CRAPPY LOW END? Do you have any idea of what you speak? The Onyx 2 that gets 13.1m polys/sec is the best graphics station in the world. I believe it costs in excess of $1million. This is what they used to make a Bugs Life with. Don't knock it. Have a look
Well that is NOT the only reason I own a PC, but I figure if I own one I might as well use it for that too since it does damn near everything else. And in my mind, it is superior. Why? Well the longest I've ever been interested in a PSX game (FF7, which I can and have got for my PC) was around 4 weeks. Most were 1 or 2. Now it seems silly to me to buy a new game that often. Quake (running the TeamFortress mod, on the other hand I've had for around a year now and STILL I play it almost every day. That's way more value for my money. Also, I feel the cost of the PC is well justified since I use it for writing papers, programming, audio recording/production, browsing the internet, HTML design, graphics design, and more IN ADDITION to playing games on. I can't justify to myslef the additional money spent ona console since my PC already does what it would do for me.
Until a console can let me and 31 of my friends play Quake/quake 2/Tribes on a LAN, they are always inferior in my mind. Thoses games have more "fun quotient" than most any others. MY average intrest for a console game (FF excluded) is around a week or 2. I've had Quake for around a year and play it nearly daily. I'd say it wins.
Using PSEmu Pro (yes, a working emu for the PC) I get better than real Playstation performance on my 400 with a Voodoo2. The PSX isn't that hard to emulate.
Well, see, there ain't no such thing as a 50million poly/sec chip today. To get that kind of performance you'd need to have something like 4 or 5 of Silicon Graphics' best systems chained together. Basically Sony is doing what big tech corprations do so well: lying. Face it, it's damn unlikely that Sony can make the quantum leap to have a 20m/sec polygon chip.
All this sounds great at first but it's not as cool as it sounds. First remember this: all companies LOVE to hype their hardware, but it rarely meets up to what they say it can do (remember when nVidia had to recall their benchmarks saying their cards outpreformed 3dfx?) They say 20 million polygons per second I say I'll believe it when I see it myself. Also remember this, PSX2 is still running (for most users at least) on NTSC. Now let's face it, NTSC sucks. It's max res is something like 720x480 (I don't really know), it's fuzzy as hell and it's colours suck. What good does a 2.4billion pixel fill rate do them? Let's say that NTSC could do 800x600 (which it can't but we'll say so for our purposes). Now NTSC's refresh rate is 60Hz (interlaced) so say we have the PSX2 doing 800x600x60 that's only 28.8million pixels per second. What good is the rest of that fill rate doing? Remember, HDTV isn't likely to hit the mainstream anytime soon and when it does it's still going to cost a bundle. It sounds to me like Sony has gone and fixed a bunch of problems that people don't have. Like the PSX2 ram. I think I saw it quoted as having 800mhz of bandwidth? Why? Latency is what makes ram fast, not bandwidth. Even the most intense 3d apps these days rarely use more than areound 100mhz of ram bandwidth. I, for one, am going to stick with my PC and probably just put a Voodoo3 in it (or mabey a different accelerator). All the other facts aside the PC has one HUGE advantage (in my eyes) that the PSX2 will probably not have. Multi-player games. On a regular basis I get together with a bunch of people and we go and frag each other in Quake 2. This is great fun since you are actually fighting against humans for once. I doubt that the PSX2 will offer the kind of networking availabe on the PC. Sure, there may be a modem and MABEY even a fast network card, but I doubt there will be anything as cool as the giant computer LANs. Last thing: The PSX2 release date (according to NextGen) is going to be March of 2000. If you think that the Pc industry will just sit on it's ass from now until then you are fooling yourself. There is certian to be an accelerator much better than a Voodoo3 by then and Intel should have their 64-bit chip out by that time. I'm not saying that the PSX2 won't be cool, I certianly think the PSX was, but everyone just needs to realise that it is not going to be the huge PC killer that Sony would like you to think it will be. It is also going to have to fight the increased number of PCs that people own. PCs used to be somewhat of a rarity in the home. Far more people owned a nintendo or some such thing than a PC (I know I did). This has taken a huge turn around. Lately it has become almost necessary to own a PC. Now these people have already invested between $800 and $3000 in a sweet peice of PC hardware that can play games (and lots of them) perfectly well they are going to be a bit reluctant to spend $200-$400 more for another game system. That is the true beuaty of PCs is their ability to do near anything. If I desired I could replace my PC with a bunch of different peices of dedicated hardware, but I like it better this way. I type my papers, record music, play games, program, surf the net, do graphics and much more all on my PC. If I got a PSX2 It would do one thing: play games. Face it, even if they ported linux for it 16-32mb of ram and no hard disk would be just too limiting to make it truly useful for anything but a novelty.
Dunno about the emulator getting continued. Form the small amount I've payed attention to this whole deal I gather not. Don't think Nintendo will sue the authors tho. How could they really, their real names are not known. It would probably be more work than it would be worth just to find out who the authors really were and sue them. The are probably just a pair of programmers (read that as NOT rich) and not really worth Nintendo's time.
