Slashdot Mirror
Playstation 2 Picture + Emotion Engine Specs
l'Abruti writes
"Can't wait to get your hands on a Playstation 2? Well,
take a look at
a picture of the beast and the Emotion Engine processor
specifications while you wait.
"
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
The thing looks like it came from the back of a 1986 COMPUTE! mag. Must be the dark casing and square corners.
Anyway, 6.2 GFLOPS is fscking impressive. For the low price of 15 W. Drool.
You also have no grasp of reality at all. And, worst of all, you call Chris a drone. Sony has a 100 billion dollar business there, and they should just hand it to Chris, huh? Yeah, sure.
You are a clueless dork, and your jealousy is probably only surpassed by your inability to achieve in you entire life what Chris has achieved by his 28th birthday. You are one sorry sumbitch.
More importantly, why in God's name would you want it to?
Hmm, so I guess the fact that Sony has quite a few little movies it could sell on DVD format has been completely missed on you...
The only thing really use it for anymore is playing games.
In that case, just wait a few months and no doubt some third party will develop an add-on to do just that, like the VCD PSX player (which I have)
I can't remember where I read this, but an article from a month ago speculates that Sony and Toshiba might team up to build a cheap PC based on the new Playstation chipset. The rumor also speculated that it'd be running Linux or a proprietary OS developed by Sony. Now that would be something... And it makes perfect sense, because Sony could drop it's money-losing VAIO line and introduce a true performer for about the same cost, and wouldn't have to pay royalties to Macrosoft for it's neverending stream of terrible OS's.
Well at the very least it's a good idea.
-Herbert T. Zweibel
The keyword is Wintel here. Multiprocessor G4's will hopefully be fast enough to emulate at least the Emotion Engine. Of course you'd need top notch video hardware as well.
What the hell, just get the PS2 for $250 and be done with it.
The 150M pixel rate is the speed at which images are decoded off the DVD. It's actualy fill rate as published is 2.6 Gigapixels/sec. Of course, that's if you believe this thing is real. (I don't - no one in the world has ever set up a fab plant for .18, despite a 1 billion dollar investment by NEC to do just that.)
Yes, however just having a dvd logo does NOT mean it will play dvd movies. There is still a big controversy on whether or not there will be a movie decoder card included with the psx2 or if it will be available as a mod.
-epyx (paitre @ cisnet.com)
Sometimes it's easy to forget how many tentacles the octopus has. Sony is involved in lots of markets, with music, their own movie studios, etc. DVD is a viable option for the Playstation 2, even though it may create negligible competition with their standard DVD players. Their DVD movie sales would probably increase, benefitting that branch of the company (Sony Pictures Entertainment). It'd be interesting to figure out the marketing statistics regarding the age/income of people who are buying Playstations and the people who buy DVD players...I'm betting that the marketing groups would find that they're two separate markets. In that scenario, DVD decoding on Playstation would not hurt Sony's DVD hardware sales, and increase their software sales for games & movies. Anyone know any more on this subject?
Hey, anyone figure that if you throw a modem, browser and dvd player on this thing you have a real windows killer. I mean, for most people, the only thing they use their home PC for is games and surfing the web (all those other home apps like Quicken and Word could easily be entirely web based). You do the whole shot for under a couple hundred bucks, you get rid of gates money makers -- win 98 and office -- and then let linux hack away at the biz and server markets ... I think linux would do much better once MS can't stockpile money from the home market ...
...
Then again, Civ II kind of sucks on playstation
That is exactly my point. Money isn't everything.
So why slave away on other people's projects if you get little in the way of monetary compensation or spiritual fulfilment? Why not pursue you own goals and dreams? Now if you dream is to work on semiconductor design or game platforms, you have little choice but to align yourself with a megacorp. If it isn't however, it's foolish to burn away years of your life for others. Especially, when they screw you the whole time.
And if you do end up working for a megacorp like Sony, don't fool yourself into believing they are your friends. They're not. You are just mutually exploiting each other while your goal coincide.
What allows Sony to sell Playstations with great hardware for such a low price is their business model. Sony makes money by selling games; the playstation units are a loss leader.
If people buy these units as DVD players without the intent to buy games, then Sony loses out big time! So, chances are, you won't see the Playstation-DVD combo.
With the reprogrammable logic abilities of this RISC chip, it looks like an excellent tool for emulation of just about anything.
Who cares about the photo - I don't think that was the point. Did you look at the specs? Did you take the time to look around that site in general? Do you realize that these specs were posted by an engineer who actually worked on the processor design? (In fact, it is his personal web site.)
Dreamcast only has the power of a low end pc?
You wouldn't have a URL to back up that flame bait would you?
But wouldn't it be so damn kewl if it was??
Yep - G4 does have a good vector processor. Maybe not quite as good as the Sony chip - but definitely (if properly utilized by software) the G4 could give a significant boost in 3D / image processing / signal processing type applications.
I would be cool to be able to design a thing like the PS2 in your garage. Even when that is possible, I get the feeling that most of the annoying dumbness that typifies much of corporate existance won't change much.
We are basically the same as we were 100,000 years ago running around hunting and gathering. Our brains and behaviors haven't changed much at all, even though our technology sure has.
The more things change...
