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Games Entertainment

PS2 Hard Drive Announced 172

Posted by CmdrTaco from the coming-eventually-to-a-ps2-near-you dept.
An Anonymous Coward writes: "Sony has announced details on their hard drive for PS2 (in Japan, anyway)." It's listed at $150, which puts the PS/2+Hard Drive at around $400 (after rumored PS2 price cuts). All of this is going to matter big time when Microsoft's X-Box storms onto the scene. The article also has information about the keyboard, mouse, and network adapters that will someday also be tethered to PS2s around the world.
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PS2 Harddrive Announced More

PS2 Harddrive Announced

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  • This just in (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This is too small of a story for the /. front page, but a lot of us will be interested anyway.

    Raphael Gray, a Welsh hacker, managed to get ahold of Bill Gates' credit card and proceeded to send Viagra to his home [yahoo.com]! Now that's funny. Great hack.

    Unfortunately, the Brits apparently are able to make diamonds by shoving coal up their ass and waiting six months. Whereas here in the U.S. this guy would be a hero and perhaps given a slap on the wrist, over there they are labelling him as mentally unstable with psychiatric problems.

    Raphael Gray wherever you are, don't listen to them. You are the one who is sane, having a very healthy sense of humor. Do yourself a favor and emigrate to the U.S., where you won't have to put up with a bunch of asshole bureaucrats who can't take a fuckin' joke.

  • Re:External Harddrive (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    is this the first post *ever* without "large gaping hole" linked to our favorite web site??

  • Re:PS/2??? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Oh.. **OH**. "PS2" stands for "Playstation 2".. Oh, now i get it.

    I sure am glad i read your post; up until here i had thought that when cdmrtaco said "PS2", he meant the UNIX environment variable.

    I was *THINKING* it made no sense to attatch a hard drive to your secondary prompt.... damn. That was confusing.

    Now i just have to figure out why those people in that other thread are obsessing about the PS1 art museum in new york and talking as if it were a piece of consumer electronics or something..

  • Re:External Harddrive (Score:4)

    by Shaheen ( 313 ) on Friday July 06, 2001 @09:17AM (#103774) Homepage
    There is a large gaping hole in the back of the PS2. This hole is where the (internal) harddrive plugs into. You can buy the internal one, or the external one which uses a USB port.

  • Re:External Harddrive (Score:4)

    by Shaheen ( 313 ) on Friday July 06, 2001 @09:26AM (#103775) Homepage
    I'm an intern for MS in the XBOX group. (Yes, it's XBOX. Not xbox; Not X-box; Not X-Box; just XBOX).

    There will be no such thing as DX drivers, at least none that the user will ever know about. Microsoft is not that stupid people. Think about it - this is a gaming CONSOLE. Yes, it is certainly a CONSOLE, and not a PC. Sure, it's got the same brand name parts. However, it has a different architecture. It has certain constraints PCs do not have. It has certain benefits that PCs do not have (locked hardware, unified memory, etc.)

    As was stated at a tech talk at MIT by J Allard, there is no real "operating system" for XBOX. All the code that drives the hardware is statically linked with a game executable. And since it's a Microsoft "OS," it has to be huge, right? As of now, this is under a megabyte.

    There. It's a console. It's not a PC. It doesn't really have an OS. There's no such thing as drivers. And stop bitching about XBOX just because it comes from Microsoft. Look past the freakin' name for once and see that MS might just have something good on their hands.
  • CD-ROM's weren't a good media to ship software on, either, because "the average consumer didn't have a CD-ROM drive".

  • The word from the source [microsoft.com]

    Xbox. No dash, not all caps either.

  • Except that Zaphod starts with a 'Z'...
  • How about:
    Randomly generated maps / items / whatever
    Opponent position
    AI state data (depends on engine)
    Past information (Wait, can't open this door until I flip switch C in room 32 5 levels back..)

    Also, you are mixing Flash memory (non-volatile) with SDRAM (requires power to store information). Flash is a _lot_ more expensive.
  • Nope, but you apparently didn't see the demonstration at E3 did you.

    Vermifax
  • Actually, the Harddrive doesn't hook into anything in the bay.(Other than sliding into the bay) The harddrive hooks into the modem/bba which hooks into that slot. At least that's the way they showed it at E3.

    Vermifax
  • They are actually two separate pieces of hardware that join together, Kaz demonstrated just using the Modem with out the harddrive, and putting both in the PS2.

    There are actually two ports on the BBA, one ethernet and one analog 56k.

    Vermifax

  • It fits in the expansion bay.

    Shown here [thedigitalbits.com]

    Vermifax

  • Xaphod BeeblebrOX

    Now, every time you see an XBOX from now until you die, you'll think of your dear friend Xaphod.

    You're welcome.

  • It couldn't possibly be that. It's called the XBOX, not the ZBOX.
  • $400 at the start, no, not 'expensive'. I guess I was thinking more in the long term after the planned obsolesence and proprietary add-on devices that BECOME NECESSARY. Suddenly it's all getting more expensive and those that are locked into it get to pay through the nose for it. Good luck :>

    --
    Delphis
  • Man, you're just begging to be told 'GO USE LINUX' aren't you? :)

    If you're serving files, using a windows PC is ludicrous.

    --
    Delphis
  • With the advances in graphics cards, PCs look better for gaming to me. Consoles make (made?) a big point about being simple and portable. Once you started adding more and more shit to them they just become very expensive proprietary PCs. Seems a bit strange somehow..

    --
    Delphis
  • Of course the people that bang-on about using consoles on a TV then come out and complain about comparing the outfit cost INCLUDING 'a nice monitor'.

    You don't always have to go to the latest and 'greatest' to get kick-ass performance. The cost savings can be huge, and why by the latest stuff when it's going to be obsoleted in roughly the same period of time anyway.

