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Games Entertainment

Playstation 2 Picture + Emotion Engine Specs 117

Posted by CmdrTaco from the lookie-here dept.
l'Abruti writes "Can't wait to get your hands on a Playstation 2? Well, take a look at a picture of the beast and the Emotion Engine processor specifications while you wait. "
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Playstation 2 Picture + Emotion Engine Specs More

Playstation 2 Picture + Emotion Engine Specs

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  • This isn't correct (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Why was this posted now? This is an old rumour, from before the capabilities of the PS2 and the emotion engine were first even demonstrated by Sony. The picture is an artist's rendition. Considering that the PS2 isn't due until fall of 2000, it is unlikely the final case design or specs are close to done.

    Regarding its use as a DVD player, it is supposed to use DVD as the storage format, but apparently no decision has been made yet on whether this will be able to double as a full DVD player or not. Apparently Sony doesn't want the PS2 to cannibalize sales of regular DVD players, especially if they manage to bring the PS2 in under $250 or so. The only way it is likely for this to be able to do full DVD would be if they raised the price to closer to $400 to $500 and made it more of a full set-top box sort of thing.

  • you people are so high (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It really stuns me, some of the comments so far. "Hope there will be a connectix gamestation2", "maybe there'll be an emulator", and "maybe they could make a pci card". Did you read the specs? This thing is one super special piece of hardware! It emulates the original playstation in software and even adds perspective corrected textures and antialiasing to old games. The main format is a customized DVD disc but many companies are rumored to use the existing sony playstation cd format to begin with. Also the playstation has 2 main processors; an Emotion Engine and the Graphics Synthesizer. The Emotion Engine is a 128 bit chip dedicated to AI and Physics Modelling. There was a water demo shown which demonstrated the EE's ability to accurately simulate fluids and fluid dynamics, complete with refraction/reflection of light. It's also capable of simulating properties of gases, plasmas, and many types of solids including wood, metal and rubber. The development systems are supposed to consist of high-powered linux boxes and SGI machines. The SGI dev machines are so high powered they've severely cut back the number of developers due to the price factor, i.e. most small developers simply can't afford the SGI machines.

    This system is something the world has never seen before, in a compact gaming unit. It's able to use the old memory cards and controllers, as well as play old games WITH IMPROVEMENTS. Hats off to Sony.
  • The answer, most likely... is no.

    This thing may have good gaming hardware now, but it doesn't have a firm upgradability path. With a PC, you can replace a 3D card, the CPU, etc as the machine gets older... you can't exactly rip the 3D chip out of a playstation and replace it.

    Consoles were always supposed to replace PC's as gaming platforms... the problem is that games that come out on the PC always seem more... advanced than what comes out on a console.

    Hell, it took them over a year to port Quake to a console and it doesn't even have networking support.

    The 3D power of a TNT2 is enough to make most developers cry in extacy. PC hardware isn't exactly slow and to tell you the truth, the specs of this thing don't really impress me. It's poly count is fairly high, but remember it's running in a low resolution compared to a PC. You crank a PC running a voodoo 3 to 640x480 or even 320x200 and see what happens.

    And when you add a modem, a keyboard, a mouse, a harddrive, etc to a console.. it ceases to be a console and becomes a PC.

    --
  • Posted by this_guy:

    Don't envy "this guy" too much because he spends I would say less than 10% of his time writing Perl code. And that is only because he has an idea of a certain tool that can help him do the actual job of verifying the chip and there is just no EDA tool vendor which already has a tool in place for that purpose. And how far is EE from CS, really?

    Chris.
  • Make it optional, like the mice on some consoles. Some games really do benefit from a keyboard.
  • At least the movies are slashdotted. My downloads are usually at 200k/sec. Now these are coming in at only 50k/sec.
  • Interesting a few days ago we read a story about how linux hackers, CS majors, people trained in programming were getting dream jobs: tech support and phone answering positions at Linuxcare.