They could make the PS2/DVD player available for the lower end market and retool their 'normal' DVD players to the higher end, including more features, better decompression, whatever. Personally, I think it would be foolish of them not to have the thing play DVDs because IMO it would increase the sales of the box enormously.
I know that if it can play DVDs I'll definately buy while if it doesn't I probably won't.
You have shown all these idiots what a real education, a real work history, a real personal achievement and a real resume look like, and not one person so far has even made mention of you. The lesson here is that the vast majority of kids who read Slashdot and post here are unable to comprehend real achievement and unable to identify with anyone such as yourself who actually gets up every day and goes to work, then contributes to the team. I've bookmarked your home page, though, and I commend you for your professional achievements, for your dedication to the companies for whom you work, and for your willingness to respect the traditional work ethics and models.
...that's an "artist's rendering" from an old next generation magazine. not that i'd complain if the finished product looked like that... :)
I wonder if that's possible, it certain seems to have the raw horsepower to do it.
It looks almost exactly like what people thought 'high tech devices' would look like in the early to mid eighties. I wonder if that was the intent.
After all we all know just how much big corporations care about the people who work for them and actually create the products they sell. I'm sure Sony is giving Chris and all the other engineers who worked on the PS2 a hefty percentage of the gross sales.
Right. All Chris and his team will see from the PS2 is thier trivial salaries (even a salary of $200k/yr is trivial compared to the hundreds of millions in profits Sony will make from the box), jack and shit. Sure they have great resume' fodder, so they can get another job slaving away for someone else's benefit.
I may be cynical, but I'm also right.
Cut and pasted directly from Sony's website:
p ?spec=91.
CPU:
128 Bit "Emotion EngineÔ"
Graphics:
"Graphics Synthesizer"
Clock Frequency 150MHz
DRAM Bus bandwidth 48GB per Second
DRAM Bus width 2560bits
Pixel Configuration RGB:Alpha:Z Buffer (24:8:32)
Maximum Polygon Rate 75 Million Polygons per Second
So for your nit-picking pleasure, it has 2 processors for graphics, not just one.
For future reference on emulation, check out http://www.playstation.com/press_releases/show.as
This is basically accurate. But Sony has stated that although it will be able to play original PlayStation games, it will not do any special enhancements to speed them up, improve graphics, etc. The main reasoning behind this is that any sort of tweaks could possibly mess up some games, and that isn't worth it. It would be cool to be able to play old PSX games with graphics enhanced and improved, but it isn't going to happen.
The 32bit I/O chip that's on board is indeed the original Playstation I/O chip, but emulation isn't strictly hardware based in the new system. One I/O chip doesn't make a 32bit PSX my friend. The actual graphics rendering and calculation is handled by the new chipset in software. Do a search at www.gamefan.com for Playstation for the last 3 months, there's a 2 week period where they posted up news daily and have TONS of info on the new PSX (PSY maybe?) along with lots of good movies that weren't posted on other sites (like the water demo I alluded to in the original post).
Actually, I never called Chris a drone. I don't know him or his attitude toward work and his company. For all know he could be a raving anti-corporate anarchist who just happens to be working for Sony at the moment. In fact I have nothing but respect for someone who helps create something as seemingly cool as the PS2. I just hope the Sony corporate culture doesn't consume him.
What I was doing was commenting on the original posters devotion to the 'work ethic'. The 'work ethic' is a sham that gets people to do what others want. Then it gets these rubes to believe they are righteous for being exploited and screwed. Why is it such a virtue to slave away for someone else?
And no I don't think that Sony should just hand over all of their income to Chris and the team he works with. That wouldn't be fair to the others who work for Sony. But tell me this, do you think it's fair that the PS2 team receives *none* of the profits generated by the device they created? Profits that wouldn't exist without tbe device they made? If you do, you have an odd understanding of the term 'fair' and I'd love to hear your definition.
'Clueless dork'. Hmmm. Friend, you have struck me to the core of my being with your clever word play. Your battering to my ego has undone me. The tower of your wit is unassailable. Uh-huh.
I can't say that weak verbal assaults are really a very good counter argument to my original point. You also bring up the straw man of 'personal jealousy', which is irrelevant because my argument really has nothing to do directly with Chris, his abilities and/or achievements. His situation with Sony and the PS2 is only the framework I draped my argument around.
Now if it makes Chris happy to work with Sony and to create machines of pure coolness, more power to him. But as soon as he stops enjoying himself he should leave. No amount of money, prestige or power is worth being in a place you hate.
150Mpixel imagine processing != polygon fill rate. Image processing is things like convolution matrix, etc.
Regardless of this picture (but manifest in it), Sony really know how to make great products. They so rarely make anything that is dysfunctional or ugly.
:)
Personally I find the pictured unit to be mouth-watering... shiny and solid, looks like it would feel cool to pick up. And, with an artistic triple-focal-point design.
And that's just the outside
I think I'm gonna get one of these...
It's on USB... so theoretically any external device will be able to be plugged in. There's plans for modem support, etc. Hopefully something will be done about Ethernet
Are we playing the same games here?
Sonic adventure, powerstone and house of the dead 2 are three of the best games I have ever seen. Game play, graphics, you name it these games have everything else beat. And Shen Mue is supposed to be even better.
Sega isn't going to drop dead this time like they did with the saturn. Sony and Nintendo have their work cut out for them.
