New PS2 models (SCPH-39001 and SCPH-39010/N in the network bundle) already ship with 2.12 firmware DVD drivers, and don't require the PS2 DVD remote upgrade disc. This saves you 1/4th of a memory card:)
If you bought your PS2 at a big, nasty store like Wal-mart or Future Shop, chances are you have one of the old SPCH-30001R or S (1st gen) machines which have the old 2.10 driver (and also many issues with lasers).
If you bought it at EB, GameStop, or some other store that focuses on games, chances are you have the newer 7th gen one. You can always check the version via triangle in the browser. If you did buy it at an EB or Gamestop and you have an old PS2, don't fret. If you bought one of their extended warrantees, you can just exchange it for a new one. Just take the base console in and ask for a newest model one.
You see, in Windows, there's one tool I need to use to add and remove applications.
The binary installer I download on the net.
Dependency hell is having to see a list of different package managers, and then get a smarmy, "Man, the tools are there, learn how to use them" at the end of it all.
And even if you do use the package managers, when they cock up, you're no better off than if you'd just installed from source in the first place.
I know the GBA SP has a frontlight, but I don't think it's an ommission that this is not a backlight. It's a design choice. Look at all the backlit handhelds, and the pile of batteries they used.
Again, the headphone jack was a design choice. Do you use headphones? The first GameBoy had headphones that came with it. Most people don't care that it requires an adaptor. Some people, like myself, and a few other people I know, will go spend the 8$ on the adaptor. Nintendo has saved 8$ * the number of units shipped (2 million SPs so far, IIRC), versus raising the price 8$. For the nearly 2 million people who didn't want headphones, it's not there, and they don't care anyways.
Do you whine about the Xbox and GameCube not coming with 2 controllers? That happened a long, long time ago. Nintendo's just packaging what most people want, with extras available for those who want it. Simple, efficient.
Speaking of addons, TritonLabs has been talking about making bluetooth linkers for the GBA.
"But Satoru Iwata promised the struggling games company was developing a radical new product to be announced next year"
Yea, avayre, because profiting $95 Million US dollars is so struggling. It'd be nice if posters would fact check their stories before they post it, or that the editors would link in apropos stories. This is just silly.
You make a few points, but if you can say, "I'd expect to have a way to "kill" msn messanger (which is what I assume's on there)." then you're just talking out of your ass.
It's not messenger. What you have is real-time voice chat over the internet, which also happens to not take up any screen real estate. It's just the same as when I'm playing GCN, GBA, or PS2 while waiting for a match to fill up in Mech Assault -- I sit there, and can hear everything that's going on, while also participating. I'm busy doing something else, yet they don't interfere at all.
As for your point about the SNES and PSX.. 11 years ago, people were saying, "why buy a SNES? On the NES, I have FF, A boy and his Blob, Formula 1: Built to Win, Mega Man, etc, etc. SNES just has cookie cutter games like Mario World and Legend of Zelda"..
I quit my job in cube land because in was distracting me from what I enjoyed in life. I'd rather work for what I enjoy, than have what I enjoy be marginalized by 9-5.
You could always try and become a game developer. You just need artists/story writers with you:)
I know what i.Link is, and I know why Sony would be sued for using the term Firewire. Go look at a real PS2 system link cable. Note how its connector is the 4-pin i.Link cable connector!
They are phasing it out because the system link games (Armored Core series, Grant Turismo 3) were so few in number. The cable is impossible to find at retail (you have to go online for it), as is the software available (2 games, woo). It's just like on the Dreamcast: you needed a special DC serial cable (good luck finding one), a game that supported system link (Virtua On, F355, and Daytona USA 2001), and two systems + two TVs + two discs. (The PS1 had Wipeout as its grand system link game..woo)
As for your line, "xbox live has very few customers even with it's 10 million networking kits" -- I find in very revealing that the Xbox has as many people online playing Mech Assault at any given time as the PS2 has people playing SOCOM: US Navy Seals. The PS2s outnumber the Xbox 5 to 1, yet there are that many Xbox owners willing to buy Xbox Live (which costs the same as a network adaptor) and play online.
Nintendo's stance is, wait until it's profitable. Sony's stance is, we don't care. Microsoft's stance is, let's make ourselves a new market of sustainable revenue. And they're doing in quite nicely. There are more games with online play and content download on the Xbox than there are online games on the PS2 by at least 2 to 1; possibly 3 to 1 by September.
