20 Years of Handheld Console Evolution 74
marcellizot writes "It has taken a while for handheld consoles to crawl from the primordial 8-bit slime to today's apex predator polygon juggling brutes. To illustrate just how much things have advanced over the last 20 years, Pocket Gamer has pulled together a few facts and figures in pretty chart form. Pitting the vital statistics of the critical handhelds of today and yesteryear against one another, there are some interesting facts to be gleaned from this infotainment extravaganza."
Minor Comment on the Aside (Score:5, Informative)
Of course, the answer is that they didn't. It was true that the GameBoy had only 8KB of RAM, but when you've got a socket for nearly unlimited ROM, that 8KB doesn't matter as much. All the graphics, sounds, code, and other space wasters are all in a read-only section of memory while the teeny-tiny information on the X and Y positions of characters is contained in the (suddenly quite massive) 8KB of memory.
If you want to talk bad, let's talk about the Atari 2600's 128 bytes of RAM.
Now if you're paying attention, you may have just realized why the PSP needs so much internal memory. That's right, it has to load all of the graphics, sound, code, and other assets off the UMD disk and into main memory. Thus it requires significantly greater RAM capacity than the DS, which uses an advanced form of the venerable ROM chip. Yet the increase in memory gives the programmer options on whether or not to load those assets into main RAM (say, because they're compressed in the ROM chip) or stream them directly from the chip.
I wouldn't go as far as to say that the design makes the DS superior to the PSP, but it certainly demonstrates how clever Nintendo is in building gaming systems. Very few hardware designers would even dream of designing seemingly underpowered machines the way Nintendo does. Yet Nintendo consistently demonstrates that they know how to focus on games, not hardware features that may or may not be necessary.
Regarding the Lynx v1's massive size... (Score:4, Informative)
They later released a second version with almost identical specs, but which was quite a bit smaller and much better looking.
The Lynx may have been battery greedy and a bit bulky (even the revised version), but the spec was still *amazing* for something that size at the time. There was a good case to be made that it filled a somewhat different niche to the Game Boy. Shame it lacked a *really* must-have game like Tetris; and *that* was fantastic- the GB's horrible flat and smeary greeny-grey graphics really didn't matter there.
Microvision (Score:3, Informative)
Here's a representation of a Klingon from Star Trek: Phaser Strike:
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Now that's graphical power.
Well, you are partly correct (Score:3, Informative)
Yes you can stream data from the card BUT that is exactly what you do, you stream it. It is NOT part of "main memory". In a way it is pretty similar to reading data on the fly from the HD or CD or offcourse the UMD disc.
The PSP can and does in certain games also keep the UMD running to load data as needed (this offcourse sucks battery power). With GTA on the PSP it is pretty amazing (until you remember the low resolution that the game actually has) how it can once load a level and then play smoothly.
The DS design itself is NOT superior. It is just different. The DS can NEVER play GTA even if it had the horsepower. The DS will forever be limited to its small memory, it can "swap/stream" faster and more random but it can never hold as much at the same time.
On the other hand, the DS can in theory have as much rom as needed (enough to hold even the biggest PC games, for a ds system a truly staggering amount of data) and I believe in theory could even include extra "stuff" on the catridge, from gadgets like the light sensor on a GBA game to perhaps extra cpu power. Its clearest advantage is that saves are on the game media, not the device. It clearest dis-advantage is that saves are limited to the media, not the device. The PSP tends to have superior saving capabilty.
The PSP's greatest failure is that while it has a load of memory it does not have nearly enough. Loading data on the fly CAN be done but it costs power. In this day and age it really should have had more to be truly cutting edge, this especially hurts its non-gaming stuff like the webbrowser. Ever tried browsing on a 32mb PC?
The DS does NOT attempt to be cutting edge, and therefore it gets away with its far more modest memory. The PSP is a low-powered sports car. The DS is a spiffy little town car. The PSP tries and fails, the DS doesn't try and succeeds.
I actually own both, and the PSP plays GTA and I like it and the DS plays advance wars and I like it. So in a way, they both succeed. And fail, because those are the ONLY games I haven't sold off by now and I am unlikely to buy anything else I have seen so far. Then again, nintendo already made a profit on my DS, Sony did not on my PSP. So I guess Nintendo still is still winner.