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Playstation 2 Pix and Rollout
Lekkim writes "Gaming Age Online has posted the first official picture of the upcoming next-gen playstation2 (its the official name...Apparently it has DVD capabilities and it looks pretty cool. Details are here.
" Thanks to Mattrad for the European playstation links as well. It will ship in Japan on March 4, 2000 with an estimated cost of 370$US.
$370 is alot for a console--no matter how awesome. Didnt the Sega Genesis have the same problem: it cost too much to be an impulse buy, and is hard to justify when you budget for the month?
How is an AC who signs his name at the bottom of his messages (but doesn't actually have a slashdot account) any less worthy of attention than somebody such as yourself, who has a slashdot account, but is every bit as anonymous as that AC?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I've made a small list of what seems to be a pretty complete list of the new PS2 info. If I've missed any, feel free to add-on.
Sony of America
Sony of Europe
Sony of Japan
PSX Nation
IGNPSX
Gaming Age
Next-Generation
Gamespot
The Magic Box
And then I'd also recomend you check out the MB's connected with some of those sites because there are some very interesting discussions in there. Also expect the major news organizations (MSNBC, ZDNET, CNN) to pick it up sometime tonight too.
The DualShock's sticks are fine, but the buttonpads just suck for me. I've always found them uncomfortable and unresponsive. I've not yet used a DreamCast's controller, though, but it looks like they took some design lessons from Nintendo (say what you want, the N64 pads work GREAT - for me, anyway). To each their own.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
Yeah and it's a good thing that the news media doesn't rely on anonymous sources. Oh wait, they do.
Your stance would appear to include dismissing a cancer cure or the Secret of the Universe(TM) if it were posted by an AC. Even if they're right.
It would be a much better idea to read the post and decide based solely on the merits of the content whether or not it should be moderated. One's ability to sign their name does not indicate that they're stupid. Lord knows we've got lots of stupid users around here.
-- 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 admit this is offtopic, but it has got to be said somewhere.
The slashdot moderation system is not working - decent arguments from anonymous cowards (and even logged in people) such as myself are never being rated up. I think I know why. Are the people who are moderating allowed to set their mimimum tolerance ? Ie do they set their threshold up, and then never even see the articles they are supposed to be moderating ?
Clearly if you are taking the responsibility of being a moderator then you should not be able to shield yourself from significant portions of the debate.
This theory would explain the recent spate of highly uprated articles which have recieved detailed and rigorous response (basically reducing much of what had been said to the misinformed opinion that it was) and yet while the votes continue to push the original article up, the worthy response does not get voted up, nor any real followups to it (presumably because of the threshhold problem for readers, although this is not really a problem).
What do you think ? Make people indulging in moderation read everything...seems only fair [even if the final moderation is still bad, at least they saw it]
But I think that supporting DVD video is really the key feature. If this comes out to the American public at under $300, this feature could be a Dad's last straw.
Heck, sell a remote at a reasonable price ($35 or under), and I bet they could cash in on that in a hurry. The beauty here is that this doesn't have to have good performance DVD-wise at all, because this is a totally different market.
I haven't bought a console since 8-bit Nintendo, but I think I'll be biting the bullet on this baby.
The Dual Shock 2 supports analog input on all buttons, while the original only did on the thumbsticks.
if you have old PS games, you have an old PS, therefore you don't need backwards compatibility
The real Sony URL is http://www.scei.co.jp/ps2 where you will find the real specs and screenshots.
The PSX2's CPU has *14* separate FPU units vs 3 on the Athlon. It has two vector units capable of doing dot products, cross products, etc. It has a x9 multiply-and-accumulate unit which can do super-fast matrix operations. In short, for 3d calculations, it blows the PentiumIII/Athlon, and even the Alpha away.
It's normal ram is RDRAM for a 3.6gb/sec bandwidth.
It's rasterizer has a 2,560 bit bus! (embedded dram) with a RAM bandwidth of 48 GIGABYTEs/sec which is 48 times more than AGP 2x. It can render a whopping 2.4 gigapixels/sec using 16 pixel pipelines which is about 5 times the best PC 3d accelerator.
Besides hardware transform and lighting, it's flexible enough to render 60+ million polys/sec and even 16 million+ BEZIER curved patches a sec.
That's about 20 times the bet polygon throughput on a PentiumIII with SSE, and for Bezier patches it's probably 50 times faster.