    Now while all those hackers are answering phones and consulting what's this guy who majored in EE doing? Writing perl scripts and C programming at a permanent job in the core engineering team of a company slightly more prestigious than Linux phone answering.
  • Double the image size and apply a logarithmic contrast adjustment on that image. The logo is then very easily seen [ucla.edu].
  • Hmm, according to the book "Game Over" (yes, Brits, I did get it off the cover of Arcade mag...) Nintendo's pre-NES machines had keyboards and such.... commercial disaster.

    Who knows, though, maybe the market's changed...


    --
  • .. do you mean to tell me you can't see that WITHOUT enhancement? Yikes, i thought my eyes were bad.

  • Hmmm (Score:1)

    by tgd ( 2822 )
    Its too bad that image is so blurry. Looks neat, though. I wonder what that flip-up thing was on the right, it almost looks like an LCD panel.

    I think Sony's going to end up with a great system here. Especially if they decide to include the ability to play DVD movies. (Which several places I've read have said they may choose not to, even though all the hardware is there...)

    Even better would be if they played DVD video and DVD audio discs, but given Sony's stance on DVD Audio, I'd guess that's not very likely. :)

    I wonder how capable it'll be, given those hardware specs, to function as a client into more immersive universal VR game/interaction spaces. Seems to me the real thing holding back the beginning of "worlds" like described in fiction books like Snow Crash and such is front-end hardware powerful enough and widespread enough to provide the interface.

    Seems the world is changing pretty quickly.

    I just hope they have Gran Tourismo for it. :)
  • This was printed months ago in the UK
    mag Official Playstation Magazine and
    has since been picked up by others.

    They also had a _really_ cool round design
    about the size of a cd and about 4 inches
    high.

    BUT THEY ARE NOT OFFICIAL PICS!
  • I would really like to get it as a stereo component formfactor, rather than some dopey console. We use CDs now. Why can't we get rackmount game players?

    It makes sense particularly for PS2 as it will also be my next DVD player most likely..

  • The facial close-up of that girl is absolutely gorgeous. Hard to believe it's actually CGI.

    What pinched me most, though, was the scene at the end of the second movie -- "Crash leading a bunch of penguins over a snow drift", as it's described. I can't help but wonder -- do you suppose it's a nod to Linux? It was reported not long ago that Sony is using Linux as their development platform for this project...

    Ciao... . SNF .

    Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty

  • Few things.

    1: There's only about 20 PS2 devkits around at the moment, first large release should be next month.

    2: The PS emulation in exact, no improvements possible (they don't even fix the perspective correction)

    3: The Emotion Engine is impressive, but the killer is the GPU. Why? Well, the pixels engines are on the same silicon as the VRAM. It has an effective VRAM bus width of 2560 bits. Think about it.

  • Nah, he contributed to the EE design, not the PS2. Different products.
  • The devkits do.

  • Now _this_ is exciting... 300mhz RISC... Mmm... Mmm... Mmm... I know which machine I'll be buying.
  • Doesn't the Dreamcast use WinCE? I wouldn't touch
    it with a 10 foot pole.
  • I got a diamond edge from a friend (thanx gg :) hoping that it would play Saturn games. However, it only plays sega pc games written for the card w/ the Saturn controllers -- it came with a special i/o device to hook the Saturn controllers to your PC. It is kinda nice tho to use the saturn controllers for gamepads in games.
    -- DrH
  • I don't have the URL off hand, but it's from of his columns about 2 weeks back. He claims to have stumbled into a PS2 testing thing while in Japan, and was blown away. Says this will make PC's a joke (or something like that). Don't want to put words in his mouth...my memory ain't too good after couple weeks. ;)
  • This is what Next Generation said about the specs:

    **********************************************
    "Remember the Jaguar?" one developer opened our interview. "It could reportedly do a billion pixels. That was possible if there was no software and all processors were dedicated to pushing pixels. It's the same thing here."

    Sony's Phil Harrison has stated that the Next Generation PlayStation has a fill rate of 2.6 Gigapixels. (That's 2.6 times the Jaguar, for those keeping track at home.)

