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A History of the Shrinking Game Console
After Sony's announcement of the PS3 Slim earlier this week, CNet took a look back at size-reducing hardware revisions over the past couple decades in console design, noting that they're gradually arriving sooner and sooner after the initial release. "Does that mean it'll creep even lower, into two-year or even yearly cycles between major revisions? Quite possibly, yes. It's worked very well with handheld gaming devices, and even some consumer electronics devices like iPods. Apple has turned out slimmer, more powerful versions of the iPod every year since 2001, and yearly events like E3 put continued pressure on console makers to show off something big. In the case of the PS3 Slim though, it could just be that the PS3 had to be pushed out to meet its launch window, and that the Slim is what Sony was going for in the first place. Advances in the PlayStation 3's core technology, like the cell processor, also underwent changes since the console launched, including changes to fabrication that have taken the chip down from 90 nanometers to 65, then 45 — the size that can be found inside the Slim. These changes meant less power consumption, smaller components, and easier cooling."
On one side they are talking about ever smaller appliances with more power. I don't see how the Slim PS3 qualifies. After all, it's the same stuff, just more efficient. That is a good thing, don't get me wrong, but it's way easier to accomplish than more advanced hardware in less space.
By the way, does anyone here know whether the Slim will have a dual voltage PSU?
Soon, you'll be able to buy your consoles "pre-shrunk," and possibly "acid-washed."
It'd go something like this ... (and this would be the logo)
Microsoft has announced its long-rumoured handheld XBox gaming console, to compete with the Sony PSP and Nintendo DS.
"The GameBoy will be wiped out by this!" said marketing marketer Shane Kim. The console, to be named the ZuneX ("we wanted a really evocative brand that would set the tone straight away") will integrate with XBox Live Arcade and the Zune music store and have phone capabilities.
"Weâ(TM)re also looking at instant-on, 1080p high-definition, Facebook, Twitter and Netflix deals, Project Natal, Windows 7, Internet Explorer 6, downloadable rings of death in every possible color ... nothing will hold a candle to the ZuneX. Google and Apple will be quaking in fear." The E74 error will also be updated to E75.
The device will be two feet by three feet and weigh twenty-four pounds. "That's an important feature. Wii Fit just canâ(TM)t compete with the rippling abs the ZuneX will give you." The device is fully portable within the length of the twenty-foot three-phase 415 volt power cable.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
The NES went on a diet in the early 90's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NES_2 as well. I am surprised that CNET missed that!
Or the Genesis 3? Or later Intellivisions fer cris'sake? I've noticed these 'History of' articles and retrogames sites kinda suck now. I was listening to a retrogames pod cast about peripherals and they spent the bulk of the cast talking about the Wii & Rock Band. Is it just me, or does game journalism kinda suck now?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Games could be downloaded, or flash memory could become cheap that games are distributed on memory cards (again). Only this time in a smaller format. That alone would make the consoles of the future smaller.
Otherwise, it depends on with how much heat to get rid of they start out. If the example of the Wii (to try something new rather than maximize graphics performance) catches on, even the first generation of a new console might be smaller than we are used to.
C - the footgun of programming languages
One doesn't even have to have a PS3 to remember how long Sony delayed the PS3 at launch because it was waiting for enough supply of the BluRay drives. Also, lets not forget that the PS3 Slim is being released over two and a half years after the original PS3.
This guy will tell you all you need to know about the Gameboy. Demonstrating an addon and mod you probably didn't know about, as well as showing a portable game system for drug dealers. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgN2Rtgt9Vg&feature=channel_page
when we get a Slim version of the PS2 it tends to overheat. When they make a smaller version, they tend to leave out a fan to cool it down. Which is why add on fans to the case are designed by third parties or people put small external fans near the open areas of the case.
Now if it was something as simple as a Commodore 64 on a joystick it wouldn't need a fan as the Commodore 64 technology reduced to a chip does not draw that much heat as an XBox 360, PS3, Wii, or modern game console.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
The problem with losing the optical drive is that you then lose backwards compatibility. Sony tries to forget this, but they made a big deal out of the backwards compatibility when the PS3 first came out (as did Microsoft and Nintendo).
I know that the lack thereof is what's keeping me from buying a PS3 now that they're affordable—they dropped a fairly important feature.
Benford's Corollary to Clarke's Law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
The Nintendo DS currently distributes games on Flash cards ;P
Ex: http://www.mediabistro.com/mobilecontenttoday/original/umd_gb_ds_carts.jpg
"I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist"
This could happen in the future, but not this console generation. And, despite what seems to be going around at some forums, most definitely not for the PS3!