Have you READ the official specs????
Display output: NTSC/PAL
Digital TV (DTV)
VESA (maximum 1280 x 1024 pixels)
MMmmmm All these graphics cards will cost about 1/4 of the price of the PS2 alone. Plus the fact that you would need to spend loads more on the rest of the PC.
Give me a £400 games console, slap it in front of the TV, grab a few mates and I'll be happy. No fuss with installing games. THE END.
What a load of pap. Why doesn't everyone just read the OFFICIAL, exact, final release specs at the official site:
R&D ANNOUNCEMENT FROM SCE, TOKYO, JAPAN
Would everyone just stop saying "oh wouldn't it be cool if they made it ____". What is wrong with it's specs, nothing. If you actually read all the specs and look at the movies etc you will see that it is the best thing to happen in entertainment history. So what if it will not be released as a PCI card etc. It rocks as it is.
This is old news anyway.
Take a close look at the front of this beast. Is that a dvd logo in the lower left corner? Does this thing play DVDs, too? That would make this thing the best toy since the atari 2600...
Yes, the Dreamcast does have good specs, and impressive graphical capabilities. But so far the Dreamcast has not really been selling as well as anticipated. Why? Because most of the games are pretty poor (poor gameplay, poor interface, boring, etc.). The greatest specs in the world don't mean anything if most of the games aren't any good. Even with the PlayStation, if it didn't have some of the early hits, like Battle Arena Toshinden, etc. it might not have taken off either. The software really makes the machine. However, Namco is porting Soul Calibur, their super impressive follow-up to the under-appreciated Soul Blade, to the Dreamcast. For that reason alone I will get one, since I'd love to be able to play Soul Calibur. Sony may or may not have to worry. The PSX is still a capable system, and very few games really push it to its limits. Nintendo probably doesn't need to worry either, as they've built a comforable niche for certain kinds of games (and the Game Boy Color is also doing better,
especially now that some people have seen how far a game can stretch the hardware. For an example, the upcoming Tarzan game for the GBC, which has very impressive animation and color, etc.
The Gameboy is again another example of software being a major factor. The Gameboy has partly been successful due to its vast library of fairly good games (and some masterpieces, like Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, Final Fantasy Legend 2, the mario and wario and donkey kong series, etc. Even though units like the Neo-Geo Pocket, the Atari Lynx, the Sega Game Gear, etc. were more technically capable, they didn't do as well.
It also has to do with design. The Gameboy hands down had the best design and was best suited for real world use. The Lynx and Game Gear were bigger and bulkier, and had poor battery life (and required a ton of batteries).
The Game Boy Color functionally is a better system....it gets longer battery life but also can display more colors on screen than the Lynx or Game Gear could.
You talking about new Amiga computers? :)
Did you know, what new aAmigas will use
Transmeta Chips? Gateway now buying (or already buyed ?) license from Transmeta. So Amiga will
rock next millenium.
I think I'll keep my N64 and wait on buying the Dreamcast unless it ships with some really good games. I'm having too much fun with my Dr.V64 :)
Interestingly, the easy availability of mod chips became a large factor in the popularity of the playstation. With the advanced protections on the new consoles, it will be interesting to see how (lack of) piracy reshapes the market.
Its going to have a vga output you know...
(max 1280 by 1024, saw that in EDGE)
And folks keep in mind that this baby will not
be upgradable, so it will still be 6.2gflops
six or seven years from now when the next one
probably appears, and of course by then that will
look as tired as the PS does today.
Our PCs will by that time of course...bla bla bla...
The hardware is here: Almost each and every PC sold these days comes with a capable 3D accellerator and the performance/price ratio of 3D graphics cards keeps doubling each year.
The network is here: The Internet. (of course)
What is needed are good extensible flexible protocols, open source software and flashy sites that can kick it off. (VRML sucks btw.)
VR goggles is also not as important.
/ johan@tiq.com (can't log in to slashdot from where I am right now)
The picture may not be of the finished product - but the specs are real. If you took the time to read, you would realized that this is the personal web site of a hardware engineer that actually worked on the design of said processor.
http://www.gaming-age.com/news2/march99/030299h.ht m
Check out those demo movies! I'm blown away.
I hope that we can expect a Bleem2 or Connectix Gamestation2 with a Voodoo3 or Riva TNT2. It would be even cooler if it ran on Linux, but I'm not holding my breath.
Sony could quash that by releasing a Playstation2 PCI card, but I don't think they will. Anyone remember the Diamond video cards that had sound and the ability to play Sega Saturn games?
I wonder if Sony will release a special Vaio desktop with Playstation or Playstation2 capability. That seems like it would really boost sales.
Dood - I am sorry to say but I am much more impressed by someone who can actually wrap their brain around something as complex as microprocessor design than someone who posts to slashdot complaining about the salary said engineer makes. Money isn't everything - maybe he actually likes this type of work. Semiconductor design and fabrication is also an extremely expensive process, if I had the skill set - I would be happy to work on such a design team for 200k/year - or whatever it pays.
Too bad. I figured it wasn't a finalized version since I saw a totally different picture in another gaming mag.
Anyway, I sincerely hope Sony doesn't do to the PSX2 what Intel did to the Celeron -- namely deliberately holding it off from its full potential to protect its higher end profits. That would suck.
