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High-end Computer or Game Machine?
ghibli writes "A New York Times article on the Sony PlayStation II describes it as a high-tech computer that will rival Wintel PCs. It's virtual reality CPU, dubbed the "Emotion Engine", claims to be more powerful (and expensive) than anything on the market. "
Yes, it's true. This product will make computers unnecessary, Wintel, Linux, whatever. For every Slashdot person that this inevitability upsets, there will be thousands of people who will discover that this product and their net connection will allow them to do everything and more that they want computers to do for them. If Sony can sell hundreds of thousands of Playstations a week, which is what they consistently do, then they can sell an even higher number of Playstation 2's every week.
Finally, freedom from having to deal with any OS whatsoever, and from computer hardware, and from all the attitudes, insecurities, rants, flames, smugness and personalities. I want one in every room.
Good speed!? A $300 playstation that rivals a $4k Wintel PC? I would say that's a good deal. ;-)
Is there any technical info about the emotion engine architecture anywhere?
At some point the console companies will no longer be able to compete in the hardware market with the PC because the PC market moves faster and processors in general have increasingly short lifespans.
So unless console companies are willing to roll out a new platform every year, they are going to find themselves up against faster PC's at the same price point as their toys.
Funny you should mention that...
I too hate the registration nazis, so I logged in as f*ckyou, password f*ckyou, etc....
The reply I got was...
"Your login name is taken. We suggest f*ckyou264."
We are not alone!
Hm, maybe. But it still has a long way to go.. it needs a real os (resembling a certain free Unix, maybe?), a free compiler and released specs.
I find it sorta funny that you're complaining about it being an "expensive toy"... isn't the gaming driving the PC hardware industry as we speak? There's a reason everybody and his dog uses unreal as a benchmark. :D Besides, console games and computer games are fundamentally different anyway (coming from different aims, backgrounds, main countries of development, controller schemes, etc.). There's room for both.
(As for the PSX2, if it comes out at $400 it doesn't matter HOW nice it looks, the parents are gonna get junior a puppy or a Dreamcast instead.)
At $500-$700 it comes in equating to the mid level AMD chip based and Celery machines. They too can add in DVD support and run thousands of game titles. Best of all, they're much easier to pirate PC games than Playstation games these days. :-)
personally think it will fail miserably as a game machine if they charge more than $200 for it.
Sony released the original PSX at $300 and it seems to be doing pretty well...
I'll be able to buy a Cel500 and Voodoo3 for that. Which actually puts them on about the same footing, graphics wise.
From the specs I read on the PSX2's graphics chips, those won't even get you close to the same graphics performance. Let's just hope they can live up to the hype.
I think the last one you're referring to is CD-i. It sucked even worse because all of the games were supposed to be "educational", and mostly looked like cheap MacroMedia flicks. Probably the most game-like game for it was Tetris, all of the others were those stupid "we know this is really just a MacroMedia semi-interactive movie, but we want you to think it's a whole lot of fun and worth plenty-o-money" things.
But for the same price I can buy a Celeron 366 system today. If you strip out the floppy drive and hard drive it becomes even cheaper. The Playstation 2 is over a year away. How much are prices going to drop and performance improve on Wintel machines in the meantime?
It's kinda amazing to see people who so regularly complain about Microsoft vaporware and FUD drool like idiots over Sony vaporware and FUD.
No, Ellison is still crazy.
Really? Exactly how many PC games rival street arcade game's level of graphic? Or should I ask it this way? If PC games are so good, why aren't the arcade stores close? According to your law, the huge amound of idiots is exactly the reason why psx2 (or iMac) will take off.
....Don't even think about any serious word processing.....
Give me a normal person you know who needs "serious word processing" at home. I can bet you a lot of money that half of the people who use Word don't know how to put "page number" on their footer and 90% people don't know the concept of "Macro."
I'd much rather spend $200 on a console than $3,000 on a PC.
Who the spends $3,000 to get a high-end gaming platform? I just bought a new one for around $500. I can play every game on the market in full 1024x768 32bit color hardware accelerated glory. And high end PC platforms are only going to get cheaper in the next year and a half before the Playstation 2 comes out.
Where consoles do have PCs beat is the ease of use. I know I'm getting really damn tired of games crashing and being told by clueless tech support people to make sure I have the latest drivers (which I do). Not that having the latest drivers fixes anything. It's a refreshing change to sit down a Playstation, pop in Tenchu and just have it work. Even if Thief was a much better game....
Yeah.
But he may have been right....
Create a phony user name with a phony address and create chained email accounts through several anonymous remailers in several different countries to obfuscate your true location. (i.e. use anonymized email address from remailer1 as the 'real' email address at remailer2, repeat several times and you now have a way for others to email you while being virtually impossible to track down.) Oh, and use a hotmail or yahoo acct as your final email address. Then register away with as many sites as you wish! And there's no need to worry, outright lying about your identity to a private company is in no way illegal.
Performance: IBM's POWER microprocessors have that kind of FPU speed now.
Competition: Why do you believe that idiot who misquoted the IR2's performance? If the PlayStation 2 gets 20k triangles/second, I'd say the IR2 is about 10x as fast as it.
I have a friend who got a PII 400 w/ a Voodo 2 :-O
two years ago.
$500 does not buy you a high-end gaming platform. It barely buys you a monitor, empty case, and keyboard.
its better than POS2
It's not a question of using all of Word's bloatware features, it's a question of being able to see more than three lines of what you're typing. I will reiterate the original point that TV resolution *really* *really* *sucks*. There is no way the graphics can look as good as Unreal or Quake 3, there are just not enough scan lines. I have a near top-of-the-line 35" TV but DVD's still look much better on my PowerBook. The concept of using a TV-based display for anything other than games is ridiculous until HDTV is within reach of mere mortals, which doesn't look like anytime soon.
Something that costs as much to develop as this
hardware is going to try very hard to find its
proper market. If it is too expensive for a
pure game machine, and if it needs a high-res
monitor and the computers have the good monitors,
then we can expect that Sony will find a way
to get it into desktop computers, most likely those made by others. Fifty+ percent of households
(mostly the 50+% that every marketing guy targets) already have committed to suppporting a computer -- with a monitor attached. If that hardware is
what it takes to make the PSX2 a winner, they
should find a way to use it. Any way to make the PSX2 a co-processor in a machine made by Apple, IBM, Intel, etc?
The alternative is for Sony to buy or be the next
Apple.
I welcome the next generation Sony game console, and all others like it that will come afterwards. Today I have a Sony Playstation (with mod chip, of course!), Nintendo 64, and a home network running at 100mbps with six PC's that allow multiplayer gaming with the world on the Internet, and I'm here to tell you, it sucks.
Forget about gaming today. It sucks. Gaming 2 years from now you can't even comprehend. Life as you know it today will NOT be the life you'll be living in 2 years.
Today the best gaming out there requires a $2000 computer and an Internet connection that most people can't even afford (a very small minority today have broadband access in the homes via DSL or Cable). Analog 56k V.90 modems are PATHETIC, and no game today performs well using a modem (how many times have YOU complained about lag?).
All of this is going to change, thank GOD!
This next Sony will arrive on the market at about the same time most of the public will finally have access to broadband Internet in the home (unlike today where only a few can really enjoy it). When the MAJORITY of the market has broadband 'net everything you do on the Internet will change.
Sony has positioned itself perfectly to exploit this change, and become a catalyst to accelerate the change.
Believe me, the Sony PS2 (it WILL be named something else) is going to support Internet gaming with graphics and sound that'll blow you away, and some of the better games will even look like real video. But the best part is that you'll be able to play with all your friends from school and around the WORLD because of the broadband 'net access we'll all have.
Single-player games are history. Multi-player games with boundaries are history. Games that have no boundaries and allow you to *LIVE* a virtual life are just around the corner, and the next Sony and several other developments are coming soon to enable all of this, but they all depend upon and REQUIRE bigger, better, faster, Internet access.
Gaming today is miserable... To begin with, it's expensive (my computer gaming "hobby" probably costs more than most drug addict's cocaine habbits) and it's FAR from user-friendly, mass-market exploiting. Computers are terribly complex and totally alien to the mass public.
No PC is going to change gaming in any revolutionary way within the next couple of years like the Sony PS2 has the potential too.
PC's are just too complex for most people, and we aren't doing much to fix it. User interfaces aren't much better than they were 5 years ago! Installing software is as pathetic a task as it was 5 years ago, and it's not getting any better anytime soon. Sh*t, on one side I've got to download files from the net, uncompress them, compile them, discover I need to download other files from the net due to dependincies, blah blah blah, and most of YOU scream "this is the best OS" while on the other hand I've got to download files, uncompress them, then run a setup app which installs buggy conflicting versions of different files into my OS's system directory that in turn causes my PC to crash - an even worse outcome.
How hard is it to rent a title from Blockbuster, bring it home, and pop it into the Sony? How many 5 year olds do you know that play games on Linux or Windows, and how far can they go without your help, compared to Sony or Nintendo?
Please.
We haven't done much to improve PC gaming since the first PC games were written! Sure, they look better, but they haven't gotten any easier for the mass public to enjoy. Sony has the ticket to ride here, and they're going to enjoy a huge success with it. I'm betting Nintendo is in for more market-share loss.
Oh, and before I forget, with USB, Firewire, DVD, PC Card, and Internet capabilities, this next generation Sony will have NO TROUBLE AT ALL doing 90% of what the mass public need in terms of computing. If that crappy WebTV can make some sales, believe me, Sony is going to sell millions of units.
Also, forget about price! Do any of you remember how much the current Sony Playstation cost when it was first released? Original price tags were about $300, and today I see them in the paper for $129 and even as low as $99. The Sony PS2 will probably roll out between $300-$400, but within a year it'll be down to $199, then later in its lifecycle you'll see it $129 and $99 again...
PC's will also be available for $400 when the Sony PS2 is out, but a $400 PC at that time won't do anything well (it'll do more than a Sony, but all of it will suck), unlike the Sony which will do a few things like gaming REALLY WELL.
