PSP: Playable on show floor, impressions inside.
- Thread starter Paul
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Ty
Well when I saw the pictures of DS I didn't go gaga over the look (and at the time I thought that was the final design). So you have no reason to assume that I will automatically go nuts over any redesigned version.
BTW have you actually seen anything more of DS then those initial images? Because I think you'll find that it actually looks a lot better in reality then it does in those images. Then again I'm not going for any style prizes when I play my games anyway so..
P.S. On PSX, I don't think it is doing that well anymore is it? Last I heard Sony finally stopped production a little while ago because it just wasn't selling anymore.
Well when I saw the pictures of DS I didn't go gaga over the look (and at the time I thought that was the final design). So you have no reason to assume that I will automatically go nuts over any redesigned version.
BTW have you actually seen anything more of DS then those initial images? Because I think you'll find that it actually looks a lot better in reality then it does in those images. Then again I'm not going for any style prizes when I play my games anyway so..
P.S. On PSX, I don't think it is doing that well anymore is it? Last I heard Sony finally stopped production a little while ago because it just wasn't selling anymore.
Here's the thing you're missing... They're not building whole new facilities, for each new product, they're using existing facilities (occasionally you get new stuff like SCEI's Nagasaki fabs) that a budgeted a year or more in advance with several products to be run across them. Where the payoff is down the road when it comes time to price reduce your product and having the bulk of the manufacturing in-house means you have more control over design changes to cut-costs of manufacturing and increase profit margins (or maintain tight margins but undercut your competitors)...
Yes, Sony has extensive battery design and manufacturing capabilities (which were actually critical for the iPods debute since it was dependent on Sony's Lithium Polymer batteries)... And no the PSP doesn't use a laptop battery, it's just you're typical Lithium-Ion design. In fact it's good it's using lithium (like the GBA SP) since Li-Ion batteries tend to be lighter than competing technologies...
Actually most of the controller logic is on the SoC... That's how most handheld ASICs are (unlike your PC) and all that's on the board are the physical interfaces and possible mixed signals logic (DA/AD converters) assuming that's also not integrated on-chip...
Yes because Sony (actually various divisions) is already a licensee (Fraunhoffer/Thompson lip-service)... Worst case scenario, you're looking at adding 75 cents to the cost of distribution... This of course depends on the implimentation, and there are ways to get around this....
I was *joking* about SonicStage...! Besides the PS2 chipset would be lousy for a handheld simply because even by themselves the EE+GS@90nm are way too power hungry for handheld use, and that's not even factoring in support logic and you'd spend quite a bit re-engineering the chips for low-power devices... Why bother when you can use your existing portable device knowledge on a clean slate? It in fact may be cheaper than re-engineering an existing solution to be shoehorned into a low-power device...
True, to design UMD is an up front cost, but then so is any media for adaptation to a portable... The only thing I could see working as an alternative that would had minimal adaptation costs would've been MD... Of course capacity is limited unless you consider HiMD... In any case Sony's constantly coming up with new storage formats (a habit ever since Morita started making his own tapes) and the concept, design and implentation costs would've probably been fairly small compared to somebody like Nintendo coming up with something from scratch considering they could use their existing knowledge base and IP portfolio...
Well it's not surprising... The GBA SP is pretty damn low tech... Most decent cell-phones these days have more capable processors and certainly better screens (albeit mostly smaller) that are more power hungry...
At "Flipper" speeds? Yeah it would, but then it wouldn't be a gameboy portable, it'd be a *sub-gameboy* portable... In any case the power to MIP ratio would be pretty lousy (the slowest I've ever seen of a 750 implimentation was 266MHz which is well above Flipper's clock) to the point you'd be better off migrating to ARM (or go to another PowerPC core more suited towards mobile devices like the 405 or 440). In either case you've stepped beyound the scope of your initial die-shrink claim... And that's just the CPU you covered...
Well actually in to professional space it pretty much did...
Well in the only market it really *pushed* them it did sell en-mass... And this was happening before mp3 even existed thru it's current existence... I'd consider the US presence of MD just market lip-service...
