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Portables (Games) Programming Technology

Sony to PSP Coders: Battery Life Your Problem 144

Posted by Zonk from the here-catch! dept.
AssaultOnBattery writes "The fine folks over at GamesIndustry.biz are reporting that Sony has found a unique solution to the problem of battery life on the PSP - making their game developers solve it for them. According to the story, Sony is going to give devs a battery emulator which will tell them if their game is within acceptable power consumption limits."
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Sony to PSP Coders: Battery Life Your Problem More

Sony to PSP Coders: Battery Life Your Problem

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  • The Buck Stops (Score:5, Funny)

    by the darn ( 624240 ) on Wednesday September 29, 2004 @03:35PM (#10386784) Homepage
    And for just $350, the problem can be yours!

  • Interesting... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by I_Love_Pocky! ( 751171 ) on Wednesday September 29, 2004 @03:36PM (#10386796)
    I wonder if games will start being released with battery life predictions on the box.

  • no disc streaming? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Apreche ( 239272 ) on Wednesday September 29, 2004 @03:37PM (#10386807) Homepage Journal
    If you can't access the disc often, that means only one thing. You have to load all the info off the disc into ram beforehand. That means, LOAD TIMES. Want to whip out your PSP in class for a quick game before the teacher gets there? Sorry, gotta wait a minute for it to load. Oh shit, times up! Not good for the PSP. Which was already looking bad with its much higher price tag.

    • Re:no disc streaming? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by gamgee5273 ( 410326 ) on Wednesday September 29, 2004 @04:08PM (#10387225) Journal
      It was as though I heard thousands of "Resident Evil" doors scream out... and suddenly go silent.

      Let's be honest: Are we surprised? Load time has always been an issue for Sony machines. Even strong developers, like Rockstar, have had load issue times with the GTA games (though I understand San Andreas is supposed to have no load times, but I'll wait to see that for myself).

      I hate to say it, but Sony is dropping the ball on the PSP. It's a slick looking machine, I agree. The specs are great. For what its features are, I think $350 is an okay price.

      BUT, if the "portable" part of portable gaming means that I'm plugged in using a power adapter, then I'm not leaving my GBA SP for a PSP any time soon.

      Can't say I'm buying a DS, either, but this discussion is about the PSP.

      • A good workaround to load times when changing areas has been in done in a few games, Soul Reaver, and Castlevania Symphony of the Night come to mind. They have load rooms, where the game loads the next area as you run past the center point of a hallway. Vice city could have easily done this with bridges.
    • Well, you aren't exactly going to be playing Pacman on a PSP. Games for a system like that are usually more in depth, and pretty much require long play sessions. If you are looking for something to play for a matter of minutes, you shouldn't have a PSP in the first place. Get a GBA and play Tetris or something.

      • What's a handheld for, then? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by KDR_11k ( 778916 ) on Thursday September 30, 2004 @02:54AM (#10391837)
        That would be a desaster. Handhelds see much usage during short wait times, wait for the bus, wait until your train arrives, wait in line, etc. If the shortest you could play the PSP for would be, say, 30 minutes, you could only use the system during very long breaks (like lunch break). Those rarely occur naturally and you'd be limited to long trips and time you take yourself for the PSP. Most of that allocated time is in your free time, anyway and most likely those parts of your free time you'd spend with gaming are spent at home. And at home there's no need for a handheld. And even less need for a proprietary movie format that only plays on the miniature screen.

    • Re:no disc streaming? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Wednesday September 29, 2004 @08:12PM (#10389689) Homepage Journal
      The PSP's UMD has an 11 Mbps transfer rate [wordiq.com] and the unit has 32MB. It can't take more than about 30 seconds to fill main memory. However, there's no reason you can't load enough to begin doing something (for instance, showing the countdown in a racing game) and stream the rest of it until memory is filled. It will require some clever programming, but I don't want games made by stupid people anyway. I can't imagine that no one is doing this now, anyway.