I can't believe you even DARE to compare a PC to a game console in terms of entertainment for the masses... Linux and Windows both SUCK in terms of gaming primarily due to complexity, except for those of us (the minority) who can make it work. It'll be a few more years before real gaming on the PC blows the game consoles out of the market.
I'm done ranting...
voodoo 2s weren't available two years ago. hell they didn't come out until Q1 1998. if i'm wrong i'm sure i'll be flamed.
When it hits the shelves it will probably retail for around US$250-300.
Game consoles never sell at their break-even point when first launched, but as production scales up they can make a little money on the hardware.
Primarily the money comes through the control of the software. Every product to run on the system will pay Sony for the right. It's a lot at first, but usually they scale it back after a few years.
I have lost track of all the useless psx2 articles /. I knew /. was pro-linux, I just wish it weren't
on
so pro playstation.
Anyway, I keep track of the latest game news and as
far as I know there hasn't been any significant
news about psx2 in months. If you are going to over
hype a game machine at least wait until we have some
real info.
http://www.macnn.com/
I was looking for Firewire components and read the Wednesday, May 5th late afternoon edition. VST and Mactell just announced hard drives..
You are talking about a 300 square mm chip with multiple coprocessors. It is specifically designed to do only a few things, and do them extremely well. For all practical purposes it is a large DSP farm being run by a 300 Mhz MIPS chip. It will not be extremely useful for anything except the PS2 because it is only designed to do a few things. Beyond that it will be expensive (CPUs generally run about $1 per square mm, right) and it will not be incredibly fast when you compare it with the chips it will be competing with. Keep in mind it won't even be available for two years. For instance a Dual Core Max CPU (PPC here folks, don't know the x86 equivalent) will probably run at about a Ghz and will have dual 2/1/1 setups which should be competitive with the EE even in things the EE is taylored for. In everything else it will really only be facing a MIPS 300 mhz with a lot of coprocessors that can't do much. It would be bloodbath.
Keep in mind that consoles are usually extremely fast at games because the hardware designers know exactly what they are going to need, and the game designers know exactly what they have. As soon as you allow upgradeablilty you might as well just buy a computer because all these advantages are lost. Also as soon as the thing tries to do more than about one or two things it becomes pathetically weak because it wasn't set up to handle those things. For instance a PS2 will never be a match for a PC in any sort of CAD or modeling because it doesn't have much ram. The lack of a good HD also hurts. I virtually anything requiring actual performance except games the PS2 will get smoked by even the cheapest computer.
sorry guys.
Iwadasn@aol.com
AFAIK It will take at least 5 YEARS from now to get 60% of the USA to broadband so we would be looking at the PSX3 or PSX4 before what you are talking about can happen. Also all I have read about it's capabilities is that it can decode mp2 vido (not play dvd, though they could add that I guess, backward compatability with original PSX, and it has some impressive stats. I havent seen anything oficial about any brodband conection or use as anything but a pure game machine.
Couldn't have said it better myself
Iwadasn@aol.com
Will the graphics chip be available to board manufacturers as well? I want one of those in my PowerMac G4.
On a quick side note: Square hasn't given up on 2D quite yet. Take a look at Seiken Densetsu 4 / Legend of Mana sometime. It's still 2d, and frankly it looks better than almost all of the games I've seen for the PSX so far.
/may/ go for in the long run but only for Squaresoft games. And only if PC versions don't exist. Problem with Square these days is that I play the games to have fun. To *play* them. Square seems to be intent on having story inversely proportional to gameplay. Soon enough anyone with an IQ under 130 will have their head implode from the story, but you can beat the game by hardly touching the controller. ;) Honestly, the best games they've made were FFs three through five, SD3, and CT(to a lesser extent.). Everything else was either boring or simply lacked gameplay. Seven most notably. Loved the story, game was dull and easy.
;)
And also: I am not going to get a PSX2. I always wait at least four years before getting a console, to see if the games are worth it. PSX2 I
The problem with the PSX2 is that while it has the drool potential on graphics, no game designers really know how to use 3d effectively, in a matter where 3d really *adds* something other than flashy graphics. All of the 3d consoles really look like crap to me.
Saturn looked pretty neat but I could never get my hands on one nor the games.(I could have SWORN I saw Silpheed for that.. I have the ol' 87/88 version of that for the PC and loved it.) And when I did see one I happened to lack cashola.
Oh well. End ramble.
> But 'on the market' won't be (as some reports
> suggest) until early/mid 2000. K7, PIIIs will
> be near a GHz by then, and with SMP, they're
> not exactly being left in the dust.
For most of the imaginable home/office applications (excluding 3D games), processor speed is not an issue. Bulky, overblown, non-modular, constantly 'upgrading' office software is.
don't forget that the PSX2 can handle up to 1600x1200 and can output in VESA format (ie. it can dump out to a computer monitor if you want)...
Wow, I bet that machine runs really well without any memory! ;-) And isn't it hard just having all the parts sitting in a pile on your desk without a case?
Slightly more seriously, though, I'd like to know where you find prices like that. Pricewatch? 3.2 giggers just DO NOT go for $85 around here ("around here" being Phoenix, Arizona), ditto for a mobo like that AND for the processor, and I'd like to know where you got a decent keyboard _and_ mouse for $5; I picked up a keyboard a while back for $2.99, and boy does it feel worth every cent of it, but I haven't seen any mouses for $2...
ps No modem or NIC or joystick?
Jeez, I've been forgetting to post "Whoa, cool Beowulf cluster!" trolls for weeks now! Thanks for reminding me!
Where are you going to find a PCMCIA ethernet connection, an EXTERNAL firewire hard diskt, andusb keyboard and mouse for $400?
Give me one URL with an EXTERNAL firewire hard disk for under $300 and I will eat this web page!
I think Kutaragi-san's story could make for a good anime...
...as long as it doesn't turn into "How Sony failed to learn from Philips' CD-I and Commodore's CDTV".
I welcome this. Macs make great computers for the general public because the OS works well with the hardware, its standard in there, no suprises.
If I could buy software for my "machine", and be perfectly assured it WILL work without any problems, like a cart for a SNES, then that would make me ONE HAPPY CUSTOMER.
Yadda
www.vsttech.com
:)
300 bucks for 2 gigs
400 for 4
and 500 for 6
3000+40 bucks Linksys ethnernet card = 60 dollars for keyb = mouse
the guy was right
Rob, someone's gonna eat your web page
Does anybody remember the Sega Netlink? A small, hard to use keyboard attached to a game system (not a computer, a GAME SYSTEM) which uses a screwed up, proprietary web browser and email system. There was only 1 modem, and it was not current technology. I was on a mailing list where some people had those things. The software DOES NOT comply with the internet standards for email.
The iMac sold on marketing alone. Anyone with even the slightest bit of technical knowledge, looking at the tech specs, would see the iMac for what it is: A marketing ploy for children and yuppies.
OK, you have a PSX2, which is a box with a CPU and RAM. Add a keyboard, maybe a mouse. Then, add USB or firewire data storage devices. Next, add some application software. What do you get?
A COMPUTER!!!
Now, let's see what kind of deal you got for you new computer:
$250-300 CPU and RAM (300Mhz with 32MB RAM)
- 1 AMD K6-2 400Mhz CPU and 64MB RAM - about same price.
I can buy a better computer for the same price. What if I want to upgrade my processor or memory? On a computer, just buy the parts and install them. On a console system, you have to buy a whole new system, when/if Sony decides to make one (which will be in 2 years or more).
Console systems have a much longer generation then computers. A generation for computers is @12-18 months and is constantly shrinking. A generation for console systems has not shunk to even close to that level.
In closing, my main point is this:
A computer is a computer.
A game console is a game console.
These are, have been, and will always be, two different products with two different markets.
sony only wants 'the right kind' of people
programming for these things. for the playstation 1, you could get a cute
little developer kit named 'yaroze' for a few thousand bucks, but it was basically illegal to put your programs
out where someone could use them on an unmodified normal playstation.
now imagine a PC to which there was no documentation available. imagine that it was illegal to
make programs for it without paying the mfg 5000$. this would be a PC without shareware, let alone freeware. no pkzip,
no telix, no screensavers, no ICQ, no nothing.
for the lack of openness alone, game consoles will never compete
with PCs.
You may not realize the difference between theoretical performance and "Real-World" performance.
I have a K6-3/400. It has a peak performance of
400M cycles at 4 single precision FP operations per cycle thus giving 1.6 GFLOPS. If I run it at
450MHz, I would get 1.8 GFLOPS (peak).
On the EE portion it does 19 macs and 1 divide per 7 cycles on 2 pipelines running at 300 cycles per
second. Thats 1.7 GFLOPS (peak).
Thus my current CPU out runs an "EE" which will not be out for 12-18 months.
If we use the same calculations for the Voodoo 3 3000 (available), 7 million triangles per second times 3 points per triangle times 30 FLOPS per point (17 mults + 12 adds + divide) equals another
0.63 GFLOPS.
Now add the power of the SB Live sound card, 1.0 GFLOPS (peak), you get 3.43 GFLOPS RIGHT NOW!!!
The Voodoo 3 3000 does 333 MTexels at 2 textured pixels per Mtexel equals 0.67 Billion Texels per second. Thats 55% of the 1.2 Billion Texels quoted for the GS.
If we assume the following for a general games machine in 2nd half 2000, K7-1000GHz, Voodoo 5 (4 x Voodoo 3 3000), and SB Live 3 (4 x SB Live), we get 1000GHz * 3 * 4 SPFLOP per cycle equals 12 GFLOPS plus 4 * 0.67 GFLOPS or 2.67 GFLOPS plus
4 * 1.0 GFLOPS or 4 GFLOPS, we get a total of 18.67 GFLOPS (peak). This will be much larger than Playstation 2. Also for fill rate 4 times 8 textures times 1.0GHz equals 32 GTexels. Again much larger than the Playstation 2.
