Either way, UMD is far from the only option.
The importance of UMD to PSP and its future *spinoff
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I double checked that. Even using old data, PSPs attach rate is much higher than that. I should have assumed since your other stats were blatant lies that one would have been too. Not only that, but your math assumes 100% of the userbase bought their PSP at launch. Given everything you said is a lie, I will just disregard you.
I already answered that
So how will games be distributed then? On memory stick or download only? Cause the whole point of UMD was so games WOULDNT come on flash/solid state mediums of any kind cause UMD is vastly cheaper. And I've been arguing we're not ready for DD only.
Remember:
-Some retailers have boycotted the Go cause it has no physical medium
-A majority of gamers prefer a physical medium, which even Sony has admitted openly
-Sony sells PS3/PSP to areas without broadband, and will not want to stop
-A significant portion of PS3/PSP users havent even signed up for PSN
-Going DD only makes it more annoying for those without credit cards (ie:underaged) to get games.
-Go's sales tell anyone with any business sense at Sony not to try to reproduce that mistake
Both of which have games many times smaller than PSP.
iphone being popular does not equal quality.
And that proves what though? Its easier/cheaper to make faster general purpose hardware (ie: X86-compliant) than others. They make netbooks far more powerful than arm processors for example. They still cant emulate a PSP.
If they were going to make hardware to emulate a specific hardware platform, they wouldn't emulate in the first place.
Please, XBOX used DX9 and MS couldnt even get it to map perfectly.
You saying PSP, which you have to access the GPU on a really low level, would do better?
Could you provide real evidence? Cause that's what I've been asking for. Nothing any of you have provided has been any better. Hell the one guy flat out lied and you're telling me I should just roll over and accept you are the ultimate resource on all things PSP? I had someone who I consider the ultimate resource come to me and tell me PSPs GPU does not have HAL. That's enough for me. You guys have yet to provide any evidence to counter that. Me saying some unknown dev (to you) said something is as much evidence as you guys have given.
I didnt say it would. I said $900 portable hardware cant even emulate PSP, what are you expecting of PSP2?
Tell me what specs you're expecting. Given power is a huge limitation, that pretty much means software emulation is out.
Hell we dont even have PSP emulation on PC yet
I wasnt saying they did. I'm saying you're over estimating the effects without evidence to back it up. Yes UMD takes up power/money/space, but less than you're trying to claim.
Show it. Nor is it even relevant. You saying cause Sony put dedicated audio hardware in it that means PSP was made for media first? Sony put dedicated audio hardware in the SNES I dont see anyone making the same idiotic claim about it.
What? It's common sense!!!! When PSP launched UMD cost ~$2 for 1.8 GB, DS cards cost $20 for 64 MB. That means DS cards cost 288 times more per megabyte. And Nintendo heavily advertised them as being far cheaper than GBA carts.
YES! Why do you think UMD was invented? UMD was used for the same exact reason optical is used on consoles, vastly more space for vastly less cost. There were many interviews from when PSP came out saying that was the reason. It boggles my mind how you can even think otherwise.
http://www.pocketgamer.co.uk/r/PSP/UMD/feature.asp?c=3530
Stop right there. UMD was not just invented for movies. Dont even try to claim something so ludicrous. PSP was NOT invented for movies first. Sony even had other devices to do that
Again, I'm not saying Sony will stop offering downloads. I'm saying it's stupid to think Sony will go download only.
There may be a PSP2 SKU without UMD, but there will definitely be one with it
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DuckThor Evil
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Adding UMD was probably an ok decision at the time (2003-2004) (although Nintendo's success with carts and their balance sheet argues differently) but it's not a good decision in 201x. The carts are now cost efficient enough for handheld gaming and their disadvantages are smaller than, what including an UMD-drive would bring (size, battery, drive cost etc.) The UMD-drive needs to die.