      • Re:no disc streaming? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by xenocide2 ( 231786 ) on Wednesday September 29, 2004 @09:14PM (#10390079) Homepage
        What about seek time? And how far will 32 MB carry you? Is it enough to store a 3d executable, 3d data, and your expectations for sound and music?

        Games aren't made by stupid people, but every second they have to spend addressing this issue is time they can't allocate to extra features like multiplayer or a faster subroutine for something like antialiasing. Nobody is doing this now because nobody is doing portable rotational media until just now.

        If you can't get more than 2 hours of movies out of it, then I have dismal hopes for the battery life from your average game maker. Just as not every game on the PS2 looks as great as Square's, there will be games that last longer than others.

        • Nobody is doing this now because nobody is doing portable rotational media until just now.

          But on the other hand, seek time and load time are issues on systems today, and a similar approach should achieve both goals.

        • And how far will 32 MB carry you? Is it enough to store a 3d executable, 3d data, and your expectations for sound and music?

          32 MB is apparently enough to play any PS2 game ever made, so I'm guessing that yes, it is enough to store a 3d executable, 3d data, and sound and music.

          • You're forgetting how much of that 32 MB serves as a buffer rather than storage. The music of a PS2 game itself is regularly streamed of the disk. Grand theft auto uses passive loading, or asynchronous loading of 3d data or whatever you want to call it to avoid load times.

            Every other game has load times. The above technologies are off limits for power consumption. Either the games will feature less graphic quality (a very real possibility given the LCD screen resolution) or load times. Its likely that some
    • Do you know what the best way to speed up load times is when you're reading off a DVD?

      To load as much data as once as possible. Huh, that's kinda the exact opposite of what you implied.

      It's a safe bet that the same principles apply on the PSP. I don't think there will be many problems, given that longtime Sony developers have 8 or so years of experience in minimizing load times off of rotational media.

    • Everyone seems to be forgetting that we have CD players that can play for 50+ hours on a set of batteries, and a CD likely requires more energy to spin. If you want to stream data, there's usually no need to do it at maximum speed, so developers are probably just going to have to change the speed to maximise battery life.
      • More energy to spin, but FAR less power to run the whole device. Remember, CD players don't have large amounts of RAM, and aren't very big in the computing power like a gaming system is. The GBA SP eats through batteries several times faster than a CD player, and the PSP will have a bigger screen, faster CPU, more features and moving parts, meaning even more power draw than the GBA.

      • Re:no disc streaming? (Score:4, Informative)

        by Doomstalk ( 629173 ) on Thursday September 30, 2004 @05:46PM (#10399246)
        There's also a lot less random access on an audio CD. You spin up the disc, and then just read the data in serial. With a data disc the information needed is more likely to be spread out across the whole disc, meaning more read head movement. Additionally, most data readers are higher speed than a CD player which means the disc is spun faster, eating more power in the process. If you want an example of this in action, find a CD player with an anti-skip buffer, and compare the battery life when the buffer is on and when it's off. Anti-skip tech works by spinning the disc a higher speed to read ahead, and copying the data read into a memory buffer. It demonstrates very nicely how much power a faster drive eats.

  • Well to a certain extent this makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)

    by antifoidulus ( 807088 ) on Wednesday September 29, 2004 @03:37PM (#10386814) Homepage Journal
    The PSP is a very complex machine(with a motor for the cd reader), and thus battery life will vary greatly depending on what you are doing(versus say a gameboy were battery life is easier to determine in general rather than per game) You want to load a lot of textures? That is going to kill your battery life. You want to have a lot of music? Going to kill battery life. A game such as quake will obviously take more battery power than puyo puyo pop. Sony did itself and it's devs a favor by providing this little kit.
    • I completely agree...this story seems silly to me, because it makes complete sense for Sony to do this.

      In fact, I don't really see how it could be any other way? It's not as if some game developer is going to create a game, then submit it to Sony for Sony to re-code parts of it to make it more power-efficient...No, stuff like this is always the game developer's responsibility, and always has been in the past.
      A game doesn't read/write from memory cards correctly? -- Game developer's problem.
      A game doesn't
    • Sony did itself and it's devs a favor by providing this little kit.