    Several other developers had the same doubts about the machine's spectacularly high polygon numbers. One PC and Console developer joked "It's the 3dfx rope-a-dope. They convince you that the only important benchmark in the universe is framerate. nVidia has better image quality? So what! It's all about the framerate. Sony knew they could destroy Sega on polygon count and Floating Point and that's what they did. Ease of development, quality of games...none of those things are here. It's all about the polygons."

    However, some developers we spoke to simply don't believe Sony's polygon numbers. "They're there to make you report on them," one developer admonished. "They're 'best case' scenarios achieved by adding every processor's raw output capacity. They don't take into account bus speed, communication between processors, or any effects."

    One developer we asked about the polygon count Sony is quoting, 66 million polygons transformed by the CPU and 75 million drawn by the graphics engine, took a much kinder view. "They're very high and best-case, but everyone's numbers at hardware announcements are high. The 20 million number is more realistic [Phil Harrison has said the machine's sustainable drawing figure is 20 million polygons per second with all effects], and that's an incredible number. I believe they can do that and I can't wait."
    ***********************************************
    http://www.next-generation.com/jsmid/news/5998.h tml



    Some of my friends who are console freaks have said that this will kill the computer as an entertainment platform, and the easy to use console will replace it, but I have my doubts. The P2 looks sweet now, but look at all the things they will add to it. They have said that they are going to have Firewire, USB, and more. Sony's own Everquest is said to be one of the first games to be available when it is released. If they are going to play Everquest, they need a keyboard. A mouse (probably). A harddrive to save all the patches. :-) A modem or other internet connection. An OS to manage all this. What do we have? A computer, only it uses TV instead of a monitor (bleech). If this becomes a hit (and it looks like it), the technology will spread, and the power of the machine will be harnessed to do other things, either top down by Sony or bottom up by hackers. This would then become the new PC.

    Question is, will we hate Sony as much as we hate Microsoft? :-)
  • Look at the current spec required to emulate the PSX at full speed - a 300Mhx PII. The CPU that it emulates runs only at around 33Mhz (Or was it 37? - can't remember) To even get equal to the power ot the PSX2 CPU, you'd have to be running a PIII at well over 1 Gigahertz. You're gonna need another order of magnitude to emulate it... Sure, when it comes out some PC's may be able to match it, but it'll still be a few years before it becomes emulatable.
  • Well, I didn't say a 'low end pc', I said a 'low end PII'...

    The graphics subsystem on the Dreamcast is very nice (if a little quirky) probably at least Voodoo II speed, but it is let down a little bit by the processor, which is only about as fast as a PII 233. We tended to find that we were limited by the processor most of the time, rather than the graphics card.

    Actually, the one *really* nice thing that the Dreamcast has is on-the-fly texture decompression - it's got 8Mb of Framebuffer/Texture space, but you can compress the texures and use them without any speed hit, which allows you to have a whole load of really big textures.

    Sorry, I don't have an URL - all of these comments come from actually programming the thing... ;-)
  • It'll be quite a long time before before any PCs are capable of running any form of Playstation 2- - it's CPU (even at 300Mhz) beats the crap out of a PIII running at 500Mhz due to the two extra sets of floating point processors. The graphics ability is phenomenal as well, much more powerful than any of the PC cards out there at the moment. I saw the thing running when I was at GDC, and it's quite incredible.

    Oh, and it is backwards compatible with the Playstation - it uses the same chip that the PSX uses for it's main CPU for handling it's I/O subsystem...

    cheers,

    Tim
  • The Sega Dreamcast has NOWHERE NEAR the power that the Playstation II has. I've just finished working on a Dreamcast game, and it's a nice system, but it has pretty much the power of a low-end PII (266Mhzish) with a good 3d graphics card. The PSX II is much more powerful than current Desktop PCs.

    However, The Dreamcast will have been out for a year by the time the PSX will probably come out, so until then Sega still retain the crown for the most powerful games console.

