The Tech Fixes the PS3 Still Needs, Eight Years On

An anonymous reader writes "The PlayStation 4 has well and truly arrived, but Sony's still selling its last-gen console by the pallet-load, eight years after first going on sale. Of course, as a new article points out, that's nothing compared to the PS2's astonishing 13 year manufacturing run. To help achieve that, the author outlines some tech fixes the PS3 could still do with, even after all this time, from tighter PS Vita integration, to yes, cross game chat. Can it make it past a decade, too?"

Comments

If they brought back OtherOS

[Khyber]

Maybe they could keep selling them 20 years from now.

HTPC

[tepples]

You can buy Other OS in a box. They call it a home theater PC. Alienware is only one of several companies making them. Slashdot's own Hairyfeet build them for a living.

Re:HTPC

[loufoque]

It doesn't have a CBE.

Re:HTPC

[Khyber]

You can't get a PC that can dedicate ~2TFLOPS of processing power to a task, and the state of home PC GPU accelerated stuff is rather poor right now in comparison.

Re:HTPC

[hairyfeet]

Yes I do and they have never been more powerful or cheaper thanks to the AMD Socket AM1 chips, which just FYI is the same Jaguar platform used by the XB-One and PS4. If you use a Linux HTPC build like OpenELEC you can easily get one built for less than $250 although i have to say that HTPCs are frankly the only place Windows 8 makes sense, its large startscreen is a perfect 10 foot UI for HTPCs.

But unless you were doing VERY specialized code the OtherOS running on the cell just wasn't a good idea, the cell was just too specialized to use as a general purpose CPU. You'd be better off with a Jaguar quad where the entire system uses less than 65w under max load and if you use an SSD idles in the teens. And of course thanks to it being X86-64 you can run any flavor of Windows/Linux/BSD you want without needing a corp to approve.

3D Blu-Ray Player

[Vandil X]

I lost interest in mainstream console gaming after the SNES/Genesis and the Saturn/PS1 eras. The way gaming was going on consoles (Xbox, PS2, GCN) just turned me off and I spent more time playing MMOs on PCs. So when the 360 and PS3 came out, I bought a PS3 only to serve as an easy-to-firmware-update Blu-Ray player that can play my PS1 games and, perhaps, any PS3 game that catches my eye (SF4 for example) and retro collection discs.

The killer app for me was when 3D Blu-Ray capability was added. For me, the PS3 will continue to have it's honorary position in my entertainment scenario, so long as it can play Blu-Ray movies and allow me to play Symphony of the Night on the big screen.

If my PS3 breaks while they're still making them? I'm not sure I'd buy another. I'd just get a cheap 3D-capable Blu-Ray player and play SotN by other means.

Re:3D Blu-Ray Player

[Dahamma]

Mandatory patches are ok if they are properly managed. Xbox does 2 per year and they generally add a bunch of useful features. Sony randomly releases mandatory patches a half dozen times or more a year, and once in a while even every few weeks...

Wet Dream

[ameoba]

That's a fanboy wishlist, not a well thought out, profit-oriented list of reasonable items that have any hope of getting added to a down-market, end of life console that's in cost-cutting, discount sales mode.

The only one of those that seems halfway reasonable would be upgrading the WiFi & that's only because it might be easier/cheaper to source modern WiFi chips during the extended production run.

Re:Wet Dream

[PopeRatzo]

That's a fanboy wishlist, not a well thought out, profit-oriented list of reasonable items that have any hope of getting added to a down-market, end of life console that's in cost-cutting, discount sales mode.

When you say "fanboy", I think you meant, "customer".

I know consumers are only supposed to accept what the corporation deigns to give them nowadays, but there was a time when companies used to say, "the customer is always right" and actually try to give them products that they wanted.

Today, it's "The customer needs to just STFU, accept the EULA and use our product the way we want them to use our product, until we decide to take that away too and force them to buy our next product, because corporations are people, my friend. People who happen to be your goddamn overlords. Now bow before, me, worm".

Re:Wet Dream

[ameoba]

This is in like somebody demanding a $12k Kia have premium sound system, leather seats & a V-8 under the hood.

Re:Wet Dream

[PopeRatzo]

So, you think wanting a feature that was in the product when you bought it and then taken away is the same as demanding a premium stereo, leather seats and a V8?

You think wanting a feature as easy to include as in-game chat is going to double the cost of the PS3 to Sony?

Wait a minute, we're talking about Sony here. I don't have to argue a case proving that they are hostile to their customers. They're behavior over the past few decades is proof enough that they think you are stupid enough to buy their products. They laugh at you.

Re:Wet Dream

[Chaos Incarnate]

Backwards compatibility was taken away, in conjunction with a price drop because eliminating those chips significantly lowered the cost to build the machine. I'm more than happy to have saved $100 on my PS3 to lose that.