      How did Sony do the devs a favor by tossing the task of managing the battery onto them? Considering the amount of data those discs can hold, I don't think even a gig of RAM in the PSP will be enough to satisfy most games beyond the RPG and Puzzle genres. Every single Action game developer will go insane trying to code for this, as well Racing and Shooting genres.

    • indeed. this could be very cool. So I can only play metal gear for three hours. Which sucks. But, I can play pac man and tetris for 30 hours. And that, would be very cool indeed.

  • Sigh... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Schezar ( 249629 ) on Wednesday September 29, 2004 @03:39PM (#10386843) Homepage Journal
    This seems like the final nail in the coffin for the PSP. After all, what good is amazing, state-of-the-art hardware, if the developers avoid pushing it to its full potential for fear of draining the battery?

    Remember the Game Gear? It was lightyears ahead of the original Game Boy. Color, backlit screen, processing power... The bastard took 6 AA batteries and lasted about 4 hours. (There was a trick where you could add a 7th AA to the section of the power supply that handled the backlight and get about 7 hours out of it, but that was little-known and difficult) It sucked batteries like a hoover, while the less powerful Game Boy lasted forever with it's ugly little brown-scale screen ;^)

    Furthermore, what about load times? The PSP uses discs right? Power consumption concerns will put the kaibosh on streaming from the media, which means LOAD TIMES! That might be well and good on a console, but on a portable? These systems are supposed to be quick-on, quick-off, quick game before class or before the subway gets here.

    It won't quite be an N-gage, but the PSP will definitly be "Game Gear 2"
    • Right.

      Every portable other than the Gameboy failed.

      Low battery life, high price. And since they weren't around for long, they never built a library of games.

      The Gameboy has always been cheap. Batteries last a while in them.
    • How about the virtual boy.... 9 AA's, and the GOOD batteries only lasted ~1hour, at best. The dollar store batteries would be lucky to last 10 minutes.
      • Correction: 6 AAs. But yes, the battery life on that was ridiculous. It also wasn't portable, so a wall power supply wasn't out of the question. Two banana plugs + a universal power supply did the trick if you didn't/couldn't buy an official adapter.

      • Re:Sigh... (Score:5, Funny)

        by FriedTurkey ( 761642 ) * on Wednesday September 29, 2004 @06:34PM (#10388898)
        How about the virtual boy.... 9 AA's, and the GOOD batteries only lasted ~1hour, at best.

        That was a saftey feature to prevent you from becoming blind.
    • It uses disk?? It uses disk???? HAHAHHAHA oh man, what were they thinking.
      • I think that they are thinking to hinder piracy.
      • Wow, what a comprehensive argument, I'm so glad I got to read that. It's not as if discman, or minidisc ever worked.
        • Yes, and they suffer battery life problems. Add a high speed processor, and a color screen to that, and your asking for trouble. Cartrages use a lot less power and are just as hard if not harder to pirate as specialised disk.
          • A good portable CD player can run 30 hours on 2 AAs. The color screen and the proc may suck power, but I don't think the optical drive will be as much of an issue as some people think.
          • I don't know how much that disk is going to add to the battery life. I've got a minidisc player that's a couple of years old, and it get's close to 40 hours of battery life on a single AA battery. I'm sure the PSP's drive is even more power-efficient.
    • "Remember the Game Gear? It was lightyears ahead of the original Game Boy. Color, backlit screen, processing power..."

      That's not 'light-years'. Except for the color screen, there was little the GG could do the GB couldn't in terms of games. If the original Game Gear was like the Nomad, then yes, it would have been 'light years', and it would have been vastly more successful.

      • Wrong (Score:4, Insightful)

        by jbellis ( 142590 ) <jonathan@carnage ... m minus math_god> on Wednesday September 29, 2004 @05:18PM (#10388075) Homepage
        I remember Sonic on the Game Gear in particular was wayyyyyy ahead of anything the GB or GBC could do, and not just palette-wise.
        • Of course, the GBC wasn't yet a twinkle in the eyes of those mourning the death of Gumpei when Sonic GG was in stores.