Now the rates for the CPU are due to 3D-Now but
you can use SSE for comparisons because 32 bit
FP is single precision. The usual FPU does 80 bit FP on x86 CPUs. Also the PC is a General Purpose computer while the Playstation 2 is a Special Purpose computer. Special Purpose computers tailor their pipelines for their specific use and usually neglect corner cases and operations deemed needed for general processing. Games designers take these into consideration when developing games. Take DSPs. There are now those that exceed 1 GFLOPS but need large vectors to keep their pipelines full.
Remember 60 points on a soccer ball generates 148 triangles and a sphere needs to be calculated only once and the points offset each frame. Thus it is possible for a K6-3/400 to generate 10 million triangles per second with optimizations. Scenes typically take 10-50K triangles per frame at 50-100 frames per second equals 0.5-5.0 Million triangles per second on a typical game.
Please do not make comparisons between apples and peas, compare peas to peas.
It sounds like they should market two products, then, a "Playstation 2" and a "SuperPC" (or whatnot), differing only in installed software (ie, game engine vs general-purpose OS) and minor tweaks in hardware.
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This reminds me of something else, though -- the BeBox. Each release of the BeBox was superior in both price and price-performance point to existing PC's, but the PC industry evolved quickly enough that the gap would be closed -- and surpassed -- in a couple of months, and it was several months between BeBox releases. The net result was that the BeBox was obsolete *most* of the time. They stopped trying after a while because they just couldn't keep up the pace. Might the same happen to Sony? The EE might be cool beans now, but how quickly will x86 processors evolve to catch up, and how quickly can Sony/Toshiba come out with newer, faster chips and systems? I'm not trying to say they can't do it, I'm just asking because I honestly don't know!
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-- Guges --
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use this and you will be happy.
unless some putrescent bulbous flatulent
toe sucking slashdot moderator smites your penis
off with a vile -1
It's not that bad -- a friend of mine used to have "geek parties" two or three times a year where everyone would bring their PC's to his house, plug into one of the hubs, and play games for 48 hours straight.. We had a few of these that topped at over 20 people (with approximately one computer per person). The biggest hassle was finding a space to set your computer up. Enough of us are network professionals that the setup effort was minimal.
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-- Guges --
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The lack of a monitor port is no big deal. This is linux we're talking about -- you can run X11 on another computer and use the playstation via the network. We don' need no steenkin UI! :-)
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Very little actually remains to be found out about the system which is necessary for installing linux on it. We will see linux-on-PSX2 in short order.
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-- Guges --
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PCs success was because any body could program it.
consoles will sue you if you publish even freeware
for them on the net. they design things to make
it hard to build for them (go to supct.law.cornell.edu and do a keyword search for 'sony' spend a few hours reading)
closed archs are never as successfull as open archs.
ibm v mac
unix v whatever
PC v playstation
I agree with the whole deal about gameplay, that's why I'm not really excited about quake 3: id software has never impressed me with gameplay features.
Anyways, I was wondering if you've ever played Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six. It's a really good 3d game that has strategy and simulation w/ the vanilla action in the 3d shoot genre. Although it has a bunch of bugs (and I do mean, a BUNCH!!), it really has a different approach to the genre. A very cool game.
I'm standing here to tell you that the PSX2 is not real. Not in it's currently spec'd form at least. Why? VRAM (or the embeded DRAM they use as VRAM.) It's only got 4 megs. Yes, just 4. When asked about how games were supposed to load the textures they need for all of those lovely triangles the thing is supposed to push, Sony's answer was: use better texture management (hard enough) and stream textures off the DVD as needed! That's impossible. Period. In a year games might need 4 megs of texture for one scene. If the player walks into a different room, it could require a complete reload of that 4 megs from the disc. What if the DVD was pushing audio and it had to seek? Even the fastest harddrive couldn't get 4 megs into the memory in time for the textureing part of the rendering process. Someone at Sony made a big mistake with this thing is going to be looking for new job once anyone gets their hands on one to do some real dev work with it.
It doesnt pose a threat. Infact, PC games will continue to look better for 1 reason:
It will use a TV
Computers use monitors
unless you have a fancy-smancy digital TV that you payed 2 grand for, your res is gunna be limited... and your resolution plays a pretty big role in computer games. Also, PCs have OpenGL/D3D which is a pretty strong development platform for games, and basically they develope games where users are.
And if its going to cost more then $300, it wont sell that well. $200 or less sounds good.
the point is this:
no one will buy the P.S. 2 so there will be no profits at all. It doesn't matter where Sony has profit now if no one gets this over-priced junk.
I looked at the specs, but I'm still skeptical. But I realize those specs can change . . .
I really do thing though that PSX II is way overhyped. For one thing, it isn't even out yet. It will be released in 2000. How far will computer hardware have advanced by then? Okay, the chip 128 bit, and I don't think there are and CPU's that are 128 bit, but there are graphics processors that are 128 bit. And the reason the PSX II needs so much power is to live up to the claims of "75 million polygons a second" (that spec alwasy confused me, what do they mean? setup? fill rate? and shouldn't fill rate be measured in pixels?) and their claims of solving differential equations that model blowing hair in the wind. If they have such a powerful processor, why not sell them to a company that sells high end graphics workstations, professional audio/video editors, or computing centers? They'd make a whole lot more money. Also, at time of release, PSX II may be cutting edge, but a few months later I'm sure the PC market will surpass it, and keep moving a whole lot faster. Just look at history and the major console releases and where the PC market was at. I mean, even Dreamcast uses a video chipset that was supposed to be released to the PC market months ago. AMD demonstrated a kryotech cooled K7 running at 1 GHz, PSX runs 300 Mhz (I know Mhz isn't the only measure of speed, but that's a huge difference in clock speed). Alpha 21264 are supposed to be 1 GHz before the end of the year (okay, it doesn't cost $500, but it will be that fast). Intel's Merced will be out in 2000 (maybe, haha, I hope intel loses a ton of market share by then). There are a bunch of things developing in PC market, some probably being developed in secret, so we really won't know how good the PC will be by the time of PSX II is released. Now if it were out now, being mass produced, that won't be different . . .
BTW . . PSX II uses Direct Rambus RAM like the N64 did, it's well known that Rambux RAM isn't the best new RAM solution for PCs.
"1 AMD K6-2 400Mhz CPU and 64MB RAM - about same price."
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About the same price, but much much less performance. If your application can take advantage of SIMD, the EE at 300MHz would yield performance comparable to a 1.2GHz x86 performing 32-bit integer logical and arithmetic operations. How much does a 1.2GHz K6 cost?
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-- Gugues --
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It hasn't been released, pure and simple. Who knows what things will be like when it is released. And with that DVD, Firewire, USB stuff, cool, yes, on a gaming console, but then Sony will actually have to worry about DRIVERS!! Also, connectivity, how will it all work? They WILL run into unforeseen problems w/ all those whiz band features. This seems like the most overhyped console ever, that's why i'm skeptical.
Also, what makes you thing PSX II will make games magically better? If PC games haven't improved much, have console games really improved? PSX II will not make games better just because it exists, though it may make games look better, that's all it can do, make games look better. It's other capabilities like DVD, usb, firewire already exist in the PC market (though firewire seems to be limited to the new PowerMacintosh G3's, pretty nice machines there). The only thing PSX II really brings to the table is more power (debateable), and a different package. So what makes you think PSX II will all of a sudden have better games? Also, since you make the point about how 5 year olds can rent a game from blockbuster and pop it in their PSX, N64, DC or whatever, that also means the games for consoles are generally aimed at the younger, while PC games are aimed at the older. I also thing PSX II will be aimed at the older, so games will probably be for the older, and thus complexity isn't really a big deal. And about games looking like a video? Doubtful, not by the year 2000. I think more power is needed. Just look at the computer generated feature films (like the PIXAR stuff), they use a LOT of power, and very few things look totally realistic.
BTW, the whole thing about getting a program and compiling, and getting its dependencies that you think is a PITA, that has been handle by better package management systems. I've had very few problems w/ the FreeBSD ports collection.
type "make install" in the right directory, the program is fetched, along w/ all dependencies that you don't already have installed, depencies patched and compiled, program patched and compiled, and the binaries, man pages, config files all installed. All nice and clean and automatic. I can't speak for linux package management systems, I've heard the debian one is good, but I have no opinion on it (I've never used it).
It *might* cost $400, but I doubt that. From its specs, it looks targetted at the set top box peole, an older audience, and probably cost more. It depends on the final feature set though.
Anyone know?
Forget Wintel, go LAMDa! Linux and AMD!!!!!!!
Game genie is different though. First, it is only like $40. If I buy the N64DD (whenever that comes out) it will be like $200, which is like buying a whole new system. Was the 32X like this too? Second, game genie lets you cheat and win easily, and everyone loves that. Sometimes I still go on my old Nintendo, slap game genie on Final Fantasy and go get 99 potions, 99 tents, etc... That is why there are 8,000,000 video game/computer game/game genie sites out there. People love to win even if it is cheating. Not the same as playing new games, though I would think that would be an attraction. Maybe it was bad marketing :
No one has set the price yet, you troll!
It will prob be 250, any way, when the psx first came to australia it was $695 here, and it sold like hot cakes
it will be 400
if u have a newish TV, it all looks good, tho then again american NTSC sucks ass, typical usa
yep, how many people can you see afford a $900 computer today ?
How many people, especially 14yrea olds working at mcdonald that can afford a $99 PSX?
If you moron had a clue, you can plug current playstations in RGB scart video cables direct to NORMAL monitors.
How about this.
PSX II will not be released until year 2000.
I also believe it will be delayed like everything else is.
Where will PCs be then?
With Intel's Merced proposed to be released in 2000, the x86 platform will probably just begin to die, but not before more improvements are made. Hopefully the K7 will clue more people into Compaq/Digital Alpha chips (most of which are manufactured by Samsung, heh). The 21264 is around now, and runs on same bus protocol as K7 I believe (EV6), but I think it still beats K7 in FP performance by a substantial margin.
So the PC industry will change also. It's not like the PC industry will stand still until PSX II is released. So it is nonsense to compare price right now. That 400 k6 you could probably get for free if you looked in the right place (knew some very generous people) when the PSX II is released.