Optical formats are cheap to manufacture in bulk. It's a wholly mechanical process where you stamp the bits into a reflective foil, toss that into a polycarbonate sandwich, add a little bit of glue and voila, done. Flash manufacturing is an entirely different beast still.
I can see Sony doing another proprietary optical format, but it needs to ditch the caddy. With the size of every other part going down, the implications on device thickness caused by the caddy have become a hurdle, and the practical advantage of the caddy seems questionable to begin with. It breaks rather easily.
I'd also suggest to get rid of the metal part (center ring) on the discs. Those pennies are better spent on a harder surface coating.
I can see Sony doing another proprietary optical format, but it needs to ditch the caddy. With the size of every other part going down, the implications on device thickness caused by the caddy have become a hurdle, and the practical advantage of the caddy seems questionable to begin with. It breaks rather easily.
I'd also suggest to get rid of the metal part (center ring) on the discs. Those pennies are better spent on a harder surface coating.
There's no-one arguing optical disks don't have the cost advantage! However, handehlds have always had carts of some form save PSP, and they haven't suffered as a result. Despite PSP's media costing a fraction of the price of DS's, it is Nintendo raking in the cash hand over fist. Considering the entire package of what makes for a good handheld, the added cost per media should not be the sole deciding factor. If I had a choice between PSP2 with optical disks, shorter battery life, chunkier form factor, more awkward game portability, and cheaper games, versus the same thing onliy with carts, significantly longer battery life, slinkier form, and more convenient game media with games costing a couple of bucks more to account for using carts, I'd choose the latter. And there'll be some people who won't be interested at all if the games can't be stored on an internall HDD/flash along with movies and music.
If the caddy breaks rather easily then what remains for the optical medium inside if there was no caddy in the first place? Have you seen how kids handle UMDs? A naked optical disk would last (read: be readable) in their hands a week, a month max. There's a darn good reason why sony's portable optical media, ie. MD and UMD, have had caddies (as poor as the UMD's one is).
They cannot get rid of the central disk hub in part due to the caddy - the spindle mechanism is single-side-access, and the loading path is slide-in-at-an-angle (i'm not aware if top-loading caddy drives exist). If we agree that removing the caddy is not an option, then removing the central metal hub is neither. The present UMD is as cheap a portable optical medium design as it gets. The only way to make it cheaper is through new cheaper materials and fabrication tech.
UMD isn't manufactured on the same level of a CD or DVD. Basically UMD are used just for PSP based media and its not like that media is tearing up the sales chart. I am not sure the cost related to this two products but Flash manufacturing volume is probably a couple of magnitudes higher than UMD. Therefore, the cost difference between producing a UMD disc and producing 1-2 Gb of Flash may not be all that huge.
http://www.dramexchange.com/#flash
8Gb (8X1Gb) Flash goes for $3.95. If I am not mistaken, thats cheaper than a BluRay disc when the PS3 launched.
Also one must consider the cost difference between a UMD drive and an extra flash slot.
Furthermore, ultimately the extra cost of Flash isn't a cost that will be absorbed by Sony but by pubs, while the UMD drive is a cost absorbed by Sony.
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And 4 GBs will probably do PSP2. Single chip solutions will be very cheap. Carts aren't prohibtively expensive. Never have been, which is why Gameboy and everything since has done very well with them.
UMD is cheaper, but cart based Nintendo consoles are vastly more profitable.
Sony are interested in profits, and so will be considering all their options.
Both the iPhone and every Nintendo handheld, ever, have been vastly more profitable than the PSP.
So why don't consoles use X86 processors?
How do you know?
If you can enable emulation by making smart decisions when you design a system, why would you cripple your new hardware by using massively outdated and poor value for money hardware instead? I think Sony will want something technologically up to date, but if they can accommodate BC (especially the kind you pay to use) I'm sure they will - as cheaply as possible.
Xbox 360 BC works well enough to sell old games through the marketplace. If PSP2 doesn't have a UMD drive then 100% out-of-the-box BC doesn't matter anyway.
