. Detailed textures and HUDs look much blurrier than on PS2.
Sure it's all under the umbrella of Sony. But even thoguh they are under that umbrella, in practice if a division looses mone long enough it wll be folded or sold. In practice Sony Games has no knowledge, or control over what Sony BMG is doing - heck, the DRM choice was probably entirely up to Sony BMG as there's no way a technical choice like that was decided on-high.
If you want to gripe about the PSP, I can understand it to some extent though I personally feel Sony has the right to update the product however they please, even though I have some projects I would use the PSP for if it were really unlocked and until that time I'll not buy one. But I simply don't feel it's fair to ostrasize a part of the company that is doing things like building in Linux support to the PS3 just because another part of the company is full of idiots. If you never offer a carrot but only sticks, why expect anything but anger and pain to be the resulting output?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Pokemon Ruby wasn't a GameCube Game. It would be like the Ps3 not being able to play PSP games. Now there was a 3rd party device that let you play GBA games through an adapter that worked through the memory card port. That sould still work.
I know I'm an odd one, but I was a late-comer to the PS2, and mostly bought the games that are now incompatible. I have GH, GHII, a few DDR's and Kingdom Hearts. So for me not being able to play most of my games matters.
Swwwweeet. I am so good with that. Do you remember the other 2? or have a link? I hope Bark at the Moon is still there. Tuff as bawls as it is, I love playing it....
Blu-ray Disc was developed by Sony Electronics, not Sony Pictures. If the divisions of Sony Corporation are as independent as some people claim, then Sony Pictures should distribute its works in both the Sony Electronics format and the competitors' format in order to reach the largest audience.
The emulator I tried for PS1 games did have graphical glitches -- which really bugged me in FF7 and FF8 cinematics -- but it also did use OpenGL for some of the graphics. Not all -- and not all of them could go high-res anyway, other than anti-aliasing (which is the name of the "fancy algorithm" you were talking about) -- consider FMV cutscenes, hand-painted backgrounds/skyboxes, and so on.
And for the most part, they won't be able to improve the models themselves. I'd do very, very aggressive Level-of-Detail, but that only makes sense because I'd do PC games -- about the only thing they really could improve directly there is round surfaces where they actually used, say, OpenGL's implementation of that, and that's assuming OpenGL -- which I don't think was on the PS1.
I'm betting it can run some PS2 games in high-res, though, or at least get rid of some of the lag that creeps through when you push a console... maybe... but if it's at all like the PS1, I remember that not all PS1 games could deal with a faster CPU -- remember, games can make assumptions about the clock speed and native resolution of a console, and they have access to a lot of the hardware. Even though you can emulate a memory card on a hard disk, the virtual memory card is likely at least as slow as a real one, just so you don't confuse the game.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Even though they are independant divisions, they still can work together toward a common goal that the higher leadership does care about - you are mistakenly thinking that every action of any Sony company is with the agreement of all others. No large company can operate in this fashion beyond the very largest of goals - like a single media format.
Also, like most other studios they came to the conclusion that Blu-Ray had more of a future, for a number of reasons.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
What about imports to the US market?
There was some coverage that region encoding was in effect on the PS3. PS2 game imports from Japan (that were not released in the US market or were earlier in the Japanese market) didn't play on the US PS3s. Is this still the case? Or has the firmware update fixed that also?
When you've found that, can you figure out how make force feedback work in Gran Turismo 4?
There's no bloody way I'm buying a PS3 for GT5 if I can't use a force feedback wheel.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
This issue was quite a big failure by the slashdot editors.
There have been lots of slashdot articles bashing the PS3 for minor issues. However, on this issue, which WAS a serious one, slashdot was pretty much the only site covering console games that DIDN'T report it.
And no, the article linked to in the 'related articles' section at the top isn't about the same issue.
Anyway, I'm in the UK, and this fix does at least mean that I can consider getting a PS3 when it is released. The issue was a deal-breaker for me.
What, you think they actually read the book before invoking it in debate?
That number being one, and the reason being that Sony are including it as a loss-leading feature in the PS3. Exclude PS3 sales, and the remaining standalone players from all companies are being massively outsold by Toshiba's HD-DVD players. HD-DVDs are also a tiny fraction of the cost of Blu-Ray discs to make, because you just press them in a DVD pressing plant, rather than the long process of coating layers that BD-ROMs require.
Why does it matter what you think it costs to make HD-DVD's, when Blu-Ray and HD-DVD discs cost the same to buy? Obviously the difference is not as vast as you think.
As for "massively outselling", that's simply wrong when you think about the PS3 as a Blu-Ray player, and probably not even correct if you count only standalone players. What source do you have to back that up? My thoughts on that would be if HD-DVD drives were really outselling Blu-Ray units by such huge numbers, why are sales for Blu-Ray and HD-DVD titles currently about equal with Blu-Ray leading?
Blu-Ray was designed as a system of blank discs to go in recording devices; it's only if you're making rewriteable discs that the costs start to even out, and where you start to want 50Gb of space. The hardware companies behind it believed that recording broadcast HD was going to be the future, not pre-recorded discs any more. I'm guessing they're wrong, and if you want to record from the TV then you'll use a hard-disc.
If you think about it, Blu-Ray disc costs are going to fall faster because millions of PS3 games need to be pressed, which lowers the cost of movie discs as well.
If you want to record TV of course you're going to use the HD. But if you want to deliver a very large HD movie to your living room in the shortest and least aggravating way, a physical disc is still required - and also good for sharing with friends.
There still is a lot of value to consumers in the largest possible physical writable disc. That's why both Apple and Dell and even HP back Blu-Ray (Apple and Dell to a greater degree than HP).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley