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Games Entertainment

Sony To 'Open' Playstation 113

Posted by emmett from the sweeeeeeeet dept.
kaphka writes "Sony will be freely licensing its Playstation 2 platform, as well as opening its architecture, according to this TechWeb article. I guess that's one way to deal with the emulators."
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Sony to "Open" Playstation More

Sony to "Open" Playstation

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  • Right. From what I've read about the X-Box, MS isn't concerned about the hardware at all. They'll leave that up to Dell or whichever company wants it.
    These console boxes lose money upfront, but you've got to figure that over the course of its lifetime the cost per unit tends to get driven down after shipping a few hundred million of them.
    So if the PSX2 goes out and is cloned, it's possible that the competition that is created could drive prices down a bit more, creating a business barrier for the X-Box.

  • Sony is unlikely to "get it" (Score:4)

    by Peter Eckersley ( 66542 ) on Sunday June 04, 2000 @06:03AM (#1027159) Homepage
    However, it's still a very good sign. Perhaps Sony "gets it"?

    While I would like to live in a world where this might happen, I don't think it can. Sony as a whole has a lot to fear from the "open" way of doing things.

    Sure, they *might* be able to do okay with a genuinely "open" gaming platform (although they'd still need to be able to collect a slice of every game sold).

    But Sony as a whole has its fingers in so many pies (film, music, etc...) that the "open" world will be one in which they loose. Ultimately, Sony will be backing encrypted-content hardware to protect theit content business arms.

    My feeling about this is that they're nervous about M$ targeting their market (wouldn't you be?), and are taking steps to defend themselves.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Just how short a life do you expect it to have? Let's say they start selling them end of June, 01. That's ~9 months after the NAm release, ~15 after the Japanese. I'll assume you're considering the Japanese release, which means a life of about 2 1/2 years. That seems short to me. The original's into its 5th (4th?) year now, and there's still alot of games coming out, making money, and comparing well with Dreamcast games. What do you consider to be the useful cycle?
  • GameShark CDX for the Dreamcast was released on June 1st. The Dreamcast is able to boot from the CDROM included, meaning you don't need a Sega GDROM to boot the console. This opens up more opportunities for getting your own code to boot on the console, if you were inclined to write code for it. It should also give a shot in the arm to those OpenBSD-sh4 [slashdot.org] guys, wherever they are [softrare.com].
  • Is this a step towards "PC-izing" consoles? Meaning if the console manufacturers start licensing the different parts, will that mean that in the future gamers will have to piece together a game console? Its bad enough already having to deal with drivers and incompatibility. If consoles start morphing into "mini-PC's" then they lose their advantage and we are back to square one. Has anyone even tried Bleem! The thing is terrible! Why spend $50 on something that rarely works when I can get a PS1 for $99? Emulators are not as good as the real thing. The only thing going for them is that they can be free to download. I know I wouldnt pay for some emulated junk when I can just buy the original piece.
  • We must put an established standard in place so that the big picture rationalizes the enabling emulation. A key driver in this process is the headcount readjustments work effectively that the suite of tools administrates the technological customers, the people using the emulators. Given current realities, the win-win market realignment will knock your socks off. The emulation disseminates the red flag, which leads us to believe that the diverse killer games are not going to blow them away. When you're thinking collaboratively, quality control fades. During that period transition in Sony, the embedded killer app impacts the drag and drop objective. Surely, we can conclude that the Strategic Business Analysis market indicates that the proactive Emulation technology found in the Play Station initiates the productized growth markets.
    Schedules eventually take ownership of Sony action items, which leads us to believe that the resources sign off on gating factors. You should be pleased to realize that the open architectures form a strong commitment to integrated systems design. As always, the collaborative committees are not going to ramp up progress on unique scalable emulators.

    I like the idea, though.

  • No, not like the DC controls (which I kinda like). I want the same sony controller, scaled up 20-40%. I have big hands, and find them small. (Just to give you an idea, i wouldn't beable to use an N64 controller if the knuckly of my index finger on my left hand hadn't been crushed. As it is, my hand fits snug when I use my N64.)
  • Are we now copyrighting our own posts, what's going on ? Are people cutting and pasting slashdot comments on other sites ???

    Just curious. I've only seen this done by another guy in the CORBA newsgroups.
  • heh. no karma loss for you, just for me. Too bad I don't care anymore...
  • Apple too has been hurt by this. If they'd opened up the Apple to clones around '89, they would own the desktop by now. I'm not convinced. They did have a go at allowing clones, but abandoned it when they found that it was just not helping market share at all. http://www.applemuseum.sea star.net/sections/history.html [seastar.net]
  • ... and that's why I doubt that it'll become a problem (well, I hope not).

    Now, if they ship a Playstation 2 emulator with it, it might become one even if it's 1 year late.

  • If there's one axiom in the game console industry, it's that no hardware company has held the lead per successive generation. Usually because of absent or lackluster lauch software. A cursory examination of the launch software for PS2 isn't exactly encouraging...



    Don't discount the enemy out of arrogance...