  • What's wrong with WinCE in a game console? (Other than the words "Microsoft" and "Windows" that is.)

    Seems to me you could have a number of interesting convergance applications, beyond web browsing. Kind of like the Atari 400 or Commodore 64 -- primarily game machines, but you could also balance your budget or whatever.


    --

  • Every attempt at a combination Game console/Computer has not been that successful. Think Coleco Adam, Atari XE, Amiga CD, Sega Saturn plus Internet add on, Pippen, etc.

    That's not to say it's a bad idea. It's just hard to design a game console (which has a shelf life of 2-5 years) that can keep up with PCs that double in speed every 18 months.
    --
  • I agree with the part about the picture of the PSX2. It is definitely an artist rendition. There are working prototypes for teh PSX2 that run some code. Obviously, they are a long way off. Remember, Japan is getting it several months ahead of the US, so the specs are going to be frozen sooner than you think.

    Re: The DVD capability. This is a tough call. I think Sony could solve the problem easily though. It wouldn't be too tough for them to put in a DVD copy protection into the system and allow studios to make DVD movies "Playstation 2 Ready" by adding a few special sectors on the DVD. Sony has learned from the mistakes in the MODchip and such things, so I am sure it would be a better solution.

    Anyway, Sony would charge studios that wanted their DVDs playable on the PSX2. That way, Sony still makes money by keeping their boxes less expensive. I'm guessing studios would love their DVDs to be PSX2 playable because of the sheer numbers that are likely to buy. PSX is more appealing to Joe Six Pack than a DVD only player and would drive rentals as well as purchases.

    Remy

    http://www.mklinux.org

  • test
  • Apparently the owner of the page has been contributing to the PS2, so I don't think he would have included the picture unless it was reasonably similar to the real thing (to the best of his knowledge).
  • Those specs are impressive. Maybe I'll just buy a PSX2 instead of a DVD player. Look at those polygon fill rates and drool. As well, this thing is using .18 micron technology, which should keep it fast/cool/stable.

    The one thing is that they specify the VDD voltage as 1.8V. That's quite low for a chip voltage (although you can see its effect on the power consumption). This processor must have been designed by some top-notch engineers. With a RISC core and a clock of 300 MHz, I don't think any good emulators will be coming out any time soon (without requiring additional hardware for your PC).
  • I totally agree. N64 to me has way better graphics and game play than PSX, but PSX had it on raw storage, a head start on game releases, and better dev tools. DC's got better graphics, equal if not better storage, and equal if not better gameplay. Unless N64 gets a CD -real- quick, it's dead (and Nintendo has been about to release a CD system for HOW long?).
  • Have you all seen the Sega Dreamcast yet? That thing is SICK! I'm a hardcore N64 believer but the DC has got as good if not better graphics at a higher resolution. It should be interesting to see how these to compete.
  • it will have firewire and some other ports
    for future expandability (I imagine it will
    something like firewire being immediately
    accessible and the rest used for future expansions
    like N64s expansion slot which only recently
    had a card released for it.)

    -Z

    What I want to know is being that DVD is so huge, much larger than a typical PS CDs used now, will load times still take forever or will the machine load quickly?
  • Last I recall, Sony was still on the fence about whether to add DVD-Video support or not. It's a given that the games will be on DVD discs, but Sony had concerns that movie playback might cut into sales of their DVD-Video players.
  • It would be an extremely fast rc5 cruncher, especially because of all the vector units. It should be possible to calculate 8 keys in parallel. I've been looking at N64 (Reality Signal Processor (RSP)) for a long time and they have a Vector Shift Left and a Vector Shift Right. The only issue is communication, I dont see an easy way to push blocks into the n64 and get results out. You could embed blocks into the program before you send it to the N64, but it would require too much user intervention.
  • What I've heard is that there won't be any out-of-the-box DVD movie support, but Sony may release an add-on later. A pity, because that was one of the main reasong I would have bought a PS2 on day one.
  • Seems to me that if they're to be taken seriously, the new Amigas should have at least this level of graphics performance.
  • The difference between the PSX2 and a PC is that we're talking about a box that is going to sell for around $250. Upgradability doesn't enter into it; it costs less than a kick-ass video card. When there's a faster PSX3 which can render a googol polygons/sec, you'll throw away your old PSX2 and buy a new $250 PSX3.