I can see how the PSPgo's dispensation with the PSP's optical drive could give one the impression that such a move might be possible for Sony's home console, but the difference is much greater than what meets the eye.
The PSPgo is not a revision of the PSP platform. Sony was made fun of for insisting that the Go will exist parallel to the PSP in the market, but the fact is, Sony is trying for a completely different kind of console experience with the PSPgo than they did with the PSP.
The PSP was conceived as a little, handheld Playstation. Same kind of games, same kind of gameplay, just smaller. The PSPgo, on the other hand, is Sony's (too late?) attempt to compete with both the DS and the iPod Touch. It's geared toward a completely different kind of game, not scaled-down versions of home console games, but games conceived from the ground up to be portable, things you pick up and play for a few minutes and then put away when your number is called at the DMV. Despite the shared software architecture, the PSPgo is not at all like the PSP.
So to launch a PS3 with no optical drive would be to target a different kind of game. While there are some disc-based PS3 titles that have been re-released as downloadable, they are a tiny minority, and given the way that platform exclusives tend to be very free with asset file size due to Blu-Ray's disc capacity, there's a pretty hard technical reason for that as well.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
So long as it's small enough to carry home from the store it doesn't need to be portable. It doesn't need to run off batteries, either, so as long as it doesn't cause your lights to dim or make the lounge room into a sauna, who cares how much power it draws?
Now don't get me wrong - technological improvements are desirable and all, but as a consumer I'd much rather go Nintendo's route and buy the same console cheaper, rather than a smaller console at the same price.
Alternatively, perhaps they could use to resources to invest in getting the next generation console out sooner?
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
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Extra-official reply from Sarah Ewen, a Sony employee:
BY: sarahe
DATE: 2009-Aug-21 22:23
SUBJECT: RE: Why no Linux in PS3 Slim?
Hi aragon,
I'm sorry that you are frustrated by the lack of comment specifically regarding the withdrawal of support for OtherOS on the new PS3 slim.
The reasons are simple: The PS3 Slim is a major cost reduction involving many changes to hardware components in the PS3 design. In order to offer the OtherOS install, SCE would need to continue to maintain the OtherOS hypervisor drivers for any significant hardware changes - this costs SCE. One of our key objectives with the new model is to pass on cost savings to the consumer with a lower retail price. Unfortunately in this case the cost of OtherOS install did not fit with the wider objective to offer a lower cost PS3.
We'll see if we can get the offical OtherOS page updated with something to this effect so that an official explanation is provided. Thank you for your comments.
Sarah.
I am not happy this version is no longer capable of running Linux or any other OS besides Sony's own.
OTOH, its RAM would make for a nasty user experience when running just about anything.
I can't believe it's hard to build a Cell-based desktop system the size of the PS3, but with plenty RAM and a nice GPU that would not play PS3 games. Software compatibility should, today, be a non-issue - there are many full-feature desktop OSs (or different versions of a couple) that can run on Cell. And since it's not a console, they could sell it for a profit. I would buy a Linux-running Windows-proof box for the price of a Dell
In the early 90s, IIRC, Sony made a very nice line of MIPS-based Unix workstations. They could do it again.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
When I got my Xbox 360, I was shocked that a product in general sale could be this noisy. Reading the specs of the noiselevel on the new PS3 indicates that it too generates a fair amount of noise. I'd be perfectly happy if the box was twice as big if it could be dead-quiet.
It doesn't need to run off batteries, either, so as long as it doesn't cause your lights to dim or make the lounge room into a sauna, who cares how much power it draws?
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
I completely agree that smaller is better for portable gaming systems but hate the fact that there is this belief that console based systems have to be so small. What really drives me crazy is when processing speed, storage size and cooling is sacrificed so it can be smaller.
I would much rather have a kick-a$# system that doesn't suffer from overheating problems and comes with a whole lot of storage than some pretty little thing that is dumb as a brick when it gets to hot.
The ps3 slim was bound to come out, yes. And, sure, it was bound to come out soon, but I think the reason the ps3 slim is out now is because the ps3 has been in trouble since day one. I think sony is trying to lower the price as much as they can so that they can get a greater market penetration, and slimming down the console is one way to do that (and it would convince people that were waiting for the ps3 slim anyway).
If the PS3 had been doing better, I don't think we would have seen a slim version until next year.