Sony should take advantage of the fact that the PSX2 could be tremendous, esp. if it came with a DVD player. That could single-handedly get back at Matsushita for those VHS/beta days. I'm never been particularly interested in DVD outside of conventional data storage (replacing CD-Rs), but if the PSX2 came with support I would seriously consider the investment.
I'm sorry but Linux Bleem would suck. Linux just doesn't have anything like DirectX to make it work well.
I want a gcc/binutils/linux kernel port to this box. Then we could stop saying linux has no games... ;-)
Actually, the Playstation 2 titles are all being developed under Linux with Sony's emulator. It's using DVDs, so it may be able to play DVD movies as well.
Regarding its use as a DVD player, it is supposed to use DVD as the storage format, but apparently no decision has been made yet on whether this will be able to double as a full DVD player or not. Apparently Sony doesn't want the PS2 to cannibalize sales of regular DVD players, especially if they manage to bring the PS2 in under $250 or so. The only way it is likely for this to be able to do full DVD would be if they raised the price to closer to $400 to $500 and made it more of a full set-top box sort of thing.
It really stuns me, some of the comments so far. "Hope there will be a connectix gamestation2", "maybe there'll be an emulator", and "maybe they could make a pci card". Did you read the specs? This thing is one super special piece of hardware! It emulates the original playstation in software and even adds perspective corrected textures and antialiasing to old games. The main format is a customized DVD disc but many companies are rumored to use the existing sony playstation cd format to begin with. Also the playstation has 2 main processors; an Emotion Engine and the Graphics Synthesizer. The Emotion Engine is a 128 bit chip dedicated to AI and Physics Modelling. There was a water demo shown which demonstrated the EE's ability to accurately simulate fluids and fluid dynamics, complete with refraction/reflection of light. It's also capable of simulating properties of gases, plasmas, and many types of solids including wood, metal and rubber. The development systems are supposed to consist of high-powered linux boxes and SGI machines. The SGI dev machines are so high powered they've severely cut back the number of developers due to the price factor, i.e. most small developers simply can't afford the SGI machines.
This system is something the world has never seen before, in a compact gaming unit. It's able to use the old memory cards and controllers, as well as play old games WITH IMPROVEMENTS. Hats off to Sony.
The answer, most likely... is no.
This thing may have good gaming hardware now, but it doesn't have a firm upgradability path. With a PC, you can replace a 3D card, the CPU, etc as the machine gets older... you can't exactly rip the 3D chip out of a playstation and replace it.
Consoles were always supposed to replace PC's as gaming platforms... the problem is that games that come out on the PC always seem more... advanced than what comes out on a console.
Hell, it took them over a year to port Quake to a console and it doesn't even have networking support.
The 3D power of a TNT2 is enough to make most developers cry in extacy. PC hardware isn't exactly slow and to tell you the truth, the specs of this thing don't really impress me. It's poly count is fairly high, but remember it's running in a low resolution compared to a PC. You crank a PC running a voodoo 3 to 640x480 or even 320x200 and see what happens.
And when you add a modem, a keyboard, a mouse, a harddrive, etc to a console.. it ceases to be a console and becomes a PC.
--
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
Posted by this_guy:
Don't envy "this guy" too much because he spends I would say less than 10% of his time writing Perl code. And that is only because he has an idea of a certain tool that can help him do the actual job of verifying the chip and there is just no EDA tool vendor which already has a tool in place for that purpose. And how far is EE from CS, really?
Chris.
Make it optional, like the mice on some consoles. Some games really do benefit from a keyboard.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
At least the movies are slashdotted. My downloads are usually at 200k/sec. Now these are coming in at only 50k/sec.
Interesting a few days ago we read a story about how linux hackers, CS majors, people trained in programming were getting dream jobs: tech support and phone answering positions at Linuxcare.
Now while all those hackers are answering phones and consulting what's this guy who majored in EE doing? Writing perl scripts and C programming at a permanent job in the core engineering team of a company slightly more prestigious than Linux phone answering.
Double the image size and apply a logarithmic contrast adjustment on that image. The logo is then very easily seen.
Hmm, according to the book "Game Over" (yes, Brits, I did get it off the cover of Arcade mag...) Nintendo's pre-NES machines had keyboards and such.... commercial disaster.
Who knows, though, maybe the market's changed...
--
.. do you mean to tell me you can't see that WITHOUT enhancement? Yikes, i thought my eyes were bad.
Its too bad that image is so blurry. Looks neat, though. I wonder what that flip-up thing was on the right, it almost looks like an LCD panel.
:)
:)
I think Sony's going to end up with a great system here. Especially if they decide to include the ability to play DVD movies. (Which several places I've read have said they may choose not to, even though all the hardware is there...)
Even better would be if they played DVD video and DVD audio discs, but given Sony's stance on DVD Audio, I'd guess that's not very likely.
I wonder how capable it'll be, given those hardware specs, to function as a client into more immersive universal VR game/interaction spaces. Seems to me the real thing holding back the beginning of "worlds" like described in fiction books like Snow Crash and such is front-end hardware powerful enough and widespread enough to provide the interface.
Seems the world is changing pretty quickly.
I just hope they have Gran Tourismo for it.
This was printed months ago in the UK
mag Official Playstation Magazine and
has since been picked up by others.