If you're talking about the DC, it's more like 3 years (assuming you don't count some of cheap dating sims and such coming out for it these days), with a much more shallow learning curve...
Actually, home consoles is pretty much one of the only markets Sony chooses that model for...
thop said:
You know thoses statement are always overoptimistics, for example Miyamoto said that he was expecting the gamecube to have a 7/8 year lifecycle.
All that is normal (on a marketing side), it's only meant for reassuring potential buyer that the system will last (Sure they're giving overoptimistic examples but that's what marketing is about
).And about your worries about the industry accelerating, i would say that it's not that obivious on the handheld market since for the moment there's only two (serious) competitors on that segment of the market.
Simon F said:
Shouldn’t that be 3 variations (X,Y and Z)?
Is that article from Develop online somewhere?I’d like to know how to do translucent bump mapped objects
On a related note, I just thought of a cheap way to do “high quality†bump mapping, here is how:
Make a CLUT bump map like described in this article: http://dienst.isti.cnr.it/Dienst/Re...2000-B4-01-03/pdf?tiposearch=cnr&langver=
The trouble with that method is that it breaks up over large surfaces, because the same set of normals is used all over the model, also it is non-tileable.
Now, instead of assigning luminance values to the texels, alpha values are used. The resulting texture is then blended on top of a light map, either specular or diffuse.
Obviously this can’t be the first time someone thinks of this, so I would like to know, does it work? If not, then why?
Ty said:jvd said:
Lol. You are a nut. That last line seriously cracked me up.
If I had to guess, jvd has a Casio watch, the one with a built-in IR remote transmitter to change channels on your tv.
Oh btw Nintendo has not yet announced the price of DS. That $200 number was a hiball guess by EB just in case it turns out to be that much. They're doing this so they can take early preorders.
thop said:
I think it's still doing 'ok'. Then again, perhaps to clarify the discussion we need to find out what does "lifespan" refer to? Is it strictly based on manufacturing of the hardware? Or some other sales point (or dev support) beneath which Sony no longer considers it "alive"?
thop said:
But that doesn't mean that once new technology is available older technology is immediately abandoned. I bet you can still find B/W TVs for sale if you looked hard enough.
Furthermore, if that Nintendo exec was estimating that the GCN would have a lifespan of 7/8 years, then the PS2 should easily hit 10 since it's many times more popular and entrenched.
Teasy said:
Sure I do. I'll go out on a limb and say that you're Pro-Nintendo (finding little to no fault with anything they do). And there's nothing wrong with that. It's your opinion and you're more than entitled to it.
And re: the DS, there's no way anyone can say the current mockup (and yes I think the final design will be better looking by quite a bit) is even remotely decent so I wouldn't expect you to go ga-ga over it. You're not that insane
. The pictures released so far make it look very very bad. True, in person it may look better but I don't think it will make that much of a difference. Still, I'm certainly not going to claim that I'd never buy one. It really depends on the games and how compelling they are.Teasy said:
Have you seen the DS mockup in person? Since you're willing to give the DS benefit of the doubt that it looks a lot better in person, why aren't you willing to do the same for the PSP "plastic bits" and all?
Teasy said:
Last I heard they dropped production down from 3 million to 1 million but they even dropped production of the PS2 as well though so it wasn't limited to PS1. I know that at least one PS1 game recently managed to sell 500k which to me, is still respectable.
PC-Engine said:
Yea, I've seen watches with that ability. What struck me funny was how he just inserted it non-sequitur. It just caught me off guard.
PC-Engine said:
Right, I saw that post as well. Still, it's the only "solid" information we have at this point so I think it makes sense to base the discussion off of that.
That's hardly solid information. If every retailer takes preorders with that price then yeah it would be fairly solid. This is one vendor making a wild way over the top guess based on nothing really. The most solid info is from Nintendo when they said it would be affordable or something along those lines. Heck it might even be $130 for all we know considering GBA SP has been $100 for a while.
marconelly!