  • If sony loses money on hardware, why would they care? would'nt they prefer someone else to lose money on hardware for them?
  • If my memory serves me correctly, Was not 3D0 Open to OEM's to create hardware? History repeats itself. Sony's in trouble and they know it.
  • ...it might be a bit large, I bet this chipset, properly programmer could might make a KILLER PDA or Webpad.
    1. Microsoft wasn't the 800 lb. gorilla we know and loathe today. Since the 8-bit systems were closed (essentially game consoles with keyboards and external floppy drives), they couldn't Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish. They had to compete on merit.
    2. It wasn't much better than the existing systems of the day. Z80 CPU, 64-128KB memory, 5 1/4" floppy.* All in an era when the Commodore 64, Atari 800, and (in Europe, at least) Sinclair Spectrum had super-saturated the market to the point that their own upscale models (C-128, 1200XL, Speccy 128K+3) weren't selling well. Microsoft showed up at the party, but couldn't get past the velvet rope. And anyone who wanted a serious computer bought an Apple II, anyway.
    3. The arrival of 16-bit computing. Anyone who wanted something better than 8-bits jumped right over MSX to those new 68000-based systems. Compared to Amiga's flashy graphics and sound, ST's MIDI ports and low price, and the nascent Mac-inspired desktop publishing boom, MSX looked like a toy.
    4. The confusing hardware. Microsoft defined a baseline MSX system, and individual licensees could extend their hardware with special brand-specific features.
      The only system I remember is a Yahama that featured, above and beyond MSX spec, an enhanced sound chip, two MIDI ports, and two mixing-board-like sliders to the left of the keyboard. BTW, that sound chip was also used on the ST, and the Timex-Sinclair 2068! (This I remember because I had one. Those were the days. But I digress....)
      This may not seem like a big deal in this era of device drivers, hardware abstraction layers, and PC parts banks. But MSX had none of these, leaving the burden of supporting the (potentially) wide variety of special hardware features on the developers. Developers who were used to the stable, game-console-like hardware specs of the current crop of 8-bit systems.
    Ultimately, MSX was seen as too much, too late. By the time anyone paid it any attention, the industry had un-converged those 8-bit systems back into personal systems (Apple IIgs, Amiga, ST, and ultimately Mac and x86 PC) and game consoles (Nintendo, Sega, Sony, and the occasional also-ran).

    *: My recollection of the hardware specs is hazy at best.

    Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel
    Facing down the future coming fast     - Rush
  • PSX2 doesn't run Linux... (not yet anyway-port underway). The development of games is done on a linux box I believe, but the PSX2 doesn't run Linux.
  • Another thing I wonder is... is this the first time that a games console has been licenced like this? I don't recall any others doing this; Nintendo boxes have always been Nintendo. Likewise with Sega, Atari, et al, including, until now, Sony.

    Sears licensed and sold their own branded Atari 2600 compatible player way back when. Am I really that old that nobody else here knows this? ...or does no one else care? :-/

  • That's a good point. But all of that is a significant amount of work -- there's an increasingly high barrier to entry. It'll happen, but not on near the scale of mp3.

    --

  • Let's not forget that 4mb isn't such of an issue when you're only having to display to a TV set (ie - low resolutions, and theres no chance in hell of differentiating between most of 100,000 shades of blue, so they won't need much of a colour depth either.

  • Open....not! (Score:5)

    by faichai ( 166763 ) on Sunday June 04, 2000 @05:13AM (#1027181) Homepage
    Everyone seems to think Sony are opening the specs, where in fact all they are doing is selling their proprietary chips to third parties (i.e. like Nvidia, mentioned earlier)

    If I am reading things correctly my guess is this a slap in the face for the X-Box. Microsodt is using commodity components to build a good value console, on the other hand Sony is going to sell the chips such they themselves become commodity items.

    The integration of PS2 chips into TVs and the like would be quite groovy, however the problem with all this integration is the problem of upgrades.

    Perhaps one of the goals of this strategy is to allow people like Creative Labs and the like to produce PC expansion cards that can handle PS2 games, with appropriate restrictions to ensure the games are read from the DVD/CD-ROM drive to ensure "playster" never becomes a reality.

    This will almost definitely be hackable, however with the massive market available, my guess is the card might cost £50 (eventually), and this will almost definitely mean that Emulators (especially considering that most of them are Piss Poor) would be defunct.

    Anyway, thats my 2p, what do you think?

  • I'm lazy....
    my original fractions were much more difficult, I made them easier but still didn't bother working out the final one.
    my reward will be (Score:-1, Offtopic), twice.

  • I think that this might mean Sony is losing money making the PS2 console. Their reasoning may be that if they have other people making environments that their games will run on, they will sell more cd media (which is cheap to make). I think it's a pretty good business strategy, all they make money off of is the games anyways. The $0.10 profit on a console probably doesn't make anyone at Sony very excited.

    They learned their lesson from minidisc. When it first came out, they wouldn't let anyone make minidiscs or minidisc players. Nothing sold. Now pretty much anyone can start manufacturing discs or players... and business is picking up.

    I'll stick to my burner, though.

    -S

    Scott Ruttencutter
  • There are actually a large number of differences between PS2 and 3DO. 3DO was an untested platform that hurt itself irrecoverably by opening up with a $799 price tag. Like all new platforms, 3DO started with the classic chicken-egg problem of, "I won't buy it because there's no games," and "I won't write for it because there's no buyers," and then allowed the problem to manifest itself with a $799 price point. These two factors combined to hurt 3DO very early on, and it's not really a surprise at all that it couldn't recoup even with products like the 3DO Blaster that brought 3DO technology to the PC.

    PlayStation2, on the other hand, has a radically different situation. Unlike the 3DO, not only does PlayStation2 already have market acceptance, but they've kept the barrier to entry low with a price tag of $299--less than half that of 3DO, and far more competitive with other systems. $299 might still be high, however, for a new platform when you can purchase a Dreamcast for $199 (I'll bet ~$170 by October) and an N64 for $99, except that PlayStation2 conveniently avoids the chicken-egg problem by supporting out-of-the-box almost the entire PSX library. With these things going for it, PS2 makes for a much more attractive platform for consumers ("hey, I can play my old games on it and get new PS2 games as they come out") and for developers, since people will buy the PS2 for the PSX library. Sony's been very smart here: they've been very careful to lower the entry point as low as they can for both developers and consumers. Quite impressive. So Sony has a much, much better chance to succede where 3DO failed.

    And what's interesting is that this is beginning to show us their strategy. They've already got a box with unrivaled graphics power that ships with USB and Fire--I mean i.Link ports, and the US version will ship ready for a harddrive. By licensing the platform to third parties, it's clear that Sony is really trying to go head-to-head with almost everyone simultaneously. And what's incredible is they stand a chance of winning, even against Microsoft. Where else can you get a $299 machine that has workstation-like power and runs Linux?

    This is just the beginning of the PlayStation saga. I think things are going to get a lot more interesting in the near future.
  • Now that the archetecture is open, can you imagine a beowulf cluster of these?

    I mean, you chould set up a really cool, large, multiplayer, 3D enviroment or something. =^)
    -legolas

    (When i gamble, i play to win. ;^)

    i've looked at love from both sides now. from win and lose, and still somehow...

  • Well for everyone who makes there own playstation games(yeah right), they have to be able to trade these games legally some how right? heh
  • ... and it is called the X-Box. This move is
    an attempt to secure the market before MS releases
    their box. And if they do it right and make their
    move cleverly and boldly, it may work.

    Alas, it has nothing to do with Open Source or
    opening the playstation.
    © Copyright 2000 Kristian Köhntopp
  • umm ignore my awesome html skills... =-P
  • But if Sony is the sole supplier of the chips, and suddenly there's a 3x rush towards those chips...

    Seems to me that there could be a much greater bottleneck, unless other companies are allowed to fab the chips as well.
  • I don't know about anyone else, but I still find the though of all my entertainment applicances being replaced by one unit a bit un-nerving.

    Anyone feel this way?

    Yep. All-in-one anything is bad because if one part dies, the whole thing is (1) useless or (2) must all be taken out of service while the bad component is repaired. For this reason:

    TV/VCR combo units suck.
    Tri-color ink cartridges suck.
    The Imac sucks.
    Those four color ball point pens suck.
    etc.

  • You will never see a Dell XBox or a Gateway XBox. Console hardware is sold at a loss. Profits come from sales of software and royalties from sales of 3rd party software. Unless you're giving a cut of the software profits to the manufacturer, why would they want to make the hardware?

    No, I think the manufacturers of the boxen will be more like Panasonic or Phillips and their ilk. I agree that it's unlikely that Dell or GW or any other "traditional" PC builder will be involved with XBox, but not necessarliy for the same reasons you cite.

    Fact is, the manufacturer(s) of the hardware typically do get subsidies from the software vendor to make the hardware. So, although hardware is a loss-leader, it can still be profitable for the manufacturer to get involved. The revenue stream just comes from somewhere other than the sales of the boxen.

    There are plenty of examples for this: iOpener, WebTV, TiVo, etc. Often, you have to consider a service as software, but the business model is the same.

    Think you'll see a Playstation 2 equipped TV?

    No more than I see VCR-equipped TVs today - they exist, but not widely enough to really matter. Likewise with PSX2. There may be a model or two, but it won't be a big deal.

  • Actually they are opening the platform up, check out Gameunit [gameunit.com] or EETimes.

  • Limerick (Score:3)

    by 575 ( 195442 ) on Sunday June 04, 2000 @07:12AM (#1027193) Journal
    There once was a man named Maloney
    His console competed with Sony
    But the box never ships
    Couldn't make his own chips
    "The PlayStation open? Baloney!"
  • Larger controllers? Like the Dreamcast controllers? Whoever designed those should be shot.

    I'm sorry, but what's wrong with the Dreamcast controllers? I've used the system quite a few times, and I find them quite comfortable. They give a good grip, but the backpieces aren't forced tight to my palms like those of the PSX. It helps to prevent any buildup of sweat during long periods of play.

    I can't for the life of me understand why Sony decided to go with only 2 controller ports. They must not think much of the competition from the Dreamcast, which already has 4 controller ports. But I can't say that I don't blame them for not being afraid. *sigh* I'm really rooting for the company this time around. Hopefully Bleemcast can pick up sales.
  • Notice the original poster's words: "video ram".
    The PSX2 only has 4 Megs of video ram, which many people think is its Achilles' Heel.
    It does, however, have a very wide bus connecting it to the main 32 Megs, and so it can be seen as a cache (well, the bit that's left after allocating frame buffers). It remains to be seen whether or not this architecture will hamper developers significantly.
  • I was at a discussion the other day, where a guy who is a professor from Berkeley (and a scientist there as well...I just wish I could remember his name) mentioned that someone at Argonne National Labs was interested in setting themselves up with a large Beowolf cluster of Playstation2's to simulate large-scale scientific applications.

    The Playstation2's have 2 vector units which set the price-performance curve much lower than large, expensive and power consuming supercomputers.

    He also mentioned that they would probably set themselves up as a Sony Game developer, just to ease importation issues.
  • Sony "Gets it" all right. Console manufacturers sell consoles at cost or (most often) at a loss. They make the real money off of the games themselves. By "opening" the Playstation2, Sony can help expand their market for games without having to take the loss associated with the console sales. And since console's aren't a profitable business in and of themselves, this will either mean high-priced playstation 2 clone's or that no manufacturer will bother making a clone.
  • It has a nice poetry.

