Umm, for a $600 Celeron box to compare to a PSX2, you'd need to add a monitor (unless you have TV-Out) $200. A GeForce256 3D card (about 1/4 the speed of the PSX, costs $300), and a DVD-ROM with Decoder ($200)
And even then, you can't begin to compare a Celeron with the Emotion Engine CPU.
They are spending $40million on the PSX2 version of FF9. That's the largest budget in history of game development.
Why? Because Square's games are literally interactive movies, and last year for the first time in history, the gaming industry beat hollywood in revenues!
Quake sucks up a lot of RAM because it uses lots of prerendered models and textures.
Carmack's latest plan on Quake3 shows that this technique is a failure, and he's moving to skeletal animation.
the PSX2 has enough power to handle realtime calculations of models, physics, lighting, and environment maps. It doesn't need to waste ram storing precalculated BSP maps, model vertexes, lightmaps, etc.
Furthermore, consoles typically don't run HUGE OPERATING systems that suck up RAM, and, with a 4x DVD, the PSX2 can easily stream code/video as needed.
The PSX2 has 32mb of RAM that is 4 times faster than the best PC ram. On the video chip, it has embedded ram that is a whopping 96 times faster than regular old RAM xfer rates.
Even games on the PSX show better design than most PC games. Just look at the graphical effects in Final Fantasy 7/8 alone.
Quake sucks up a lot of RAM because it uses lots of prerendered models and textures.
Carmack's latest plan on Quake3 shows that this technique is a failure, and he's moving to skeletal animation.
the PSX2 has enough power to handle realtime calculations of models, physics, lighting, and environment maps. It doesn't need to waste ram storing precalculated BSP maps, model vertexes, lightmaps, etc.
Furthermore, consoles typically don't run HUGE OPERATING systems that suck up RAM, and, with a 4x DVD, the PSX2 can easily stream code/video as needed.
The PSX2 has 32mb of RAM that is 4 times faster than the best PC ram. On the video chip, it has embedded ram that is a whopping 96 times faster than regular old RAM xfer rates.
Even games on the PSX show better design than most PC games. Just look at the graphical effects in Final Fantasy 7/8 alone.
Welp, comparing the PSX2 to the Dreamcast is like comparing the price of the original PSX to the SuperNES. That's about how I look at it.
When the system is delivered, it will be quite clear in everyone's view just by looking at the graphics if they are on level playing fields or not.
One thing the consumer will immediately notice is DVD capability. Current owners of PSX's (many millions of people) who remain loyal to the platform will upgrade. And finally, the price is bound to drift lower by Fall 2000 when it hits the US.
And with Squaresoft producing a $40million game for it, I can't see how they will fail.
$360 is *NOT* expensive, especially if you put a keyboard/model on this thing for an addition $100, you've got a computer which blows the living hell out of the cheapest comparable PCs you can buy.
(any $499 PCs you know of with mega graphics, sound and DVD?) Sure, it can't run PC software, but it could probably run a great emulator.
It will be $360 in Japan, not the US. It won't come out in the US until Fall 2000.
The original PSX cost over $300 also and it was by no means " a flop "
Finally, the cheapest quality DVD players you can get nowadays are $260, usually $299. $360 for a KICK ASS console with DVD play capability doesn't sound like a bad deal to me.
I think the early adopters will easily buy +1million units on release, which is enough to keep them going until price reductions.
The biggest thing Sony has going for them is PSX1 compatability and DVD Video. These two are big IMHO.
Sorry, but the PSX2 blows away the Dreamcast hardware. The dreamcast is nothing more than a PowerVR2 card + an SH-4 processor at 200Mhz with regular RAM and a GD-ROM.
It's much more important that the PSX2 come with a DVD than a modem. The PSX2 view is that a built in modem is a waste, since different people in different areas can get different things (DSL, ISDN, Cable, etc) A model is clearly an add-on product.
Right now ZERO Dreamcast games support the modem, and only 16 titles are released.
By the time the PSX2 comes out in march (which plays all PSX1 titles by the way, unlike Saturn/Dreamcast), DVD players still won't be "common" like VCRs in American homes.
Finally, Sony has better publishers lined up like Squaresoft with Final Fantasy 9 ($40 million budget). FF8 takes 4 CDs, so clearly DVD is the way to go.
I'm not saying don't buy a Dreamcast. New awesome hardware comes out every 6 months. If you always waited for the next best thing, you'd never buy anything. However, don't even dare to compare the Dreamcast hardware to the PSX2, it's not even close to being in the ballpark.
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!
People keep complaining that he is taking so long to give away his money, without realizing the fact that there is a much better net-gain for society if he keeps investing his wealth now, creating more jobs, more companies, etc.