Remember, the console isn't even out yet. They WILL run into problems. There WILL be delays. Their ambitious expandability features WILL cause them some headaches that they don't know how to deal with.
Um, MIPS itself tried this some years ago; it was called "ARC" - the notion was to put together a standard for a commodity hardware platform that was not based on Intel's badly designed CPUs and outdated instruction set. Alas, the effort failed to garner enough momentum from the industry or interest from consumers, and so it died.
If you really want an alternative to Intel, keep pushing on Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD, et. al. to port cleanly to as many different kinds of computers as possible. If we get the OS sufficiently independent of the hardware that you don't have to care what it is, you will be able to buy hardware with the best price/performance available, and the hardware guys will be freed from the tyranny of the "Intel Standard" to go and design better architectures.
Heh, do you really seriously think that the PSX 2 has "no OS whatsoever" =). A CPU system without an operating system is just that, only a fancy cpu which no-one can use.
"For most imaginable home/office applications processor speed is not an issue"
Sorry, but your wrong about that one. Many clueless people are saying that. That we any faster CPUs nomore. The Fact is that we do. There are alot of home/office applications that never can get to much CPU. like:
Image Manipulation (Photoshop, etc)
3D modelling (3D studio, Lightwave, Maya, etc)
CAD/Computer Aided Design (Autodesk, etc)
Movie editing (a common home/hobbie thing)
That just some of the common applications beside
"Office" and "3D games" that have a infinite CPU speed need.
The possesive form of "it" is "its", not
"it's", dammit.
so i got the price wrong.
i think my thesis is still valid,
(heh maybe i shoulda left the price out then...)
personal computers are open,
game consoles are closed,
game consoles won't "take over" the home pc biz for this reason.
history of computers i believe supports my theory.
by the usefulness of the device, as in the case of the original PSX. No Desktop, either. And nothing to configure. The GUI and the end user programs are the whole focus.
These are not part of the use of this device. Such concepts may be your security blanket, but they have no relevance whatsoever in the PSX2/Internet application of the benefits of technology. Pretty threatening, huh?
Whether it's grammar or anything else, knowing the rules and following them does have its benefits, especially in the situation of being able to express onesself without appearing to be ignorant.
Please tell me the circumstances of you "using the PSX II," because I'm inclined to believe that's BS. Before the N64 came out, at a show Nintendo had "demos" of what the N64 would be able to do. One magazine (EGM, I think) took a camera under the Nintendo table and snuck a picture. What they found was a 1 million dollar (at list I think it was a mil, maybe $100,000, not sure, at the time) SGI piece of hardware. So you never know what you were actually playing with, or w/ what they are showing you.
I heard a chip based on the same design will be used by Toshiba in an attempt to break into the high end router business and give Cisco some competition. So I guess the chip will probably first be used in embedded systems. Will PSX II kill PC? I really doubt that. I wouldn't trust the demos either, b4 n64 came out its "demos" were run off SGI computers (really expensive ones for the time), so the demos you see I doubt are from an actual console, but probably from a high end workstation, and if it really were from a working console, they would probably release the damn thing to give the whole technology world a kick in the ass.
K6-400 handles 2 floating point multiplies and 2 floating point adds per cycle. ( Giving 1.6Gflops )
On the EE each vector unit handles 4 floating point multiplies and 4 floating point adds per cycle. This gives 2.4Gflops per vector unit. There are 2 vector units on the EE that work together ( as well as the normal FP unit and the dividers ) which is where the 6.2Gflops figure comes from.
The 19macs & 1div in 7 clocks is from the example showing the time taken to transform a 3D point, not the peak performance.
They suck
I don't have one in my Cel 333 and I haven't had to use it at all.
1.44 mb is too small now anyways, and the floppy controller should just be trashed on newer hardware. I like how Apple put USB and Firewire on the new G3's, new technology is good
I just saw this piece in Times yesterday. This will only challenge the Wintel empire even more. Sony has invested so much on the R&D (10 billions, if my memory serve) that it can't afford to not bring out the web surfing option. (With memory stick to save the cookies, I suppose.)
Now this is one Webtv scheme M$ can't buy out. Come on everybody, bring on the dirt cheap alternatives! WebTV; Satellite browsing; free-pc; AOL non-windows box free for two years of subcribtion.... What? what did you say? Besides surfing and word processing, non-win boxes don't have enough game support?!? Now PlatStation 2 can surf! Take that Intel, so much for Pentium III IV V.
One important question, does PlayStation2's DVD media format owned (partially) by Sony? If so, Sony probably will make DVD burner available just to kill off other Game playing platforms.
cy
Game consoles and computers are, have been, and always be in separate domains. No one except sweet but clueless mothers ("Oh deary, I want my sweet little sonny boy to learn that computer thing.") will buy an add-on to a game console to turn it into a 'real computer'. A game console is a toy. A game console with a keyboard and a hard drive is still a toy.
Three chips: the emotion engine (EE), the graphics synthesizer, (GS), and the I/O processor (IOP)
Performance claims: 6.2 GFLOP/s peak * 66 Mpoly/s transform peak * 36 Mpoly/s transform sustained * 16 Mpoly/s Bezier surface patches * 75 Mpoly/s peak rendering * 2400 Mpixel/s fill with z buffering + alpha blending * 1200 Mpixel/s fill with Z + alpha + texture David Sheth
My friend here at school is s console gaming nut, but I think I'll ALWAYS prefer my computer to a console system for the following reason:
I am not too much into fighting, shooting, and adventure games. I prefer strategy and first person style games, as well as military sims and due to storage factors(consoles would need larger HD's) and the fact that most console gamers don't like these types of games as much, they aren't released often on a console system. A television doesn't have the resolution to show the crispness that is need for the small icons and text of a strategy game. It just seems that the computer, and many computer gamers are drawn to more complex and thought provoking games than just straight fighting and first-person shooters.
Some people on this thread seem to believe the DC or PS2 are some kind of second coming or something, well I doubt they will be. Are they impressive, heck yeah! Are they going to sell well, probably yes as well, but they are still just new console systems!
I think that the computer & console gaming indistries REALLY need to improve the quality of their gameplay innovations first, and then worry about polygon pushing. Case in point: Thief: The Dark Project. Although this game's graphics are not the most powerful or gorgeous, Thief is an extremely entertaining and innovative idea in the relatively tired FPS genre. Her was a game where the standard FPS tactics only got you killed, and a game that actually brought back those feeling of excitement, fear, and surprise that had left me after I first played DOOM/DOOMII(really, what truly GREAT innovations have been made in FPS games since DOOM?). I see what my friend buys, from both here and Japan, it seems that a large chunk of new console games are just the n-th rehash of Final Fight, FFVI (or FF3 int he US), Tomb Raider, or Street Fighter 3000 Ultra-Deluxe Super Edition Beta 9!
In the end I'll be more impressed with less polygons and more innovation and re-playability.
Respectfully,
Kevin Christie
kwchri@maila.wm.edu
IIRC, the Emotion Engine will be produced by Toshiba, who worked with sony on the development.
Artdink's claim to fame was the A-Train series in Japan. A-Train 3 in Japan came over here as A-Train, and was released by Broderbund/Maxis for the PC. It is no longer available. (I got it a few years back for $10 in full retail boxes from Maxis. Of course, when Maxis sold its soul to Electronic Arts, it stopped selling almost all of their old games, but I digress.) A-Train also has a PSX version I'm told. Artdink had other games too, I'm sure, but this is the one I'm aware of.
That 700 dollar figure is according to an "analyst", who is misquoting a very early Japanese rumor article released when news of the Playstation II was leaking. Sony replied to questions about this by promising to keep it "under 400" (so we can assume 399.99...).
Sony has had extensive experience in the computer market in Japan, and only recently in the US with its consumer-oriented Vaio computers.
"Silence when you're talking to me!" -- Leona Ozaki, Dominion Tank Police
Posted by The ULTIMATE Crippler:
...because with a name like "PS2" it is doomed from the beginning.
Regardless of price.
Posted by Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love:
The PSX2 will be of no substantial threat to the computer industry. Just like every one of its predecessors, the PSX2 will be nothing more than an expensive toy. The WebTV was supposed to dominate the low end market, because you could "surf the web", send e-mail and print from it. Those things are a joke.
The PSX2 may be a cool game only machine, it may be a nice game/DVD machine, but it's not a computer. It doesn't have the power of flexability that a computer has.
If the low price was so important, people would be buying up those $599 specials that we all see. The don't as soon as they see the limitations, people will not even think of trying to replace the computer with some set-top appliance.
Sample conversation.
Console Gamer " I can do 'X' with my PSX2!"
Computer Gamer "Well I can do 'W','Y','Z', and I can emulte 'X' on my computer"!
Consoles should die a quick and painful death, the heyday of the Atari 2600 && NES are over.
LK
Posted by Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love:
>>I'd much rather spend $200 on a console than $3,000 on a PC.
If you're spending that much for a gaming PC, either you need to redefine your requirements or you're being ripped off.
A good, custom built gaming PC shouldn't cost more than $1500-$2000. Depending on the type of options you get.
LK
Posted by Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love:
>>When I said 'PSX' I meant 'PSX 2'
This is what we were told about the PSX , two years ago. We'll have gigahertz machines before the end of the year (I hope), the CPU power will be there within two years, it's just a question of who will do it.
LK
Posted by Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love:
>>Yes, but how many of you have 15 (or 4 for that matter) computers sitting around in your living room? And if you don't, then it's a huge hassle to get them all in your living room.
Check the URL I have listed above, if everyone brings their own computer, it's not a problem at all. We've had over 20 computers on our lan before.
LK
cypherpunks/cypherpunks as login/password works just about everywhere!
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
clearly, your TV is too small... :0)
(really, what truly GREAT innovations have been made in FPS
games since DOOM?)
Jedi Knight? Hmm, might not qualify as 'great', but certainly significant.
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
Well, you can bet they know that $500 is asking too much for a home game console. They'd only have to look at 3DO, CDTV, and an old CD-based console sold by Philips/Magnavox to see where they could end. Most people don't care about quality as long as there's a cheaper option available. I just hope they can find a way to recoup the costs (licencing, perhaps?).