It's I/O and sound processors alone best the best PC I/O and sound controllers. (It's I/O processor alone is good enough to run Playstation 1 games)
And, it decodes and displays DVD Video.
In short, $360 is fucking cheap for this box! This box destroys E-Machine PCs 100 times over.
And they have another box called TOOL which lets you develop and run PSX2 games on Linux with the PSX2 hardware!
Just another comment. When the Playstation 1 first came out, it cost $299 with NO packin game. After buying a game and a second controller, with tax, it cost near $400.
Folks, this is technology you should be excited about. You should dream of having a Linux box with the PSX2 hardware as your CPU/graphics card/CPU and DVD player!
I sincerely doubt this is the final design of the PSX2. I don't believe a drawer will be on the final design of the thing. The only other consoles that had a drawer on it was the ill fated 3DO and the CD-I. Drawers cost money, and if Sony can shave off a few bucks for this sucker, they'd more than likely do it, especially with the Dreamcast near the "impulse buy" price-range (under $200).
It's going to be an interesting Christmas, and one heck of a spring.
I have been following the PSX2 development for some time now and with this latest release of info on the system, I see some good and bad points. Lets see here...
Good:
"The new system is backwards compatible with the original PlayStation." Very good for those of us who have invested way more money than they should have on a huge library of games.
"High capacity 8MB Memory Card" Great, too many of the games for PSX used an entire card's blocks to save.
"CD-ROM and DVD-ROM" Good cause I just purchased FF8 and its 4 CDs, would've been nice to have it as just 1 DVD, and there would've been still more room for another 4 hours of CG animation. heh...
"128 Bit "Emotion EngineTM" 294.912 MHz 32MB Direct RDRAM "Graphics Synthesizer" 147.456MHz 4MB VRAM" What else can you say here other than its going to have some kick ass graphics.
"$370 US" I know some of you think this is way too high, but when you think of what you're getting, its not that bad. Sure, if you compare the price to say Dreamcast, N64, or PSX it may seem high, but you are not getting just a game console. You can play DVD movies on this thing. Have any of you priced DVD players, for a decent Sony DVD players you pay $300-400. So if you are getting a DVD/CD/game system in one for $370, I think you got a deal.
Now for Bad:
"Controller port (2)" I don't know about the rest of you but I find this a really bad point. I own a PSX and N64 and when it comes time to play multiplayer games with my friends when we get together, it always comes down to playing games on the N64 because it has 4 controllers standard on the system. PSX made an adapter so you could have more players playing, but there are like next to no companies that support it so what's the point. Almost anyone who plays games on the computer knows that multiplay is what keeps games alive, why not use these same principles with the PSX2 and give us atleast 4 controller ports standard!
Well that's the only thing I found wrong so the good still outweigh the bad heavily, and even if Sony doesn't modify the system to support more controllers, I know I'll still buy it and love it, just would be nice to have it all though, eh? hehe
Damn create account didn't work again!
Killjoy76
Jason Carter
You need to insert the Amiga CD32 inbetween 1 and 2 up there. :)
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
Myself, I'm not too eager for the PSY. Yeah, the specs are very impressive, but they still have those crappy controllers, and it seems that the Dreamcast already has more than enough computing power for quite some time; I think the PSY will have the problem the Jaguar did - too much of a legacy 'feel' while really being far ahead of its time. Also, the fact that they apparently won't try to improve PSX games being emulated (like, why don't they improve the color blending and lack of perspective correction at least? and maybe add in texture filtering and stuff) doesn't make me want to get one for PSX games, not that there's any that I really want which isn't out/coming out for the PC anyway.
I'll wait on getting a Dreamcast (want to see a commitment to a 10baseT adapter, want to see the price come down, and need it to be in stock anyway :) and I'll probably also get a Dolphin, since as bad of a company Nintendo is, they have Shigeru Miyamoto whose games are just fun, but so far, the only reason I see for getting a PSY is that I could theoretically develop fun stuff on it, assuming they release the SDKs and the like, which I highly doubt. Just because they use Linux as a dev platform doesn't mean they use Linux ideals, after all.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
Can anyone clarify what they mean by 128-bit system? Is that the internal register size? Bus? I think the the Dreamcast was billed as being 128-bit as well, yet when I looked at the specs, the integer processor was 32-bits, the floating point was 64, and the bus was 32. Yeah, 32+32+64=128, but really that means absolutely nada. Anyone have info on the Playstation2?