The importance of UMD to PSP and its future *spinoff

Devs make games for publishers. The publishers care about sales, and as I already said, if the publishers can keep selling their games they don't care if it's through emulation (or wrappers) or through the code running on the hardware.

There's always a learning curve so long as you are pushing boundaries and using new tools. Nintendo re-used the GC hardware because their major selling point was the user interface. Unless Sony can guarantee a similar utterly unique revolution in gaming for the PSP2 (and the iPhone has already brought fast 3D and touch screen gaming to the masses) they might want to think about more than simply going with a rebadged PSP Go.

 

sorry to bring it to you, but JVC XV-BP1 supports playback of h264 High Profile, level 4.1, from user-prepared media (usb, burnt disks, etc). here's the manual.

huh? sony did a massive push for UMD video during the first year of psp's life. you could buy quite a few things on UMD, including rare stuff (Chan Wook Park's UMD on the shelf right in front of me waves at you). yes, eventually 3rd-party support for the medium died out, but the initial push was huge.

1. it's up to their customers to decide, and i'm one of them.
2. which one is that?

you mean the buttons you'd find on the psp remote?

what? are you making up this shit as you go or do you actually believe that crap? ME has been used in the psp since day one. in parallel with the CPU. and ME handles AV tasks alone. that's what sony meant it to do.

oh dear. what left you with the impression i was speaking of homebrew? and yes, i'm well aware one can run custom code on the ME under homebrew. but as you put it eloquently, sony sdk =/= homebrew.

i did not say anything about one game being better than the other. that was sarcasm on my part; i even marked it as such. both games are quite comparable in terms of gameplay, volume of playable content, sound quality, etc. one of them does not have FMV (and and endless heap of live recorded BGM), though. guess which one.

BIOS is software. the MIPS3K in the PS2 is used as an IO processor (outside of BC mode). claiming that said chip is the BIOS is like saying that your CPU is your kernel, since the kernel runs on your CPU.

libgu an its successor sceePspGu. the latter one actually supersedes several early libs, libgu being one of those.

 

Hardware many times more powerful is what we expect though.
It's probable we won't see BC, but it's not out of reach - they'd need to use MIPS cores again, and have edram in the GPU again. Run CPU code natively, and use some sort of wrapper to do rendering on the new, DX9+ level GPU.

A problem with that is ARM is what you use for high performance nowadays. PSP uses a MIPS core with an architecture dating back to the early 90's ?? (they say it's based on R4000. the R4000 came out in 1991 ).

 

So far I'm quite amused at the endless quote orgy, but that sentence is so ridiculous it's not funny anymore.

Well maybe just maybe neither frequency by itself nor just CPU speed/efficiency is the be all end all for a handheld gaming device. SONY's next generation handheld isn't going to appear anytime soon but you should maybe consider that there will be soon enough dual core A9 CPUs even in smartphones soon. The iPhone3GS (smartphone) or the iPad (tablet PC or fancy e-book reader) aren't exactly comparable to a handheld console either.

But if it really has to be it's rather the PSP that would have a bloody hard time to emulate any content an iPad or iPhone3GS could process and not the other way around.

You shouldn't be too certain about future aspects just because eating a hat in due time isn't the most pleasant thing either (all in a metaphorical sense always). SONY knows better than you or I what they really want or what they are planning and no they haven't officially revealed yet what their plans exactly are. However I'll keep a bookmark for this thread when SONY actually does.

 

The level of debate here is bickering. This thread is very close to being closed.

 

PSP games will be sold as DD for PSP2 over PSN and will be made possible by the combination of a Sony emulator plus developer tuning/polishing/QA.

The GPU of PSP2 will easily handle the emulation of the PSP's GPU, with great improvements, and without needing eDRAM.

 

bullshit. you said: 'Good luck with that playing a movie in bluray quality.' and i showed you XV-BP1 does exactly that. as about flash cards, last time i checked the usb mass-storage protocol was not limited to flash cards alone. you should check out these external hdd's some day, they're a great.

the free altermative was handicapped for a long time - it could not play UMD-bitrate movies from the MS until fw 3.70, just because sony were trying to push UMD movies into wide adoption. your psp developer friend should have told you at least that.

says the person who has not played either wipeout or ridge racer.