"and the PPSX is only $200, but offers alot better DVD support as well as wireless networking with other systems. (It was also rumored to offer DVD burning support but I dont have a confirmation on this)"
The Sony rep for my area says it'll be 499$ CDN. I'll take her word over yours anyday.
"heck why the hell would they release a linux kit for the thing which is only really good for learning to code if they didnt think technical people where buying it."
Better bread and circuses from Sony than all that homebrew stuff that went on with the Dreamcast. I can sit down and write an entire game for the Dreamcast and publish it; you can't publish anything on the PS2.
"those people who want to play FF online HAVE to buy the hard drive, its bundled with the software and is required for play. In fact they send you a beta version of it for the testing they are doing right now, "
Yes, I had a long chat with a person beta testing FF11 last Friday. AFAIK, the HD will be included with FF11. People who don't want to buy FF11 and play online for a fee will ignore it, naturally.
Until you can come up with real sales numbers that show that the network adaptor is selling amazingly well, or that you have secret knowledge of PS2 online games that will be must have, you'll have to concede that not everyone who has a PS2 wants FF, nor does everyone have a credit card even if they did, nor does everyone want to pay. The only way to get 100% saturation is make it so you can't not get the network adaptor with the PS2 -- Sony missed out on that, however.
Ok, if you are buying a bunch of PS2s and Xboxes because you can turn them into PCs, you are such a tiny fraction of the populace as to not matter. Of the 10 million Xboxes out there, how many are running movies, etc? I'd guess less than 1 in 100. For the PS2 I would guess less than 1 in 1,000, since there are 50 million out there.
I own 2 GameCubes, 2 Dreamcasts, 1 Xbox, 1 PS2, 2 NES, etc. Multiple GameCubes will make sense once more system-link games come out, much like multiple Xboxes makes sense for system-link parties (no one cares about PS2 system link, which is why Sony's dropping the i.Link port on future models).
What GameCube needs are just games that appeal to wide audiences. Games that sell on GameCube are games that wouldn't sell on PS2 or Xbox, and vise versa. A lot of people want GTA on Xbox or Halo on PS2, but not one of the GC owners cares about those two games. The GameCube market is not shooters and violence, remarkably enough. The trouble is that most development companies in North America are geared towards that because of the PS2, which they can shovel that stuff out on no problem.
I expect once more people start porting Japanese games to GCN in North America, it'll get more sellers. IE: Ikaruga is a good sleeper hit on the GCN.
"Nintendo on the other hand makes the debug kits and SDK hardware impossible to afford for small companies and the cart and burn fees are much worse than the same fees for Xbox and PS2."
The various fees for producing GCN games were lowered last April. That's why Sega games and other titles from Capcom and Konami are coming out at cheap prices, like 59.99$ CDN or less. Capcom can publish new games at 49.99$ CDN and still earn great profit!
And this is completely ignoring the efforts of Nintendo to work together with 3rd party developers. Miyamoto has made himself available to Capcom, Konami, Sega, and other third-parties, while leaving his titles to mainly be built with his remote supervision. This has led to many great contributions by those companies to the GameCube product library.
Nintendo's changing how they do business, they have been for years. That you're ignorant of it shows you haven't been following it since Hiroshi Yamauchi stepped down.
I was laughing with my friend who works at the video game store, because the guide came in around December. MOO 3 didn't come out until February or March. Normally the guides arrive at the store half a week before the game.. although there are some times when it gets in much earlier. My friend still has a strategy guide for Dreamcast Half-Life in mint condition:)
The vast majority of people with stock PS2s won't upgrade with an HD, the same way they won't upgrade with a network adaptor. There are 50 million PS2s out there, and about 500,000 network adaptors. That's a 100 to 1 ratio. Do you know how many Xbox users have network adaptors in their console? all 10 million of them. That's also why Xbox system link thrives, while Sony is pulling the i.Link port in their next design revision.
Sony has discontinued the PS2 without network adaptor. All the video game stores in town are out of new PS2s without network adaptor, but all of them have plenty of the network bundles. The network bundles don't sell well either, even though the user is getting half off the price of the network adaptor (30$ CDN more than new at some places). The PSX will be twice as expensive as the network bundle!