    Incidentally, I agree. I see a future, though, with two options, similar in form and reason to the way people listen to music at home now. Ordinary Janes will purchase asinine products like the Bose Wave Digital Media Center and other tightly integrated, "easy to use, easy to install" all-in-one mind cleansing machines--while people interested in quality of parts, ease of maintenance and upgrades, distributed reliance on multiple specialized parts and vendors (basically, people who spend more than two seconds to think about it) will have the opportunity to purchase Conformo-Socializer separates.

    Choose your poison.
  • "no hardware company in their right minds would ever want to be cloned"

    Re-phrase that as "no hardware company following traditional models of physical goods manufacture would..." and I can go with it. It is however, wrong to think of computer equipment as a normal physical good. Let's look at a related industry: in cellular phones, everyone is doing closely compatible things based on standards. I think Motorola is not in a possition to complain about the results (they'd love to have more market share, but cell phones would be dead technology if not for the massive penetration that they achived due to the large number of vendors).

    Cloning is the way you shove your implimentation down everyone's throat. Then it's a matter of using your first-to-market edge to brand yourself as the leader. You have to maintain your R&D at a high level, but the return is a piece of a much larger market than you would ever have had alone. It looks like Sony might be figuring this out. We'll see.

    The Apple clone situation was a half-step, and a bad one that that. They wanted to essentially establish a set of OEMs, which is not a clone market. You get a clone market by standardizing your product and publishing the standards.

    What's more, you point out IBM. IBM had two PC technologies that it pushed. One was (intentionally or not) allowed out the gates for cloning. One is still around today and making IBM money even nearly 20 years later... the other is a memory, kept alive by people with too little money to do anything but buy/steal/dumpster-dive it from their companies/schoools/etc.
  • "Apple too has been hurt by this. If they'd opened up the Apple to clones around '89, they would own the desktop by now."

    That's one of the most innacurate statements made. First of all, no hardware company in their right minds would ever want to be cloned (PC clones were done against the wishes and actions of IBM). Sony loses money for every PSX2 sold, Apple makes money and would NOT ever benefit from clones. It happened in the past and they learnt their lesson.

    3.14 out

  • Mostly because TV/VCR combos are the integration of a crappy TV and an even crappier VCR. If they'd use decent components, they could actually sell units.

  • hey (Score:1)

    by nomadic ( 141991 )
    Wouldn't the export restrictions [slashdot.org] on the P2 make it hard to open it up too much?
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Or they'll avoid the 3DO pitfall altogether and integrate PS2 as a "feature" in medium-high-end consumer electronics (think "The big-screen TV with PS2 and DVD player built in!"; depsite their flaws, it seems a lot of TV/VCR hybrids get sold...). I think this was what Sony is shooting for; I can't see how anyone can profit from cloning the console outright without cutting some serious corners when Sony (who partially owns the company making the chips IIRC) is selling the PS2 at $300.
  • I think that this might mean Sony is losing money making the PS2 console

    There's no "might" about it. They are definitely losing money on each console sold in Japan. This is nothing new, though. This has been the standard practice for the last ~5 years for console makers.

    - Scott


    ------
    Scott Stevenson
  • On the extreme end of this, I was reading the latest GNOME summary, where I found this tidbit:

    RHAD Labs has shifted focus a bit. For a long time we were doing much of the GNOME user environment work, fixing bugs, making packages, and maintaining code. However Helix and Eazel have stepped up with far greater resources and expertise in this area than we have. So we've shifted our efforts to focus on libraries and development tools.

    I found this stunning. Here are three companies that have sprung up from the chaos of open source software developement, but because they are still open to working with other companies, they are litterally able to shift whole projects between them on the fly. This is a radical shift in the evolving landscape of the software business.

    ----

    I'm not trying to disparage RedHat, but you're forgetting that they don't really profit from this work. They're basically funding Gnome so that they have expertise in that area and are seen as good guys.

    Why wouldn't they want someone else to work on it? They can't prevent it anyway, and they know that the more people working on Gnome the better they look. Gnome never belonged to RedHat in any sense anyway.

    So, although this is great I dont really see any relevance to hardware manufacturers. Sony obviously has to get back the huge amounts of money they've invested.

  • On one hand, this will drive down prices with competing products.

    On the other hand, we'll be left with a bunch of (potentially incompatible) systems. I've run into enough incompatibilities with my DVD player to know that this is likely. One of the nicest things about game consoles is the stability and compatibility one gets.

    Of course, the main problem with free emulators is playing games that rely on quirks of the target hardware. Will game manufacturers stick to a de facto set of features for maximum compatibility? If that's the case, then freely reverse-engineered emulators have the potential to play many more games.

  • like every other so-called "open source" business out there, you fail to deliver to the community that which we hold so dear to our hearts. until your company can provide us with the one thing that unites us in common cause, i think you should refrain from carelessly throwing around the "open-source" name!

    you, sony, are "in this" for the money. you are clearly dipping your whick into the vast open source fortune. do you give of yourself? do you provide the community with the ONE piece of open-source goodness that we yearn for down to our VERY SOULS?!

    i think this would be a prime opportunity for you to clear the air. tell us once and for all WHAT IS YOUR POSITION?! what exactly DOES sony offer to the large population of natalie portman obsessives?! we are growing majority of the linux community and we DEMAND that you acknowledge our most intimate wants, needs and addictions.