    GeForce2 GTS is my example .. very good graphics card.. costs about 1/3rd of a GeForce3. Nothing really NEEDS the power right now, so it's a waste of money.


    --
    Delphis

  • But I do agree with many of your points. I think really that the market has focused on being the coolests -- that is, having pretty graphics and slick features.

    How many people here remember the Quest for Glory series (was also the Hero's Quest series) by Sierra? Wonderful games. Very fun, with relatively few bugs (well, terrible race conditions in QfG4, but those only surfaced several years later). Sadly, there will be no more QfG, as they lost a lot of money on QfG5. Why? Because they busted a wad on a fancy 3-D engine, and very detailed 3-D character models and other expensive artwork. QfG5 grossed more than any of the other games in the series, but it was just too expensive to code, debug, and produce artwork for.

    The focus on fancy graphics is killing the PC gaming industry, yes. But isn't because there is anything inherently wrong with the PC as a gaming platform. I'd rather the quality of PC games increase. I have to have a fairly top of the line computer anyway for work. Going out and buying a console just to play games is an additional expense for me, not a cheaper alternative.

  • Gads. Where to begin?

    First off, a meg is huge for an embedded OS. Hell, my boot image is a (fairly bloated, IMHO) 700K. Handles all standard IDE/EIDE devices, SCSI, AGP, a dozen NIC's, more filesystems than I can count, and 3-4 sound cards. All without any modules. It is by no means an embedded OS. You, however, need a freakin' meg to bring up your DVD drive? I mean, that's all your ROM needs to do, is bring up the disk and finish booting from that.

    Second, there are too drivers. They just ship on the game media, and don't need to be handled by the user. So, I suppose it is true that there are "non that the user will ever know about". Of course, if a game ships with buggy drivers, then there is no way to fix that, so you're just screwed. And I don't believe for a minute that you can write totally bug free drivers for something as complicated as a DirectX implementation. At least not without cutting out all of the features that make DirectX a viable choice as a 3D graphics library.

    Third, are you serious about calling unified memory a plus? There is a very good reason why only cheap PC's use unified memory: it is waay tooo slooow. I remember a benchmark about a year back analysing the performance hit a unified memory architecture gave. It was about 7% for standard stuff, and pushing 20% for graphics-intensive stuff. Unified memory loses so bad that I doubt that your statement is even accurate. There is no way you can have the GPU and the CPU competing for the same memory bandwidth and still get a decent framerate. If it is a "unified" architecture, then I'd bet that the GPU has so much cache/buffer on it that it really isn't unified in any way but name.

    If you want to do any good for the XBox, you should leave the PR to the people who have been hired to do it. Or at least get a clue first.

  • Well, that is one way in which the XBox could make it all work. Since they are a 800 lb gorilla, I'm sure they can talk Intel into giving them chips with a low clock multiplier and a fast bus. They would need fast ram, and there is quite a premium for, say, 200 MHz SDRAM. However, from what I've heard, they are using a 133 or 100 MHz bus like everyone else.

    Also, if they do fancy thing with dual-port RAM and whatnot, they increase their reliance on specialized hardware. Overall, they have a small handfull of devices (CPU, GPU, sound, DVD, controller) which are going to be competing for those resources. To get it to work well will complicate the design. They could have, however, just gone with a plain old non-unified architecture, and grabbed all of their parts off the shelf, or whatever special stuff they did design, would be equally applicable to PCs, and PC sales could help absorb the development costs.

    Really, what I'm saying is that if you are 95% percent identical to a PC architecture already, you may as well just use a standard PC architecture. It works pretty damnn well, and while there is room for improvement in that you only care about 1 particular task (games), it isn't worth the extra design effort to deviate from standard. A commodity CPU on a commodity chipset with commodity RAM and a commodity DVD drive hanging off of a commodity IDE bus is pretty cheap, and can be made wicked fast at little expense. Yeah, you need nVidia's fancy new GPU, but nVidia is going to spread the development/manufacturing costs between MS and the PC gamer market, so it's just as good as if MS was buying a commodity video card too. Well, standard at least.

  • And stop bitching about XBOX just because it comes from Microsoft. Look past the freakin' name for once and see that MS might just have something good on their hands.

    It doesn't matter.

    I'd rather give Nintendo my money than Microsoft, just so I know my cash won't help finance a company that produces shite software and plans on extorting even more money out of users.
    At least Nintendo's business practices are slightly less evil, and mostly confined to the toy market, anyway.

    Besides, (IIRC)the Gamecube will cost $50-100 less, looks fucking killer [ign.com], AND Nintendo is known for making some of the best games ever.

    Microsoft can take their box (oh, sorry, BOX) and shove it.

    C-X C-S

  • I'm not sure exactly where or when the compatibility ends; since I'm not planning on upgrading past my (now ancient) copy of Win '95, I haven't really tried to keep track. It's nice to hear that XP will preserve backwards compatibility, but I imagine new software written for XP (especially games) won't run on '95 any more. Thus my interest in a console.

    It wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft did break backwards compatibility too at some point, possibly as an excuse to force people onto .NET. But I don't

  • On consoles there is no compromising as all the systems are exactly the same.

    Not that I don't get your point, but consoles have the same problems sometimes - I went through two used PSXs a couple months ago before finally getting wise and buying a PSOne like I should have in the first place. Supposedly they play the same games, but FFIX (my wife's killer app) was pretty sketchy on the PSX due to heat issues.

    That being said, console gaming is looking a lot more attractive to me than it did a few years back. Compared to the pain of setting up PC games, which monopolize the computer, require a much more upright posture, and involve dealing with either Linux 3D issues or Windows games that won't work with Windows '95 any more (maybe not yet, but I imagine W95 compatibility will no longer be a goal for game publishers once XP is out), consoles are a breeze. And there are enough old-but-cheap-and-fun games out there to hold me for quite a while.