Veteran
Not really optimistic - it just means they want to support the PS2 for ten years like they after all did for PS1 (still alive and selling nicely). As soon as they introduce PS3 sometimes in 2006, they'll likely come out with PStwo and sell it as their budget console for couple more years.
PC-Engine said:
Which is why I put "solid" in quotes. Fact is it's the most official # we have right now. I'm completely open to the idea that could debut at a lesser price point but the fact remains, it's the most official # we have. Unless you or JVD have something else it only makes sense to stick with what we have.
Ban me if you must, jvd, but can you please stop putting a space right before the last punctuation mark of every sentence? I love coming to this board, but man, I just can't understand why you do that. It looks weird, it's distracting, and it just makes your posts seem... less smart.
Thank you.
Thank you.
london-boy said:
Just found this post which I overlooked.
First of all the fact I got S3TC mixed up with DC's VQ is irrelevent with respect to the point I was making, which was DC can do quality texture compression on-the-fly with ratios as high as 8:1. Saying PS2 CLUT textures is comparable by some people is stretching it. Sure it's a form of VQ, a lower quality form to be exact.
Second DOT 3 is a hardware feature right from the beginning and like Simon has already stated, it's not that difficult to use in-game. You don't have to BM every freaking object! Lazy8 has seen it first hand. Used in the right situations, and can look pretty good.
Third DC can do anisotropic filtering in-game. Bottom line is DC has very good image quality especially when it comes to textures and filtering.
So in conclusion, I'll state what I've already stated in the previous post. PS2's strengths over DC are polygons, lighting, and fillrate. That's exactly what I said before, but I guess that wasn't enough for some people so they had to find ways to say "Well technically PS2 can do DOT3, VQ, blah blah blah". To those people I say, well technically my GBA can do photon mapping...
Fafalada:
And yeah, size made VQ really impressive - good results with only around half the memory of S3TC.
When people mention 'better quality' or 'more colorful textures' for texture compression, they're obviously talking about the net effect - using less memory affords the ability to increase the quality of existing textures and/or add more variety. They wouldn't of course be referring to just one individual texture's quality since the very act of compression is about trading that off (if quality was the ultimate goal, you wouldn't add/increase compression in the first place).
And yeah, size made VQ really impressive - good results with only around half the memory of S3TC.
Teasy said:
Oh, you just say that because Nintendo didn't think of it! They had to make an entire SCREEN just for a keyboard!
I just hope there's little LEDs inside the bottom edge of that plastic screen, lighting it up in darkness. Damn that would rock so hard, the thing would look TOTALLY hi-tech!IMO, those bits of see through plastic are TOTALLY super-secksi. They protect the main screen from wear and tear too from fingers/stylus taps. Hope the PSP comes with a nice carrying case with room for the console, maybe 2 extra UMDs, memory card and at least one of those input screens.
Really, I think Mr Kutaragi could puke into a bottle and you'd think it was art
Now don't be disgusting, OK?
Lazy8s said:
I haven't seen any PS1s on sale *anywhere* in Sweden for ages now, I don't even think you can buy them actually. Same with PS1 games, they're not sold anymore from what I can tell. Except as 2nd-hand, of course...
Just because I am pro Nintendo that does not mean I will "go gagga" over every aspect of anything they release. When have I gone "gagga" over GBA or its design/look? When have I even gone gagga over the design of GC?
BTW I don't share your opinion that the final design of DS will change a lot. I'd be interested to hear how you suggest it should change to make it look so much "cooler"?
Well....
http://image.lik-sang.com/content/pspnews/psp8.jpg
Lesson being pictures can make things look very bad indeed..
Well because nobody I am disagreeing with has given me a reason to do that. They're all basing there decisions purely on the same pic as I am, not on seeing it in person. I didn't say it was ugly though anyway, just that I don't understand how that can be considered sexy.
A peice of plastic with a little LED on it would look "hi-tech"?
I've heard it all now man Discusting but true
I'm not saying that thing looks particularly ugly, just that I don't understand how it can be considered sexy. Its merely a rectangular peice if plastic with a keyboard drawn on. Just out of interest do you guys also get excited at the sight of acetate?