    WHAT IS THE SONY POSITION ON OPEN-SOURCING NATALIE PORTMAN?! ANSWER NOW, SONY! NOW!

  • Interesting possibilities (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The PSX2 architecture is a great design for multimedia processing... anyone else want to see this turned into a video (or video-editing) card for the PC?

    AC
    Some assembly and C++ required

  • Not so much "opening"... (Score:5)

    by wowbagger ( 69688 ) on Sunday June 04, 2000 @04:34AM (#1027211) Homepage Journal
    This really isn't "opening" the Playstation 2. This is just allowing other companies to buy the chips. There is no mention of whether the specs for the chips will be under NDA ("You can buy the chips from us, and if you do we'll let you have the specs, but you cannot share them"), nor is there any indication that any other company could make video games. Kiosks, embedded displays yes, but how knows about games.


    However, it's still a very good sign. Perhaps Sony "gets it"?

  • not about emulation (Score:3)

    by [verse]Eskil ( 118352 ) on Sunday June 04, 2000 @04:45AM (#1027212)
    I don't think this is about emulation. its more about training future dame developers. sony and other developers have this huge problem that there are very few programmers out there whit experience of console platforms. The amiga used to be a good place to find them, but the amiga is about as dead as Elvis. who programs assembler on the pc? and who has experience programming custom graphic chips?

    Ninitendo lets some people hack the N64, and sony used to have Net yarose. so its noting new.

    emulation, and copy protection is of course something to be afraid of. but remember that sony doesn't make a profit form selling units, they do it by selling the license to make commercial games for it, so they would gain on some emulation not loose. The only reason they don't like it is because of bad PR, but still no one is going to be able to emulate a ps2 for some years to come.

  • "In the future, Playstation 2 may be absorbed into TV sets and [the game console] may disappear," said Kutaragi.



    I don't know about anyone else, but I still find the though of all my entertainment applicances being replaced by one unit a bit un-nerving.


    Anyone feel this way?

  • I'm actually surprised Sega didn't do this first, Since they're trying to be so pioneering on the net.
    In any case, I'll bet they OS sometime in the next couple months. Of course, I think sega has always been more
    open with their hardware.

    tcd004

    Here's my Microsoft Parody [lostbrain.com], where's yours?

  • I seem to remember another console that was supposed to be manufactured by all the different electronics companies... can you say 3DO?

    I'm sure this will generate far more interest with manufacturers than 3DO ever did, both because the market is much larger (and no longer 'niche'), and because the product's going to be successful, regardless of a particular manufacturer trying for a piece of the market. I wonder what different manufacturers will do to try to differentiate their version though? Maybe someone will offer a deck with four controller ports? Or maybe larger controllers... (please please please)
  • The article doesn't really make it too clear; is Sony opening the Playstation chips, the Playstation 2 chips, or both?


    --------------------------------------------
  • The first worry that springs to mind about other people building PS2 machines is compatibility - given that even now there are DVD players being released that have problems with some discs, and all those driver updates and patches for PC games, I wouldn't be surprised if more people making PS2s introduces a similiar thing.

    Still, given the hype that the PS2 graphics chips get, it might be nice to have a video card based on them (which I expect will be one of the first things they do with this). Not only would it make PS2 emulation a lot easier, but would allow us to all have a good giggle when NVidia beats it at timedemos...

    iain
  • Another thing I wonder is... is this the first time that a games console has been licenced like this? I don't recall any others doing this; Nintendo boxes have always been Nintendo. Likewise with Sega, Atari, et al, including, until now, Sony.

    I think 3DO did this when their console came out. The licensed the technology so that others could make compatible units.

  • Sony Playstation 2 wins. MS and Nintendo and Sega lose.

    This is kind of what NVidia does, if I am reading the article correctly. You then get GREAT competition within their own systems for the best price and quality, and just look how much marketshare NVidia has taken, (despite my GeForce still not working)... It's a great idea!

    Mike Roberto (roberto@soul.apk.net [mailto]) -GAIM: MicroBerto

  • PSX2 games won't be bootlegged until broadband becomes broad enough (>T1) to support DVD bootlegging. A 4 minute, 4 MB Vorbis or MPEG clip takes 15 minutes over a V.90 (4 kilobyte per second) connection. Multiply that by about a thousand for a DVD-ROM. That's over ten days!
  • All I see is Sony selling its chips to other manufacturers so they can make PS2-type consoles themselves. It looks like they want TV manufacturers to enbed their technology so they have a broader user base. Which means more games and more licensing fees. Unfortunately, I dont believe the article is detailed enough to answer all questions. It looks geared towards the 15 second-general-population-reader.
  • Those can be purchased (at least for PSX 1.x). They're probably in development for PSX 2.
  • 3DO Never whent a step further. They never even built a console. They imagined up a machine, and sold the rights to build it. To Panasonic and Goldstar I believe, as well as Creative Labs -I always wanted a 3DO-blaster (to play ssf2t).

    Any corrections?

    Gfunk
  • Sony already has this. It's a workstation with a built-in PSX 2 subsystem. Costs $20,000, but its graphics performance will make you drool.

  • Re:not about emulation (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    but remember that sony doesn't make a profit form selling units

    Every time I read this sentence in a thread about emulation, I wonder if this is just an urban legend or if someone has real and official numbers about the claim.

    Actually, this sounds like the "you can download rom's/mp3's but have to erase them 24 after the download if you down own the original". A false claim, but very convenient to justify emulation.