  • So woundn't it make sense for Sony to start produceing PS2's with built in hard drives, network cards and other things that they plan on makeing standard needed items for the PS2?

    Maybe make a PS2.1 with built in harddrive and network card. Then also sell add-ons for the old PS2.0. This would give Sony the advantage of already haveing games and users. Then giveing all of the features of the XBOX around the same time or before it comes out.

  • PS/2??? (Score:5)

    by Julius X ( 14690 ) on Friday July 06, 2001 @09:19AM (#103797) Homepage
    Am I the only person who saw that and thought "PS/2? Why would someone make a new hard drive for a machine that has been out of production for over ten years??"

    I don't want no steenking hard drive for a IBM PS/2....

    (Taco, take the hint, its PS2, not PS/2, but even then you should probably just stick to Playstation 2...its only a few more letters!)

    -Julius X
  • When I think of PC games, I think of games developed in the first half of the 90's.

    And I think of games that were developed even before that. Games that were true classics like Sam & Max Hit the Road, Out of this World, Prince of Persia, Ultima IV, Wasteland, Wing Commander, Tetris, Pirates!, Populous, Gabriel Knight, System Shock, The Secret of Monkey Island, SimCity, and Alone in the Dark.

    When I think back to the first half of the 90s I think of all the disappointments. I guess you don't remember Battlecruiser 3000AD, Phantasmagoria, Rise of the Triad, The Adventures of Willy Beamish, Cutthroats, The Daedalus Encounter, Lands of Lore 2. And those are just the ones I remember. I'm sure there are far worse ones that I've completely forgotten.

    Games published today are typically very buggy (Anarchy Online), overly focused on graphics and glitz, very reliant on marketing, and very often disappointing despite long waits (Black and White?) or promising themes (Emperor: Battle for Dune?).

    That has been the case for a very long time. There are plenty of truly excellent games that have been published after your "Golden Age". I would suggest you try playing Thief, Space Empires IV, Deus Ex, Baldur's Gate, Close Combat, Half-Life, Triple Play 97, Diablo, Starcraft, The Sims, Rainbox Six, Planescape: Torment, Everquest/Ultima Online, Unreal Tournament, Command and Conquer: Red Alert, or Homeworld.

    Don't rely on your memory. It lies to you.
  • doesent the PS/2 have USB as well?

    even though usb is IMHO, too slow for a hdd, what about keybord, mouse and ethernet?
  • When are we going to see some price drops? Sony is going to have to lower their price to be more attractive vs. the $299 xbox and the $199 nintendo. I just don't see the ps2 as that competitive at its current price of $289 (as seen on pricescan.com).

    F.O.Dobbs

  • Cool! (Score:3)

    by RJ11 ( 17321 ) <serge@guanotronic.com> on Friday July 06, 2001 @09:19AM (#103801) Homepage
    I have way too many devices on my SCSI bus, and all of my IDE controllers are filled up too. So just the other day I was wondering how I'd put a new hard drive in my system, I was debating getting a firewire controller.

    Thanks to Sony, now I don't have to worry about that! I can get this new PS/2 hard drive and plug it right into the jack with a pass-through cable to my keyboard or mouse! This sounds great and all, I'm just not sure that the PS/2 bus could sustain enough bandwidth for that.
  • At Game Developers Conference 2000 MS was openly telling people that the XBOX would ship with just enough of an OS to initialize the hardware and start reading the DVD. Everything else necessary to run the game will come from the DVD. This allows them to update libraries, drivers, whatnot and have the developers distribute them as a part of their product. The end user never has to worry about system maintenence.

    So, no. I don't think any NDA was broken by the mention of no driver updates and a small base OS.


  • You are so wrong. There were tons of succesful games that used R.O.B. the robot and the PowerGlove. Oh wait...nevermind.

    Cool NES accessories page [thepong.com]

    -B
  • Locked hardware is a benefit?! For whom? Certainly not for the customer. Maybe for those that love control, such as the MPAA and the RIAA, but not us, the customers.

    I think by "locked hardware" he means that all the XBoxen (I refuse to capitalise it all no matter what they say) have the same hardware so you don't have the problem normal PC developers have. If a normal PC developer writes a game that needs an 800Mhz P3 and a GeForce3 only a small amount of the PC user population would be able to play it, if they target P2-300s with Voodoo2s then anyone who has anything better won't be satisfied.

    XBox developers can just write a game targeting the XBox and know that all the users will get the same experience.

  • This really irks me about my PS2. For some reason, the thing just will not boot games anymore. DVD movies work fine, and regular CD games work fine, but no DVD games will boot.

    I read somewehre that this means the DVD laser is misaligned and that this is not covered under warranty. Anyone care to comment? It's three months old and never been dropped, this totally sucks ...
  • I saw Linux running on PS2's with pre-release hard drives at JavaOne. Sun has ported the Java runtime to work on the PS2 hardware, and was demonstrating that. They were running WindowMaker for their WindowManager.
  • Errrm, except, to outfit a nice gaming rig, plug a GeForce3 into it and get yourself a nice monitor is going to cost you a whole heckuva lot more than $1k.

    -------------
  • See my comment above re: the Square/Final Fantasy effect on HD sales.

    Also, with FFXI going online, you can bet your bottom dollar that the BBA/modem combo (for a mere $40) will sell like hotcakes as well.

    -------------
  • *sigh* Once again, not seeing the Square/Final Fantasy edge that Sony has in this particular case.