Most people who own PS2s only care about the latest Madden or Grand Theft Auto. They probably can't even spell hard drive.
No forum comes with glossy, pretty pages. No forum has answers for the end of the game if you are stuck near the end, and it just came out. No forum gives you something that's super easy to read on the couch (unless you purchase a tablet PC; however, you could also buy about 200 guides for the same price).
I can't count the number of illiterate gamefaqs exist on the net. There are so many people who failed grade 8 english who like games, and they all seem to like to try and write guides.
For PC games the guide can be outdated, but for most console games, it's the most complete guide you'll ever find.
How many people out there are willing to spend 60+ hours on a game, and then write it up all for free? There are lots of people who'll write complete FAQs for SW: KOTOR, but how many complete guides exist for Hey, you, Pikachu?
There are 2 uses to a guide. The first is the most obvious: when I get stuck, I will look it up in the guide. I do this sparingly, so as not so spoil anything. Cool guides that work to not spoil it (like Brady's Wind Waker guide), are even better. Once I've beaten the game once, and the game offers replay value (again, Wind Waker does this, as does KOTOR), I will play through the game with guide in hand. I will find everything, I well check all the side quests, I will do everything I humanly can. If I really consider it done and I really won't want to play it years later, I even get extra from my local video game store when I trade in the guide with the game.
Maybe you haven't heard about how the strategy guide stuff works, but here's the gist of it.
The game goes gold. Then it is sent to a publisher who has rights to the game. They, in turn, have a group of hardcore gamers who are also litterate (things like capitalizing the start of sentences, proper comma and semi-colon usage, etc). They get to play through the game before anyone else, with the catch that they have to play through it completely and also write everything down. They take screenshots, and in some cases also make maps. All of it is vetted past the game developers.
"To use everybody's favorite OS as an example, if I want to run Win95 for some reason and MS doesn't sell it anymore, than I should be free as the wind to make as many copies as I desire. "
I think 14 years is still excellent in this case. You don't want to cut the business down too much. Besides, MS will still happily sell you everything from DOS 2.0 and up.
"I can't imagine in fifteen years still obsessing over what the game companies are coming out with now."
That's because games like Madden 2004 don't really offer anything worth obsessing over. All the games you do remember fondly and still enjoy are games you will remember because they are so good. Do you remember Fester's Quest? The original Robocop game? GI Joe the video game? Zillion, the mega cartridge?
No. If you'd been the way you are now, about 18 years ago, you'd have said "I can't imagine in fifteen years still obsessing over what the game companies are coming out with now." because games that are worth obsessing over don't come out that often. It's easy to look back on a library of 40 or 50 older games that rock and ignore the 400 or 500 shitty games that came out at the same time.
DOSEmu 1.1.5 and 1.0.2.1 both worked well for me, although I'd reccomend 1.1.5. The SB emulation is better than in VMWare; VMWare's audio breaks up like there's no tomorrow for some reason. It's almost like I have reverb turned on:-/
DOSEmu is also free as in freedom and free as in beer. VMWare is fairly expensive if you aren't a student.
But DOSEmu costs nothing. It works really well. I used it to continue a Genecyst game I was unable to play under Win9x and WinNT kernel OSes, as well as playing the original 2 Monkey Island games.:-D
That of the 50 million PS2s out there, no large percentage will ever have HDs. Unless it comes stock with the system, no one will buy it. The only peripherals that every got more than 20% market saturation are memory cards and controllers with rumble.
I'm not talking updates to fix bugs, I'm talking updates to add more FUN. New armours, weapons, starting character classes, etc. Updates are the reason there won't have to be a Mech Assault 2; Microsoft will stream out updates as they see fit to increase the game's fun factor.
And, even if you don't agree with the idea of patches, patches do help. Any multiplayer online game for console should have some way to update it so that hacks or bugs don't become exploited and ruin the game.
It should be noted that GTA: Vice City and GTA: 3 also look like poo compared to KOTOR. Streamed levels do come at a price...
This game is something that the PS2 would not be able to run unless it was cut down so far as to make the game useless. Save files for it are 64megs in save, for crynig out loud! You're as likely to see Morrowind on the PS2 as KOTOR.