          After the fact, I'd have to disagree with you about the GBC, to an extent. Bionic Commando: Elite Forces was a great game, as was Xtreme Sports (bad title though). And Shantae puts Sonic GG to shame in both departments.

          But this is all in the past. All I know is that this is yet another line drawn in the magical seal of PSP homebrew development, when you have to do your own power consumpti
    • Has anyone checked if the game gear will take 2300mAh NiMH batteries? It's pretty much the same problem with digital cameras: put new alcalines in... and cry
    • > This seems like the final nail in the coffin for the PSP

      I love how everyone's an expert around here.
    • There was also a trick where you used 4 or 6 batteries and 1 or 2 paperclips. Don't know how long the batteries lasted then. Just seen it done is all.

  • Sony: Here is a handheld more powerful than the PS2. Developers: Hurah! Sony: But you can't use that power. Na-na-na-na-na. Developers: D'oh.

    • Reformated. (Score:2, Redundant)

      by arose ( 644256 )
      Sony: Here is a handheld more powerful than the PS2.
      Developers: Hurah!
      Sony: But you can't use that power. Na-na-na-na-na.
      Developers: D'oh.

  • Icarus (Score:5, Informative)

    by clu76 ( 620823 ) on Wednesday September 29, 2004 @03:40PM (#10386861) Homepage
    Sony is flying too high and it looks like they're about to get burnt. They're making all the same mistakes their predecessors have made in the hand held market. Battery life being one of the biggest ones.

  • hmm (Score:5, Insightful)

    by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Wednesday September 29, 2004 @03:43PM (#10386889) Homepage Journal
    Well the Nintendo fan-boy in me would like to predict doom and gloom for Sony's PSP. However, I think I'm missing the point of why this article is as negative about it as it is. It's not like Sony can put an optical drive in this thing and magically make it work forever on batteries. If Sony's trying to say "look, don't piss off our customers" I say more power to them. (no pun intended.)
    • Well the Nintendo fan-boy in me would like to predict doom and gloom for Sony's PSP.


      Doom on a PSP? Dude! That would absolutely ROCK! Quick frag-fest on the way to work... yeaaaah!

    • Re:hmm (Score:1, Flamebait)

      by incubusnb ( 621572 )
      well, i couldn't find a good place to put this comment so i'll make it here, i'm not directing this to the parent directly. and sorry for the length, this is some stuff i've been wanting to get off my chest for a long time.

      i have to laugh at alot of Nintendo Fanboys, i really do, they're talking about how "innovative" the DS is, why? cuz its got duals screens and wireless? the DS is far from Innovative
      1: the Dual Screens is a gimmick that, IMO, will become merely a neato thing, i'd rather have a single

      • "1: the Dual Screens is a gimmick that, IMO, will become merely a neato thing, i'd rather have a single screen and have better games"

        Too bad a 6" screen wouldn't fit well in your pocket. Also, you've conveniently ignored the stylus aspect of it.

        "2: wireless isn't exactly that new in the handheld world, hell, cell phones have been doing it for more than a decade, and PDAs have been doing it for a few years too. now that a gaming machine has it, all of a sudden its innovative? its not pushing technology
        • i ignored the stylus because i honestly hate the fucking things, my PDA has one and at any chance i can get id rather use my damn finger, i'd rather it have a trackball or something integrated, a Stylus is just something else to lose. as for a 6" screen in my pocket, i've never put my SP in my pocket, i keep it in my backpack, i don't care about putting it in my pocket

          as for the wireless part, maybe you missed why i added it twice, the PSP and DS are both 802.11 wireless, and the PSP also has infra-red.

          • "i ignored the stylus because i honestly hate the fucking things, my PDA has one and at any chance i can get id rather use my damn finger,"

            Uh yeah, the DS lets you do that, too. The PSP does not.