John Stossil covered this very point on ABC's special on GREED. And he ended upsetting Ted Turner in the process. There is a certain level of skill required to manage money, and just blindly giving away his money at this point in time would be a huge waste -- like if Gates gave every American a gift of $400, it wouldn't make a dent society's well being. Most people who win the lottery squander it. If you gave every homeless person $1million, or ever yheroin addict $1million, or even every politician or charity manager $1million, it isn't the same as Gates managing that $1million.
Frankly, if Gates set out to dominate the biotech market, and cure AIDs and Malaria, I'd feel much better than some non-profit managing it, because his track record is one of making deals and getting things done.
A second point, Gates' wealth is only worth $100bil on paper, if he cashed it all in, it could drop significantly in value.
If Ted Turner wants to give away 33% of his net worth (keep in mind, it's over a 10 year period), that's his mistake, but don't blame Bill because he isn't experiencing as much *pain* or *suffering* as Turner. Why should the value of someone's charity be based on how much *pain* they suffer?
Not really open source right now (but probably will be), but my company has developed a mail/webmail/POP server solution, first outsourcing email for free similar to free homepages, and eventually offer single-click outsourcing, as long as you point your MX at us. Keeping it closed source doesn't benefit us, since the real value of outsourcing is our hardware/network setup with large RAIDs, and big pipes.
I have 10,000 messages in my INBOX right now (too many damn mailinglists), and many with large >2mb attachments, and the system runs fine. Similar to Sun's internet mail server, mailboxes are stored in a very scalable fashion, with hash indexes and preparsed MIME headers. As a comparison, the standard Linux IMAP/POP servers choke on my mailbox once it reaches about 3000 messages (meaning, lots of paging, and slow performance)
There is an integrated address book, with color coding, special mailing list detection, and an anti-spam system that uses a Visual Turing Test to eliminate bulk machine-generated spam.
Basically, it's an SMTP, POP, Webmail, and address book server, written from the ground up to be scalable, and it's pure Java. And for the naysayers, I'll tell you that the average time the SMTP daemon spends processing a message in he queue is 10ms. I develop it on Linux, and deploy it on a cluster of big Solaris boxes and it runs very nicely with no change.
(by being scalable, I mean that all resource utilization is kept at a minimum, in terms of disk thrashing, socket usage, and object allocation, so that for instance, 1000 concurrent users can be handled on a very cheap box)
If there is significant community interest for a pure-Java set of servers, I'll spend more time putting together an open-source package of the the MTA, POP, and IMAP servers in the near future. If interested, send me mail.
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Umm, for a $600 Celeron box to compare to a
PSX2, you'd need to add a monitor (unless you
have TV-Out) $200. A GeForce256 3D card
(about 1/4 the speed of the PSX, costs $300),
and a DVD-ROM with Decoder ($200)
And even then, you can't begin to compare
a Celeron with the Emotion Engine CPU.
They are spending $40million on the PSX2 version of FF9. That's the largest budget in history of game development.
Why? Because Square's games are literally interactive movies, and last year for the first time in history, the gaming industry beat hollywood in revenues!
No, they won't need ram.
Quake sucks up a lot of RAM because it uses lots of prerendered models and textures.
Carmack's latest plan on Quake3 shows that this technique is a failure, and he's moving to skeletal animation.
the PSX2 has enough power to handle realtime calculations of models, physics, lighting, and environment maps. It doesn't need to waste ram storing precalculated BSP maps, model vertexes, lightmaps, etc.
Furthermore, consoles typically don't run HUGE OPERATING systems that suck up RAM, and, with a 4x DVD, the PSX2 can easily stream code/video as needed.
The PSX2 has 32mb of RAM that is 4 times faster than the best PC ram. On the video chip, it has embedded ram that is a whopping 96 times faster than regular old RAM xfer rates.
Even games on the PSX show better design than most PC games. Just look at the graphical effects in Final Fantasy 7/8 alone.
No, they won't need ram.
Quake sucks up a lot of RAM because it uses lots of prerendered models and textures.
Carmack's latest plan on Quake3 shows that this technique is a failure, and he's moving to skeletal animation.
the PSX2 has enough power to handle realtime calculations of models, physics, lighting, and environment maps. It doesn't need to waste ram storing precalculated BSP maps, model vertexes, lightmaps, etc.
Furthermore, consoles typically don't run HUGE OPERATING systems that suck up RAM, and, with a 4x DVD, the PSX2 can easily stream code/video as needed.
The PSX2 has 32mb of RAM that is 4 times faster than the best PC ram. On the video chip, it has embedded ram that is a whopping 96 times faster than regular old RAM xfer rates.
Even games on the PSX show better design than most PC games. Just look at the graphical effects in Final Fantasy 7/8 alone.
Welp, comparing the PSX2 to the Dreamcast is like comparing the price of the original PSX to the SuperNES. That's about how I look at it.
When the system is delivered, it will be quite clear in everyone's view just by looking at the graphics if they are on level playing fields or not.