As for yearly revisions: don't hold your breath. I doubt anyone is eager to rebuy their consoles ever year. The redesigns are more for people that haven't purchased one yet, or for those whose consoles broke. Very rarely is it for everyone (like with the DS lite). Home consoles make even less sense here, as there's not a significant benefit to the gamer to rebuy their console.
The 1 exception to this is for hardware revisions wherein a part can be replaced with a more stable/cheap/efficient piece of hardware.
It's not just this generation - the original playstation was much bigger than its competitors, and while the xbox was hilariously huge, even the revised PS2 felt bigger than the gamecube (it was slim but long, which took up more space on the shelf). Sony is the one shrinking its consoles for the simple reason that sony's original consoles are frickin' huge.
I am trolling
I care, because I pay the electricity bill.
Mother Earth cares, because of the millions and millions gamers out there.
Well yes, but to be honest... I'm fairly sure the 42" TV I'm pulling the Wii up on consumes lots more power than the Wii itself, probably in the 100-150W range. In any case, for $/hour of entertainment isn't exactly breaking the bank anyway.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I completely agree that smaller is better for portable gaming systems but hate the fact that there is this belief that console based systems have to be so small.
The price of urban real estate in Japan makes the Wii's footprint look a lot more attractive.
In other news Moore's law works backwards too! Since you can pack more onto a chip faster, old standardized game console chips shrink in size faster and the consoles shrink with the chips. Not news, common sense.
50G is an awful lot to download or put on flash. I think it will be a couple of years before either of these options would be competitive to blu-ray.
50G is an awful lot to download or put on flash.
True OTOH as the xbox 360 and certain downloadable games for the PS3 (e.g. ratchet and clank future quest for booty) prove it isn't really needed for good HD games. It just means you have to economise a little (e.g. animating cutscenes using the game engine rather than using full motion video)
And afaict flash is continuing to fall in price, there may be a time when it's capacity and cost per gigabyte are low enough that it becomes a good format for game consoles.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
...cluster of these. ;-/
http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/18/ps3-slim-sized-up-smaller-deeper-no-linux-or-ps2-compatibilit/
Is it? My current (cheap) home Internet connection is 10Mb/s, and I can sustain around 1.1MB/s for downloads. At that speed it would take 13 hours to download the game. How many 50GB games can you finish in under 13 hours? You just need to download enough to play the first level and then have it download the rest while you're playing. Actually, how many games even take a single-layer, 25GB, Blu Ray disk?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Well yes, but to be honest... I'm fairly sure the 42" TV I'm pulling the Wii up on consumes lots more power than the Wii itself, probably in the 100-150W range. In any case, for $/hour of entertainment isn't exactly breaking the bank anyway.
A Wii, no. A Wii won't break the bank. But a PS3 is an energy hog.
http://www.hardcoreware.net/reviews/review-356-2.htm
About the same as my 46" TV, which draws 185W when on.
After being a faithful gamer for the 3rd (Sega Master System), 4th (Megadrive) and 5th (Playstation) generation consoles, I skipped the 6th generation. This reason for this is a combination of growing up (and thus spending less time on consoles) and the PSX simply having such a great library of games that I didn't finish them all within the 5 years of its lifepsan. Even today, I've still got a fairly large library of games I've yet to complete. Although that library is shrinking with time.
So when I do get a 7th generation console (I'm confident I'll slog my way through my PSX games before the 8th generation comes), it COULD have been PS2 library+PS3 library versus Xbox360 library (because the xbox was simply an abysmal failure in catering to me).
Instead due to the lack of backwards compatiblity, its the PS3 versus Xbox360, and while Microsoft failed to cater to me in regards to the Xbox, its doing much better with the Xbox360.
So Sony COULD have had a massive advantage over the Xbox360, if only they had continued to keep backwards compatibility.
It doesn't need to run off batteries, either, so as long as it doesn't cause your lights to dim or make the lounge room into a sauna, who cares how much power it draws?
I care about heat, because the console is sharing a cabinet with a PVR, stereo receiver, etc.
I recently got a 64GB chip for the pc (father in law to be gift). I'd LOVE to see games launching as USB chips for new systems. 64GB is enough for nearly any game. also 128 WILL be out within a year or so. Mod this up so gaming companies get ON IT! :D
you have no clue what you're talking about. The PSPGo is nothing more than a optical driveless PSP. All games for the PSP are now being released in downloadable form via the PSN. They aren't releasing PSPGo exclusives it's the same thing, except you download all your games. The PSP go is exactly like the PSP as far as what games you can play.
it proves no such thing. While quest for booty graphics wise looked just as good as Ratchet Future it was a much smaller game and was rather large to download. Just because they can put 1/6th of a game in download format doesn't mean the whole game is fitting to be released that way. Now things like Burnout Paradise which is a full game offered for download show it can be done.