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
I think this article is interesting in how different it is from all the other articles out there on the PS2. Most have said Sony's target price was $300, without DVD playback capability (or rather with it purposefully disabled).
$300 seems low, but Sony's never been a company to sell their game machines for the profit -- they make their profit by being the only publisher of the games.
Everything I've read indicated that the lack of DVD playback was purely a pricing issue -- they didn't want to cut into their $300-$500 low-end DVD player sales. So maybe this higher price (although I'd hope not *that* high) is the result of a guess on their part that they may sell more of them at a bit higher price that includes the DVD support than without it, without hurting their $300 DVD player market.
I for one hope they have the DVD support. Sure, some people may then have two, but how many people have more than one CD player? Lots I'd guess.
In the time it took you to post your complaint about NY Times logins, you could have simply done the annoying registration...
:P :P
And you weren't first post, either
Television is an illusion of picture quaity due to the constant motion. Our eyes are trained to watch things that move. Television seems to have a very high quality picture, because we process more information from the average television experiece compared to the static ultra high definition monitor.
Now, if we watched movies and the usual media on a computer monitor, there might be an appreciation for the detail. It would be nice if movies on tv would have something steamy worth the resolution, but the frames keep moving. Even the nude shots are such a blur in motion it wouldn't make a difference.
Television is great for inexpensive gaming and large viewing from a comfortable distance. As long as it moves quickly, the consumer thinks its great. I would be depressed if I still had to use a television for computing (Sinclair ZX81 and Apple ][ were my experiences, but I'm spoiled by my 17 inch!)
it's really only FP performance now, there's plenty of bandwidth left on the AGP bus.
:)
Napalm will have mad geometry acceleration, 3Dfx isn't stupid. Their line on the whole issue is "well, we guess you can use the CPU for physics or something unimportant like that"
It's not clear to me that pushing more GPixels is meaningful.
the highest end Voodoo3 can fill 1600x1200 at 60fps. That's _plenty_ of fill rate to go around. And the next generation will be faster.
You have to take these tech spec numbers carefully. they get big very fast, but they don't always mean much.
Don't get me wrong, I don't work for 3Dfx. But I'm a game developer. The PC 3D card companies work hard to support game developers, while devkits for consoles run like $50k, so obviously there's no love lost.
than 4-way N64 games. Goldeneye and MarioKart look terrible in little tiny windows, and the TV is a lousy display anyhow.
...
Andy, if you read this, we're gonna have to have NetFest IV this summer
will suck 5 years down the line, it's just that there will still be games produced for it (like N64 now).
I would just consider $100-$150 (no need to spend more than that on 3D hardware) a part of the price of a new computer every 18-24 mos. Granted you may end up spending more, but that's because computer games continually take advantage of the latest technology that's available. A good thing rather than a bad thing IMHO.
for several reasons.
:). But they've certainly carved out some hard work for themselves.
a) Performance: the numbers I've seen on these things suggest 20million polygons per second. But this has to be taken with a grain of salt. The current leader is almost definitely the Voodoo3, which claims to be capable of 6-8million polys/sec. But our benchmarks of a V3-2000 indicate it gets about 500k best case in the real world. But fine, PsxII will be extremely impressive if it can actually do 5-10million polys/sec.
b) Obsolescence: this thing will be out in Q1'00 in Japan, and not in the States till probably Q4'00. And that's the introductory price -- they will have to keep selling this thing for years (as Nintendo still sells the N64, which came out in like '95?'96? only now is Nintendo making money on the hardware...). But that's an absurdly long time to keep a computer -- we expect them to be obsolete at the best every 2 years.
c) Competition: this thing goes head to head with the current leaders in game performance, nVidia and 3Dfx. But 3Dfx will have their new Napalm boards for this Xmas -- 1st completely new architecture board yet. All kinds of spiffy features (they talked about it at their developers conference at GDC this year). Cycle time in 3D hardware is 9 months, forget Moore's law. N64 & Psx are pretty pathetic now, and they didn't have any 3D hardware competition till partway thru their product lifespan. PsxII will enter a madly competitive, established field.
d) Price: Sure, new computers appear more expensive than Sony's announced price targets for PsxII. But remember, computers right now have a lot more functionality. The wholesale (or pricewatch.com) price of a computer without HD or monitor starts to push Sony's targets, and when you consider that OEM's always have to be making a profit on their machines, since they can't sell the same configuration for very long, a computer is decently price competitive.
This is not to discount what Sony is doing. It's interesting, and I'd be fascinated to know more about the hardware in there (yeah right! Japanese technology...we may never know. Be easier to get an account on the NSA's supercomputer
With the vector processing of the emotion, with the nuon processor doing the management, and the IEEE1394 iLink, stacking a few PSX2s will make for a helluva parallel system.
Even at $500/box, that sill slaughters most other methods I've heard of. I imagine Becker and NASA will be all over it.
This is absolutely right. I've been looking at those things as a possible replacement candidate for the several hundred x86/UltraSPARC/MIPS boxen we use in my employer's machine room. And the PSx2 looks like a very serious machine for heavy low precision floating point work. The next generation StrongARM chips also look very good for this kind of work.
The biggest problem I have in that machine room is the large power requirements x86 draws when multiplied in the hundreds. This is not just about a power bill, but it affects the size of our UPS, air conditioning, and rack requirements as well. Several hundred x86 are cheap compared to a few SGI Origin/Sun E10000 SMP boxen, but those machines are really designed for high I/O, not compute. Anyway, now that we've come to accept the price point distributed x86 systems offer over the supercomputer competition it's time to begin thinking how to drop that price point down even further. If PlayStations do the trick I'm all for it.
Thing is, Sony is going to have to support such a move. We need more than just a PSx2 Linux based SDK... we need an entire Linux distribution ported to the PSx2, plus driver support for all the nifty features like firewire et all included in the box. Sony hasn't mentioned anything like supporting a Linux distribution on this hardware, only that they're providing an SDK under Linux (probably running on x86 with a hardware cartridge dongle to the PSx2). So, Sony would have to open the hardware up before this could be a serious possibility.
If not the PSx2, maybe those crazy guys at www.rebel.com (the new name for Corel Computer) will recognize low power consumption and high integer/floating point compute systems as viable, and begin developing a hardware line specifically to target that market. I tell you, if they released a Netwinder with decent floating point performance, supported at least 512MB of RAM, and sucked roughly the same power the current Netwinders draw (about 15 Watts total) we'd buy hundreds of 'em.
Of course, the same holds for Sony if they opened up the PSx2 and began to target the performance compute market. I just want cheap compute that draws as little power as possible (thus dissipating little heat) and fits in a smaller form factor than a standard AT or ATX case. Is this really too much to ask?
Well, while it sounds pretty cool, I have to say that there are two important factors for what people will want to buy.
1st off, there's performance. PS2 sounds like it will kick quite a lot of booty, although I think that the Emotion Engine thing is basically hype.
2nd, and more important to most people, is price. If PS2 sells at ~$100-150 it'll sell like heroin hotcakes. At ~$500+ it'll sell like, oh, NeoGeo, or 3DO.
Hell man, after the Rev. C iMacs appeared, the earlier revisions dropped in price and outsold the new models. People would much rather save a few hundred bucks than get a better system. What I'd like to see is an expandable architecture. I know that add-ons for games have never done well in the past, but a dirt cheap add on that significantly increases performance, and which new games require to run would be the best bet.
Consoles are not a market I'd want to deal with. Too scary.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
I'm sure the old 'cypherpunk' trick will work soon enough
Chris Wareham
Anyone else remember the Coleco Adam? It was an add-on to the ColecoVision game system that made it roughly the equivalent of an Apple ][+ (keyboard, floppy drive, daisy-wheel printer). I never actually saw one of these units in person, and if I recall correctly, it was a pretty big flop. Haven't heard much from Coleco since then.
Sony makes excellent products, and I worry that these plans for the PlayStation 2 may tank, and drag the company down with it. That would be a shame...
________________________
Corporate Jenga: You take a blockhead from the bottom and you put him on top...
With the vector processing of the emotion,
with the nuon processor doing the management,
and the IEEE1394 iLink,
stacking a few PSX2s will make for a helluva
parallel system.
Even at $500/box, that sill slaughters
most other methods I've heard of.
I imagine Becker and NASA will be all over it.
IF PS2 is a hit, I think it will be the end of the traditional console, not the computer. However, Sony must overcome many problems before they will reach the goal their hype has set for them. There are three major reasons I doubt PS2 will be the PC killing console some people have dubbed it:
* *
*
:-)
1) The techology. Read this from an article in Next Generation:
***********************************************
"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."
***********************************************
http://www.next-generation.com/j smid/news/5998.html
Those who have seen the early demos have reported that it is indeed AWESOME (for instance the famous dancing couple demo, or the dinosaur), but remember that a demo is not a game, and does not show the finished product. The console is not here yet, and while it might easily beat several Xeons with Voodoo3/UltraTNT2 as some have reported, a lot can go wrong in development of this ultra new technology, and in the meantime a lot can happen in the computer world in a year.
2) How to make a profit. When the Playstation emulators came out, I read that even on the Playstation 1, Sony actually LOST money on every console sold. What they made money from was licencing the rights to make games to gaming companies. On Playstation 1 this worked wonderfully as we have seen - the console gave people wonderful prestanda/price which meant they sold LOTS. The big market made gaming companies willing to pay the licencing fees.
But look at PS2. The system will be MUCH more expensive. Sony first claimed $300 or below price, but who thinks this is possible? $500 dollars is a lot....$800? Hardcore Playstation fans will no doubt buy it anyway, but will parents buy it as a Christmas gift for their kids? (Playstation 1 sales soared around Christmas) Lots of developers were also attracted to Playstation 1 because of ease of development. No worry about different hardware configurations, different OS versions and so on. But what of the Playstation 2? Read what Squaresoft has to say in the same article as above....
***********************************************
The most important issue in development, however,
is who will be able to develop for the machine.