Cross-game chat (which is what's really being asked for; plenty of games have implemented their own in-game chat), while trivial from a technical perspective, has the issue of Sony not being able to increase the memory or CPU footprint of the OS while a game is running, lest they break one or more of the thousands of existing games. So if they added that, they'd have to find something to carve out. Theoretically I suppose they could build more RAM/a faster CPU into the newer machines, but only those would be able to support chat.

Re:Wet Dream

[R3d M3rcury]

...or a customer who, say, buys a brand new PS3 from Sony's online store..

No, they're not suggesting that Sony upgrade everyone's WiFi for free. They are saying that if you buy a new PS3, it would be great if it came with support for more modern WiFi implementations.

Re:Wet Dream

[David_Hart]

That's a fanboy wishlist, not a well thought out, profit-oriented list of reasonable items that have any hope of getting added to a down-market, end of life console that's in cost-cutting, discount sales mode.

When you say "fanboy", I think you meant, "customer".

I know consumers are only supposed to accept what the corporation deigns to give them nowadays, but there was a time when companies used to say, "the customer is always right" and actually try to give them products that they wanted.

Today, it's "The customer needs to just STFU, accept the EULA and use our product the way we want them to use our product, until we decide to take that away too and force them to buy our next product, because corporations are people, my friend. People who happen to be your goddamn overlords. Now bow before, me, worm".

No, he means fanboy. Normal console customers will see that all of the new games are being released on the PS4 or Xbox One and move on. Also, it's unrealistic to expect a company that has the next gen product out to make any changes to the old product. The reason why is because they have put any new R&D into the new console and need to recover their investment.

Re:Wet Dream

[Rakarra]

This is the main problem with consoles: When you buy one, and you buy a bunch of games, you don't own squat

Oh, you own it, and you own it completely. After all, no one HAD to upgrade the system BIOS to the version that disabled OtherOS. What people need to know if they can only count on being able to do what they can do NOW. They can not count that future games will be playable, at least not without a lot of nasty strings attached.

counts on people not reading or not understanding their EULA. If people knew what they were actually agreeing to, I'm not sure there would be nearly as many consoles sold. But clearly people don't care, until they do

They usually don't care because it doesn't affect them. Weird, short-lived reports from Sony that researchers were using them in clusters did not affect the average gamer. Those researchers didn't lose out, either, since they didn't upgrade the BIOS. They just used the machine like they always had.

The removal of OtherOS didn't affect the average gamer, it only affected a very small group of people who installed Yellowdog Linux out of curiosity. I was one of those who did so -- a year later, I didn't particularly care that the feature was removed, because as everyone else who tried it discovered, OtherOS sucked. The hypervisor, which can't be worked around, locked out much of the hardware. Want to use it as a cool games emulator? Good idea! But since the hypervisor has always restricted the RSX, the PS3 runs much slower than your standard HTPC, and has almost no graphics acceleration.

It's only been recently that some exploits with specific hypervisor versions have allowed the Linux kernel to boot in "game mode," unlocking full graphics acceleration, but that's not a Sony feature and wasn't available through OtherOS.

OtherOS always sucked because Sony was scared it would lead to pirated games or homebrew games that competed with their own offerings, so they crippled it from the very start.

Re:Wet Dream

[CronoCloud]

So, you think wanting a feature that was in the product when you bought it and then taken away

I own a CECHE model PS3 that at one time had a YDL install on it. I was even a moderator over at the Yellow Dog Forum. I have said the following many many times.

The thing is, you have to agree to have the feature taken away, it won't be taken away without you agreeing to do so....twice.

The choice is yours, keep Linux and lose access to PSN because your PSN isn't "trusted" or keep access to PSN and lose Linux. Your choice.

Now perhaps Sony shouldn't have required you to make that choice, but they believed that Geohot gave THEM no choice and the final choice is yours.

Re:Real tech fixes

[SScorpio]

The Blu Ray drive has nothing to do with the YLOD. Yes the laser can burn out, and I've had to do a single replacement.

YLOD is caused by micro fractures in solder eventually leading to connections failing. This is because the PS3 came out in 2006, which is the same time PC video cards were also combating the move away from lead based solder (thanks California, do you have that sign up that the state of California contains things known to cause cancer so anyone visiting or living there is aware?).

The YLOD and RROD caused both Sony and Microsoft to be very conservative with power and heat in the new console.

Re: Real tech fixes

[Anonymous Coward]

Ylod on ps3 is for more than one error. It can be for a bad CPU, or GPU connection, it can also be a drive read error.

Games on disc; shared PS3

[tepples]

Or without someone else in the household agreeing to do so twice. Not everybody lives alone. And it's not just PSN that was taken away but also access to newly published games on disc.