    Don't get me wrong, I love emulators and I'm an emulation freak. But I can't believe things are as simple as exposed in this claime.

  • PS2 emulation? (Score:3)

    by yerricde ( 125198 ) on Sunday June 04, 2000 @05:30AM (#1027226) Homepage Journal

    no one is going to be able to emulate a ps2 for some years to come

    Then what's Bochs [bochs.com]? Emulates IBM PS/2 computers quite nicely, useful for running older CPU-sensitive games.

    Oh, you meant Sony's ps2. That's a different story entirely.

  • This bears a striking resemblance to several points brought up in a recent article on freshmeat: http://freshmeat.net/news/2000/ 06/03/960091140.html [freshmeat.net]
  • Sony will back up its drive into the merchant market with a $1.2 billion investment to expand its semiconductor manufacturing plants.

    From this statement I assume, that opening the specs to other fabricators is not on the cards, (or if it is, all produce will be routed through Sony onto the market, i.e. not allowed to sell the chips independently of Sony).

    The move is most likely not about easing bottlenecks, but expanding markets, and by selling the chips, Sony will be able to control (gasp!) the market, recover development costs faster, and fill it's coffers to the brim!

    ...maybe, it's not like I'm an Economist/MBA or anything!

  • If Sony had done this from the start, there would never have been unlicensed emulators. Commercial emulators would have been out there, and neither the open source nor commercial efforts would have been able to gain enough momentum (likely, but then again it could have happened).

    Apple too has been hurt by this. If they'd opened up the Apple to clones around '89, they would own the desktop by now.

    More and more in the computer software and hardware industry, open means success. Closed means someone will take a chunk of your market, and there's nothing you can do about it.

    On the extreme end of this, I was reading the latest GNOME summary [gnome.org], where I found this tidbit:
    RHAD Labs has shifted focus a bit. For a long time we were doing much of the GNOME user environment work, fixing bugs, making packages, and maintaining code. However Helix and Eazel have stepped up with far greater resources and expertise in this area than we have. So we've shifted our efforts to focus on libraries and development tools.
    I found this stunning. Here are three companies that have sprung up from the chaos of open source software developement, but because they are still open to working with other companies, they are litterally able to shift whole projects between them on the fly. This is a radical shift in the evolving landscape of the software business.

    Watch this space. I suspect we're going to see some amazing moves that will keep economists and lawyers guessing for decades to come....
  • ok. this pisses me off.

    [ note to moderators: this is not flamebait or a troll. it's a genuine opinion of a genuinely pissed-off person. so at least read it before you moderate it, ok? ]

    i love how this always happens; "x is _way_ too big to download with y speed, therefore nobody will ever pirate it! duh!" - then new technology pops up, and every 14-year-old kid and his brother are sucking gigs and gigs of copyrighted material off usenet/napster/gnutella/freenet/whatever.

    people said this about audio cd pirating. now we have mp3. people said this about data cds. now we have dsl and cablemodems capable of tossing a few gigs around with ease. people said this about dvd movies. hey, have you checked usenet out recently? go look at alt.binaries.vcd and count the number of movies ripped from dvd.

    and think about it; 2 gigs (compressed from a 4gb game) isn't all that hard to download with dsl or cable. no more difficult than people who download 4 cds worth of final fantasy psx games.

    and honestly, the availability of dsl/cable is much more widespread than many people think. i live in tacoma, a mid-sized city, and the first thing i did when i moved was transferred my phone service and order dsl. same goes for many of my geek friends.

    so give it a break and get a clue.

    --

  • So does that mean that soon they will have them chips attached to PC motherboards along with the normal prosseser ...so people dont have to buy graphics ? ..if so i think its a good idea :O)
  • Thanks for clarifying my comment.. what experience do you have of the PS2, specifically the video ram and anti-aliasing, or are you currently under NDA...?
  • There's a fair bit of Slashdot-plagiarism going on, though I think adding a separate copyright to each post is a bit of an overcorrection... there is, after all, a copyright notice at the end of each page.

    However, Slashdot has never been a bastion of copyright protection issues, so I guess, on the other hand, putting individual copyright notices in your .sig to differentiate yourself from the Slashmob on copyright issues is probably a wise thing...
  • I don't think that Sony cares about the X-Box, hardware-wise. It's the deveopers they want.
    What makes or breaks a new console to the market is the number of (good) titles available for it. And the number off titles available is limited by the number (and quality) of developers willing to code for said platform.

    There is a huge amount of DirectX experienced coders out there, anxious to code for the X-Box, whilst the handful of PSX coders in existance are busy performing black rituals, in order to get Sony to improve their API and fix library bugs (I'm a PSX coder at the moment). Point being: Sony is trying to expand their developer pool before the X-Box hits the market, in order to get more titles out, and thus maintain their market-share-domination.
  • Anyone else remember MSX? That was a great idea too, back in the early 80's, and could've been pulled off as a concept... since I was just a teenager back then, I didn't really have any comprehension of why exactly MSX and MSX2 failed as a market... anyone got any tips?
  • I've read numerous comments that have mentioned this is what Sony and all the other console manufacturers should have done from the beginning, but I don't think it's quite that simple. If Sony did licence the PlayStation chipset years ago when it first came out, I don't think the PlayStation market would look nearly the same as it does today. There would be multiple implementation of the PlayStation architecture, all with their own particular advantages and quirks.