No developer we asked could think of a team in
the United States with the expertise to develop
for the Next Generation PlayStation's high end
abilities.
The demo shown in Japan revealed an ability to
create curved surfaces and pre-rendered quality
gameplay graphics. Whether anyone currently
geared toward developing with polygonal systems
will be able to turn around a game using that
kind of technology is highly questionable --
particularly with the quick development cycle
Sony's 2000 release will require.
No one has commented on this question, whether a
world used to developing for PlayStation can take
advantage of a wholly new architecture with
advanced 3D functions, more publicly than
Tomoyuki Takechi, president of Square Co. The
Nihon Keizai Shimbun reported yesterday that the
Square chief believes, "No more than five
software companies can develop games that take
full advantage of the PlayStation 2's
capabilities." (Though given that outlet's recent
translation troubles, he may have in fact said no
more than fifty.)
Takechi reportedly went on to say that the new
technology will draw the lines between
developers "who have computer graphics prowess
and those who do not."
***********************************************
FIVE?? And even if it was fifty, that is pretty god damn low! Are these companies alone expected to support Sony and their subventioned console? They will have to make a really big profit then to make ends meet. Also, fifty companies in the world. How many good and original games can they churn out per year? Look at how long it has taken Id to learn the new technology (curves and so on) and do Quake 3. And look at Squaresoft the flagship of Playstation, they seem to be only making compies of their old hits these days. (Parasite Eve, Final Fantasy 8. I have seen it all before.) As a gamer, I am sceptical. The added price and low number of developers can make the positive spiral of Playstation 1 turn negative. Few games and an expensive unit around release could make many gamers take a wait and see approach. And if profits doesn't come quickly gaming companies will start to pull out and develop for PC and Dreamcast instead. Sega Saturn, Atari Jaguar anyone?
3) "It's a bird! It's a plane! No! It's..a pretty hot computer!"
Even if Sony manages to overcome the previous problems (and that is a big IF), what is it that they are creating? According to Verant, Sony is considering making Everquest one of the games available for the PS2 when it comes out. To play Everquest, you need: An Internet connection, a harddrive for the patches, a keyboard, a mouse, a monitor unless you want to view the gorgeous graphics on a cruddy TV screen, speakers for the monitor, an OPERATING SYSTEM to manage all these things. What is this if not a computer? Also, they have said they will have DVD, Firewire, USB, a built in camera and microphone. With internet connection you will want a browser. A mouse for the browser. An email program. A frigging ICQ client, maybe IRC! Are Sony going to develop all this hardware and software by themselves?? If all these promises are kept, how the HELL are they going to keep the price for the "console" below $1500?
Again, if they despite all odds manage to pull this through...more power to us! I presume this will mean that we will finally be free of the crud that has built up over the years around the x86 architechture. We will have computers that are many times more powerful than today. The only losers will be Intel. And hopefully Microsoft.
There, I've spread enough FUD about poor Sony for one day.
/Lars
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
What makes you say that? It seems to me that *vast numbers* of people will buy the PS 2...
$175 for a 17" montior?
It'll be a while before you'll be able to emulate a PSX on a PC. It'd be interesting to see a PC emulated on a PSX though.... ;-)
When I said 'PSX' I meant 'PSX 2'
That's why community minded individuals created cypherpunks/cypherpunks
/. with that sometime.
Hm. I should try logging into
pooptruck
They can produce it for 100$. Big whoop. Do you know how much it costs Intel to make a PIII 500mhz? about 80$...wait...they sell it for close to 1000$. Amazing isnt it? Lets say they had a chip that can do 75 million polygons...thats ALL FPU, that means this chip is one big FPU processor. It doesnt mean it can run linux or windows, it means it can do some fancy rendering.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Ok, here's some bubble bursting comments.
1. 75 million polygons- Big freaking deal, it's still only 320x240 or 640x480 resolution, this isnt like a computer game that can get up to 1280x1024 resolution on a big monitor. Just like N64 and the PSX, they can do their fancy rendering and effects with a super low resolution. The N64 only has 4 megs of video ram, it rarely uses textures, just colors. It uses a über-shading to make stuff look like they have a nice anti-aliased look to them.
2. This system wont be supported by as many game developers as the PSX is because only a handful of companies have the technical ability to develop games for it. Just like Suqaresoft told the press. This means without a trillion licensees that the system is gonna cost an arm and a leg. All the extra doodads on it are gonna to make the price skyrocket.
3. Games like Everquest that need a hard drive for patches and such will give Sony an excuse to release proprietary Firewire drives just for it, sure it adds a little more flexibility...but at what cost? 200$ for an add-on hard drive? Plus the 500$ or so system cost? No thanks
4. The DVD will be nice, but when games DONT take up all 5 gigs of space per side does that mean we're going to see commercials in games? Demos and trailers might be nice..but I see a potential for companies to have commercials play before the game starts, ones that you cant fast forward through. This would help them offset the cost of the hefty licensing fees charged by Sony.
5. If it CAN run wince then we'll probably see a M$/Sony alliance that basically strong arms developers into using Microsponge or nothing at all.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Which is why the iMac has sold something like a bazillion units? The PSX II has _four_ ways to store data: PSX Memory Card (cookies and bookmarks for a PSX II browser could easily fit in one or two slots), FireWire, USB, and PC-Card. People who want large-scale storage are going to go FireWire.
Exapandibility? Yeah, like a laptop. We all know how often THEY get expanded. Keep in mind the difficulty of expanding what will still be a GAME machine too... if you start creating games that require expansions, things are going to get complicated. Enough expansions, and now you've got a PC level of complexity, without true PC expandibility.
There's no RAM expansion, and there's no PCI slots. Beyond that, we're talking about a pretty expandible unit here. The average home computer user never upgrades anything and never buys a new bit of software or hardware. For those who want to expand their toy, a PSX II has lots of room to grow.
I don't know what the device driver situation is with the PSX II, and I don't think anyone outside of Sony does, either. When they are done, we can see how it handles its expansion devices. I'd bet that Sony understand Plug and Play about a million times better than Microsoft.
Display? Nifty cool, it can pump out millions of polygons... to a TV screen. Wowie. Can it still do that to a real monitor?
Yes. Did you even look at the tech specs on the PSX II? It can drive a digital TV. That's sufficient resolution for consumer purposes.
Believe it or not, browsing the web is not the be-all, end-all of computing. Can you write a paper? Balance a checkbook?
If yes, then why on earth are you doing it on a game console?
Cost, cost, cost. There's no reason why you couldn't bundle a keyboard and low-end office software. A USB keyboard costs what? $20? A copy of Microsoft Works or ClarisWorks is around $70. Quicken is around $50. Charge $100 for a keyboard, word processor, and expense program and you could still make a good-sized profit. Everyone is going to have one of these boxes in their home anyway. What's $100 to make it practical? Data could be stored on a USB Zip drive or a FireWire drive, or maybe on a remote server.
Price? Look around. A $700 computer is already reasonably capable. Do you think that this is going to be any less true 6 months from now? And by the time this thing is out, we may be looking at the first breed of graphics accellerators that do geometry mapping as well.
PSX II will ship for under $300. I'd wager on that. If Sony is smart, they'll realize that adding on the ability to play back DVD movies is a huge win. Considering the number of teens and pre-teens with a TV in their room, this is a no-brainer. Buy one box for something like $250 and give the kid a game station, a DVD player, and a low-end Internet-capable box. Pop in the right software, a FireWire hard drive, and a DV Camera, you've got a low-end video and sound studio for schools and middle-class families with creative kids. Heck, you can Ethernet them together with a $50 Ethernet PC-Card. Sony'll sell 10million units in 3 months, easy.
Sony is being smart and not claiming that the PSX II is a low-end PC killer. But it is. I'm drooling already...
-jon
Remember Amalek.
If they're "smart" and sell it at $250, then heck YES it's a great product. It's a steal even. But can they afford a $300-$500 loss on every unit? That's a _lot_ of games. At $700, it's much less competitive, and won't be even that competitve for very long (unless they want to really treat it like a computer, and half the price every several months).
I believe my main point stands... Sony does not understand computing. Most people assume they do when they make these assements. Heck, maybe they do, but competence in the console industry has NEVER equalled competence in the computer industry, and I don't think the two have merged yet (if they ever will; a machine to play games easily will probably always have a market).
- Storage? Sorry, need to buy it. Recall the (justified) flap about the iMac?
- Exapandibility? Yeah, like a laptop. We all know how often THEY get expanded. Keep in mind the difficulty of expanding what will still be a GAME machine too... if you start creating games that require expansions, things are going to get complicated. Enough expansions, and now you've got a PC level of complexity, without true PC expandibility.
- Display? Nifty cool, it can pump out millions of polygons... to a TV screen. Wowie. Can it still do that to a real monitor?
- Believe it or not, browsing the web is not the be-all, end-all of computing. Can you write a paper? Balance a checkbook?
- Price? Look around. A $700 computer is already reasonably capable. Do you think that this is going to be any less true 6 months from now? And by the time this thing is out, we may be looking at the first breed of graphics accellerators that do geometry mapping as well.
If everybody would get over the excitement of having a video game console work as a computer (oh my!), we'd see this for what it is: A cheap computer, in both senses of the word. It tries to be a computer, with video-game console ideals. Thing is, the computer industry isn't some kind of idiotic mindless stuck-in-the-ruts industry that everyone who seems to be excited about this seems to think it is. Being all the things Sony thinks the Playstation II can be means being a very complicated product, and I seriously doubt there's anybody at Sony who really understands the computer industry, who has to deal with that kind of complexity on a routine basis. "Does this game run on all the thousands of possible Playstation configurations there are?" is a question Sony has NEVER had to answer, and it's the biggest advantage the consoles have. The video game industry is quite bad at answering that question; see Sonic CD for a great example. (Also, Sonic R has many problems on my Riva 128, which I haven't heard a hint of from anyone of a fix... which should be simple)If yes, then why on earth are you doing it on a game console?