One thing the consumer will immediately notice is DVD capability. Current owners of PSX's (many millions of people) who remain loyal to the platform will upgrade. And finally, the price is bound to drift lower by Fall 2000 when it hits the US.
And with Squaresoft producing a $40million game for it, I can't see how they will fail.
$360 is *NOT* expensive, especially if you put a keyboard/model on this thing for an addition $100, you've got a computer which blows the living hell out of the cheapest comparable PCs you can buy.
(any $499 PCs you know of with mega graphics, sound and DVD?) Sure, it can't run PC software, but it could probably run a great emulator.
It will be $360 in Japan, not the US. It won't come out in the US until Fall 2000.
The original PSX cost over $300 also and it was by no means " a flop "
Finally, the cheapest quality DVD players you can get nowadays are $260, usually $299. $360 for a KICK ASS console with DVD play capability doesn't sound like a bad deal to me.
I think the early adopters will easily buy +1million units on release, which is enough to keep them going until price reductions.
The biggest thing Sony has going for them is PSX1 compatability and DVD Video. These two are big IMHO.
Sorry, but the PSX2 blows away the Dreamcast hardware. The dreamcast is nothing more than a PowerVR2 card + an SH-4 processor at 200Mhz with regular RAM and a GD-ROM.
It's much more important that the PSX2 come with a DVD than a modem. The PSX2 view is that a built in modem is a waste, since different people in different areas can get different things (DSL, ISDN, Cable, etc) A model is clearly an add-on product.
Right now ZERO Dreamcast games support the modem, and only 16 titles are released.
By the time the PSX2 comes out in march (which plays all PSX1 titles by the way, unlike Saturn/Dreamcast), DVD players still won't be "common" like VCRs in American homes.
Finally, Sony has better publishers lined up like Squaresoft with Final Fantasy 9 ($40 million budget). FF8 takes 4 CDs, so clearly DVD is the way to go.
I'm not saying don't buy a Dreamcast. New awesome hardware comes out every 6 months. If you always waited for the next best thing, you'd never buy anything. However, don't even dare to compare the Dreamcast hardware to the PSX2, it's not even close to being in the ballpark.
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!
People keep complaining that he is taking so long to give away his money, without realizing the fact that there is a much better net-gain for society if he keeps investing his wealth now, creating more jobs, more companies, etc.
John Stossil covered this very point on ABC's special on GREED. And he ended upsetting Ted Turner in the process. There is a certain level of skill required to manage money, and just blindly giving away his money at this point in time would be a huge waste -- like if Gates gave every American a gift of $400, it wouldn't make a dent society's well being. Most people who win the lottery squander it. If you gave every homeless person $1million, or ever yheroin addict
$1million, or even every politician or charity
manager $1million, it isn't the same as Gates managing that $1million.
Frankly, if Gates set out to dominate the biotech market, and cure AIDs and Malaria, I'd feel much better than some non-profit managing it, because his track record is one of making deals and getting things done.
A second point, Gates' wealth is only worth $100bil on paper, if he cashed it all in, it could drop significantly in value.
If Ted Turner wants to give away 33% of his net worth (keep in mind, it's over a 10 year period), that's his mistake, but don't blame Bill because he isn't experiencing as much *pain* or *suffering* as Turner. Why should the value of someone's charity be based on how much *pain* they suffer?
whoops, my email address is
ray@msgto.com
http://www.msgto.com
Not really open source right now (but probably will be), but my company has developed a mail/webmail/POP server solution, first outsourcing email for free similar to free homepages, and eventually offer single-click outsourcing, as long as you point your MX at us. Keeping it closed source doesn't benefit us, since the real value of outsourcing is our hardware/network setup with large RAIDs, and big pipes.
I have 10,000 messages in my INBOX right now (too many damn mailinglists), and many with large >2mb attachments, and the system runs fine. Similar to Sun's internet mail server, mailboxes are stored in a very scalable fashion, with hash indexes and preparsed MIME headers. As a comparison, the standard Linux IMAP/POP servers choke on my mailbox once it reaches about 3000 messages (meaning, lots of paging, and slow performance)
There is an integrated address book, with color coding, special mailing list detection, and an anti-spam system that uses a Visual Turing Test to eliminate bulk machine-generated spam.
Basically, it's an SMTP, POP, Webmail, and address book server, written from the ground up to be scalable, and it's pure Java. And for the naysayers, I'll tell you that the average time the SMTP daemon spends processing a message in he queue is 10ms. I develop it on Linux, and deploy it on a cluster of big Solaris boxes and it runs very nicely with no change.
(by being scalable, I mean that all resource utilization is kept at a minimum, in terms of disk thrashing, socket usage, and object allocation, so that for instance, 1000 concurrent users can be handled on a very cheap box)
If there is significant community interest for a pure-Java set of servers, I'll spend more time putting together an open-source package of the the MTA, POP, and IMAP servers in the near future.
If interested, send me mail.
Cheers,
-Ray