            " as for a 6" screen in my pocket, i've never put my SP in my pocket, i keep it in my backpack, i don't care about putting it in my pocket"

            It's still a ding against Sony. The DS gets a good deal more screen real-estate while maintaining its portableness.

            "cartidriges are a plague of the handheld gaming worl
            • maybe its just because i have shaky hands, but i actually prefer the D-pad for entering anything over a stylus, me writing something on my PDA is a combination of hitting the wrong letter and hitting backspace. and those writing recognition programs are useless to me and my extraordinarily bad writing/printing.

              and some part of me agrees with you about the UMDs, but still, you can get 1GB SD cards now, why can Nintendo come up with its own 1GD memory card format for the DS(unless thats what the DS's carts

              • So let me get this straight...
                You have Shaky hands, you hate styluses, you only have the need for 1h a day of mobility since you can plug the game in the rest of the entire day....

                Guess what? You are not the Targeted market for the DS! So maybe stop pointlessly bitching about it just because an article is pointing out a potential weak feature of the PSP...sheesh!

      • Re:hmm (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Rallion ( 711805 ) on Wednesday September 29, 2004 @09:35PM (#10390224) Journal
        First, I don't think you know what 'innovative' means. Optical media in a portable is not innovative. (In a gaming portable, maybe, but you say yourself that the purpose of the device has no bearing.) The audio options are not innovative, they're a waste. It's like putting a retractable corkscrew on the system. Neither is the arctitecture, of either system. Incidentally, the only innovative thing about these systems are the screens. You think dual screens are a gimmick, which may be true if you fail to consider that one is a touchscreen. And PSP's is simply massive enough and pretty enough to cross the innovation line, IMO, simply because it is treated as the system's main feature.

        My biggest complaint about your logic is that you say more mario games are not innovative. If that's necessarily true, than you could take your favorite game, insert some classic character, and it's no longer any good. Not innovative, either, if it even was in the first place. Mario 64 was quite innovative at the time, and had enough of an influence that it can even be hard to remember that these days. Even the more recent installments, Sunshine and Luigi's Mansion, were really quite innovative, though I'm not personally a fan of Mansion. Also, look at the Super Smash Bros. games. Not a single new character in either of them, but to this day, they're still the only two games of the kind.

        Also, I don't really see the games on PSP looking to be all new. The most hyped one is the Gran Turismo game, which is something I've certainly seen before. Guess it must not be any good then, huh?

        At the same time that this is my biggest complaint with your logic, it is also the single most important point. The games are what matter!

      • Re:hmm (Score:2, Interesting)

        by jensen404 ( 717086 )
        7.1 3d audio in a handheld - innovative
        Where on the PSP are they going to fit 7 speakers and a subwoofer?
      • Dual Screen - Gimmick

        It depends on how they are used in a game, honestly. If the second screen just gets regulated to maps and item screens, then yes. If the second screen is used for other things, especially relating to control, then it is innovative.

        1.8GB DVD in a handheld - innovative

        Easily scratched, longer load times, skipping problems, drains battery faster. Where's the innovation there?

        stereo - still havn't reached the 60 have we?
        7.1 3d audio in a handheld - innovative

        Well, Sony has

  • To me, it seems like a horrible answer to a (what should be) simple problem. Developers should be concerned with making a good game, not how much battery life their game will have. I'm sure this will eliminate or seriously affect entire genres. When building a portable, you would think that one of the first things you would focus on is battery life. Most companies hold off on releasing a product until it gets acceptable battery life. Now, I guess it won't be as bad as a Game Gear since you can recharge

    • Re:Horrible answer... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by AltaMannen ( 568693 ) on Wednesday September 29, 2004 @04:43PM (#10387662)
      I don't see why optimizing for battery power performance would be much different than optimizing for cpu power performance. If you display a pause screen there really is no need to re-render the game scene every frame for example, or don't use the graphics system heavily while accessing the drive. The DS probably has a predetermined maximum power usage by using components that never drains the battery more than a guideline would specify while the PSP gives that responsibility to the developer.

