The Sony PS3 thread (apparently *still* obnoxious!)

[Mele]

For the first time in years I'm going to get it as well just to see this mythical supplement. I can remember the rise of the robots front cover , man that was a fine beat em up .

To be calling the 360 future less is an unbelievable viewpoint. God I love console wars its so entertaining reading the bullshit they chuck out at each other. The ps2 reminds me of the ps3 , all I had to play on for months was SSX before any decent shit came out. All that time the ps2 was being touted as an integral home AV kitt more than a games console.
History repeats itself is no more obvious than in consoles. Hoping the wii can break the mould in that respect but we will see.....

[gilesgoat]

I'll pick up a copy in town today to see for myself.

Just got mine in the mail. I would advice you to have a huge NCoT at hand.

As I was saying Yak yesterday I saw myself when I was working in the
other company as a "war againist competition" can start.

Certaintly there are many ways but the thing I saw is if you want to be
effective and make people really believe in what you say you have to
base you "war" on facts.

It generally involves spending quite some time studying what your
competitors have and what they don't have and comparing it with what
you have.

If you have something that someone else has the same then you have
to explain to people "why your thing is better than the other one" you
have to prove that in some way "you have an enachement", if you can't
prove that then "keep it smoother" just state you have it but don't say it's better.

If you have some stuff that others don't have then here you can play
your bells, you can start saying "all the wonderful benefits" you can have
thanks to this feature that the others don't have (yet).

If there are things you miss .. you can still try to play another game, saying
things along the lines of "yes we don't have this because we tought that
in having this stuff we might have the following disvantages so we decided
to take a different approach".

Of course any real defect/missing the competitors have you can
point your finger at and make them look "20 times worse" than what they
really are.

But they must be "real defects/missings" that are there without any doubt.

The moral of the story is "you must have evidence", you can't make a
beliveable campaign based on "chattings" and/or making people believe
things that can't be actually verified and/or that can't be directly compared.

To say loud and big "I am the best" this does not work, it just makes you
look "you are just one saying that getting big air", to talk about
"potential" showing actually nothing is still a thing that does not work.

It's not credible and makes you look .. odd ..

You want to convince people that something is good you have to
supply credibility backed up by samples.

Nintendo promised "innovation" and they bloody well did, their controller
and what is coming around it is real innovation.

Microsoft promised some innovation as well, the online community stuff
and they said that the 360 would have been lot improved after the Xbox.

And it's really all like said.

Sony is saying around that "they are ahead anyone else", but don't look
convincing at all and they don't back up what they say with some real
evidence that proves it's like that.

Clearly, they are fucking behind everyone in this moment, they had troubles
they wanted at any costs to do a launch in this moment even if they
are not really ready for, they started to should loud an wide "we are
Sony we are the big" but what they are putting in your hands in this
moment is not so big at all.

They should have waited a bit more, fix up the things and come out
with some more reasonable facts and evidence.

Instead they choosed the option to create "a lot of fuss in their fans base"
trying to convince people that "all the do is better than anyone else" and
that "we are the best because we are Sony".

That is the message really.

This is the thing mostly irritating of Sony now.

That the PS3 in a future will be a good piece of HW with some good stuff
it probably will be, that maybe a day it will be with more advanced SW
and stuff it maybe will be as well.

But in this moment now, handling a campaign that way they are doing seems .. very silly (to be gentle).

I think IMHO they did not a big thing in putting that American guy as CEO
but that is a judgement we'll live to the future.

It does not sound so Japanese any more.

[disciple]

For the first time in years I'm going to get it as well just to see this mythical supplement. I can remember the rise of the robots front cover , man that was a fine beat em up .

To be calling the 360 future less is an unbelievable viewpoint. God I love console wars its so entertaining reading the bullshit they chuck out at each other. The ps2 reminds me of the ps3 , all I had to play on for months was SSX before any descent shit came out. All that time the ps2 was being touted as an integral home AV kitt more than a games console.
History repeats itself is no more obvious than in consoles. Hoping the wii can break the mould in that respect but we will see.....

Put like that this gen sounds like PS2 style marketing vs DS style marketing.

[GrapeApe]

GrapeApe wrote:
FFS...remember the fun old days when consoles were just used to play games.Bit ranty but Ive got stereos and dvd players that do all that other stuff perfectly fine, thankyewverymuch.

That's what I said a while back, and everyone tried to tear me a new one, for, I dunno, not getting with the program, I suppose.

Consoles are for playing games on, and oh look, there's no reason to go for any of the new machines because the old ones are better for games at the moment. That'll change soon, but right now the only reason for buying any of these new ones is "oooh, shiny."