    The HD and Final Fantasy X, which will require/make use of the HD (depending on who you ask) are both being released the same day in Japan. I'd say this is a good indicator of good future sales of the HD add-on.

    -------------
  • You're confusing FF X with FFXI. FFX will not feature online play, FFXI will.

    -------------
  • And you, as well, are wrong. FFXI will feature online play, FFX will not.

    -------------

  • Re:Not good. (Score:3)

    by ZaMoose ( 24734 ) on Friday July 06, 2001 @09:29AM (#103812)
    Ummm, except Square has stated that the HD add-on is going to be a virtual necessity in order to play Final Fantasy X. That might not sound like much here in the States, but that's a near-guarantee of gargantuan sales figures over in Japan. Besides, hasve you taken a look at the sales figures for PS2's after the announced price drop in Japan? Well-nigh equal to the sales figures of the Gameboy Advance over the same time period, no mean feat given the popularity of GBA and the price differential between the two. Square + necessity of HD add-on == virtual guarantee of sales on the HD.

    -------------
  • I swear, the next person that names a high-tech electronic device P S 2 with any combination of ., /, - is going to have to deal with me! I have to read half the article to figure out what the heck system someone came up with a hard drive for!
  • Next thing you'll tell us is the correct way to say XBOX sounds like exbo-X with a long O and accent on the X.
  • i was under the impression that (at least the ms mouse, maybe even only the *old* one at that) the 'microsoft' hardware was not actually made/designed by ms but only licensed and whatnot.
    i agree though, i love the ms natural keyboard and the ms optical intellimouse (the original one that they dont seem to make anymore :\)
  • i've got a regular optical mouseman with ifeel, and i just dont like using it as much as my ms mouse.
    its more to do with the scroll button software though, i think ifeel would be pretty kickass, but i really like using the ms mouse because of how the wheel operates.

  • indeed! (Score:1)

    by ebbv ( 34786 )

    you know i hadn't thought about the external ones that way and was planning on an internal hdd for my PSX2 but now that you mention it, that's a much better idea.

    you're a genius! i will build a statue of you made of meatloaf.
    ...dave
  • Funny comment coming from someone with a .sig like that...
  • ...though I suspect if a lima bean had a CPU Linux would get ported to it)

    No, first there'd be a NetBSD [netbsd.org] port ;)
  • Can I store MP3's on it?

  • PS/2 hard drives have been out for years! (Score:3)

    by Myself ( 57572 ) on Friday July 06, 2001 @10:05AM (#103821) Journal
    As a matter of fact, I'm using a PS/2 keyboard right now!

    Oh, wait...
  • As of 7:55 Eastern on July 6, 2001, Pricewatch lists GeForce2 GTS starting at $105 (plus shipping, lowest one listed at $105 + $11). $116 is quite a distance from $400.



    icanneverbereached@sogoaway.com aint my address.
  • "I'm an intern for MS in the XBOX group. (Yes, it's XBOX. Not xbox; Not X-box; Not X-Box; just XBOX). "

    It's nice to see that in 2001, Microsoft have finally figured out that case sensitivity *does* matter.

  • Well, I don't know about the mice, but I used a very generic USB keyboard ($25) with a friend's PS2 to take the bundled BASIC for a spin. It was quite fun (always nice with a basic that let's you draw Gauraud-shaded triangles with a single command, although that's of course pretty simple in C/OpenGL [opengl.org] too). It seemed to lack any high-precision, as in <1-second resolution, timers though, which kind of killed it for me. Anyway, the keyboard worked just fine.
  • Don't rely on your memory. It lies to you.

    I hate to be pedantic, but you should heed your own advice. :)


    And I think of games that were developed even before [the first half of the 90's]. Games that were true classics like:

    • Sam & Max Hit the Road, 1993 according to my CD
    • Out of this World, early 90s
    • Prince of Persia, I think was from '90
    • Wing Commander, 1990 also if I recall correctly
    • Gabriel Knight, early 90s
    • System Shock, mid 90s
    • The Secret of Monkey Island, early 90s
    • Alone in the Dark, early 90s.


    I'm also puzzled as to why you cite the Triple Play series as being great, but that's a whole 'nother can of worms...

  • From time and memorial of console gaming, gadgets and nifty peripherals have traditionally been bombs. There are a few exceptions where a very popular game is so inherantly tied to the peripheral that playing it without just isn't playing the game(think gun games, DDR). Heck the keyboard for Dreamcast was a washout until PSO came along.

    So while its nice to have a harddrive on your PS2 people are not going get it just to have a harddrive on your PS2. They need to have a "killer app" that does a "gee wiz I'm glad I have this thingy".
  • I don't own a console, so maybe I don't have the facts right, but it seems console makers make the money on the games. The $400 price tag seems great, adding a keyboard and mouse for another ~$70 still makes it a pretty good deal. The problem is that the games are likely to be more expensive than for a PC. It's also a pretty special purpose machine, why not spend a little more and get a PC. It'll run more software, you won't be using a TV for a display, unless you really want to. If you like the PS2 only games that are out there, then it still makes sense.
  • A lot of video cards have TV out, and this also takes care of the need for a DVD player. Of course you need a wireless input device of some kind, so we're upping the price of the PC a little bit.

    Your point about proprietary extensions is a good one, but with high powered video cards becomming so affordable, you might be able to get better graphics without the extensions.