    • Re:Horrible answer... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by DarkZero ( 516460 ) on Wednesday September 29, 2004 @11:48PM (#10390986)
      To me, it seems like a horrible answer to a (what should be) simple problem. Developers should be concerned with making a good game, not how much battery life their game will have. I'm sure this will eliminate or seriously affect entire genres. When building a portable, you would think that one of the first things you would focus on is battery life. Most companies hold off on releasing a product until it gets acceptable battery life.

      I think you're misunderstanding the issue, here. The problem isn't that the hardware takes up a lot of power. The problem is that with an optical drive, the software developers have control over how much power their game takes up, not the hardware developer. One software developer can create a very efficiently coded game that very rarely spins the optical drive, while another could create a very inefficient, poorly coded game that spins the optical drive almost constantly. So whereas one game from one company could drain the battery in ten, another game from another company could drain it in just six.

      And the worst part is that when Spongebob Squarepants: The Jackass Licensed Game Developer's Adventure drains the battery in six hours, no one will care that other, more professional developers like Capcom and Square are getting four more hours of battery life out of their games, or that the problem is obviously the Jackass Licensed Game Developer's fault. They'll just blame Sony, because they've never had an optical drive in a handheld before and will assume that any power inefficiency is the hardware developer's fault, just like it was with Sega and the Game Gear.

  • Geez ... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SuperRob ( 31516 ) on Wednesday September 29, 2004 @04:12PM (#10387282) Homepage
    If Sony is going to put the battery life problem off on Developers, then I think that having a battery life rating on the box, as accurate as possible, should be a requirement on each game. Maybe gamers only buying games that will give them a decent play experience will convince Sony that battery life is a HARDWARE problem, not a SOFTWARE problem.

    This is why no one has wanted to use an optical disc in a handheld until now. Funny how much a simple spindle can drain a battery.
    • Oh, umm, maybe it's a harware and software problem. And maybe it's not a problem at all. Also, can you explain to me how a discman with one or two AA's can run for 50 hours, but this is going to be so much worse? Surely you must have some facts about how a 'simple spindle can drain a battery'.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Painfully Obvious... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by polyp2000 ( 444682 ) on Wednesday September 29, 2004 @04:27PM (#10387470) Homepage Journal
    There are a couple of posters who have said this is a silly idea or its should be up to Sony to ensure enough battery life is available for its gear.

    Well I think that you havent really got the gist of what Sony are saying. Sony can make the battery for the PSP as good as is possible (within the confines of cost and technology) for the PSP but if the thing is running say "Tetris" is going to use a hell of a lot less power than if it is running "Doom III". This thing aint a gameboy its basically a PS2 running off a lithium battery-powering a pretty damn big screen and some pretty powerful hardware.... just how long do you expect the battery to last on this thing?

    Encouraging game developers to be careful about use of processing power and other parts of the hardware (eg optical drive motors/screen's/speakers) etc. Makes sense!

    The more powerful these handhelds/portables get the more conservative use of hardware and resources is going to be an issue.

    EG: imaging a game that streams shed loads of fmv off the optical drive... maybe there is a better way of acheiving this than having that drive constantly spinning. Howabout the use of audio etc ? having it constantly playing through the game? even on the title screens etc. There are lots and lots of legitimate reasons for Sony to encourage efficient use of hardware- I applaud them for that. It is Sony's job to ensure that the games that come out for the PSP are every bit as well engineered as the console itself. Cut them some slack 'cus they are only doing what is neccesary...

    Nick

    • Re:Painfully Obvious... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by unts ( 754160 )
      "Well I think that you havent really got the gist of what Sony are saying. Sony can make the battery for the PSP as good as is possible (within the confines of cost and technology) for the PSP but if the thing is running say "Tetris" is going to use a hell of a lot less power than if it is running "Doom III". This thing aint a gameboy its basically a PS2 running off a lithium battery-powering a pretty damn big screen and some pretty powerful hardware.... just how long do you expect the battery to last on th

      • Yes, because portable devices with moving parts, like Discmans, CD MP3 players, or hard drive MP3 players get terrible battery life. Why, my 40G iHP only gets 16 hours!