    In the time in-between the PSX2 and PSX3, lots of peripherals can be hooked up via those PC-Card, Firewire, and USB connectors. That's pretty neat.

    Sony is going to be selling an incredibly powerful box for an incredibly low price. PC makers should be _very_ afraid.

    -jon

  • Ugh. If that's accurate, it's very unfortunate.

    DVD movies are cool, but still not that widespread. People are renting VHS movies in droves. The whole point is, why buy a DVD player when you can just rent VHS movies (the quality's not really that bad) or order them pay-per-view on your digital cable/sattelite system?

    But then enter the PS2. If it comes in at a low enough price point (not $400) then it will sell at remarkable levels. All of these households will suddenly be able to watch DVD movies, not on a 17" computer screen, but on their big TVs while kicking back on their couches. I suspect a video game console that happened to play these movies would create a great demand for more discs and more titles. All of the sudden, DVD would be much more viable as a lets-go-out-and-rent-a-movie format.

    I believe that sales of traditional DVD movie players would increase due to the sudden boost in the format.

    Just my two cents, though. PS, with such a powerful processor, would it be viable for the PS2 to do software movie decoding? Is that likely how it would be done?

  • I can't help noticing that on the spec page it says "150 million pixels". Doesn't that mean 150 Mpixels fillrate? The Voodoo3 3500 has 366 Mpixels fillrate, so it seems like it would squash the PSX2 in that department, if I'm reading this right. Of course the PSX2 doesn't need much fillrate because it's running at TV-res and V2 is running at 1024x768 and beyond.

    I read a post up there where somebody was saying the PSX2 has 2.6 Gpixel fill rate, so what the hell is this "150 million pixels" of "image processing"??
  • From what I understand from the Microsoft website, WinCE will be used for those games requiring DirectX for either graphics or network play. Sega Rally 2 is an example where WinCE is being used. The Developers for WinCE did a pretty good job considering they were able to shrink the whole WinCE package to less than 1MB, IIRC. Here's a link [microsoft.com] to the core components of the WinCE package on Dreamcast.

  • To answer the question about decoding DVD movies in software...

    As per subject; We are told it is has hardware MPEG2 decoding capability (for streamed texture decompression on the fly - drool).

    While this, along with the DVD media, allows it theoretically to do DVD movies, Sony would have to put a bit more hardware interfacing on, and then have to worry about a minimal couch-potato-suitable UI for the player, as well.
    One benefit of dedicated units is that people *like* their remotes. A game controller's not quite the same ;-)

    I can imagine Sony, or some 3rd party, will do an add-on at some point, but I think the drive to lower their initial price point, along with a desire not to trample all over their DVD player sales will leave it out of the base unit. IMHO, completely, of course. The economics of a box like this one are strange to say the least.

    (rambling off-topic)
    What gets me is that Sony, along with Toshiba, are plumping down the cash for large-scale .18 micron production facilities *just* to produce the custom bits for this thing in quantity.
    "Right, we've designed it. Let's drop a few billion into factories to make it with."
    Sheesh.
  • I've seen this image elsewhere too. I think it was supposed to be the next 3do or something. It's a concept drawing. Not the real thing.
    --
  • My info about this subject is about half a year out of date, but as I understand it, WinCE is only one of about two or three different OSes a Dreamcast game can run on. (The others, I think, are Sega proprietary OSes.)