    As you pointed out, the best thing about consoles is that they're all the same. This maens that games will work equally well on all of them so developers know the target system specs. It also means that a lot of the stupid driver problems that make Windows so unstable go away. Consoles still have a lot going for them
  • Microsoft does pretty well at making things like keyboards, optical mice, and other input devices. Maybe XBOX will follow this trend instead of that of their software business.
  • Massivly Multiplayer Online Gamse are becomming very popular. These games are constantly being patched to add new content as well as rebalance the game and fix bugs. Turbine, the makers or Asheron's Call (which is published by Microsoft), have already expressed interest in the XBOX. They have monthly patches to provide new content, so they will be making use of the hard drive. I'm sure Sony won't let Microsoft be the only ones with a MMOG on a console. If they're smart, you'll be seeing EverQuest for the PS2 for Christmass.
  • At least that's what the World Economic Forum intends to use them for, to disseminate vital health and other information to third-world countries.

    read more [cnn.com] at cnn...
  • Since when did game consoles become network computers?

    It's a GAME CONSOLE. A toy that hooks to your TV and plays games. It doesn't matter how much crap you throw on it, it's still a game console.

    When the PS2 can boot off the 'net and fire up X, it might be an NC.

    Interested in weather forecasting?
  • "Ummm, except Square has stated that the HD add-on is going to be a virtual necessity in order to play Final Fantasy X."

    Square making FF games that support the hard drive is still just a niche product. FFX will not require a hard disk for solo play, only for the additional online stuff. Only players who want to use their console to play the game online will need to buy the hard disk, and many will likely balk at buying said hard disk just to play SquareSoft games online when four other new games could be purchased for the same cost.

    This of course assumes that Square makes online content people actually like. Don't forget that Square has had many games that flopped sales wise, examples being The Bouncer, Ergheiz, and their forgettable PS2 racing sim.

    "Besides, hasve you taken a look at the sales figures for PS2's after the announced price drop in Japan?"

    And those have what to do with the hard disk add-on?

  • CD-ROM became a popular format out of necessity. At the time it grew into common use, software was just becoming too large to manage and distribute on floppy disks. This created a need for people who wanted to use a PC to run any recent software to buy a CDROM or deal with piles of floppies.

    Hard disks on consoles are a different situation. With the exception of online games that need frequent patching, there is little need for a hard disk on a console system that already allows for data storage on memory cards. Until we reach a time that online gaming is massively popular, or find another reason for a game console to need mass storage, a hard disk in a gaming console is not likely to be widely adopted unless it is installed by default (As is the case of the XBOX.).

  • Not good. (Score:5)

    by supabeast! ( 84658 ) on Friday July 06, 2001 @09:16AM (#103835)
    This is not a good thing for Sony. While it is neat to have a hard disk, network adapters, etc. for the PS2, chances are it won't go over well.

    Developers don't like console add-ons, because they facture the market and can lead to low game sales. Nintendo learned this in the 1980s, when their slew of add-ons for the NES in Japan (Even a knitting machine.), and a smaller number of them in the US, flopped. Sega experienced the same problems with their 32X and Sega CD add ons for the Genesis . Nintendo again had problems trying to add high-density media to the N64 system. When Nintendo created a RAM add-on for the N64, it sold well at first, but was eventually rejected with consumers, and the first game to require it ended up being packaged with one.

    Console add-ons are just bad news. Sony will likely end up slashing costs and making crazy deals with developers to get the add-ons support beyond niche games. In the long run, they will fracture their own market and annoy customers. Microsoft will have these features prepackaged without an obvious added cost, and Sony will likely suffer for it.

    Nintendo, of course, will get to sit atop the heap of game companies, leveraging their experience into a strategy that allows them to come out best (Albeit maybe not highest selling.) by marketing a simple, cheap gaming system without much hassle by a proven console company.
  • Go to www.xbox.com [xbox.com] and you will notice they spell it Xbox, no dash mixed case.
  • Could you use a generic PC USB keyboard or mouse with the PS2, and not pay those inflated prices for them?
  • I grow weary of this argument that "console makers get it right the first time". Console games have revisions as well, you just have to pray that the bugs you suffer through aren't showstoppers. Sometimes they are (thanks Midway). Just because there are no rogue processes to step on a game doesn't mean no bugs exist. Hell, sometimes they change UPC symbols between revisions. I have had two exchanges blown because of this.

    I love my consoles. I prefer them to PCs for gaming (save for Action Half-Life). But nothing is flawless.

  • I saw these things at E3. Though they had plenty of goons keeping people from looking at the device in detail, you could tell that the hard drive was plugged into the rear expansion bay, and jutted out about an inch from the system. An ethernet cable was hooked up to a port on the back of the HD. Seems pretty clear to me that Sony has more interest in this thing being a content-delivery device, rather than simply a complement to games.

    Also of interest: the PS2's were running netscape 4.x on PS2 Linux. All attempts to get to a command prompt were met with hostility :-O

  • Re:Why not just buy a PC? (Score:4)

    by JohnG ( 93975 ) on Friday July 06, 2001 @09:21AM (#103845)
    There are many reasons. First of all some of us still enjoy the company of actual people. It is very easy to play Mario Kart on a 31 inch TV split four ways in a relatively large living room. Try fitting four people at a computer desk and playing on a 17 inch screen in a smaller room and it becomes a bit harder. 17 inch screen maybe, computer desk maybe, but not both.

    Consoles also make it much easier for developers to take advantage of proprietary "extensions". On a PC the developer can't make extensive use of say Nvidia specific extensions, without providing alternative support for non-Nvidia cards. The models can't be as tessellated as a GeForce 3 card will support without crawling on a Voodoo2. On consoles there is no compromising as all the systems are exactly the same.

  • External Harddrive (Score:5)

    by JohnG ( 93975 ) on Friday July 06, 2001 @09:10AM (#103846)
    The picture I've seen showed an external hard drive, I hope if they ship PS2's with a hard drive, they keep this arrangment. The biggest fear I've had of systems coming with hard drives is having to worry about filling them up. External harddrives would function like a big 'ole memory card, allowing you to just buy a new one when you filled the old one up, without having to worry about navigating multiple drives, or taking your console apart.
    Basically I guess what I'm saying is that I want consoles to remain as "carefree" as they've always been. Of course the X-Box, I think is going to hurt that alot, especially if they make you upgrade DirectX drivers, download patches and such, but hopefully Sony and Nintendo will continue to cater to the CONSOLE market and not try to compete with MS in the "innovative" [sic] PC in a little black box instead of a big beige one market.