        ;-P

    • Re:Painfully Obvious... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Doomstalk ( 629173 ) on Wednesday September 29, 2004 @05:30PM (#10388221)
      So basically what you're saying is "I applaud you Sony for putting an optical drive into your handheld, and then mandating that developers can't take advantage of it." What are you going to do with all the rich content you've stuck onto the UMD when usage of it is rationed out? Like you said, FMV is a big no-no because it's likely to suck a lot of battery. High quality music too. In fact, high resolution textures and models will probably be a problem too, since you can't stick a lot of them in RAM at once. They'll want to keep drive usage to an absolute minimum, so the game's code, textures, models, music, and levels will probably all have to be loaded into memory. That means whatever you're going to do has to fit into 32 MB of RAM. And if that's the case, why bother having a massive storage format at all?
    • Encouraging game developers to be careful about use of processing power and other parts of the hardware (eg optical drive motors/screen's/speakers) etc. Makes sense!

      Yes, it makes sense but it seems that Sony neglected to set guidelines on acceptable power consumption. Without battery consumption guidlines, Sony is basically taking no responsibility and put the entire problem (and blame) of battery life in the hands of developer.

      Sony has to do more than say "Here's a battery emulator. Be more efficient."

  • Well look, if every game on the ps2 used the same graphics engine, then they would all look like first gen peices of crap! But by allowing developers to develop(keyword develop) their own engine, it allowed for graphical masterpeices (relativly) like MGS2 et al. Perhaps this will prevent ho hum battry management from sony but instead lead to talented developers making their ownsystems that preform much better. Plus they can liscense it and make a pretty buck off of it. Anyways at this rate sony better p
    • I can't think of any console that kept a developer from working on their own graphics engine. Its really a matter of them wanting to spend the time to work all that good stuff out or buy an off-the-shelf engine developed by someone else.

      What Sony is doing by giving out these emulators is letting the developers know that they aren't going to hold themselves responsible for their shitty research, development and production techniques. They are so set in their ways with this mini-disc shit, when they total

  • Better Games? (Score:1, Insightful)

    by nko321 ( 788903 )
    Ya know, people on this site talk an awful lot about how games these days are all about the graphics and 3D sound, and not enough about the game play. Maybe with all that processing power and limits on battery usage, the result will be a step closer to games that focus on being fun and having good game play? Maybe? ........Nah.
    • I thought the same thing myself a few times while playing FFTA on my GBA, well within reach of my Xbox, PS2, Gamecube, PC and HDTV.

      But it's a different experience, much like playing a game of poker can be addicting. You won't get the immersion factor of say.. Morrowind with surround sound on a 120" screen, but as long as the competition, leveling, etc is there, it can be quite enjoyable.
    • Actually people on this site talk a lot more about how they are superior to people who actually care about fancy graphics and sound.

  • There is no choice on the developer's end (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 29, 2004 @06:12PM (#10388717)
    If I'm a PSP developer, do I try to make my game as pretty as possible by streaming media from the disk and suck the power, or make a less good looking but more power consumption friendly game? There is no choice - you have to make the best looking game you can and forget the long term effects on the consumer and platform. This is the same reason why big corporations don't naturally do environmently friendly things - the end customer doesn't care, even if the whole planet goes to pot.

  • Developers solving hardware problems... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by chrispyman ( 710460 ) on Wednesday September 29, 2004 @06:52PM (#10389020)
    While it's quite nice that Sony will be including a battery consumption utility with the PSP devkits, doesn't the whole disc thing add a whole new level of complexity. Isn't the idea for a video game system (to developers) is to make it as easy and efficient as possible to make games?
    • Isn't the idea for a video game system (to developers) is to make it as easy and efficient as possible to make games?

      Efficient maybe, but definitely not easy. The idea is to make as many people buy it as possible, and then developers will just use it (PS2). Sure, ease of use may help, but it's never been a primary concern.