    I have absolutely no idea what proportion of Dreamcast games use WinCE as opposed to the other ones.
  • Still, I can't see it being software emulation. That would mean that you'd have to have a separate CD with an emulator on it to load into the PSX 2 and then put your original PSX1 disc in and play. And of course this isn't how it works. You just pop in your old PS disc and it works like the PS 1 does. Thus, unless there is some disk drive in the PS2 with the emulation software on it (which there isn't), all of the calcs must be done in the hardware on the new system.
  • Did you read the specs? This thing is one super special piece of hardware! It emulates the original playstation in software and even adds perspective corrected textures and antialiasing to old games

    Did you read the specs? First of all it does not emulate the original PSX in software. It has a separate I/O controller on board to do it in hardware. Also, the old PSX 1 games will not be enhanced in any way. They'll play like they do now on the new system. They're shooting for 100% compatability, not 110% or 95%.

  • I remember reading that this time around the native discs will be DVD format, and there was talk it would play movie DVDs too.

  • In a year and a half, the cheap PCs should be running at over the speed of a PIII at 1GHz. High-end ones should run twice to 4X as fast. We may not be running single-processor systems or

    I remember when they were saying that the N64 would never be emulated, using a simple extrapolation from how slow the Super Nintendo emulation was at the time. Emulation techniques improved and now we have N64 emulators. You are not going to need an extra order of magnitude to emulate.

    Of course, it will take a few months to a year for emulator-writers to do their stuff. I'm not expecting an emulator the moment the Ps2 is released. But those specs aren't ambitious enough for the timeframe. The PSX blew everyone away at the time of its release because nobody was really doing 3d accelerator cards for PCs; now PC hardware makers are unashamed when they make toys for gamers, and they don't take two years between hype and release.

    If the Ps2 was released now, it would eat the market alive, at its scheduled release date it'll still probably sell well, but computer gamers won't be drooling over it and turning green in envy (except, perhaps, over the hit to their wallets; Ps2 will still probably be the best hardware for the buck).
  • I hardly think the PC industry will be staying put for the next year and a half!

    I bet by the time the Ps2 comes out, it'll barely be keeping up to the cheapo boxes (it had better be as cheap as the PSX!). The high-enders should be able to keep up even while emulating.
  • Has anyone noticed the similarities between the Sony chip and the G4 with Altivec? Maybe the next generation of SMP Macs will be able to emulate it.
  • I showed this to a friend in the industry and the picture is apparently a fake which has been floating around for a while?

    Comments?
  • 6.2 gigaflops....

    Of course that's probably peak theoretical, not real world peformance which would be about half that, but still! This thing has numbers that would hang with a supercomputer a few years ago.
  • [Sudden urge to nit-pick this thread.]

    >One I/O chip doesn't make a 32bit PSX my friend.

    Actually, it does. The PS2's I/O chip is the PSX _core_, not the I/O chip (at least, it was a few weeks ago). When Playstation games are run it just flips over to I/O processor.

    And of course the rendering is done by the new hardware--they aren't going to drop the PSX graphics system in their too--but since the old core is still handling geometry (and AI, and physics, etc) I don't think it'll make much of a difference.
  • Nit-picking:

    "It emulates the original playstation in software and even adds perspective corrected textures and antialiasing to old games."

    Nope, it runs PSX games on the PSX hardware, otherwise known as the PS2 I/O controller.

    "Also the playstation has 2 main processors; an Emotion Engine and the Graphics Synthesizer. The Emotion Engine is a 128 bit chip dedicated to AI and Physics Modelling."

    It only has a single, very special, processor: the Emotion Engine, and it isn't optimized for AI (would that even be possible?) The EE has two vector units, one for geometry, the other for physics models. AI and whatever else is left is handled by EE's core and the standard FP unit.

    As for the development systems (sorry, too lazy to quote), I hadn't heard anything about SGI's being involved. It would make more sense to just use the Emotion Engine for graphics development, as you can do with PSX. (Hint: you aren't doing much pre-rendering, so what would the SGI's be used for?)

    And no, it won't improve older games.

