Let's design a new PSP

The Switch has clearly been a success and there's no way that Sony aren't paying attention. Certainly, the gaming public are aware of this and itching for Sony to get back in the portable game.

We've discussed such a possibility here before, but the conclusion has generally been reached that, in order for it to be a success, it would need to be a portable PS4. As appealing as this is, manufacturing and price constraints dictate that such a device would still be a good few years away from viability i.e. even if the stars somehow aligned for 7nm everything in 2019, with a low power AMD SoC, the cost of such a device would be too high for mass market appeal.

I propose a different route, one on which I would really like people to chime in. I propose, in essence, a DualShock Vita.

Microsoft released their pro controller a couple of years ago IIRC but Sony has yet to follow suit. Sure, they've released so-called pro controllers, but these have all just been wired versions of the DualShock 4, often with a mangled design.

It's about time Sony released a first party pro controller, and capitalised on both their market leading position with the PS4, and their catalogue of portable games.

I'll refer to it as the DualShock V. The design and function, I think, should be as follows:

- Launch at a low price. More expensive than a DualShock 4, but cheaper than a Switch would immediately make it relevant.

- Take the existing DualShock 4, and expand the width enough to fit the smallest possible functional screen in place of its touch pad. 4 inches seems like a pretty good fit: not so small that games can't be played, not so large that the device becomes cumbersome.

- Stick to a 540p screen. A small screen needn't be high resolution, and 540p would perfectly scale 1080p PS4 games.

- Ditch the rear touch pad. It was only ever a novelty and never worked properly. Certainly never intuitively.

- Treat it as a new platform, but make it a piece of cake to port Vita games.

- Ensure that all games which run on the DualShock V also run on the PS4 at 1080p, and on the Pro at 4K, with little to no effort from the developer.

- Use the same save files as the PS4, so you needn't faff with entering into a game and uploading a "cross save." Just upload your saves to the cloud at the system level.

- Use 3 cards for storage. Two Micro SD cards: one for media and captures, one for games. One port for a flash cart, which could be used in future, for a full blown portable system i.e. a cart that could be placed in a future PS4 Portable.

- Use the cheapest possible SoC on the newest but most economical fabrication node, so it's a little bit more powerful than the Vita, but prioritise battery life.

- Implement the same video and screen capture features as the PS4, ensure that it can cast to any compatible display, and give it video out! Sure, if the PS4/Pro can play the same games, they'll always be the better option, but this is enough to compete with the Switch as a budget option.

So, what would others like to see?

I mostly wonder what SoC and memory combination people would like to see, and what fabrication process. More memory's always better, but at what point does it reach diminishing returns?

Would the Vita SoC be viable if manufactured on 16/14/12/10/7nm and then had its clockspeed bumped up to provide a slight performance increase, or would another SoC be as worthwhile?
 
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The Switch has clearly been a success and there's no way that Sony aren't paying attention. Certainly, the gaming public are aware of this and itching for Sony to get back in the portable game.

We've discussed such a possibility here before, but the conclusion has generally been reached that, in order for it to be a success, it would need to be a portable PS4.

If Sony are to deliver exactly what Nintendo did it needs to be more than a portable PS4, it needs to a portable PS4 that can easily dock to your TV. The problem with the basic concept of a portable PS4 is storage. Game developers for Switch, for a few notable exceptions, are pretty good at keeping install sizes down whereas PS4/Pro is on it's third HDD; 2013 launch day it got a 1Tb drive, about a year in it got 2Tb and when I got my Pro I slotted in a 4Tb drive.

Lack of affordable fast Storage will hold it back massively.
 
What if they make a device that streams games over LTE so you can play anywhere instead of a traditional portable console?
 
4 core ARM Cortex-73 @ ~2 GHz
1.5 GHz Pascal based GPU w/ ~384 cores
8 GB LPDDR4 w/ 1 GHz LPDDR3 for OS
7" 1080p screen
64 GB onboard storage w/ slots for proprietary game cards and SD cards supported as big as they can make em
 
What if they make a device that streams games over LTE so you can play anywhere instead of a traditional portable console?

Play anywhere and streaming don't exactly go together. Add in the many issues with streaming a game over LTE and you have a product that will be absolutely horrible.

Point is the Switch ticks pretty much all the boxes.

It's cheap enough
Powerful enough (b3d will always disagree)
Portable enough
Lasts long enough on a single charge

Obviously it's not perfect but as far as a product that consumers will actually buy and not some internet pipedream goes it's pretty close to it.
 
Sony simply doesn't have the clout like Nintendo does for the portable market, esp now that the Switch is Nintendo's main system and just happens to be a portable system to boot. Nintendo's title's are the very reason people buy Nintendo systems. Unless Sony can deliver a literal mobile PS4, there's really no point.
 
Maybe the Ps4 pro hardware physically scaled down by half, and running at half clock, for basically half an original ps4 in performance. It would need a quarter of the pro's memory bandwidth so it could use 128bit lpddr4 around 60GB/s. With 7nm combined with a very low clock, power might reach portable levels. Kind of.

I think the age of two completely different architectures for home/portable is over. Internally, they have the Pro as a good experiment to analyse and see how it allows a low overhead to port and develop for multiple targets within the same platform. A portable sku would be planned similarly but without BC, just "easy" porting and simultaneous publishing pipeline.

But honestly, I don't think it makes business sense for sony right now.
 
@MrFox when would it make business sense for Sony, if ever? What sort of conditions would need to exist?
 
@MrFox when would it make business sense for Sony, if ever? What sort of conditions would need to exist?
When there is a way to have compatibilty between home and portable titles, maybe ps5 and ps5portable, but it has to be without compromising home titles... which is where sony is dominating right now. It must not split the user base nor the dev base, which would happen with a non-compatible device. Nintendo didn't lose much when they ditched the wiiu, that one made business sense at the time, it wouldn't have been a good idea during the peak of Wii sales.
 
I don’t think Sony needs to go the route of the Switch. Just make sure the previous generations remakes are compatible and they’re probably good.

A current generation portable should be able to play The Last of Us and Shadow of the Colossus. God of War III? Should be doable.

After that, the retro games are a steady stream of cash. Trying to keep up with TV consoles will probably just hold both back technically, like the Switch.
 
What I could see is a fully functional phone playing (remastered or not) PS1, PS2 and PS3 games. it could even be plugged to the TV a la Switch. But they can't (and won't) compete with their own PS4 / PS5 games.
 
I think the next psp need to be automatically compatible with home console games be it ps4 or PS5.

Make it like Xbox one games that automatically use all the available power in xbox one X. But in reverse.

So force the game to run in half resolution or something. Do it in ways that the game itself didn't know, so no need to patch older games. But also have a flag to set so new games can be tailored carefully to the spec if the developer have resource to spend.
 
So force the game to run in half resolution or something. Do it in ways that the game itself didn't know, so no need to patch older games. But also have a flag to set so new games can be tailored carefully to the spec if the developer have resource to spend.

Easier said than done. There are already games on Switch which are close to unplayable mobile because the UI is too damned small in 720p on a tiny screen. Flame in the Flood is particularly egregious. Great game, virtually unplayable off of a TV.
 
Easier said than done. There are already games on Switch which are close to unplayable mobile because the UI is too damned small in 720p on a tiny screen. Flame in the Flood is particularly egregious. Great game, virtually unplayable off of a TV.

I don't know about that game but when I was RP-ing ps4 games from a vita, the small screen small ui still works. It's just the control that's no good.

For future games, they can mandate mobile mode UI or something. Like vita with their own control scheme
 
So what sort of proprietary storage would this next-gen Sony portable device use?
 
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