  • OLEDs anyone (Score:2, Insightful)

    by stryck9 ( 670369 )
    Based on the massive investment Sony just made on OLED technology, I wonder why they don't use those instead of LCDs.

    • Re:OLEDs anyone (Score:3, Insightful)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 )
      Because the lifetime of OLED panels is still abysmal and the smallest panels have only just now become profitable to make. If PSP is successful enough I would expect an OLED version down the road.

    • Re:OLEDs anyone (Score:2, Informative)

      by NightDragon ( 732139 )
      OLED's wear out after 2 or 3 years. so if they do go OLED, its not goodbye-old-psp-say-hello-to-the-used-section-of-S oftwareETC
  • If the battery life on the PSP sucks, people will find out and not buy it. They can blaim the developers all they want, but the company that will get blaimed is the maker of the hardware, Sony.
  • Who knew the cartridge would ever come back and bite sony in the ass?!

    WHEEEEE!
  • It has a rechargeable battery and an AC adaptor? It's not like your going to be buying AA's every day or somthing.

    Sony did state the 'minimum' life to be 2 hours, which one would assume to be somthing that had constant disc access and GPU access (movie?). And on the high end, 10 hours.

    Oh, and c'mon, we're all geeks here, 99% of the time we're no more than 5 feet from an electric outlet, and the rest of the time we are in a car, so put down the $10 for an car adaptor ;-)

    And don't give me the whole 'it's p

    • Re:You do realise.... (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Being tethered to the wall fucking sucks dude! And come on, who here honestly plays their 8-10-hours-on-the-battery GBA SP plugged into an outlet? I play mine in bed 3" from an outlet at times... but I never plug the bastard in until that little orange light lets me know I've only got an hour or so left.

    • The battery life issues aren't that simple. Regardless of how much tweaking you do, the damn thing is going to consume a ton of power--that's what happens when you use mechanical storage and a big, backlit LCD. Not to mention the rest of the hardware. That, in turn, leads to a number of problems:

      • Big batteries are heavy. I don't know if anyone outside of Sony has actually had a chance to even hold a PSP, but I'd wager that they're pretty damn heavy, maybe even in the "you'd best wear a belt if you pla
  • And we've seen how well that one worked. Why develop for a platform when the competition is willing to do some of the work for you?
  • ...an example of how programming consoles and handhelds are more of a challenge than the PC. It is a type of programming that computer science professors rally on about, as they recount like a drunken sailer how they had to wait in line for seconds of computing time, and how that bred tight efficient code.

  • Lets look at the core battery problem (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Kamalot ( 674654 ) on Friday October 01, 2004 @01:06AM (#10401912)
    The ONLY reason battery life is a concern is because Sony based the system around discs.

    Had Sony decided to build the system around their Memory Stick line, they could have had a system that was MUCH smaller and had a MUCH longer battery life.

    Instead, someone got the bright idea to base it around discs. Why? Do you NEED a Disc to make a game system? Their current proposal of loading the game into the system memory says, "No". In fact, the disc based system introduces a whole host of problems such as: poor battery life, load times, moving parts to break, exposure of dirt to the laser / moving parts, etc.

    Why make a such a poor design decision?

    The ONLY reason Sony has decided to base the system around discs is so they can sell you movies.

    This money-grubbing decision has introduced fundamental design problems into what otherwise could have been a great game system. Instead, it comprimises some core functions in return for making Sony more money by adding additional, potential revenue streams to the device.

    • >The ONLY reason Sony has decided to base the
      >system around discs is so they can sell you
      >movies.

      Well...
      Optical disc is CHEAP. Are you too young to remember N64 (ROM) vs. PS (CD)?
      • So, again, this comes down to another way for Sony to make more money. My point is, they made sacrifices to the core system in order to make money, either through selling you things that are not games or by cutting the costs of the game media.

        For a home system, discs may be fine. While on the road, battery life and loading time are two of the primary concerns, two that aren't addressed by Sony.

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