Slashdot Mirror
CRAPPY LOW END? Do you have any idea of what you speak? The Onyx 2 that gets 13.1m polys/sec is the best graphics station in the world. I believe it costs in excess of $1million. This is what they used to make a Bugs Life with. Don't knock it. Have a look
Well that is NOT the only reason I own a PC, but I figure if I own one I might as well use it for that too since it does damn near everything else. And in my mind, it is superior. Why? Well the longest I've ever been interested in a PSX game (FF7, which I can and have got for my PC) was around 4 weeks. Most were 1 or 2. Now it seems silly to me to buy a new game that often. Quake (running the TeamFortress mod, on the other hand I've had for around a year now and STILL I play it almost every day. That's way more value for my money. Also, I feel the cost of the PC is well justified since I use it for writing papers, programming, audio recording/production, browsing the internet, HTML design, graphics design, and more IN ADDITION to playing games on. I can't justify to myslef the additional money spent ona console since my PC already does what it would do for me.
Until a console can let me and 31 of my friends play Quake/quake 2/Tribes on a LAN, they are always inferior in my mind. Thoses games have more "fun quotient" than most any others. MY average intrest for a console game (FF excluded) is around a week or 2. I've had Quake for around a year and play it nearly daily. I'd say it wins.
Using PSEmu Pro (yes, a working emu for the PC) I get better than real Playstation performance on my 400 with a Voodoo2. The PSX isn't that hard to emulate.
Not entierly true, it's got a MIPS chip and those are quite old.
Well, see, there ain't no such thing as a 50million poly/sec chip today. To get that kind of performance you'd need to have something like 4 or 5 of Silicon Graphics' best systems chained together. Basically Sony is doing what big tech corprations do so well: lying. Face it, it's damn unlikely that Sony can make the quantum leap to have a 20m/sec polygon chip.
All this sounds great at first but it's not as cool as it sounds. First remember this: all companies LOVE to hype their hardware, but it rarely meets up to what they say it can do (remember when nVidia had to recall their benchmarks saying their cards outpreformed 3dfx?) They say 20 million polygons per second I say I'll believe it when I see it myself. Also remember this, PSX2 is still running (for most users at least) on NTSC. Now let's face it, NTSC sucks. It's max res is something like 720x480 (I don't really know), it's fuzzy as hell and it's colours suck. What good does a 2.4billion pixel fill rate do them? Let's say that NTSC could do 800x600 (which it can't but we'll say so for our purposes). Now NTSC's refresh rate is 60Hz (interlaced) so say we have the PSX2 doing 800x600x60 that's only 28.8million pixels per second. What good is the rest of that fill rate doing? Remember, HDTV isn't likely to hit the mainstream anytime soon and when it does it's still going to cost a bundle. It sounds to me like Sony has gone and fixed a bunch of problems that people don't have. Like the PSX2 ram. I think I saw it quoted as having 800mhz of bandwidth? Why? Latency is what makes ram fast, not bandwidth. Even the most intense 3d apps these days rarely use more than areound 100mhz of ram bandwidth.
I, for one, am going to stick with my PC and probably just put a Voodoo3 in it (or mabey a different accelerator). All the other facts aside the PC has one HUGE advantage (in my eyes) that the PSX2 will probably not have. Multi-player games. On a regular basis I get together with a bunch of people and we go and frag each other in Quake 2. This is great fun since you are actually fighting against humans for once. I doubt that the PSX2 will offer the kind of networking availabe on the PC. Sure, there may be a modem and MABEY even a fast network card, but I doubt there will be anything as cool as the giant computer LANs.
Last thing: The PSX2 release date (according to NextGen) is going to be March of 2000. If you think that the Pc industry will just sit on it's ass from now until then you are fooling yourself. There is certian to be an accelerator much better than a Voodoo3 by then and Intel should have their 64-bit chip out by that time. I'm not saying that the PSX2 won't be cool, I certianly think the PSX was, but everyone just needs to realise that it is not going to be the huge PC killer that Sony would like you to think it will be. It is also going to have to fight the increased number of PCs that people own.
PCs used to be somewhat of a rarity in the home. Far more people owned a nintendo or some such thing than a PC (I know I did). This has taken a huge turn around. Lately it has become almost necessary to own a PC. Now these people have already invested between $800 and $3000 in a sweet peice of PC hardware that can play games (and lots of them) perfectly well they are going to be a bit reluctant to spend $200-$400 more for another game system. That is the true beuaty of PCs is their ability to do near anything. If I desired I could replace my PC with a bunch of different peices of dedicated hardware, but I like it better this way. I type my papers, record music, play games, program, surf the net, do graphics and much more all on my PC. If I got a PSX2 It would do one thing: play games. Face it, even if they ported linux for it 16-32mb of ram and no hard disk would be just too limiting to make it truly useful for anything but a novelty.
Dunno about the emulator getting continued. Form the small amount I've payed attention to this whole deal I gather not. Don't think Nintendo will sue the authors tho. How could they really, their real names are not known. It would probably be more work than it would be worth just to find out who the authors really were and sue them. The are probably just a pair of programmers (read that as NOT rich) and not really worth Nintendo's time.