If you've played the game, you know the enormous amount of detail that was put into it. They'de have to take out all bump mapping, shrink the levels, remove most of the NPCs, etc, etc. The PS2 just doesn't have the graphics power and RAM to execute this game. Plus, there's no way for Bioware to release updates to the game on the PS2; even if they figured out how to release updates via Sony's network adaptor (without any of the Live! infrastructure), where'd you put it? Assuming you could do a 4/1 compression on the save file, you'd still take 2 full memory cards with each KOTOR save.
I think you should play this game, as it is excellent. Wether you do so on your PC or you Xbox is up to you. If you don't have either, consider getting one; the more systems you own, the more games you can play, the less likely you'll ever miss out on anything cool.
It's the graphics capabilities, the sound capabilities, etc, that determine how cool a system is.
Back in the 1980s, Sega developed the marketting technique of 16-bit. Their Sega Genesis was better than the NES not because it was 16-bit, but because it had better capabilities. IE: it had a dedicated Z80 (8-bit CPU!) for sound, and its PPU could do more interesting things with more sprites and more colours than the NES' PPU.
The SNES is the same thing: a custom Sony CPU with wavetable support for sound, and a really awesome PPU which had things like mode 7 FX. The CPU in it was 1/3rd the speed of the Genesis cpu because the CPU of your gaming system does not determine how cool the system is overall.
The Palm gaming platform is no different. Who cares if one part is 16-bit? It's all about how the entire system works as a whole.
If you'll notice, the colum where it has total QphH figures is the big telling factor here. Look down at the 10,000gb range, for example. When you scale up the total QphH, your cost per QphH also rises (kinda like how a P4 costs more per Mhz at its highest stepping as compared to the next highest stepping). The Solaris solution that is 40$/QphH is also 1/12th as powerful overall.
A fairer comparison would be to something with a similar overall power. HP's offering with only 100 less QphH than IBM's offering costs 203$ QphH vs. the 65$ US of the IBM version.
I think it's really amazing that an install whose raw power is so much higher than anything else in the class is still as affordable as IBM's nearest Windows solution, which gives you half the power for about the same price per QphH.
Slashdot Mirror
New PS2 models (SCPH-39001 and SCPH-39010/N in the network bundle) already ship with 2.12 firmware DVD drivers, and don't require the PS2 DVD remote upgrade disc. This saves you 1/4th of a memory card :)
If you bought your PS2 at a big, nasty store like Wal-mart or Future Shop, chances are you have one of the old SPCH-30001R or S (1st gen) machines which have the old 2.10 driver (and also many issues with lasers).
If you bought it at EB, GameStop, or some other store that focuses on games, chances are you have the newer 7th gen one. You can always check the version via triangle in the browser. If you did buy it at an EB or Gamestop and you have an old PS2, don't fret. If you bought one of their extended warrantees, you can just exchange it for a new one. Just take the base console in and ask for a newest model one.
You see, in Windows, there's one tool I need to use to add and remove applications.
The binary installer I download on the net.
Dependency hell is having to see a list of different package managers, and then get a smarmy, "Man, the tools are there, learn how to use them" at the end of it all.
And even if you do use the package managers, when they cock up, you're no better off than if you'd just installed from source in the first place.
And people wonder why I want a Macintosh.
I know the GBA SP has a frontlight, but I don't think it's an ommission that this is not a backlight. It's a design choice. Look at all the backlit handhelds, and the pile of batteries they used.
Again, the headphone jack was a design choice. Do you use headphones? The first GameBoy had headphones that came with it. Most people don't care that it requires an adaptor. Some people, like myself, and a few other people I know, will go spend the 8$ on the adaptor. Nintendo has saved 8$ * the number of units shipped (2 million SPs so far, IIRC), versus raising the price 8$. For the nearly 2 million people who didn't want headphones, it's not there, and they don't care anyways.
Do you whine about the Xbox and GameCube not coming with 2 controllers? That happened a long, long time ago. Nintendo's just packaging what most people want, with extras available for those who want it. Simple, efficient.
Speaking of addons, TritonLabs has been talking about making bluetooth linkers for the GBA.
"But Satoru Iwata promised the struggling games company was developing a radical new product to be announced next year"
Yea, avayre, because profiting $95 Million US dollars is so struggling. It'd be nice if posters would fact check their stories before they post it, or that the editors would link in apropos stories. This is just silly.