They also had a _really_ cool round design
about the size of a cd and about 4 inches
high.
BUT THEY ARE NOT OFFICIAL PICS!
I would really like to get it as a stereo component formfactor, rather than some dopey console. We use CDs now. Why can't we get rackmount game players?
It makes sense particularly for PS2 as it will also be my next DVD player most likely..
What pinched me most, though, was the scene at the end of the second movie -- "Crash leading a bunch of penguins over a snow drift", as it's described. I can't help but wonder -- do you suppose it's a nod to Linux? It was reported not long ago that Sony is using Linux as their development platform for this project...
Ciao... . SNF .
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
Few things.
1: There's only about 20 PS2 devkits around at the moment, first large release should be next month.
2: The PS emulation in exact, no improvements possible (they don't even fix the perspective correction)
3: The Emotion Engine is impressive, but the killer is the GPU. Why? Well, the pixels engines are on the same silicon as the VRAM. It has an effective VRAM bus width of 2560 bits. Think about it.
Nah, he contributed to the EE design, not the PS2. Different products.
The devkits do.
Now _this_ is exciting... 300mhz RISC... Mmm... Mmm... Mmm... I know which machine I'll be buying.
the amazing bc
just another guy doing IT
webnaut, music junkie, holes-in-head
Doesn't the Dreamcast use WinCE? I wouldn't touch
it with a 10 foot pole.
I got a diamond edge from a friend (thanx gg :) hoping that it would play Saturn games. However, it only plays sega pc games written for the card w/ the Saturn controllers -- it came with a special i/o device to hook the Saturn controllers to your PC. It is kinda nice tho to use the saturn controllers for gamepads in games.
-- DrH
--DrH, the Sandwich with the Ph.D.
I don't have the URL off hand, but it's from of his columns about 2 weeks back. He claims to have stumbled into a PS2 testing thing while in Japan, and was blown away. Says this will make PC's a joke (or something like that). Don't want to put words in his mouth...my memory ain't too good after couple weeks. ;)
This is what Next Generation said about the specs:
h tml
:-) A modem or other internet connection. An OS to manage all this. What do we have? A computer, only it uses TV instead of a monitor (bleech). If this becomes a hit (and it looks like it), the technology will spread, and the power of the machine will be harnessed to do other things, either top down by Sony or bottom up by hackers. This would then become the new PC.
:-)
**********************************************
"Remember the Jaguar?" one developer opened our interview. "It could reportedly do a billion pixels. That was possible if there was no software and all processors were dedicated to pushing pixels. It's the same thing here."
Sony's Phil Harrison has stated that the Next Generation PlayStation has a fill rate of 2.6 Gigapixels. (That's 2.6 times the Jaguar, for those keeping track at home.)
Several other developers had the same doubts about the machine's spectacularly high polygon numbers. One PC and Console developer joked "It's the 3dfx rope-a-dope. They convince you that the only important benchmark in the universe is framerate. nVidia has better image quality? So what! It's all about the framerate. Sony knew they could destroy Sega on polygon count and Floating Point and that's what they did. Ease of development, quality of games...none of those things are here. It's all about the polygons."
However, some developers we spoke to simply don't believe Sony's polygon numbers. "They're there to make you report on them," one developer admonished. "They're 'best case' scenarios achieved by adding every processor's raw output capacity. They don't take into account bus speed, communication between processors, or any effects."
One developer we asked about the polygon count Sony is quoting, 66 million polygons transformed by the CPU and 75 million drawn by the graphics engine, took a much kinder view. "They're very high and best-case, but everyone's numbers at hardware announcements are high. The 20 million number is more realistic [Phil Harrison has said the machine's sustainable drawing figure is 20 million polygons per second with all effects], and that's an incredible number. I believe they can do that and I can't wait."
***********************************************
http://www.next-generation.com/jsmid/news/5998.
Some of my friends who are console freaks have said that this will kill the computer as an entertainment platform, and the easy to use console will replace it, but I have my doubts. The P2 looks sweet now, but look at all the things they will add to it. They have said that they are going to have Firewire, USB, and more. Sony's own Everquest is said to be one of the first games to be available when it is released. If they are going to play Everquest, they need a keyboard. A mouse (probably). A harddrive to save all the patches.
Question is, will we hate Sony as much as we hate Microsoft?
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
Look at the current spec required to emulate the PSX at full speed - a 300Mhx PII. The CPU that it emulates runs only at around 33Mhz (Or was it 37? - can't remember) To even get equal to the power ot the PSX2 CPU, you'd have to be running a PIII at well over 1 Gigahertz. You're gonna need another order of magnitude to emulate it... Sure, when it comes out some PC's may be able to match it, but it'll still be a few years before it becomes emulatable.
Well, I didn't say a 'low end pc', I said a 'low end PII'...
;-)
The graphics subsystem on the Dreamcast is very nice (if a little quirky) probably at least Voodoo II speed, but it is let down a little bit by the processor, which is only about as fast as a PII 233. We tended to find that we were limited by the processor most of the time, rather than the graphics card.
Actually, the one *really* nice thing that the Dreamcast has is on-the-fly texture decompression - it's got 8Mb of Framebuffer/Texture space, but you can compress the texures and use them without any speed hit, which allows you to have a whole load of really big textures.