  • I wouldn't call "unified memory" a benefit for a console. Just look at the speed drawbacks of unified memory!

    The XBOX has a PC architecture - everything driven around the processor/3d card. The PS2 has five or so separate processors that are each specialised in doing individual tasks. When you read something off a CD on the xbox, you'll probably have to hit the main processor a lot. Do that on a PS2, and you'll hit the IO/PS1 chip more, thereby leaving more stuff for the processor to do.

    Quite simply, you can't just dump PC hardware into a box and call it a console. There are *many* more issues that most people (including MS) don't seem to understand.

    I don't trust this just because it's from MS. The reason I don't buy into the hype is because the "Architect" of it, Seamus Blackley(sp?), was responsible for Trespasser, and all of the hype behind that (40,000 trees in software mode on a P233 at a full frame rate? I don't think so...)
  • That announcement link also indicates that a USB mouse and keyboard would be available. Doesn't that imply that the HD is definatively USB?

    If so, why is it not possible to plug one in right now?
  • Well all I know is that I went to CompUSA and bought a PS/2 mouse and now I can't find anywhere to plug it into.
    --
  • This is a tad off topic, but what I'd really like to do is hook one of these puppies up to a battery power supply, a Glasstron, load Linux and use as a wearable.

    So, towards that end, does anyone know of any sites that go into the internals of the power supply, or explain how to hack it to work off a battery? I don't want to buy one to take apart without at least some kind of reassurance that it's a doable project. If the power adaptor were external, it'd be real easy, but unfortunately not..

    The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.

  • Pretty standard stuff; the DreamCast, Saturn and, I think, PSone worked this way, and probably the PS2. The OS is on each disk; later games have later revisions of the OS.
  • Nope, sorry. My GeForce 3 blows away a PS2. And can run things at much better resolution on a high-quality monitor. PS2 still has the jaggie problem that the PS1 had, but at least the PS1 had an excuse.
  • No, but the game boy color sold pretty damn well, and you had to buy a whole new game boy, which cost from 80 - 100 dollars. And it's not even like it was that much better, what did you end up with, 16 shitty colors? For another 80 bucks?

    Also, keep in mind that Sony will be selling PS2's with the hard drive installed. If the improvement to the games is great enough, they'll sell. If all it lets you do is store some pictures, then probably not.

  • Combat is the ultimate proof that graphics don't really matter. We love some Q3A, but a while ago my roommates and I got into a round of Combat and I have NEVER seen people get into a multiplayer game like that.
  • Very true. I mean, my PS2 has Firewire (oops "i.Link"), USB, a DVD/CD drive, and an expansion bay. Soon, I will have a mouse, keyboard, hard drive, and monitor (TV) hooked up to it.

    What I see, though, as the difference, is that it was designed for games. While other things run on it (Linux was ported, though I suspect if a lima bean had a CPU Linux would get ported to it), it's mainly a game console. What they are learning is that the PC has many advantages (keyboard, for one) for more complex games (C&C, Starcraft, Rougue Spear, etc.) and they are trying to take those few items away to keep the console market going in the face of sub-$1K PCs that blow the absolute arse off the consoles (GeForce 3, anyone?).
  • The Playstation 2 consumes so much power, with its many DSPs and CPUs, that even with a giant card lead/acid battery strapped to the Playstation 2, you probably wouldn't break an hour of battery life. Here is another way of saying it: It would be like trying to use one of those >1ghz AMD CPUs, as a portable processor.

    You are better off buying a few Gameboy Advance systems and some copies of the upcoming port of Doom. Can you say portable lan party?

  • I can buy drives in 1s and 2s for less than $90. Sony can probably buy them in bulk for what, $50? $40?.

    If I were Sony, I'd wedge the drive into the case. If it doesn't fit, design a slightly larger case and market it as the "Sony Playstation II Deluxe" and sell it at the same price as the PS-II + cost of drive + same profit margin on the drive as the main unit (actually I bet the console is already sold at cost anyway). The redesigned case shouldn't take that long to pay for itself, and if I were in the market for a console I might be willing to pay $50 more for a unit with a drive.

    On the flip-side of this, once they get the drives out there, how long will it take somebody to reverse engineer the interface and undercut the price? If it's a std IDE or something like that, not long at all.

  • I think you are forgetting a very important point:

    Final Fantasy X is announced to support it. And both of them are released on the same day in Japan.

    This alone is enough to ensure the thing being sold out within minutes of its arrival at shops over there for at least a few months (Square is such a system-seller/killer in Japan it's disguting...).
  • the PS2 doesnt have the jaggy problems... its the first generation games with the problem. The PS2 is fully capable of doing some nice anti aliasing, and you will be seeing more and more game without jaggies soon. The ones that had to make the launch date, didnt have time to take advantage of the majority of the PS2 power. This is no different that most other console releases. The coders will catch up to the hardware, give them a chance.