    One only has to look at the difference between installating Linux x86 and LinuxPPC. My experience has been that the former can potentionally be a real bear, as there are such a wide variety of peripherals, cards, motherboards, CPUs, etc. By contrast, however, LinuxPPC requires virtually zero configuration. It just works.

    Now, I realize that many people on slashdot don't really mind configuring hardware and hacking drivers (perhaps actually enjoy it), and I realize that some of these very same people also have a PlayStation and will likely buy a PlayStation2. However, I would bet the farm on the fact that this is not indicative of the majority of Sony's customers.

    If you have a bunch of PlayStation2 "distributions" floating around in various forms in consumer electronics, you're eventually going to run into some compatbility issues. This is inevitable. This may be acceptable in the computer world, but it's totally unacceptable in the console world. If a console game doesn't work, people aren't going to go hunting for an update on a web site, they're going to return it to the store.

    The whole idea of a console is that you just plug the game in and it runs. The consoles are identical, so that if it works on one PlayStation, it should work on any. Consumers have proven with their wallets that they appreciate this simplicity. It has been provent that there is a place for consoles, and a place for computers, and probably will be for some time. Ignoring this would be a mistake and reduce the level of choice available.

    From what I can gather about what Sony is doing, they're actually creating a new computing platform, which may bring with it all the pros and cons of such a move. Maybe there's a way to have the best of both worlds -- somehow simpler devices like DVD players can have multiple vendors and remain completely compatible -- but it remains to be seen if that will hold true for PlayStation2.

    Plus, what happens when somebody -- let's say Panasonic-- decides to augment the PlayStation2 chipset with their own 3D hardware, and make that available to developers. You then need that particular version of the PlayStation2 in order to use the game as intended. This is totally contrary to the concept of a console.

    Another example is the disaster of the Macintosh clones. As soon as the machines from UMAX, Power Computing and Motorola (the worst by far!) showed up, the Mac OS became much harder to use and configure. Things weren't working because there was all this alien hardware floating around. At the time, this damaged one of the key advantages of the Mac OS -- simplicity.

    - Scott
    ------
    Scott Stevenson

  • Re:Not so much "opening"... (Score:3)

    by kaphka ( 50736 ) <1nv7b001@sneakemail.com> on Sunday June 04, 2000 @09:27AM (#1027237)
    This really isn't "opening" the Playstation 2. This is just allowing other companies to buy the chips.
    The article isn't very clear on this point, but it does say that Sony is doing two things: licensing the chips, and "opening the architecture". "Opening the architecture" could be a euphemism for licensing the chips, but if it is, they wouldn't have mentioned it separately. So I assume that it means publishing specs.
  • is there anybody here who replaces his TV set every two years? consider throwing away your old playstation 2/TV when they next generation of consoles has arrived.
  • At several points in its history, Slashdot's
    owners had a very liberal attitude towards
    the ownership of the words of its contributors.

    For example, Slashdot once had a notice claiming
    copyright of the entire page when in fact most
    of that page were user contributed comments. Also,
    Slashdot was trying to bundle and print a number
    of user posts as a book without contacting the
    original authors first.

    I added the Copyright notice to my posts in order
    to visibly claim ownership of my words - not that
    this would be necessary under current Copyright
    legislation in Germany or the US. But it works
    fine to remind everyone of the current legal
    situation with respect to the content I and
    you and everyone else here creates.

    Note that I am usually very generous with
    my own content: I maintain a page [koehntopp.de] where I keep
    everything that I have written
    and sold online and readable for everyone for
    free. If you ask me beforehand, I will usually
    grant you the needed rights to republish something
    I have written. I also maintain or have maintained
    a number of FAQs (currently the de.comp.lang.php
    FAQ) or HOWTOs (formerly the Linux Partition
    Mini-HOWTO) and I maintain a popular PHP package
    (PHPLIB [netuse.de]).

    But I want to know where I am published and why
    and that is why I require that you ask me before
    you work with my words. Hence the disclaimer below
    my posts.

    © Copyright 2000 Kristian Köhntopp
  • Oh, I don't have a problem with the layout. (It's really well done, especially considering the button count) It's just that I'd like it be scaled up so that it would seem like I've got something substantial in my hands.

  • Why Sony's doing this (Score:3)

    by Greyfox ( 87712 ) on Sunday June 04, 2000 @04:38PM (#1027241) Homepage Journal
    I thought it should be pretty evident why Sony's doing this: They want to make it easy to make missile guidance systems out of their Playstations. Did they ever get that Japanese export ban lifted?
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • There is a fundamental difference between games and music/movies: the latter can be compressed acceptably with lossy formats, while presumably that won't work with software.

    All those mp3s and VCDs are far smaller than the original.

    --

  • Why wouldn't [Red Hat] want someone else to work on it? They can't prevent it anyway, and they know that the more people working on Gnome the better they look. Gnome never belonged to RedHat in any sense anyway.

    I was never trying to suggest that they would not want this to happen. I was saying that it's amazing that this could happen. Can you imagine IBM saying "ok, someone else is taking over managing SMIT bug-fixing and feature tweeking. Now we can focus on long-term SMIT R&D." ? I don't think so.

    My point is that a new industry is appearing. In this new industry, trust is the equivalent of the late 80s soft-dollars phenomenon. We'll see how far it goes....

    As for GNOME never belonging to Red Hat... true, very little of Red Hat Linux "belongs" to Red Hat. However, RHAD was basically formed around GNOME development, and has been it's strongest corporate champion until recently.
  • It is unlikely Joe Public is going to waste their time downloading DVDs.

