Development History of the Ps2

Hello everybody, I new here. Just a simple Austrian guy with technical knowledge what so ever I am just a interested lay person. The reason why I registered here is, because I found many old informative postings about the history and technical details about various Retro consoles.

For now I am researching . about the Development history about the PS2. It is hard to find the spicy stuff though. Unlike Sega, where you can find lots of stuff about the various projects that never materialized Sony keeps all these stuff under wraps.

For a moment i though that Sony was just better than Sega, that they followed one design philosophy and that's it. That there were no different prototypes like Sega had, with their 5 gen Console (Black Belt Dural aka Dreamcast and the proposed Real 3d console, ) but then I found that article

https://www.pushsquare.com/news/201...he_ps2_cpu_and_it_was_named_after_a_dogs_bits

It seems Argonaut was up to make something for the PS2, but then were tricked by Sony to make it weaker than the internal Toshiba Version.

That is partially just speculation from the Arogonaut guys but it i still interesting.

Does anybody know more that that more? More stuff about the Argonaut chip or other non Emotion Engine like technology that was meant initially for the Ps2 and was later scrapped?


ps: I hope that is the right place for this retro discussion.If not I want to ask the moderators to move it to the right place. And sorry for my mistake.
 
Yeah, I have heard About the Story the PS2 could be used as weapon. A really funny Story.:mrgreen:.

The development history of the Ps2 is very fasciniating, but it seems that Sony is among the best Companies in the world when it comes to hide their prototypes and Fails.

The history of the Sega Consoles for example is very easy to Research compared to the Sony stuff.
 
The development history of the Ps2 is very fasciniating, but it seems that Sony is among the best Companies in the world when it comes to hide their prototypes and Fails.
There is plenty of original PlayStation prototype hardware out there, that is when the PlayStation was an CD-ROM accessory for the Super Famicom. The reason you will find very little on Sony 5th and 6th generation prototype hardware is it was all developed in-house using Japanese and the take secrecy and corporate espionage seriously there.

There have been a couple of books on the development history and background of the original PlayStation which you can pickup from Amazon*
*other bookstores are available.
 
Thanks a lot for the information @DSoup

The history of the original Playstation is an intriguing topic as well. But unlike the Ps2 it is really easy to get some nice books. Reading Revolutionaries at Sony now and it is a great book.
 
W/e design other companies might might've come up with could've negated the wide vector processing approach of the Emotion Engine by putting the T&L on the graphics chip. I could see Kutaragi prob having to satisfy the higher ups by allowing for outside bids but being worried about his EE baby as designed being threatened.
 
Another interesting aspect of the Development history is that Kutaragi might have removed some features that he wanted to see in the PS2 initially maybe due to technical constrains. But that is just pure speculation from my side. The reason why I thought so is that there were some interesting speculations floating around in the end of 1998. According to some German Gaming mags Kuturagi was working on a new hardware generation that also supports Voxel Graphics and even Ray Tracing. It was never said that this stuff had anything to do with the ps2. Maybe it was something for the more distant future . Another interesting factor is, that the DVD support of the PS2 might have been decided rather late in the developing cycle. In 1998 Tokunaka thought DVD support could be possible. He did not confirm it on the spot.

But course that's no prove. Maybe the knew exactly what they were doing. They were just not ready to tell the press about it.

It could also be possible that the High Tech Talk Kutragi made at the End of 98 was exaggerated on purpose to counter the Dreamcast Release hype in Japan.
 
If you want to talk prototypes, allegedly Xbox One had a low end Secondary Radeon GPU whose sole purpose was to run the dashboard and home automation/entertainment And Kinect functions until very late in the game. This is one of the reasons they felt they could get away with lower end hardware, because all it did was play games. Removing it saved them $20 a unit. Who’s going to miss it right? ;)
 
If you want to talk prototypes, allegedly Xbox One had a low end Secondary Radeon GPU whose sole purpose was to run the dashboard and home automation/entertainment And Kinect functions until very late in the game. This is one of the reasons they felt they could get away with lower end hardware, because all it did was play games. Removing it saved them $20 a unit. Who’s going to miss it right? ;)

Lower end hardware? The die size is huge, it's site between the One X and Series X in size.

Only the jaguar cores are low end technology wise, and that is because they are low power parts.

The Apu is ambitious and packed full of clever tech, it has less GPU CU's due to the inclusion of ESRAM.

Marketing sucked more than the hardware imho and Sony's gamble was both clever and fortune. This skews the perspective of hardware comparisons.

The dash is light on the gpu and only heavy when full screen and the game does not need it. If anything an external part would have been good for Kinect to allow its use at no cost to the game performance. That would I feel have make it more welcome a device but would it have added more lag or complexity?

I am not sure an external part would ever be a serious consideration for a console however, perhaps an early devkit hack to simulate discreet Apu components or virtualized components.

You made me fanboy :(
 
Back
Top