I don't know whether the PSP GPU uses a HAL in the official SDK. I was hoping you could fill me in on what the PSP GPU does that couldn't be run as software on a modern GPU. If, like me, you don't know then that's cool.
I don't think comparing a homebrew emu on generic hardware is necessarily demonstrative of what Sony could achieve working ground up on a new platform with every conceivable bit of knowledge about the old and new systems, several years, tens of millions of dollars to spend and some of the best engineers around!
PSP2 may or may not feature some degree of BC, but I simply can't see Sony lumbering a new handheld with a mechanical media loading drive and a seriously outdated GPU. With PSP2 Sony will most definitely be thinking beyond selling to existing PSP owners by giving them free BC.
Sony will be thinking more along the lines of Gameboy and Appstore than minidisk and UMD.
PSP did not suffer as a result of using optical
Are you saying PSPs "low game sales" (I use quotes cause what I can find it's games are selling better than claimed here) were based solely on what the games came on and not due to ANY other factors such as piracy?
Do you really think PSP would have done anywhere near as well had they not used optical? I don't. EVERY game would have been crippled down to fit smaller. We wouldn't have Crisis Core or God of Wars
Nintendo making more money says nothing about its quality
It would be more than a couple of bucks, especially to the publishers. It'd be a couple million bucks. Even if it was just a couple of bucks, that adds up fast. That's also more risky for publishers
Eh? Is that a joke? They've always been prohobitively expensive. Do you not remember why FF7 was made on PS1?
Both of which have games many times smaller than PSP.
iphone being popular does not equal quality.
You asked that question in reply to a statement that already answered it.
X86 is general purpose. They can make more gaming-oriented processors that do the job better
Cause they've tried.
Or do you have info I don't? Do you have an emulator that runs on existing high-end portables?
No they dont. They stopped doing that, and only had a few games. BC is useless if they're only going to use it for 10 games
All I was told is that PSP's GPU doesn't use HAL, and you have to access it really low-level. The dev who told me has enough credibility that I don't question him.
If they were to make hardware to emulate specific hardware, they'd use the specific hardware instead of emulating it. Again, it's a portable not a PS3. They don't have the space or the power for emulation. And it would drive up costs.
Seriously outdated, yet still producing games better than anything on the iphone/pandora/dsi or other recent tech.
I'm not saying they'll use PSPs exact hardware, but faster versions of the same hardware
Sony can't ditch UMD for many reasons. They aren't going to abandon the significant amount of people who cant switch to downloading just cause some of you have some irrational hatred of discs.
I don't believe the disadvantages of optical (latency, noise, power, size) necessarily have to be pronounced in practice. We do agree that the UMD design is not ideal in these respects.
One thing I want to throw in first is that games do not sell at launch price for very long. If I look through the bins of new games at local b&m stores, where if you dared you could wade knee-high in new, unopened games ranging from 5~10€ a piece, I wouldn't want to be the guy suggesting to a publisher to pay 3~4€ on manufacturing. Margin is important, especially at rock bottom.
As a corrollary, outside of the evergreen million-seller bracket, I have a real hard time finding new copies of 6+ month old DS games. If they were just moderatly successful, they eventually just vanish from the face of the earth.
If UMD is indeed history -- which seems risky, with respect to the PSPgo's reception -- I think all options need to be weighed fairly, and we are well equipped to do so. We know pretty well what carts can do better than optical media and vice versa. Pointing to the DS's success and assuming a correlation with its choice of carts doesn't seem convincing to me.
I'm thinking along the lines of a 1.5" hard-coated caddy-less slot-in drive with a somewhat bumped-up data density (for lower rpms/higher performance/little bit of both). Would that be so bad?
Maybe it's irrational but using all these beautiful processed silicon wafers as read-only storage just seems incredibly wasteful to me. What if one fine day all sand in the world is used up, and you want to buy a new graphics card but ... you can't! Your silicon has already been alloted to Mario Kart. You can never bring it back!