Sorry, I don't have an URL - all of these comments come from actually programming the thing...
It'll be quite a long time before before any PCs are capable of running any form of Playstation 2- - it's CPU (even at 300Mhz) beats the crap out of a PIII running at 500Mhz due to the two extra sets of floating point processors. The graphics ability is phenomenal as well, much more powerful than any of the PC cards out there at the moment. I saw the thing running when I was at GDC, and it's quite incredible.
Oh, and it is backwards compatible with the Playstation - it uses the same chip that the PSX uses for it's main CPU for handling it's I/O subsystem...
cheers,
Tim
The Sega Dreamcast has NOWHERE NEAR the power that the Playstation II has. I've just finished working on a Dreamcast game, and it's a nice system, but it has pretty much the power of a low-end PII (266Mhzish) with a good 3d graphics card. The PSX II is much more powerful than current Desktop PCs.
However, The Dreamcast will have been out for a year by the time the PSX will probably come out, so until then Sega still retain the crown for the most powerful games console.
What's wrong with WinCE in a game console? (Other than the words "Microsoft" and "Windows" that is.)
Seems to me you could have a number of interesting convergance applications, beyond web browsing. Kind of like the Atari 400 or Commodore 64 -- primarily game machines, but you could also balance your budget or whatever.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Every attempt at a combination Game console/Computer has not been that successful. Think Coleco Adam, Atari XE, Amiga CD, Sega Saturn plus Internet add on, Pippen, etc.
That's not to say it's a bad idea. It's just hard to design a game console (which has a shelf life of 2-5 years) that can keep up with PCs that double in speed every 18 months.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Re: The DVD capability. This is a tough call. I think Sony could solve the problem easily though. It wouldn't be too tough for them to put in a DVD copy protection into the system and allow studios to make DVD movies "Playstation 2 Ready" by adding a few special sectors on the DVD. Sony has learned from the mistakes in the MODchip and such things, so I am sure it would be a better solution.
Anyway, Sony would charge studios that wanted their DVDs playable on the PSX2. That way, Sony still makes money by keeping their boxes less expensive. I'm guessing studios would love their DVDs to be PSX2 playable because of the sheer numbers that are likely to buy. PSX is more appealing to Joe Six Pack than a DVD only player and would drive rentals as well as purchases.
Remy
http://www.mklinux.org
test
Apparently the owner of the page has been contributing to the PS2, so I don't think he would have included the picture unless it was reasonably similar to the real thing (to the best of his knowledge).
-- John Truong
Those specs are impressive. Maybe I'll just buy a PSX2 instead of a DVD player. Look at those polygon fill rates and drool. As well, this thing is using .18 micron technology, which should keep it fast/cool/stable.
The one thing is that they specify the VDD voltage as 1.8V. That's quite low for a chip voltage (although you can see its effect on the power consumption). This processor must have been designed by some top-notch engineers. With a RISC core and a clock of 300 MHz, I don't think any good emulators will be coming out any time soon (without requiring additional hardware for your PC).
æeee!
I totally agree. N64 to me has way better graphics and game play than PSX, but PSX had it on raw storage, a head start on game releases, and better dev tools. DC's got better graphics, equal if not better storage, and equal if not better gameplay. Unless N64 gets a CD -real- quick, it's dead (and Nintendo has been about to release a CD system for HOW long?).
Have you all seen the Sega Dreamcast yet? That thing is SICK! I'm a hardcore N64 believer but the DC has got as good if not better graphics at a higher resolution. It should be interesting to see how these to compete.
it will have firewire and some other ports
for future expandability (I imagine it will
something like firewire being immediately
accessible and the rest used for future expansions
like N64s expansion slot which only recently
had a card released for it.)
-Z
What I want to know is being that DVD is so huge, much larger than a typical PS CDs used now, will load times still take forever or will the machine load quickly?
I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going.
Last I recall, Sony was still on the fence about whether to add DVD-Video support or not. It's a given that the games will be on DVD discs, but Sony had concerns that movie playback might cut into sales of their DVD-Video players.
It would be an extremely fast rc5 cruncher, especially because of all the vector units. It should be possible to calculate 8 keys in parallel. I've been looking at N64 (Reality Signal Processor (RSP)) for a long time and they have a Vector Shift Left and a Vector Shift Right. The only issue is communication, I dont see an easy way to push blocks into the n64 and get results out. You could embed blocks into the program before you send it to the N64, but it would require too much user intervention.
What I've heard is that there won't be any out-of-the-box DVD movie support, but Sony may release an add-on later. A pity, because that was one of the main reasong I would have bought a PS2 on day one.
Weblogging Considered Harmful:
Seems to me that if they're to be taken seriously, the new Amigas should have at least this level of graphics performance.
Legacy hardware/software addict. Midnight hacker, 1960. Codepage 819 in DOS: Total Latin-1 compatibility (no boxes/lines
In the time in-between the PSX2 and PSX3, lots of peripherals can be hooked up via those PC-Card, Firewire, and USB connectors. That's pretty neat.
Sony is going to be selling an incredibly powerful box for an incredibly low price. PC makers should be _very_ afraid.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
DVD movies are cool, but still not that widespread. People are renting VHS movies in droves. The whole point is, why buy a DVD player when you can just rent VHS movies (the quality's not really that bad) or order them pay-per-view on your digital cable/sattelite system?