Yeah, there's does seem to be a bit more heated debate about what machine can do better than the other one rather than play games. Which is just a tad ironic when most people buying these consoles will be/should be using them primarily as gaming machines.

[gilesgoat]

GrapeApe wrote:
FFS...remember the fun old days when consoles were just used to play games.Bit ranty but Ive got stereos and dvd players that do all that other stuff perfectly fine, thankyewverymuch.

That's what I said a while back, and everyone tried to tear me a new one, for, I dunno, not getting with the program, I suppose.

Consoles are for playing games on, and oh look, there's no reason to go for any of the new machines because the old ones are better for games at the moment. That'll change soon, but right now the only reason for buying any of these new ones is "oooh, shiny."

Yeah, there's does seem to be a bit more heated debate about what machine can do better than the other one rather than play games. Which is just a tad ironic when most people buying these consoles will be/should be using them primarily as gaming machines.

Well ..

If we are starting to talk about "real music listening" then we can
beging to throw MP3s in the dustbin, consider a proper CD player with
a proper preamplifier unit and a couple (one per channel) triode
amplifiers connected to some proper speakers.

I have to build two more one day, they should do great for tekkno as well.

[Snakey]

You've said the PS3 can't play non MPEG2 codecs

No I fucking didn't.

based on the assertion that BRD releases to date have been MPEG2.

That was true until recently as you just found out. I said that perhaps they weren't sure if they'd get the other codecs working in time for PS3 release, which might have been why they were sticking with MPEG2. Probably true. The PS3 can be updated. There was no way it was not going to be able to play any format they threw at it at some stage and I didn't say otherwise.

The PS3's been out for a couple of weeks and I am 100% certain they can play these non MPEG2 Blu-Ray DVDs out of the box.

Of course it bloody well can, if it couldn't, there wouldn't BE any non MPEG2 discs yet. Sony control the bloody thing.

Same goes for the stuff about saying you probably won't have access to the BRD drive under Linux. 10 second googling and the real situation is pretty clear.

As I already said many bloody times that was an example. I knew there'd be limitations somewhere. No I'm not going to fucking google it because I really don't care what those limitations are. I was just saying there would be some.

Besides, if you're telling me that you can stick an MPEG2 Blu-Ray movie in there and just rip the fucking thing directly, then they've seriously fucked up somewhere.

Also saying you need to have a 1gb to play BRD. Again patently not true and a little bit of googling shows that to be false as well.

No, I was saying that other players have 1GB and there must be a good reason for that. Do you know what it is? No, I bet you don't.

It's done now. Everybody else finally gets what I was saying. Drop it.

[tufty]

Same goes for the stuff about saying you probably won't have access to the BRD drive under Linux. 10 second googling and the real situation is pretty clear.

As I already said many bloody times that was an example. I knew there'd be limitations somewhere. No I'm not going to fucking google it because I really don't care what those limitations are. I was just saying there would be some.

Okay, how's this?

Windows Vista will be shit, and will annoy users, because it will take your data and post it back to Microsoft without asking you, and you'll have to pay them to get it back. And it will bluescreen all the time and you'll need special drivers to make it do anything on normal hardware. The main problem with Windows Vista is that it's underlying architecture, based, as it is, on 6502 assembly language emulated in a befunge VM, will be hideously slow.

Or

MacOS 10.5 will bring new and more annoying interface paradigms, breaking compatibility with most previous versions of software, but half the system will go back to the "Aqua" look; that's what "Time Machine" really means. Only later generation iPods will work with it. You will be able to run Windows in a parallelised environment, but only Vista professional as Apple have taken MS's dollar; trying to run Vista "home" will cause subtle memory errors resulting in system panics.

There's some more half-thought-out, unresearched crap. I can't be bothered to Google it, because why the fuck should I?

Simon

[Snakey]

Yes, miss the point why don't you.

Given that on every other sony platform they have tried very bloody hard to make sure that homebrew coders could not do very much, and given that allowing you to do anything on the PS3 will make it a damn sight easier to hack, it's fair to say they are not going to let you do whatever the hell you want with it. And we've already seen that they're not. So what's the problem? There's no need to be such an arse about it.

[gravy]

The PS3's been out for a couple of weeks and I am 100% certain they can play these non MPEG2 Blu-Ray DVDs out of the box.

Of course it bloody well can, if it couldn't, there wouldn't BE any non MPEG2 discs yet. Sony control the bloody thing.

You just don't seem to understand this at all. The Blu-Ray disc association control BRD not Sony. It's not like PS3 software where Sony license the disc and manufacture it.

Yes all Sony releases so far are MPEG2 and Sony are also currently saying that for a while they'll still be releasing that stuff in that format.

(Interesting article here)

It's the multitude of non Sony publishers that have released discs in VC-1 format for a couple of months prior to the PS3, something Sony have fuck all control over.