    The pirates will _make_ pirated DVDs, just like the millions of pirated CDs, VCDs, tapes, etc. Nicely printed with holograms too. You get these factories who make X legit copies, and then Y "surplus" copies.

    You can get pirate VCDs here at about USD1 to USD1.5 per VCD. So much so that the nonpirate ones are becoming much cheaper.

    The masses aren't going to bother downloading stuff. They want to buy stuff, stick it in, and press PLAY.

    They'll also want to watch it on their wide screen TV hooked up to their AV stuff, NOT some elcheapo 15 inch monitor (which the masses usually buy). I don't see Joe Public burning DVDs any time soon either :).

    Cheerio,
    Link.
  • >nor is there any indication that any other company could make video games. Kiosks, embedded displays yes, but how knows about games.

    I was under the impression that Sony let pretty much any company make games for the playstation. Which was one of the reasons so many were availible. Nintendo (or Sega, I forget which) required that it okayed or published each and every game (ie get a slice of the pie on every game sold) consequently there were fewer games to draw buyers, and their market share suffered. Good short-term thinking... :-)
  • Ok, how many times will the phrase 'gets it' appear in the comments?
    1-5 > odds 1/35
    6-10 > odds 2/5
    11-15 > odds 3/7
    16+ > odds [whatevers left]

    How many times will beowulf clusters be mentioned?
    1-5 > odds 1/13
    6-10 > odds 3/5
    11-15 > odds 1/9
    16+ > odds [whatevers left]

    Minimum bet $5, accumulators not allowed.

  • 3DO (and Apple) are shining examples of "open vapor". Apple. These PR moves are done so that investors can "imagine the posibilities" allowing to company to attract more public investment) without actually having to invest in those posibilities.

    The key words in this anouncement are: The chips will be sold on the merchant market beginning next year. Begining? Q2? Q3? This puts the public release date about a year away. Applying moores law to this PR move, the chip will (comparitivly) be more than 50% through it's usefull cycle.

    I see this as purley a defensive move to help maintain share as other game console makers catch up with PS2.
    ___

  • Re:don't know what to call the subject (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Damn, pulling apart my TV just to install the PS2 mod chip is gonna be a *bitch*.
  • That's the revenue model for all consoles. Lost money on the decks, make a little bit off of every game sold. Sony licenses every game that gets made for Playstation, same as every console manufacturer has since the Atari days (don't know about Coleco/Intellivision). That's why Atari had naked rape games and modern consoles don't. Alot of developers wen't away when Nintendo stayed with cartridges while Sony went with super-cheap-mass-produce CDs. Sony's also a lot easier to get approval from than Nintendo. (still, more games is better, even if a larger percentage are crap)

  • Hello... Mcfly!!! (Score:5)

    by Duncan3 ( 10537 ) on Sunday June 04, 2000 @05:01AM (#1027251) Homepage

    Game consoles are sold at a LOSS, and a big one at that. Sony is opening up the hardware for the clones, big deal, noone cares.

    Sony and everyone else sells the hardware at a loss because all the money is in the games.

    It you wanted to buy the parts and build it yourself (i.e. clone it), it will cost you a few times more then if you just but it at the local story. You might be able to build a system for 3-4x the cost of the Sony subsidized system.

    You wont see the game license fees dropping, or the emulators being allowed ever because that's where the money is.

    Once again the Slash-blurb is grossly misleading.

  • If this is a preemptive strike against Microsoft's XBox. I'd guess the XBox would be licenced to multiple manufacturers, much like WebTV is.

    PSX2 should already have a natural head-start, and anything Sony can do to build the network effect for the platform would go a long way to maintaining ground against XBox.

    Another thing I wonder is... is this the first time that a games console has been licenced like this? I don't recall any others doing this; Nintendo boxes have always been Nintendo. Likewise with Sega, Atari, et al, including, until now, Sony.

  • If Sony makes its money on the games, then emulators would be a good thing $-wise, as they provide an additional platform for the games. I don't see DVD-ROM bootlegging as a significant threat (4 GB = 10 days over 56K modem at 4 KB/s); emulators will play games off the DVD, much as Bleem! does today.
  • Re:What do you consider to be the useful cycle?

    Under moores law (more acuratly described as "moores trend of chip fabrication research") would place the useful cycle at 18 months. 18 months from the release date, you will be able to get processing power that is twice as powerfull at the same price.

    I would agree with your assesment that the product cycle for PS1 is considerably longer, but I would put forth that this is caused more by market conditions (momentum, and lockin) than to technical considerations.
    ___

  • The Dreamcast is Windows CE compatible, not Windows CE dependant. Some games use the Sega API, others use Windows CE. See here [big-boys-toys.com] for some details.

  • Comment removed (Score:3)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday June 04, 2000 @06:00AM (#1027262)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Once upon a time (back when I was in college) I had a typewriter, a TI-59 programmable calculator, a video game console (very primative, it played 'pong' type games), and a stereo system. If I wanted to use a computer I had to go to a computer center to use a decwriter or a terminal to access the IBM 3033. Fax machines were also available on campus.

    Today I have a Power Mac G3. All those things (and more) in one box.

    Far from un-nerving I find it a very welcome improvement.

    Now from a hobbiest point of view, part of the fun of 'home theater' is the choosing of and buying components. It's a similar to the difference between buying a computer system or buying the components and assembling it yourself.

    For most people (aka consumers) the one box option is what they want. No decisions to make, just plug it in and go. The hobbiests and hackers will always want the ability to tweak the system. Hopefully, we'll continue have that option.

    Steve M

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