But then enter the PS2. If it comes in at a low enough price point (not $400) then it will sell at remarkable levels. All of these households will suddenly be able to watch DVD movies, not on a 17" computer screen, but on their big TVs while kicking back on their couches. I suspect a video game console that happened to play these movies would create a great demand for more discs and more titles. All of the sudden, DVD would be much more viable as a lets-go-out-and-rent-a-movie format.
I believe that sales of traditional DVD movie players would increase due to the sudden boost in the format.
Just my two cents, though. PS, with such a powerful processor, would it be viable for the PS2 to do software movie decoding? Is that likely how it would be done?
I can't help noticing that on the spec page it says "150 million pixels". Doesn't that mean 150 Mpixels fillrate? The Voodoo3 3500 has 366 Mpixels fillrate, so it seems like it would squash the PSX2 in that department, if I'm reading this right. Of course the PSX2 doesn't need much fillrate because it's running at TV-res and V2 is running at 1024x768 and beyond.
I read a post up there where somebody was saying the PSX2 has 2.6 Gpixel fill rate, so what the hell is this "150 million pixels" of "image processing"??
From what I understand from the Microsoft website, WinCE will be used for those games requiring DirectX for either graphics or network play. Sega Rally 2 is an example where WinCE is being used. The Developers for WinCE did a pretty good job considering they were able to shrink the whole WinCE package to less than 1MB, IIRC. Here's a link to the core components of the WinCE package on Dreamcast.
To answer the question about decoding DVD movies in software...
As per subject; We are told it is has hardware MPEG2 decoding capability (for streamed texture decompression on the fly - drool).
While this, along with the DVD media, allows it theoretically to do DVD movies, Sony would have to put a bit more hardware interfacing on, and then have to worry about a minimal couch-potato-suitable UI for the player, as well.
One benefit of dedicated units is that people *like* their remotes. A game controller's not quite the same
I can imagine Sony, or some 3rd party, will do an add-on at some point, but I think the drive to lower their initial price point, along with a desire not to trample all over their DVD player sales will leave it out of the base unit. IMHO, completely, of course. The economics of a box like this one are strange to say the least.
(rambling off-topic)
What gets me is that Sony, along with Toshiba, are plumping down the cash for large-scale
"Right, we've designed it. Let's drop a few billion into factories to make it with."
Sheesh.
Wyrd, dude.
I've seen this image elsewhere too. I think it was supposed to be the next 3do or something. It's a concept drawing. Not the real thing.
--
InstantCool
My info about this subject is about half a year out of date, but as I understand it, WinCE is only one of about two or three different OSes a Dreamcast game can run on. (The others, I think, are Sega proprietary OSes.)
I have absolutely no idea what proportion of Dreamcast games use WinCE as opposed to the other ones.
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Do I look like I speak for my employer?
Still, I can't see it being software emulation. That would mean that you'd have to have a separate CD with an emulator on it to load into the PSX 2 and then put your original PSX1 disc in and play. And of course this isn't how it works. You just pop in your old PS disc and it works like the PS 1 does. Thus, unless there is some disk drive in the PS2 with the emulation software on it (which there isn't), all of the calcs must be done in the hardware on the new system.
Did you read the specs? This thing is one super special piece of hardware! It emulates the original playstation in software and even adds perspective corrected textures and antialiasing to old games
Did you read the specs? First of all it does not emulate the original PSX in software. It has a separate I/O controller on board to do it in hardware. Also, the old PSX 1 games will not be enhanced in any way. They'll play like they do now on the new system. They're shooting for 100% compatability, not 110% or 95%.
I remember reading that this time around the native discs will be DVD format, and there was talk it would play movie DVDs too.
In a year and a half, the cheap PCs should be running at over the speed of a PIII at 1GHz. High-end ones should run twice to 4X as fast. We may not be running single-processor systems or
I remember when they were saying that the N64 would never be emulated, using a simple extrapolation from how slow the Super Nintendo emulation was at the time. Emulation techniques improved and now we have N64 emulators. You are not going to need an extra order of magnitude to emulate.
Of course, it will take a few months to a year for emulator-writers to do their stuff. I'm not expecting an emulator the moment the Ps2 is released. But those specs aren't ambitious enough for the timeframe. The PSX blew everyone away at the time of its release because nobody was really doing 3d accelerator cards for PCs; now PC hardware makers are unashamed when they make toys for gamers, and they don't take two years between hype and release.
If the Ps2 was released now, it would eat the market alive, at its scheduled release date it'll still probably sell well, but computer gamers won't be drooling over it and turning green in envy (except, perhaps, over the hit to their wallets; Ps2 will still probably be the best hardware for the buck).
I hardly think the PC industry will be staying put for the next year and a half!
I bet by the time the Ps2 comes out, it'll barely be keeping up to the cheapo boxes (it had better be as cheap as the PSX!). The high-enders should be able to keep up even while emulating.
Has anyone noticed the similarities between the Sony chip and the G4 with Altivec? Maybe the next generation of SMP Macs will be able to emulate it.
I showed this to a friend in the industry and the picture is apparently a fake which has been floating around for a while?
Comments?
6.2 gigaflops....