I've never actually seen media as beat up as some of the UMD games I bought used off Amazon marketplace last summer. The naked UMD should by all rights be as robust as CDs and DVDs, which is to say "not very", but the UMD caddy might as well not be there. There is a typical breaking point between an opaque white rim part and the transparent top cover, and if that's kaput the whole drive mechanism won't fit together anymore. I've seen games that came with sticky tape from two sides preapplied to keep the caddy in a functioning shape. If you have a lot of wear and tear in your house, at some point, you just have to say "I can never sell this to anyone" and toss it in the trash.
Of course, the actual disc inside the UMD caddy might be better off, but you can't use that, you need the whole thing intact. I don't see evidence to UMDs, whole, being more robust than naked discs, not by enough to justify the hassle.
This is a good point. There are probably ways to make the mechanism work. PStwo and Gamecube are two different approaches to a top-loading drive. PStwo is more of a "jam it on the spindle and pray for friction to be strong today"-design while Gamecube seemed to have some sort of spring-loaded clasping mechanism if I recall correctly.
The stupid ... it's hurting me ...
Your idea of prohibitive is different than Nintendo's, I guess.
Quality is subjective. Profits less so. I'm guessing that Sony would gladly degrade themselves to Nintendo's quality in exchange for their profits.
You said X86 is always cheaper and faster.
Who's tried? Who's "they"?
You said no netbook could emulate the PSP. The people who would be best able to do this, Sony, haven't tried afaik.
The fact that you aren't aware of a homebrew PSP emu that works on netbooks isn't proof that it can't be done.
They did it. It worked. Lots of games were fully BC.
[Edit] Actually, I just checked. There are still 25 originals for sale on Live. So yes, they do.[/Edit]
Perhaps you could question him, and find out what it is that rules out doing PSP GPU work on a programmable GPU?
You can design a system with BC in mind without designing a system specifically for BC.
If the space and power for emulation/wrappers/whatever is less than the space and power needed for next gen gaming, you have the space and power for BC.
Until you know what is needed for BC you don't know what the costs are. If costs are an issue, you sure as heck wouldn't consider putting a UMD drive on the thing.
An argument in favour of budgets, not the PSP tech.
I don't think you understand Sony.
On they other hand, they aren't going to go with outdated hardware that's unsuited to their aims just to keep a minority of PSP fans happy.
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Are you being deliberately obtuse, or are you just finding this all a bit confusing? Where have I said PSP's game sales were low, or anywhere implied that was due to being optical disks? PSPs games are selling fine. My point, which you repeatedly fail to address or even recognise, is that carts have never been a burden for the most successful handhelds ever made, so what leg is it your argument is standing on, that carts are such a lousy format for handhelds?
No, because as I said before, PSP needed the storage capacity and flash didn't offer it back then.
But it does prove that carts can be successful, disproving your theory!
Not if they passed that cost to the buyers! If the games cost $2 more to make, add $2 more to the price, and the publishers are no worse off. Again, the point you blindly ignore because it blows your theory to pieces, publishers are publishing to Nintendo handhelds and not going bankrupt due to the crushing cost of carts. Nor are cart-based games costing 50 bucks a piece.
Again, you seem to be strugging with the discussion here. This is a thread about handhelds, right? Where all talk about carts up to this point has been about using carts in a handheld. My argument has been that Nintendo hasn't suffered with its cart pricing, so why and how are you making a link to 32bit home consoles?!
Maybe I'm muddling my words and not making it clear, so let me rephrase in a manner you can probably follow - Carts in handhelds have never been prohibitively expensive.All you've repeated is that, in your opinion, PSP would not have been a success without UMD (a point I do not contest), and ergo this proves optical disks are needed for PSP2. My point, which in several attempts has failed to coax an actual response from you, is that, irrespective of the role UMD played with PSP, looking at all the handhelds ever made, carts are a proven and successful format. Thus, and this is question you should answer (but I've a sneaking suspicion you won't...), if carts are successful for Nintendo, why is it impossible for carts to be successful for Sony? Every single point you've raised in optical's favour hasn't impacted Nintendo's handhelds at all, which surely goes to show your opinion is wrong and poorly considered?