Yes, however not everybody has internet connections like yours, my cable connection is 7Mb/s when I'm not sharing the pipe with others in my building, and the best DSL I can get is 1.5Mb/s. On top of that you've also got the transfer caps, Comcast has the most liberal cap that I know of at 250GB. At the moment i'm running around 100-125GB/month of transfer just with browsing, podcasts, and streaming media. If I had a download only system I'd need to carefully plan out when I wanted to play what game, as I'd need advance warning and enough drive space to store it, and I could only download 2-3 games per month with a 50GB game file (4-6 if you're calling it a 25GB download) while staying under the transfer cap, and it's even lower if you're on an ISP with more restrictive caps. And even the largest PS3 capacity believed to exist (250GB) could only store 10 games with no other media stored on the console, not a large library without the ability to back up games. I believe that we'll need to see larger storage capacity in consoles, faster 'net connections, and a removal of transfer caps before we see any sort of growth in download only consoles.
It doesn't need to run off batteries, either, so as long as it doesn't cause your lights to dim or make the lounge room into a sauna, who cares how much power it draws?
I haven't had one of those in years. I heard that electricity is rapidly going up in cost. is that true?
I think gamers are responsible for global warming
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
I have to agree with you. But Nintendo has the distinct advantage that their consoles are small to begin with. Compare the size of the GameCube to the PS2 or XBox. It's not only a lot smaller, it's also a lot lighter. Same goes for the Wii compared it's current generation counterparts. It's scarcely bigger than a DVD driver for a computer. It would make absolutely no sense for Nintendo to put out a smaller version.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I agree entirely - there is a point where a device can become 'too small', eg. mobile phones that are too small to dial on, or peripherals that get dragged around by the cables plugged into them. The Wii is about where I expect a console should be - light enough to carry easily but hefty enough to sit stably on your AV cabinet shelf. Anything smaller would likely be disadvantageous.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
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For the past 30 years, there's been a real technology treadmill. PCs, video games, VCRs->DVDs->BluRay, more recently flat panel TVs and digital cameras. It seems, though, like the treadmills are starting to slow. The move to 64-bit OSes (handled cleanly by Linux and Apple, Microsoft... not so much) seems like the last major transition even to be done, and high-end video cards can handle most games at beyond HD resolution. Movies and TVs could go even higher-def, but human eyesight often isn't good enough to care. Likewise, cameras are all multi-mega-pixel, capable of storing huge numbers of photos and even taking high-quality video. Do you think we're nearing the end of the upgrade treadmill for video games too? The next Wii could be higher def and higher-detail graphics capable, the 360 could have Blu-Ray, the PS3... seems like there's no compelling reason to upgrade. Sure, it could be even faster, and look a little better as a result, but would that be enough to justify the purchase?
If not, shrinking the system (to reduce costs) and selling more throughout the world may be the only direction Sony can profitably go.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
What surprises me is that anyone particularly cares about the physical size of consoles.
Slim consoles increase the WAF significantly.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
So...you're happier not playing all those games that "failed to cater to you" on the Xbox on an Xbox 360, rather than not playing the games might've "catered to you" on PS3?
Brilliant logic! Of course, you could just get a PS2 and spend a lot less money overall on games that you might enjoy, but that would require that you have a functioning brain stem. After reading your post I'm not so sure you do.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
After it was acid-washed, it was licked dry by the turtle-necked crew. They even Detailed it with a portrait of myself. Buy one ASAP.
Sincerily,
not Steve Jobs (most of the time)
I remember that the MachZ was the first complete single-chip computer, on a breadboard with all the headers for IO from PATA and RS232. XBox Portable would live to my dream of a 386-compatible PDA, somthing that I could multi-boot if not the firmware for XBox
If Microsoft were to help-out 3DRealms and Apogee to get Duke Nukem Forever to launch, it would make Microsoft a bundle if pre-packaged with XBox Portable (Duke Nukem and Cmdr Keen basically defined the MS-DOS days of gaming) and it would get 3D Realms through their speedbump in getting Duke his jetpack and Ripper in play.
XBox Portable would keep all the legacy XBox in the arena. Great Idea, man.