I think the Sony will do reasonably well at the beginning... with its name power, it can hardly fail to. What happens after that is always difficult to tell. But Sony is hardly the first video game manufacturer to try to break into the computer buisness (Even the Intellivision tried that stunt!), and nobody else has come even close. That's because for all the video game industry (and its fans) thinks that the computer industry is somehow inferior, and not as difficult to be in as the computer industry, it is not easier and Sony has no experience there. Playstation-as-computer will go the way of the "Entertainment Computer System".
My 2 cents, after reading a few of the opinions on this thread...
Sony is very forward thinking, I believe. They have a very strong base, with the PSX, and plan to grow it even further with the PSX2. For the longest time games and consoles were for kids, and it was the era of SNES and Genesis. Enter Playstation, alongside the Jaguar, N64, and Saturn... Of all of them PSX is the biggest slice of the game market now, 5 years later, and by the time PSX2 comes out, will be positioned exactly for all those teens who bought into the PSX, and co-incidentally will have gone through college and are now young adults; they can afford a 300$ gaming device, I think.
Sony can and will definitely leverage its advantages, the large installed user base by utilizing the current games and controllers in their PSX2, while also embracing a new range of technologies. It is not rare to see 2 or 3 CD games now, so DVD will be a welcome addition to their arsenal. Likewise, the PSX is *finally* getting pushed to its limits, and even if Sony has overestimated their performance figures by an order of magnitude, and can only provide 7 million polygons per second, comparable to a V3 system, it will be more than enough; developers like Square will sell the system, and not the number of polygons per second the system pushes.
People complain about the price and such; Sony will probably PLAN on losing money per unit, as long as there remains strong sales of software/games for the unit, and as all the teen-aged gamers of today grow up into consumers of tomorrow, there will be no shortage of buyers for quality games.
DVD movie support is a plus, and will leverage Sony's own DVD market, likewise the FireWire support and their own line of FireWire devices.
It would surprise me if Sony seriously marketed this towards anything other than the home market, as a functional integrated home entertainment device, for movies, games, email, web browsing, and minor computing tasks.
There exists and will not exist anything in the market that will compete at this target price range; Come on, a bunch of Cyrix CPUs and Rage Pros currently inhabit the 300$ PC market, and 2 years from now we will see 300MHz Celerons and Savage4s in that price range; they would still suffer from the complexity of the PC architecture, unless Intel manages to push something drastic through the channels, and they would still suffer from the performance bottlenecks of EIDE drives, low small busses to shuttle data around, and the generally unoptimized nature of their hardware for high performance.
On the flip side, I really doubt Sony will even come close to producing a device that can push 75 million polygons per second, or whatever they are quoting, without the significant help of giants such as Intel or IBM; AMD, NVIDIA, etc and all the other companies have problems manufacturing to high specs, how can I be expected to believe Sony and Toshiba can do so?
Likewise, their sails may be seriously deflated by Dreamcast, esp if Sega has really gotten their act together... The lure of the DC is that it is WinCE compatible, and games targeted towards the DC is much easier to retarget towards desktop PCs than the usual...
Still, Sony has guts and balls, grabbing the market away from Nintendo, with a device that will fit perfectly in the homes in many consumers in the next few years...
I'll probably get one, just so I can play Xenogears2 on it or something =)
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Not to mention that while computers have deathmatches over the net, consoles have deathmatches with the players right next to each other, a great party thing!
Oh yes, fighting over who gets to play next, dividing an analog TV screen in two (or four, if you're masochistic).
Contrast that to a 15 player tribes game with everybody in the same room.....
You will not be flamed, as I recall Voodoo2's came out in February/March 1998.
It's funny how everyone ooh's and aah's at this Playstation, forgetting that it's not *here* yet. When it's here, then we can compare it to VoodooX's that are here at the same time, and I bet it won't look as impressive.
The N64 was really great too, it had the processing power of a $100000 SGI system of a couple of years before. Now it's just a console.
but the business model for Sony is not to make money selling the consoles, but to make up for the loss through licensing revenue. Seems to work pretty well for them...
to mail me, first remove the evil spam.
None of the modern consoles even have RF outputs, much less require them. They use RCA outs like most other consumer video equipment. Now, if you are one of those people who use S-VHS outs and fiber optics all over, or balanced outputs, then you might not want one, but Sony is likely not marketing a Playstaition to audiophiles.
Logic ... merely enables one to be wrong with authority. -- Doctor Who
True, they would be outpriceing their lower-priced models, but a lot of people are willing to pay more for "features", not just a bare-bones model..who the heck wants to watch a DVD using those horrible RF-outputs?!
PSXII will be a totally awesome set-top box if they really go for it; maybe this will really bring 3d to the net. But they'd need a HD to cache stuff on, store cookies, etc.; every "web" set-top plan has a few 100 meg for this purpose. -m
I don't know, an $800 dollar beg got me my first 286 and that was quite a while ago.
For all you doubters, I have one thing to say - animatronic Leonardo DiCaprio. If they can pull off a winking, smooching DiCaprio they could get $1000 dollars for the thing.
Realistically, I'd expect them to just take a huge loss on the machine and make it back with $75+ games.
-sunking
I don't see to many boys and girls getting this as a Birthday / Christmas / Hanukkah present. As far as I can tell, the console game market has depended upon kids begging their parents for the newest thing. How many kids do you think can pull off a $500 job of begging?
Last I heard, this thing could also double as a DVD player.
@ around $550, this thing would be cheaper than a good game console and DVD player.
:wq
I don't think anyone is really claiming that businesses will have PSX2's at the worker's desks. (Although I'd be happier coming to work) I think what is possible is using the Emotion Engine chip that they were refering to and using that as part of a pc. Kinda like using the StrongArm in the netwinder. The new PSX2 chip seems very well suited for things like medical imaging, CAD programs, VR schtuff, etc...
Word processing is probably not its strong suit. Complex molecular visualizations though would probably be well done on it.
-cpd
Isn't it funny how many people had their troll detector offline and took the trouble to post what they consider to be their serious responses... Kaa's law in action!
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
People consistently tend to forget that TV sucks as a display. Really, really sucks. That may change in the future with the HDTV/digital TV/the great PC-TV convergence, etc. etc. but I expect that to take a while and necessitate shelling out mucho bucks for new hardware.
Basically, you cannot get high-rez high-quality computer graphics on the TV. That's no problem for Mario kind of games, but highly graphical games (such as Baldur's Gate, even though it's only 640x480) would be painful on a TV. Don't even think about any serious word processing. And, of course, once you add the cost of a decent monitor, if the machine can drive it, that is, the price rapidly approaches $1000 and there the PCs can compete perfectly well. Don't forget upgradability, software base, etc.
To me, consoles are cheapo hardware for kids. They have the right to cost up to $200 (YMMV), but if I were to spend, say $800 for my kids' computing hardware, I would definitely buy them a PC.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
reports of the network computer's death have been greatly exaggerated. This looks like it will do email, possibly web surfing, and play games as well as or better than any pc. That sure seems to cover a good share of the PC buyers out there. They will just need some kind of printer support and a word processor and this could be a category buster. Maybe Larry Ellison wasn't so crazy after all?
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
$500-$700 is expensive for a new game machine that has no software. But for a versatile, powerful platform that can be extended to play DVDs and surf the 'Net and already has thousands of game titles it can run, it's a bargain.
IGN and PSX2 have more info.
--
--
Jason Eric Pierce
no one can see the future for sure
but we can see the past
1975 - Magnavox Odessy $150 Pong!
1982 - Intellivision about $200
fill in your own horror stories
oh, and the Osborne $2000
This machine certainly has some power under the hood. I'se seen a couple short movies and screen shots. I thought that was amazing for a game machine until I saw this
Myers said Sony would have to charge at least $500 for a Playstation 2 to even begin to approach break-even, making it at least twice as expensive as rival consoles -- and some have speculated the price will actually run to $700 or $800.
$700!! By next Christmas (when it should be out in Japan) I'll be able to buy a Cel500 and Voodoo3 for that. Which actually puts them on about the same footing, graphics wise. Sony is sneaking a computer through the back door, and personally think it will fail miserably as a game machine if they charge more than $200 for it. Of course with a Net connection possibility, and all that raw power, some SERIOUS net gaming could take off. I've heard it would absolutely suck as a file server though, maybe a Vid-phone, streaming MP3/Movie jukebox, dictation taker?
Who's working on the Linux port?
+&x
I honestly do not see the sony playstation as event a remote threat to wintel, however "information appliances" are a must for the future and there is a great deal of money to be made in this.
- about me
simple verdict.
:)
As long as an industry continues to separate the platform hackers from the developers and the developers from the users, they're going to have other people walk all over them. It's all a matter of whether or not buyers want a do-hickey like their neighbors or they want to decide what they need it for after the purchase.
Some want a do-hickey. Like all those different removable drive sizes we're about to be bombarded with again. You know - standard issue homework disc 35MB, Professional Email archive disc 40MB, Enterprise report disc 63MB. How far can you take a gimmick? Depends on who or what your customer is. Last I checked they were people but that was a while ago. Now they seem like mindless zombies.
No serious user would bother with a PSX with email when it's so much easier to just buy or e-purchase an email program. Nevermind the savings in styrofoam, cardboard boxes, bubblewrap
(Keep our attics clean!)
Besides, if the majority of people just want to get a,b,and c done and don't have to lift a finger, who's pushing the industry forward? What's a college degree worth to those of us who give a shit, if the market is full of fad freaks? There's a price to pay kissing up to couch potatoes. Speaking precisely of the hardware industry, it was PC gaming not console gaming that pushed it forward.