They may work better as a distribution method cached to internal flash. This would avoid the limits of the doenload-only distribution while only needing to access the drive for installs and game validation. Would a miniturised BRD work? Something that would work with existing fabs would be a plus for a portable optical format.
All that said though, I have an 8GB SDMicro card in a micro-UDB adaptor, and there's no cooler medium than that! MicroSD is way cooler than any disk and is what I'd like in a handheld (maybe something a little bigger for the ham-fist
). 2GBs should be cheap ($1?) and if needed, larger games could cost a little more like they did in the 8 and 16 bit eras.Actually UMDs are not as robust - the overall thickness of the data carrier is notably thinner than than that of the CD/DVD (0.84mm vs 1.2mm for CD) - and that's mainly in the coating layers.
Without being a mechanical engineer, i'd venture to guess UMD's design has had certain considerations to meet - like minimizing mass of the disk for the sake of the battery.
Oh i agree - everything has its endurance limits. But something tells me those UMDs you received in a 'patched' condition would have been useless long before that point, had they been in a naked form.
That said, i do agree the UMD caddy is more of an excuse for a caddy - aside from fingerprints/smudges, it's not particularly good at keeping dirt out (much better at keeping it in, actually). but it's an extra layer of mechanical sturdiness which otherwise would've gone into the data carrier.
Anecdotally, of all optical media i've used, MD hold the crown in durability, and that's not because the data carrier is something extra-durable - no - its purely thanks to the well-designed caddy. After that come desktop MOs (the 3.5" format - again, perfect caddy), then naked CDs which can last a few months tossed around in cars' glove compartments and side-door pockets before they start showing audible damage, but that's uncompressed, 'robust' audio data; had they actually had some loss-intolerant data, their life would've been way shorter. Which brings us to the DVD and its successors - these things, especially in the dual-layer formats, are just asking for trouble. We keep them on shelves and away from kids.
Yes, the cube's and pstwo's are examples of top-loading, manual-force lock-in drives. They have ultra-simple, clamping-action traction-based spindle design (cube indeed has the better one) but that's partially thanks to the factor 'helping human hand' - the force to lock-in and release the disk in those drives is considerable - would not work for a caddy design.
DuckThor Evil
Legend
In my experience Blu-ray discs are actually quite sturdy and the discs don't scratch easily. Dirt and fingerprints can cause issues, but those can be wiped away. I also talked to a owner of a nearby video rental store and he was also satisfied with the durability of Blu-ray discs compared to DVDs.
The real problem tho is many of us don't want to carry around these things.
I will freely admit I own a modded psp and dsi. I didn't mod these to run illegal games. I own the games I have on my systems. But with my ds instead of having to carry around a case with all my games in it. I now have my 32 games on a 4 gig sd card that stays in the system.
On my psp i have my 5 games that I play on a 8 gig microsd card. These things all take so much room and limit what I can do on the go which is horrible for a handheld.
I much rather have a system with 64-128 gigs of storage built in that can then use sd cards so I can increase storage space .
SD cards are already aproaching 64 gigs and a 16 gig card is now $40 bucks. Price will only go down during the generation. And I myself would rather it all be contained on my system through a sony store.
I would have gladly bought a psp go if the system wasn't a down grade at a higher cost than the one I owned.
The down side to SD cards in that respect is transfer rate. They aren't particularly fast, and will limit loading times and how much can be streamed. I dare say that a handheld of the greatest possible pwoer would be severly bottlenecked in what it can render if it had to stream data from an SD card. Cacheing of some form will be essential if graphics are to become 'next-gen'.
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