  • One Word For You (Score:3)

    by TotallyUseless ( 157895 ) <totNO@SPAMmac.com> on Friday July 06, 2001 @11:22AM (#103880) Homepage Journal
    'Mods'
    The biggest thing that is missing from console fps, has been mods. There has never been a way to play mods with the game, unless they were included with the game. Who wants to play Q3 on the dreamcast or ps2 if you are just limited to actually playing... Q3? I don't. Most gamers want more, and mods sell games nowadays. Game companies know this, and console makers are hopefully starting to realize this as well.
    My biggest fear of hard drives and consoles coming together however, is fear of the 'release now and patch later' syndrome that seems all too frequent with pc games these days. Until now, console makers had to get it right the first time. There was no way to patch a game, and if a showstopper was found, the only thing that could be done was a recall. I have a serious fear that hard drives on consoles will lead to the same sort of problem. Hopefully it will be used more as an avenue for add-ons rather than a crutch when companies run out of time

  • Re:External Harddrive (Score:5)

    by zombieking ( 177383 ) on Friday July 06, 2001 @09:42AM (#103884)
    I'm an intern for MS in the XBOX group...

    We are asking you nicely, Mr. Gates. Please stop trolling slashdot. Thanks. :)

    I just couldn't resist that one.

    -----

  • NDA??? Re:External Harddrive (Score:4)

    by firewort ( 180062 ) on Friday July 06, 2001 @10:10AM (#103885)
    Did you break NDA by telling use the size of the OS and about certain constraints and no DX components? or is that publicly available...

    Waiting until MS comes and asks CmdrTaco to remove the post...

    A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
  • And stop bitching about XBOX just because it comes from Microsoft. Look past the freakin' name for once and see that MS might just have something good on their hands.

    While I won't disagree that there're some people bitching over the MS issue, game console preference seem to be as equally religiously charged as text editor preference. You'll find numerous people all claiming how great the suckitude is of any current (or even unreleased) game system from the PS2 to the N64 to the Dreamcast to the GameCube to the XBOX. It's just a given.

    However, it's worth pointing out that if I ignore the anti-Microsoft bias, all I'm left with is the fact that it's a game console from a company that hasn't produced a console before. That's not to say they can't pull it off -- just that there's nothing to get me downright excited until I reach out and touch one.

  • Well I think the problem for Sony is that "piece of shit vaporware" will be coming out on November 8, 2001, and it will come with a hard drive, and it will also come with a built in ethernet adapter, all devices that the Playstation 2 were lacking. As more people end up with cable modems, etc.. being able to play games over a network will be of greater importance. Having a hard drive just makes sense, rather than having to switch out CD's, a 40 GB hard drive could give games some room to spread out. All things that Microsoft gave some thought to, and now Sony is doing the same. I'm glad to see Sony is taking this step, competition breeds innovation, or at least some more add-ons I guess...

    bbh

  • The PS2 has 1394 - adding a HD should be easy. (Score:3)

    by willy_me ( 212994 ) on Friday July 06, 2001 @10:09AM (#103895)
    I've been using 1394 for a short while (CDRW drive) and I have to say it works great. I don't know if the sony OS in the playstation supports hard drives over the 1394 bus but if it does then adding a hard drive will be trivial. There are even some smaller drives [vsttech.com] on the market now that can draw their power from the 1394 bus thus not requiring an external power source. Such a drive would be just as easy to install as a controller. The hardware infostructure is there with the PS2 - Sony just needs to enable it in the software.

    Willy

  • Hopefully the PC will DIE as a gaming platform.... (Score:3)

    by kstumpf ( 218897 ) on Friday July 06, 2001 @10:47AM (#103896)
    PC-like consoles are apparently the future of console developers' attacks on PC gaming, and hardware like this PS2 disk are a big part of it.

    Consoles slipped into the background somewhere during and after the PlayStation's reign, and heads turned towards the PC. Personally, I hope this trend finally ends, and consoles come back to the forefront as the must-have systems for gaming.

    Face it, PC gaming has gone down the tubes. When I think of PC games, I think of games developed in the first half of the 90's. Games like Quake, Doom2, Master of Orion, XCom, Master of Magic, Tie Fighter, Monkey Island, Civ, Warcraft II, etc. Games today don't match up, in terms of playability and commitment to gameplay over all else.

    Games published today are typically very buggy (Anarchy Online), overly focused on graphics and glitz, very reliant on marketing, and very often disappointing despite long waits (Black and White?) or promising themes (Emperor: Battle for Dune?).

    So, I honestly hope that the PC gaming industry experiences some sort of wrathful purge. Put the PC games back at the rear of the software store, just the way it was in the pre-doom days. Maybe then PC developers will think "oh no, if we want to actually sell our game, it needs to be playable and relatively bug-free!". Yes, what a revelation...

    I bought a GameBoy Advance recently, and believe it or not, its the most fun I've had since I was hooked on Half-Life/TFC and running the radium map sites. Its cheap, the batteries last long, the games are good, and the console is just weak enough that developers have to make sure games are FUN, because the graphics alone won't sell the game.

    So, some reasons I'm all for consoles at this point:

    1) Hassle-free - Put the disk/cart in and play. No installation, no patches, easy controls, etc.

    2) Stability - Wow, NO BUGS. I sure do miss that. Pay for a game and know it will run.

    3) Cheap - Yes, far cheaper. My PC is still an overclocked Celeron 300A with a TNT2. I'm sick of having to pay hundreds (or thousands) of dollars a year just to keep my machine in a state suitable to run a game off the shelf well. Its ridiculous. Does a game really need to make my computer sweat blood to be fun? Hell no.

  • Ethernet Adapter already included? (Score:4)

    by MWoody ( 222806 ) on Friday July 06, 2001 @09:44AM (#103897)
    Taken from Gamespot [gamespot.com]:
    Sony Computer Entertainment has officially confirmed the release of its hard disk drive for the PlayStation 2 later this month in Japan. The add-on peripheral will serve as a data cache, for faster loading, for more than 20 games, including Final Fantasy X, Jade Cocoon 2, Capcom vs. SNK 2, and Guitar Freaks 4th Mix and DrumMania 3rd Mix, among others. The utility disk for the hard drive will also include the latest CD drivers, with new features such as programmed and shuffled play, and DVD player driver 2.10. The unit, which also includes an Ethernet network adapter, will serve an additional purpose in the future, working in unison with the company's broadband network.