The ship sank. Get over it. (This sig was cut out from another's shirt and painstakingly hand-posted)
$67 Motherboard AGP K6-III ready
$90 AMD K6-2 400
$85 3.2 G HD
$175 17" Monitor
$5 Keyb/Mouse/Pad
$36 24X CDROM
$230 TNT2
----
$513
check pricewatch for real prices
add 20% per item at fairs
add $400 for brand name store PC's
The ship sank. Get over it. (This sig was cut out from another's shirt and painstakingly hand-posted)
If it weren't for heavy business use, there wouldn't be a Wintel monopoly. How many IS departments are going to trade in their Dells and Gateways for Sony Playstations???
get nemulator
Sony has a Good Thing(tm) going here. What they should do is release the PlayStation 2 gaming console and use the Emotion Engine to power seperate personal computer products, perhaps pulling talent away from their in-house game developers (I've never really played an in-house Sony game I liked anyway, it would be no big loss) to develop applications and such for the system -- maybe even make it Linux-based, but that's a long shot. :) Of course, by the time they got all of this done, their Emotion Engine chip would probably be pretty average in terms of CPU balls.
So I have no clue what I'm talking about.
You know, I think I'd prefer it if they kept in the console business and didn't take a stupid risk trying to topple Wintel, just so the console gamers would get the ultra-badass games the console could produce. Granted, it may have seemed stupid to try to tackle Nintendo years ago, and look where they are -- they all but own the Japanese gaming market, and they've got a good hunk of the other markets. Still, I'm skeptical.
--Slack
I have used the Playstation 2 (no kidding), and I can tell you this : a celery 500 and Voodoo 3 doesn't even *approach* the PSX2. When they say 66 million triangles/second, they aren't lying - the PSX2's graphics are *amazing*, real-time bezier tesselation and modifications (used for such kick-ass effects as morphing) is incredible. Seeing as the Playstation 2 has over 3x the floating point performance of a Pentium III-500 (and the FP is well-optimized for vector and bezier calculations, unlike the P3), which is critical to 3D graphics performance, your combination won't even match.
However, the PSX2 has Firewire, PCMCIA, and USB connections. So, add a firewire hard disk, a USB keyboard and mouse, and a PCMCIA ethernet connection, and for under $1000 you have a machine with integer performance equal to a P2-300 and floating point performance equal to a quad Xeon-500. And the PSX2 has VESA, DTV, and NTSC output capability, to boot, so you wouldn't be limited to 60hz interlaced.
Yes, all my information came straight from Phil Harrison - I'm not pulling this out of my butt.
Preceptions are important, as the history of computer platforms illustrates clearly.
More than a game machine? Only when a non-game 'killer app' (the writer supresses a shudder at using the cliché) comes along.
--
First off, I'm looking forward to the Dreamcast more than the PSX2. Yes, I hear you say, the Dreamcast's specs are inferior. Yes, I hear you say, the last console Sega put out here (the Saturn) bombed. Second point first. Does nobody remember the glory days of the Genesis? At one point, it was the most popular system in America. OK, I will freely admit I spent more time devoted to my Super Nintendo, but the point remains that Sega has been on the top before.
Now to address the first point. Even if inferior, the DC's specs are pretty damned good in their own right. Second, it's already out (at least in Japan), and the US launch is just a scant four months away. Compared to the PSX2, whose launch still isn't until December in Japan and godknowswhen here. So, months ahead of time, titles are being released for the DC in Japan which I am already eyeing.
Moving on to that point. These are gaming systems; they would never replace my computer. Why would I want to get them if they didn't have the games I wanted? Right now, I know the following titles are out/will be out for Dreamcast, and I know I'm going to want to get a hold of them: King of Fighters '99, Marvel vs. Capcom, Soul Calibur, Resident Evil: Code Veronica, House of the Dead 2, and so on. On the other hand, I don't have a clue for what's going to be for PSX2, because the developers have been really tight-lipped.
Moving on to developers. In a survey of 20 major gaming companies conducted by Weekly Famitsu (a Japanese gaming mag) on April 14, 1999, (being ArtDink, ASCII, Atlus, Bandai, Capcom, Data East, Enix, From Software, Game Arts, Hudson, Imagineer, Koei, Konami, Namco, NEC, SNK, Square, Taito, Takara, and Warp), all but *three* of those companies are committed to Dreamcast development. Enix is undecided, and ArtDink (who I have never heard of) and Square have said no.
Now comes the Square gambit. Some people are going to get a PSX2 only because Square is developing for it and not DC. Personally, in my opinion this gambit is simply not what it used to be. Square has put out some titles which have been the most enjoyable gaming experiences of my life (Final Fantasy 1-7, Secret of Mana 1-3, Parasite Eve, and Xenogears especially). However, and this is a big however, their insistence on using only the highest-grade technology available to them has caused them to lose sight of how to make good games and their core audience, in my opinion. Final Fantasy 8, while visually stunning, is a flat game. It's either too hard or too easy, depending on what features you abuse; there is no middle ground anymore. Saga Frontier was just far too nonlinear and far too confusing fr a console game; it probably would have worked better as a computer game. Then there are the myriad games coming out based on the chocobo mascot. I don't care for this much. I appreciated the chocobo for transportation, not to explore dungeons while looking cutesy (Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon) or participating in a Mario Kart ripoff (Chocobo Racing). On top of all this, they're producing a movie which is going above George Lucas's self-imposed limit: making fully polygonal actors who are indistinguishable from normal people! (Lucas has stated that he will never use CG to render humans, since humans aren't humans if they're not human. Or something like that.) Which brings me to my next point.
(Before that, though, a quick loopback to the support bit. On PSX2, of the above companies, only ArtDink, Atlus, Capcom, Enix, From Software, Koei, Namco, and Square are committed. Warp has said no; of the rest, they are all either interested or undecided.)
Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but I truly believe that we in the USA are currently being forced to evolve from 2D to 3D. I am an appreciator of drawn art, animation especially (my home page is proof enough of that; devoting a section to reviewing fan fiction based off of a perticular anime is probably the 5th level of fanaticism right there). I collect pictures. I collect posters. I even try to draw sometimes. There is a certain charm in the drawn art form which appeals to me; and very few of those pictures are 3D renderings. Soul Calibur is about where I draw the line; the characters are gorgeously rendered, but I notice in each of them just enough of the drawn style of art to fully appreciate them. Animation isn't animation to me if it looks far too real.
Well, this is getting probably long-winded of a read as it is, so I'll just reiterate the main points: so far the DC has the games *I* want to play, has plenty of third-party support (which the Saturn didn't have), and is far from selling out to the 3D-obsessed crowd. I may make a post later on the technical non-gaming aspects, but for now I want to hear what the /.ers have to say.
Navaash
I don't see how this product would "make computers unecessary"
If he wants to use a word processor, he needs software; if he needs to print they requires a means to communicate with the printer at least (and that's more software) ;)
This is not just semantics or a curmudgeonly gripe, but totally serious.
I think everyone reading this forum expects -- or at least would not be shocked by -- radical changes in computer use, computer appearance, computer ubiquity, etc, in the coming years, but (please correct me if this is off-base, someone!) computers will still have hardware / software and some form of OS, even if it's just applications cooperating to use the hardware. Even if the OS is hardwired, in fact - it'll still be there.
If these Sony chips become as popular as it sounds like they could / "ought", and are worked into extensible boxes, I certainly hope that there are multiple competing operating systems fighting for their users' mindshare. Linux (or other GPL'd, or BSD liscensed, or whatever, OSes) would make good contestants.
Respectfully,
Timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
http://psx.ign.com/news/7154.html
This link is to a playstation 2 faq. In it is says that Sony has officially announced that the playstation 2(or whatever it will be called) will have a maximum price of $400.00 and it could be alot less.
It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes -- Douglas Adam -- Life, The Universe and E
What if this chip found its way into PC's. The article states that sony could produce these chips for $100. That could possibly make it an affordable alternative to other chips produced at his time. And just think. Not only could you surf, but you could provide all of the common household computer needs (word processing, spreadsheet, taxes, solitaire..) as well as play all of the Playstation and Playstation 2 games on a high resolution monitor. All at under $1000.
Now all you need is an OS....hmm...
Boy, you hit the nail on the head about the iMac. That thing tanked because it didn't have a floppy drive. Talk about a bomb...
I bought one and right away I had to get a floppy with it, or else I couldn't live with myself.
What a waste of money it all was. Not only did I dish out $100 for the floppy drive, I've yet to use it! Not one time! But I know, from reading all the responses here at Slashdot that I NEEDED a floppy drive....but I guess I'm doing something wrong because I can't seem to find a reason to use it.
But anyway, hopefully Apple will learn from it's mistake with the iMacs and G3's. Maybe they should get some pointers from Compaq or Dell on how to run their company.
(By the way, for the sarcastically challenged out there, I'm kidding)
--- "It's not enough that I succeed...everyone else must fail."
Myers said Sony would have to charge at least $500 for a Playstation 2 to even begin to approach break-even, making it at least twice as expensive as rival consoles -- and some have speculated the price will actually run to $700 or $800.
$500 for a home console is way too high. Almost no one would buy it for that much, especially with the Dreamcast at $200 and N200x around that too. The only one's who would buy the PS2 would be hardcore gamers and you can't support a system solely on them. Sony is going to have to lower the price in order to compete with it's rivals. Of course, if they market it to the high-end PC gamers and include a modem, then they could justify the cost. $500 is cheaper than a $3,000 gaming computer.
Consoles should die a quick and painful death, the heyday of the Atari 2600 && NES are over.
Consoles will not die anytime soon. First of all, they are a heck of a lot cheaper than a high-end gaming platform. I'd much rather spend $200 on a console than $3,000 on a PC. And with consoles, I don't have to worry about upgrading and compatibility issues. I know that when I stick the cartridge into the N64, it will work. I don't have to upgrade or get some patch to make it run. Consoles are so much easier to pick up and start playing. Not to mention that while computers have deathmatches over the net, consoles have deathmatches with the players right next to each other, a great party thing!
what truly GREAT innovations have been made in FPS games since DOOM?
You ever hear of a game called Goldeneye 007 for the N64? That game revolutionized the FPS genre. It's considered by many to bringing back intrest in FPS. It's the only game that I'd ever want to play that's a FPS because I personally don't really like them. But I love Goldeneye.
But 'on the market' won't be (as some reports suggest) until early/mid 2000. K7, PIIIs will be near a GHz by then, and with SMP, they're not exactly being left in the dust. Though I do like the specs, and if they can keep it under $400 it'll be good speed for da money.
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