1. DJ max is not a multi-disk game. it just has the Link Disc feature that allows the game to read the tracks from other versions.
2. Clannad is basically an interactive video novel.

that leaves us with LoH4 and Eiyuu-densetsu - two typical JRPGs where devs knock themselves silly with cutscenes. for the sake of your argument, i suggest you try to remember the name of that baseball game.

i doubt an actual developer would say that ME and allegrex 'cannot multitask'. here's a little 'pro-tip' for you: go into the xmb music menu of your psp, press play on a tune, press 'home' button - watch ME and the CPU miraculously work together. that functionality has been there since day one. a developer could not be as clueless as to claim some of the things you have in this thread, so don't try to present yourself as 'the voice of developers', please.

and re the whole 'my dad said' - i have the sony sdk on my desktop. you refer to somebody on a forum. that's no way to have an argument. if you sources do not know about libgu (reversed engineered and widely used for homebrew for many years now) that's their own problem. and i see no point trying to play 'broken telephone line' with somebody via you. learn your facts or stay out of tech arguments.

see, here's where you'd quote a statement from sony's sdk. in a PM, if you felt that'd break somebody's NDA.

sorry for the inconvenience for having to spawn this thead, Shifty. i'm done for today with this, erm, argument, even though calling it an argument is a stretch.

 

Too bad your internet skills failed you with regards to this statement;

I'm seeing an awful lot of non-Sony Minidisc recorders and players

Probably because just like the cameras at the time, it made more sense to standardize towards DUO in small devices to allow them some headroom for form-factor reduction. Plus it helped stimulate the sales of the DUO form factor (which has been Memory Stick's most popular form factor).

Also I'd avoid the whole ultra-proprietary moniker for UMD as well considering it was a published spec within 6 months of it's release.

There's a couple of flaws in the argument;

1.) You're assuming Sony is exactly the same as it was back in '04/'05. It's not. Management has changed, staff have changed, priorities have changed. So while history may illustrate one thing (and in reality there's not enough history to make the assumption), the fact of the matter is that the company is quite different now than it was then and decisions made about hardware then may not be made now.

2.) Backwards compatibility is not useless w/o UMD. PSP also played back PSOne games, and it didn't have a CD-ROM drive. The point being, that backwards compatibility with a physical media is costly and not terribly profitable. PSN games OTOH will continue to be more profitable and can be patched on a case by case basis for compatibility.

 

ok, fair enough. do you btw, know anything about the fate of the read-only MS variation sony were talking about before launch? did anything from that ever reach market?

i guess it did, though the use of DUO in a full-size slot is practically seamless, so DUO would not have suffered much from a full-sized slot in the PSP, as long as sony were pricing DUO favorably.

now that's news to me - thanks. btw, the ultra-proprietary moniker was bad wording on my part. i meant it in the same sense as 'brand-new media format we bet the farm on for some of our devices'.

 

Why go disc? You can get a 4GB SD card which has 4* the transfer rate for $8 retail on Newegg. Wholesale bulk prices would like be less than $4 and you can get a compact flash card for $80 retail which has 25MB/S transfer rate so wholesale in bulk would be much less and embedded would be a little faster too.

 

Plus will it be needed at that size? I expect 2GBs to cover the first few years of next-gen handheld storage requirements. Carts will be affordable at that price. They won't be as cost effective as pressed discs, but they will be cheap enough and with the other advantages, there's no reason not to use them.

 

With digital downloads they wouldn't even need a pressed disc per game sold which would lower the cost per title substantially. Though I wonder when the best time to release a PSP2 would be as Apple are eating them alive with their iRange of portable media players and the DS2 may not give them an advantage in performance or as much as they'd like anyway.

 

I rather hope that the PSP2 has PS2 emulation.

I'd like to see PS2 emulation come to the PSN Store and be available for the PS3 and PSP, just like they have done with the PSOne catalogue.

I wonder if Sony have been dragging their feet on PS2 emulation on the PS3 because this is going to be one of the main draws of the PSN subscription service.

IMHO PS2 catalogue is the Jewel in the Crown of the Sony's gaming business. If they want to remain competitive in the handheld space, they need to use this to their full advantage.

 

The longer they wait the less the library is worth though. Many of these games are already getting very dated and if they wait almost as long as the PS2 generation in a chronological sense they will soon be a couple of generations old.

@Topic:

Consoles aren't designed to be catering to the needs of 5-10% of game concepts which might use one feature or another. There has never been a console in which every developer is fully satisfied with everything the console or handheld offered. Just because some games might use more space or need a faster CPU doesn't mean that it will be implemented, its a balance of price and convenience for consumers.

Now Sony has to balance the needs of previous PSP customers, people who want a PMP and anyone new to the gaming system. Everyone wants long battery life, a large screen and good internal storage so something has to give. In this case it could very easily be the UMD player as a standard component. It drives up the cost for the 2nd and 3rd group of people whilst shortening battery life for everyone when its used. They could easily sell people an addon to rip the games onto a PSP2, perhaps charging people $5 each per license.