You make a few points, but if you can say, "I'd expect to have a way to "kill" msn messanger (which is what I assume's on there)." then you're just talking out of your ass.
..
It's not messenger. What you have is real-time voice chat over the internet, which also happens to not take up any screen real estate. It's just the same as when I'm playing GCN, GBA, or PS2 while waiting for a match to fill up in Mech Assault -- I sit there, and can hear everything that's going on, while also participating. I'm busy doing something else, yet they don't interfere at all.
As for your point about the SNES and PSX.. 11 years ago, people were saying, "why buy a SNES? On the NES, I have FF, A boy and his Blob, Formula 1: Built to Win, Mega Man, etc, etc. SNES just has cookie cutter games like Mario World and Legend of Zelda"
As a P54C Pentium or an AMD Athlon: data buses do not a bitness make.
I quit my job in cube land because in was distracting me from what I enjoyed in life. I'd rather work for what I enjoy, than have what I enjoy be marginalized by 9-5.
:)
You could always try and become a game developer. You just need artists/story writers with you
I know what i.Link is, and I know why Sony would be sued for using the term Firewire. Go look at a real PS2 system link cable. Note how its connector is the 4-pin i.Link cable connector!
They are phasing it out because the system link games (Armored Core series, Grant Turismo 3) were so few in number. The cable is impossible to find at retail (you have to go online for it), as is the software available (2 games, woo). It's just like on the Dreamcast: you needed a special DC serial cable (good luck finding one), a game that supported system link (Virtua On, F355, and Daytona USA 2001), and two systems + two TVs + two discs. (The PS1 had Wipeout as its grand system link game..woo)
As for your line, "xbox live has very few customers even with it's 10 million networking kits" -- I find in very revealing that the Xbox has as many people online playing Mech Assault at any given time as the PS2 has people playing SOCOM: US Navy Seals. The PS2s outnumber the Xbox 5 to 1, yet there are that many Xbox owners willing to buy Xbox Live (which costs the same as a network adaptor) and play online.
Nintendo's stance is, wait until it's profitable. Sony's stance is, we don't care. Microsoft's stance is, let's make ourselves a new market of sustainable revenue. And they're doing in quite nicely. There are more games with online play and content download on the Xbox than there are online games on the PS2 by at least 2 to 1; possibly 3 to 1 by September.
"and the PPSX is only $200, but offers alot better DVD support as well as wireless networking with other systems. (It was also rumored to offer DVD burning support but I dont have a confirmation on this)"
The Sony rep for my area says it'll be 499$ CDN. I'll take her word over yours anyday.
"heck why the hell would they release a linux kit for the thing which is only really good for learning to code if they didnt think technical people where buying it."
Better bread and circuses from Sony than all that homebrew stuff that went on with the Dreamcast. I can sit down and write an entire game for the Dreamcast and publish it; you can't publish anything on the PS2.
"those people who want to play FF online HAVE to buy the hard drive, its bundled with the software and is required for play. In fact they send you a beta version of it for the testing they are doing right now, "
Yes, I had a long chat with a person beta testing FF11 last Friday. AFAIK, the HD will be included with FF11. People who don't want to buy FF11 and play online for a fee will ignore it, naturally.
Until you can come up with real sales numbers that show that the network adaptor is selling amazingly well, or that you have secret knowledge of PS2 online games that will be must have, you'll have to concede that not everyone who has a PS2 wants FF, nor does everyone have a credit card even if they did, nor does everyone want to pay. The only way to get 100% saturation is make it so you can't not get the network adaptor with the PS2 -- Sony missed out on that, however.
Ok, if you are buying a bunch of PS2s and Xboxes because you can turn them into PCs, you are such a tiny fraction of the populace as to not matter. Of the 10 million Xboxes out there, how many are running movies, etc? I'd guess less than 1 in 100. For the PS2 I would guess less than 1 in 1,000, since there are 50 million out there.
I own 2 GameCubes, 2 Dreamcasts, 1 Xbox, 1 PS2, 2 NES, etc. Multiple GameCubes will make sense once more system-link games come out, much like multiple Xboxes makes sense for system-link parties (no one cares about PS2 system link, which is why Sony's dropping the i.Link port on future models).