Anyway after too much back forth, we're at the bottom line:

The linux shipped allows you access to everything you need to make a lovely open source media center that'll play everything.

It's much better than the X360 or the XBOX for that job as it'll handle HD output, loads of codecs and not be noisy.

It'll make a nice mame box as well.

And when the console's around £350 I'd be happy to get one as opposed to a mac mini, a PC or that new apple STB.

Which is exactly what I said to start with.

[Marius]

GrapeApe wrote:
FFS...remember the fun old days when consoles were just used to play games.Bit ranty but Ive got stereos and dvd players that do all that other stuff perfectly fine, thankyewverymuch.

That's what I said a while back, and everyone tried to tear me a new one, for, I dunno, not getting with the program, I suppose.

Consoles are for playing games on, and oh look, there's no reason to go for any of the new machines because the old ones are better for games at the moment. That'll change soon, but right now the only reason for buying any of these new ones is "oooh, shiny."

Yeah, there's does seem to be a bit more heated debate about what machine can do better than the other one rather than play games. Which is just a tad ironic when most people buying these consoles will be/should be using them primarily as gaming machines.

I never owned a PS2 until this summer, so I'm having the time of my life trying to decide which cheap and brilliant game to play first. I have one game for my 360 and have no interest in the PS3. But the Wii offers something completely new and innovative, something no other computer, console, handheld or older machine of any sort can offer, so this year, and probably out 07, it's the only truly interesting machine.

And am I the only one thinking that the Wii is the only real next gen machine out there? If you compare it to the automobile industry, making the cars go faster and faster was interesting only up to a certain point. These days it's more about the aesthetics, innovation and making the ride as comfortable as possible.

[Bubba]

Anyway after too much back forth, we're at the bottom line:

The linux shipped allows you access to everything you need to make a lovely open source media center that'll play everything.

It'll make a nice mame box as well. Which is exactly what I said to start with.

Yeah, I think that sums it up. The only thing that bothers me is only having framebuffer access to the GPU. As long as Cell is fast enough to decode HD content itself then all should be good, but I imagine it'll take some time until someone comes up with codecs that are optimised for cell.

One of the big factors to the success of XBMC/ Xbox Media Player before it was the fact that the box was basically a PC so porting the win32 version of mplayer was relatively easy. Not saying that the PS3 won't be an excellent media box, just that I wouldn't expect it to be an overnight thing either

What do you thing the chances are of getting decent GPU access out of the thing, through hacks or another method. Cause without any GPU access I can't help but think that homebrew games will be rather limited compared to what will be possible on the 360 via XNA.

Cheers

Bubba

[gravy]

What do you thing the chances are of getting decent GPU access out of the thing, through hacks or another method. Cause without any GPU access I can't help but think that homebrew games will be rather limited compared to what will be possible on the 360 via XNA.

I've no idea if GPU access is precluded by some sort of hypervisor or if it's just because the only people that write drivers for NV HW is Nvidia, all of their drivers on linux are distributed as binary.

If it's the driver thing then there's no reason why some sort of 3rd party driver allowing acceleration could be developed.

1. The % of people wanting to use their console for playing games is v high (obv, close to 100%)

2. The % of people that'd use their machine as a media center is a lot smaller

3. The % of people that would actually code something for their console is a lot smaller again

The X360 covers options 1 & 3 but I'd rather a machine that covers 1 & 2 if one was mutually exclusive of the other.

[Snakey]

You just don't seem to understand this at all. The Blu-Ray disc association control BRD not Sony. It's not like PS3 software where Sony license the disc and manufacture it.

Well, OK then. As to why I didn't google this myself, well you've answered that question already. There's nothing worth having on HD-DVD or Blu-Ray yet. I was in a store looking at the selection just last week. So I have little interest in either format at the moment. I might be more interested when there's something worth having.

Yes all Sony releases so far are MPEG2 and Sony are also currently saying that for a while they'll still be releasing that stuff in that format.

That's what I had heard.

The linux shipped allows you access to everything you need to make a lovely open source media center that'll play everything.

...except HD-DVD Sorry, couldn't resist.

But I'm sure it's not going to be that easy. Blu-Ray is protected, no? But you'd just play those with the built in player, that has full hardware access, an extra 256MB to play with, etc. So it's no big deal.

[Kemper_Boyd]

And am I the only one thinking that the Wii is the only real next gen machine out there?

Yes, if you define next gen as relaunching your previous failure.

[Bog]

There's nothing worth having on HD-DVD or Blu-Ray yet.

Yes there is.

HD-DVD: Serenity.

Blu-Ray: Firefly.

Pardon me, I'm just going to go cry in this corner.