Of course that's probably peak theoretical, not real world peformance which would be about half that, but still! This thing has numbers that would hang with a supercomputer a few years ago.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
[Sudden urge to nit-pick this thread.]
>One I/O chip doesn't make a 32bit PSX my friend.
Actually, it does. The PS2's I/O chip is the PSX _core_, not the I/O chip (at least, it was a few weeks ago). When Playstation games are run it just flips over to I/O processor.
And of course the rendering is done by the new hardware--they aren't going to drop the PSX graphics system in their too--but since the old core is still handling geometry (and AI, and physics, etc) I don't think it'll make much of a difference.
Nit-picking:
"It emulates the original playstation in software and even adds perspective corrected textures and antialiasing to old games."
Nope, it runs PSX games on the PSX hardware, otherwise known as the PS2 I/O controller.
"Also the playstation has 2 main processors; an Emotion Engine and the Graphics Synthesizer. The Emotion Engine is a 128 bit chip dedicated to AI and Physics Modelling."
It only has a single, very special, processor: the Emotion Engine, and it isn't optimized for AI (would that even be possible?) The EE has two vector units, one for geometry, the other for physics models. AI and whatever else is left is handled by EE's core and the standard FP unit.
As for the development systems (sorry, too lazy to quote), I hadn't heard anything about SGI's being involved. It would make more sense to just use the Emotion Engine for graphics development, as you can do with PSX. (Hint: you aren't doing much pre-rendering, so what would the SGI's be used for?)
And no, it won't improve older games.
[Now for my own unfounded rumor: Sony is supposedly thinking of using the Emotion Engine in things other than the PS2, like workstations.]
Ummm.. DVD is considerably better off 2 1/2 years into its life than VHS was after the same amount of time. DVD *is* catching on very quickly (10s, if not 100s of thousands of players sold monthly). However, for most people, one DVD player is "good enough." I had a DVD-ROM on my computer, and I thought it was quite awesome... then my parents got a low-end (Toshiba 2008) stand-alone, and I was blown away by the improvement in quality. I quickly got the Toshiba A110 to replace my PC's player, and the quality is outstanding. Forget 19-21" hi-res monitors, DVD looks much better on large TVs (DVD on a 32" Wega XBR is incredible).
The moral of all this is that if Sony adds DVD to the PS-Y, they will cannibalize their entry-level DVD player sales, which is currently the bulk of the market (there are far more A110s, 2109s, and 530s on the market than Theta DaViDs), and royally hurt profits. A future add-on might make sense; however, with DVD doing very well on its own, Sony would be foolish to make it a DVD player.
Will the Playstation 2 have an ethernet port?
You're abslolutely right. I think the mock-up was done by a british artist before the PSX2 was even announced. Sony has never shown any case design for their next box. Check
www.next-generation.com
This picture is a fake. It was released by an IGN publication last year as an "artists conception". Suprisingly, the pic was first released during a short drought of console industry news....hmmmm.
= 602
For more PS2 information and demo movies go here: http://gamefan.com/newhotinfo/hotinfo.asp?storyid
I would be grateful if anyone could give an educated opinion as to whether the highly impressive mpegs at the URL above are possible in real-time on the hardware described.
Have you tried recent builds of Wine? It can play many games, including Quake 2 and StarCraft, extraordinarily well. Eventch, Windows will be COMPLETELY unnecessary, especially considering what a crufty technology DirectX is.
Emulators? Fuggeddaboutit. No Wintel hardware is going to run like that kind of machine. I'm sorry. Maybe when Alpha systems proliferate Bleem will get its butt in gear and do a Linux release :)
Sorry, you can't create a chip like that in your garage. CPU design and manufacture is one of those things that REQUIRES the kind of big money that corporate megaliths have to throw around. Maybe that'll change in the future, and we'll have whiz-kid hardware hackers visiting their local IBM plant with their latest designs. Open source chips. Sounds cool. But not in this century. :)
Well, if Sony is to be believed, then the PSX2 is as fast as a supercomputer, and closer to AI-complete than any other machine on the planet. (The reason for the "emotion Engine" name is so-called "emotion synthesis" technology which, according to SCE's marketing dept., is what it sounds like.) It will be very difficult to separate reality from hype.
Remember the Sega Genesis? It was the first widespread, fully 16-bit system. When the technically superior SNES came out to compete with it, Sega started an ad campaign to pump up its system, claiming it had something nonexistent called "Blast Processing". The ads showed a Formula 1 racer with a Genesis strapped to the back drag-racing a broken down milk truck with a SNES strapped to the back. They were obviously trying to get you to believe that the Genesis was much, much faster than the SNES even though they were comparable speed-wise and the SNES had better graphics and sound.
This is typical of console companies. Pump up the system and try to get the game kiddiez, who can rattle off pixel and polygon counts but don't know that much about the internals of the technology involved, to think it can do more than it actually can. Hopefully some Japanese hackers will try hacking some demos or something on this hardware, to find out what it ACTUALLY can do. Still, I can hardly wait to see it.
Well, if the thing's as fast as a supercomputer like Sony keeps saying, why the hell not?
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There are no facts, only opinions
Now all we need is Sony to put a modem on it,
and a TCP/IP stack. Then distributed.net to
port an RC5 client on it and we're laughing.
Particularly if they sell it for as much
as a playstation.