What GameCube needs are just games that appeal to wide audiences. Games that sell on GameCube are games that wouldn't sell on PS2 or Xbox, and vise versa. A lot of people want GTA on Xbox or Halo on PS2, but not one of the GC owners cares about those two games. The GameCube market is not shooters and violence, remarkably enough. The trouble is that most development companies in North America are geared towards that because of the PS2, which they can shovel that stuff out on no problem.
I expect once more people start porting Japanese games to GCN in North America, it'll get more sellers. IE: Ikaruga is a good sleeper hit on the GCN.
"Nintendo on the other hand makes the debug kits and SDK hardware impossible to afford for small companies and the cart and burn fees are much worse than the same fees for Xbox and PS2."
The various fees for producing GCN games were lowered last April. That's why Sega games and other titles from Capcom and Konami are coming out at cheap prices, like 59.99$ CDN or less. Capcom can publish new games at 49.99$ CDN and still earn great profit!
And this is completely ignoring the efforts of Nintendo to work together with 3rd party developers. Miyamoto has made himself available to Capcom, Konami, Sega, and other third-parties, while leaving his titles to mainly be built with his remote supervision. This has led to many great contributions by those companies to the GameCube product library.
Nintendo's changing how they do business, they have been for years. That you're ignorant of it shows you haven't been following it since Hiroshi Yamauchi stepped down.
I was laughing with my friend who works at the video game store, because the guide came in around December. MOO 3 didn't come out until February or March. Normally the guides arrive at the store half a week before the game.. although there are some times when it gets in much earlier. My friend still has a strategy guide for Dreamcast Half-Life in mint condition :)
The vast majority of people with stock PS2s won't upgrade with an HD, the same way they won't upgrade with a network adaptor. There are 50 million PS2s out there, and about 500,000 network adaptors. That's a 100 to 1 ratio. Do you know how many Xbox users have network adaptors in their console? all 10 million of them. That's also why Xbox system link thrives, while Sony is pulling the i.Link port in their next design revision.
Sony has discontinued the PS2 without network adaptor. All the video game stores in town are out of new PS2s without network adaptor, but all of them have plenty of the network bundles. The network bundles don't sell well either, even though the user is getting half off the price of the network adaptor (30$ CDN more than new at some places). The PSX will be twice as expensive as the network bundle!
Most people who own PS2s only care about the latest Madden or Grand Theft Auto. They probably can't even spell hard drive.
No forum comes with glossy, pretty pages. No forum has answers for the end of the game if you are stuck near the end, and it just came out. No forum gives you something that's super easy to read on the couch (unless you purchase a tablet PC; however, you could also buy about 200 guides for the same price).
I can't count the number of illiterate gamefaqs exist on the net. There are so many people who failed grade 8 english who like games, and they all seem to like to try and write guides.
For PC games the guide can be outdated, but for most console games, it's the most complete guide you'll ever find.
How many people out there are willing to spend 60+ hours on a game, and then write it up all for free? There are lots of people who'll write complete FAQs for SW: KOTOR, but how many complete guides exist for Hey, you, Pikachu?
There are 2 uses to a guide. The first is the most obvious: when I get stuck, I will look it up in the guide. I do this sparingly, so as not so spoil anything. Cool guides that work to not spoil it (like Brady's Wind Waker guide), are even better. Once I've beaten the game once, and the game offers replay value (again, Wind Waker does this, as does KOTOR), I will play through the game with guide in hand. I will find everything, I well check all the side quests, I will do everything I humanly can. If I really consider it done and I really won't want to play it years later, I even get extra from my local video game store when I trade in the guide with the game.
Maybe you haven't heard about how the strategy guide stuff works, but here's the gist of it.
The game goes gold. Then it is sent to a publisher who has rights to the game. They, in turn, have a group of hardcore gamers who are also litterate (things like capitalizing the start of sentences, proper comma and semi-colon usage, etc). They get to play through the game before anyone else, with the catch that they have to play through it completely and also write everything down. They take screenshots, and in some cases also make maps. All of it is vetted past the game developers.
That's how Versus Books, Brady, and Prima do it.
"To use everybody's favorite OS as an example, if I want to run Win95 for some reason and MS doesn't sell it anymore, than I should be free as the wind to make as many copies as I desire. "
I think 14 years is still excellent in this case. You don't want to cut the business down too much. Besides, MS will still happily sell you everything from DOS 2.0 and up.