    [Now for my own unfounded rumor: Sony is supposedly thinking of using the Emotion Engine in things other than the PS2, like workstations.]
  • Ummm.. DVD is considerably better off 2 1/2 years into its life than VHS was after the same amount of time. DVD *is* catching on very quickly (10s, if not 100s of thousands of players sold monthly). However, for most people, one DVD player is "good enough." I had a DVD-ROM on my computer, and I thought it was quite awesome... then my parents got a low-end (Toshiba 2008) stand-alone, and I was blown away by the improvement in quality. I quickly got the Toshiba A110 to replace my PC's player, and the quality is outstanding. Forget 19-21" hi-res monitors, DVD looks much better on large TVs (DVD on a 32" Wega XBR is incredible).

    The moral of all this is that if Sony adds DVD to the PS-Y, they will cannibalize their entry-level DVD player sales, which is currently the bulk of the market (there are far more A110s, 2109s, and 530s on the market than Theta DaViDs), and royally hurt profits. A future add-on might make sense; however, with DVD doing very well on its own, Sony would be foolish to make it a DVD player.
  • Will the Playstation 2 have an ethernet port?
  • You're abslolutely right. I think the mock-up was done by a british artist before the PSX2 was even announced. Sony has never shown any case design for their next box. Check
    www.next-generation.com
  • This picture is a fake. It was released by an IGN publication last year as an "artists conception". Suprisingly, the pic was first released during a short drought of console industry news....hmmmm.

    For more PS2 information and demo movies go here: http://gamefan.com/newhotinfo/hotinfo.asp?storyid= 602

    I would be grateful if anyone could give an educated opinion as to whether the highly impressive mpegs at the URL above are possible in real-time on the hardware described.
  • Have you tried recent builds of Wine? It can play many games, including Quake 2 and StarCraft, extraordinarily well. Eventch, Windows will be COMPLETELY unnecessary, especially considering what a crufty technology DirectX is.
  • Emulators? Fuggeddaboutit. No Wintel hardware is going to run like that kind of machine. I'm sorry. Maybe when Alpha systems proliferate Bleem will get its butt in gear and do a Linux release :)
  • Sorry, you can't create a chip like that in your garage. CPU design and manufacture is one of those things that REQUIRES the kind of big money that corporate megaliths have to throw around. Maybe that'll change in the future, and we'll have whiz-kid hardware hackers visiting their local IBM plant with their latest designs. Open source chips. Sounds cool. But not in this century. :)
  • Well, if Sony is to be believed, then the PSX2 is as fast as a supercomputer, and closer to AI-complete than any other machine on the planet. (The reason for the "emotion Engine" name is so-called "emotion synthesis" technology which, according to SCE's marketing dept., is what it sounds like.) It will be very difficult to separate reality from hype.

    Remember the Sega Genesis? It was the first widespread, fully 16-bit system. When the technically superior SNES came out to compete with it, Sega started an ad campaign to pump up its system, claiming it had something nonexistent called "Blast Processing". The ads showed a Formula 1 racer with a Genesis strapped to the back drag-racing a broken down milk truck with a SNES strapped to the back. They were obviously trying to get you to believe that the Genesis was much, much faster than the SNES even though they were comparable speed-wise and the SNES had better graphics and sound.

    This is typical of console companies. Pump up the system and try to get the game kiddiez, who can rattle off pixel and polygon counts but don't know that much about the internals of the technology involved, to think it can do more than it actually can. Hopefully some Japanese hackers will try hacking some demos or something on this hardware, to find out what it ACTUALLY can do. Still, I can hardly wait to see it.
  • Well, if the thing's as fast as a supercomputer like Sony keeps saying, why the hell not?
  • That's an image from an old Playstation magazine, I doubt that the real thing will look like that.

    --

  • RC5 (Score:2)

    by Dusty ( 10872 )
    Now all we need is Sony to put a modem on it,
    and a TCP/IP stack. Then distributed.net to
    port an RC5 client on it and we're laughing.
    Particularly if they sell it for as much
    as a playstation.

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A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable. -- Thomas Jefferson

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