    As previously reported, the pricing for the external drive is set at 19,000 yen (US$153), while the internal one will retail for 18,000 yen (US$145) in Japan. The company is currently taking preorders for the first 10,000 units (7,500 external and 2,500 internal) through its online store, PlayStation.com.

    I saw no mention of an included adapter in the IGN article. Would be very interesting, if true... Might actually come close to warranting that price tag.
    ---
  • "Why not just buy a PC?"

    Because my Original Nintendo, Genesis and Saturn all work flawlessly, where as my PC (whose ONLY job is to serve files to my Macs) had an incident a few months ago where it decided C: was also D:, E:, F:, and finally G: and Norton didn't know what the hell to do with it.....

  • Man, you're just begging to be told 'GO USE LINUX' aren't you? :)

    I wouldn't touch Linux. But for your information heres the OS's I have tried, other than windows of course: BeOS, FreeBSD, QNX and Windows ME. FreeBSD didn't know what to do with my monitor and I didn't feel like tinking with it. BeOS was rock Solid and quite useful but at the time didn't have much in terms of networking. QNX was nice, but didn't have much in terms of networking setup. I'm sure i could have used Samba on QNX or BeOS, but again its a simple home lan, why should i learn to use such a powerful tool for such a little job.

    Well since I have DAVE (for OS 8.1) sitting around and can download Sharity (for OS X) for free, I figured it would be easiest to just use CIFS. Which it was. Now, after i get around to purchasing a new monitor (which is what freaked out FreeBSD), I'll migrate to FreeBSD and use NFS for MacOS X and Samba for exporting Appleshare volumes.

    "If you're serving files, using a windows PC is ludicrous."

    Not really. Considering its a home lan and all it has to be able to do is at least 1-2 Megabyte a second (video). Other things I've been experimenting with is using streamsicle control my PC as a stereo (which of course since streamsicle is Java based, i could do in any OS) which is quite neat.

    Before you make preemptive judgments make sure you know you facts. I could USE any OS, but using Windows was the easiest. Personally, I'm not fond of Windows and would pefer BeOS or FreeBSD and am thinking about switching in the near future.

  • Re:This just in (Score:4)

    by tmark ( 230091 ) on Friday July 06, 2001 @10:21AM (#103902)
    Yeah, but I would have laughed harder if this guy had a copy of Office XP sent to Richard Stallman. Or if he sent a framed copy of choice pieces of Transmeta class action documents sent to Linus Torvalds. Or if he had a few copies of FreeBSD (or BeOs, or Windows, or Solaris, or any other OS *not* Linux), sent to CmdrTaco, neatly wrapped with VA Linux share certificates.

  • Absolutely right. In fact, Microsoft has already declared the XBOX as an integral part of their .NET strategy [microsoft.com]. I think Sony knows it too, and that's why they're trying beat MS to the punch. Why else do you think that they're announcing the Hard Drive (with NIC, according to some reports), keyboard, and mouse at the same time?

    It's a known fact that Sony hates Microsoft. Ken Kutaragi, the president of Sony Computer Entertainment has been trash talking [cloudchaser.com] about the XBOX for a while now and Nobuyuki Idei, the big boss himself, has done all but declare open warfare. [yahoo.com] They've probably got a good idea of what Microsoft is up to, and want to nip it in the bud.

    Here's another fact to chew on. Be has been trying to remake themselves into an imbedded OS provider. Rumour has it that there's been a lot of hush-hush discussion between Be and Sony, and Sony has already released a BeOS device [benews.com]. Maybe I'm smoking crack, but combine all those facts together and it's not a big leap of logic to predict a BeIA based web client for the PS2 this fall. The XBOX might have some real competition on it's hands.

  • It took years of effort to turn dull PCs into game machines; nowaday people found challenges to do the opposite.

    "Hey look I run an Oracle database server on my PS3!"
    "Can you give me a break I'm trying to get this Final Fantasy XX running on my 10GHz P5."
  • All you people saying that add-ons de-value the console and developers dont like them dont get the big picture. As Nicholas Petreley pointed out in his opinion piece [infoworld.com], m$ has seen the NC light. The xbox is just another NC. Coupled with .NET, it becomes a full time player in m$ vision of windows software services. The more competitors out there in various sizes (watch, cell phone, pda, NC, desktop, etc), the less likely that m$ will be able to dominate. Start writing your http based web service apps now.
  • I won't argue that games look good on a PC for the most part but there's another thing to consider in this.

    If company X creates game Y with systems specs Z in mind, anyone with specs below Z can't play the game. Or at least not the way it was intended to be. Not to mention driver problems, hardware compatibility or even OS issues...

    A game console will never have this problem. When company X writes game Y for the PS2, it will look, and feel exactly as intended for every person that plays game X. Of course, the downfall to this is what do you do when your hardware ages a couple of years and the PC technology has surpased it? Create a new, backward compatible console I suppose. Props to Sony on that one.

    And on another note, while PC games are good, I've never, ever seen a game look and play as beautifully as games such as Gran Turismo 3, Metal Gear Solid 2, or many of the other hot new titles out there.

    My point: There's a place for everything, and certain games, and especially game styles, will always prevail on the console. In my opinion, PC's only seem well suited for two types of games, Shooters (quake,half-life) or strategy (starcraft...)

    - Mike
  • Then why bother with a PS?

    PS To PC USB Adapter [consolesource.com]

    PS Emulator [bleem.com] or countless other places

    TV Out Adapter [compusa.com]

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