"I can't imagine in fifteen years still obsessing over what the game companies are coming out with now."
That's because games like Madden 2004 don't really offer anything worth obsessing over. All the games you do remember fondly and still enjoy are games you will remember because they are so good. Do you remember Fester's Quest? The original Robocop game? GI Joe the video game? Zillion, the mega cartridge?
No. If you'd been the way you are now, about 18 years ago, you'd have said "I can't imagine in fifteen years still obsessing over what the game companies are coming out with now." because games that are worth obsessing over don't come out that often. It's easy to look back on a library of 40 or 50 older games that rock and ignore the 400 or 500 shitty games that came out at the same time.
DOSEmu 1.1.5 and 1.0.2.1 both worked well for me, although I'd reccomend 1.1.5. The SB emulation is better than in VMWare; VMWare's audio breaks up like there's no tomorrow for some reason. It's almost like I have reverb turned on :-/
DOSEmu is also free as in freedom and free as in beer. VMWare is fairly expensive if you aren't a student.
But DOSEmu costs nothing. It works really well. I used it to continue a Genecyst game I was unable to play under Win9x and WinNT kernel OSes, as well as playing the original 2 Monkey Island games. :-D
That of the 50 million PS2s out there, no large percentage will ever have HDs. Unless it comes stock with the system, no one will buy it. The only peripherals that every got more than 20% market saturation are memory cards and controllers with rumble.
I'm not talking updates to fix bugs, I'm talking updates to add more FUN. New armours, weapons, starting character classes, etc. Updates are the reason there won't have to be a Mech Assault 2; Microsoft will stream out updates as they see fit to increase the game's fun factor.
And, even if you don't agree with the idea of patches, patches do help. Any multiplayer online game for console should have some way to update it so that hacks or bugs don't become exploited and ruin the game.
It should be noted that GTA: Vice City and GTA: 3 also look like poo compared to KOTOR. Streamed levels do come at a price...
I suspect that the save file is just a compressed dump of the system memory (which is 64mb).
This game is something that the PS2 would not be able to run unless it was cut down so far as to make the game useless. Save files for it are 64megs in save, for crynig out loud! You're as likely to see Morrowind on the PS2 as KOTOR.
If you've played the game, you know the enormous amount of detail that was put into it. They'de have to take out all bump mapping, shrink the levels, remove most of the NPCs, etc, etc. The PS2 just doesn't have the graphics power and RAM to execute this game. Plus, there's no way for Bioware to release updates to the game on the PS2; even if they figured out how to release updates via Sony's network adaptor (without any of the Live! infrastructure), where'd you put it? Assuming you could do a 4/1 compression on the save file, you'd still take 2 full memory cards with each KOTOR save.
I think you should play this game, as it is excellent. Wether you do so on your PC or you Xbox is up to you. If you don't have either, consider getting one; the more systems you own, the more games you can play, the less likely you'll ever miss out on anything cool.
It's the graphics capabilities, the sound capabilities, etc, that determine how cool a system is.
Back in the 1980s, Sega developed the marketting technique of 16-bit. Their Sega Genesis was better than the NES not because it was 16-bit, but because it had better capabilities. IE: it had a dedicated Z80 (8-bit CPU!) for sound, and its PPU could do more interesting things with more sprites and more colours than the NES' PPU.
The SNES is the same thing: a custom Sony CPU with wavetable support for sound, and a really awesome PPU which had things like mode 7 FX. The CPU in it was 1/3rd the speed of the Genesis cpu because the CPU of your gaming system does not determine how cool the system is overall.
The Palm gaming platform is no different. Who cares if one part is 16-bit? It's all about how the entire system works as a whole.
If you'll notice, the colum where it has total QphH figures is the big telling factor here. Look down at the 10,000gb range, for example. When you scale up the total QphH, your cost per QphH also rises (kinda like how a P4 costs more per Mhz at its highest stepping as compared to the next highest stepping). The Solaris solution that is 40$/QphH is also 1/12th as powerful overall.
A fairer comparison would be to something with a similar overall power. HP's offering with only 100 less QphH than IBM's offering costs 203$ QphH vs. the 65$ US of the IBM version.
I think it's really amazing that an install whose raw power is so much higher than anything else in the class is still as affordable as IBM's nearest Windows solution, which gives you half the power for about the same price per QphH.