PSP sample unit is here: pics + impressions

well, there's at least one good thing about having to wait 3 more months for it to launch here - it gives plenty of time for developers to improve their stuff for US launch :p
 
acklame said:
.....

really, realize what you are whining about.

.....

rofl. :lol :lol cyba has nintendo's dong stuck so far up his ass it's cutting off blood to his brain. sadly, this condition has gotten worse over the years, and i shudder to think what his posts look like on the IGN underground now...
 
PS2 301 x 78 x 182 mm (w/h/d) -- 2.2 kg (4 lbs. 14 oz)
Ps2 4,272,996 mm

GCN 150mm(W)×110mm(H)×161mm(D)
GCN 2,656,500 mm

XBX 320 x 100 x 260 mm (w/h/d) -- 4kg/8lb 3oz.
XBX 8,320,000 mm


NDS 148.7 x 28.9 x 84.7 mm (w/h/d)
NDS 363,992 mm

GBA 4.94 oz.

PSP 170.0 x 23.0 x 74.0 mm (w/h/d) -- of 260g (9.132 oz.)
PSP 289,340 mm
130,560 pixels
 
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It will be mine...oh yes, it will be mine.
 
The battery can be removed? Awesome awesome awesome. I'll be purchasing the best battery and the biggest memory stick. Make that 3 memory sticks. The smallest for game saves, and two of the biggest. One for music, one for video.
 
Has anyone really thought about buying movies on UMD? I mean, who's going to buy two copies of the same movie, one on DVD and one on UMD? Not me.

It's far more likely, and I would guess that Sony knows this, that the majority of people will get a huge memory stick and DL or convert their own movies from DVD and watch them that way. I just don't see a huge market for UMD movies or music albums for that matter. People won't buy two copies of a new album/movie on different formats.

Classic game re-issues don't count as most people buying these don't own them anymore. We're talking about going into a store and buying TWO copies of the Chronicles of Riddick movie instead of just one. It's the exact same movie on both discs. Who's going to do this when there are apparently ways to avoid this built into the hardware?
 
Dr. Zoidberg said:
Has anyone really thought about buying movies on UMD? I mean, who's going to buy two copies of the same movie, one on DVD and one on UMD? Not me.

It's far more likely, and I would guess that Sony knows this, that the majority of people will get a huge memory stick and DL or convert their own movies from DVD and watch them that way. I just don't see a huge market for UMD movies or music albums for that matter. People won't buy two copies of a new album/movie on different formats.

Classic game re-issues don't count as most people buying these don't own them anymore. We're talking about going into a store and buying TWO copies of the Chronicles of Riddick movie instead of just one. It's the exact same movie on both discs. Who's going to do this when there are apparently ways to avoid this built into the hardware?

Man, do we have to go over this again? Consumers will eat anything up. Hell, they'll buy the same movie multiple times for a few extra features on DVD. As for me? Well, if I don't get a US PSP, then it won't matter, but if I do, I'll probably save it for movies that I maybe kinda want to see, but don't care about enough to watch it on a TV with all the cinematic features a nice movie setup would require. Also, I wouldn't mind buying TV series/anime on UMD discs.
 
People are paying $20 a pop for those stupid Majesco GBA cartoons. They run at like 15-20 FPS and barely top 40 minutes in length.

That alone should tell you that there will probably be some sort of market for commercial UMD videos on the PSP. Price them at ten bucks or less and they'll probably go like hotcakes.

Getting movies onto Memory Sticks is probably too much of a hassle for mainstream folk. Your average person doesn't even know how to rip a movie off of DVD, much less how to re-encode it into some esoteric codec. GBA users can watch videos with a big flash cart too, but that hasn't stopped Majesco from making a killing.
 
Like I mentioned in another thread, UMD as a format is never going to take off. It will share the fate of the minidisc. Even worse, actually, since UMDs aren't recordable. :P
 
People are paying $20 a pop for those stupid Majesco GBA cartoons.

Price them at ten bucks or less and they'll probably go like hotcakes.


You're forgetting the primary market for these GBA videos. Young children. Parents will buy these to shut their kids up in the car or at the reunion. It's the LCD-in-the-van effect. Notice there are no non-cartoon GBA videos. The PSP is not for children so these types of applications will not sell as well.

If they are priced at less than $10 they might succeed but somehow I doubt this. Maybe they could package the DVD and UMD of the same movie together for a slight upcharge? I don't think we'll see that either. Most of the non-Sony studios probably are taking a wait-and-see approach anyway.
 
Wow, 15+ seconds just for Ridge Racer/Minna no Golf to start up. That doesn't sound too good, what about the loading time between maps for each game? Still no information on battery life for games, video, music though.
 
Dr. Zoidberg said:
Notice there are no non-cartoon GBA videos. The PSP is not for children so these types of applications will not sell as well.
Well, anything other than cartoons is going to look atrocious at 15 fps.

The success of UMD movies depends on the price predominantly, and how well they are marketed. Sony really should consider including Spider-Man 2 UMD for free in the "Sorry You Bought The First Version You Stupid Bitches" Edition of Spider Man 2 that is coming out next year. A lot of people would buy it, wonder what the extra disc is, then find out more about the PSP and its capabilities.

Majesco/Cartoon Network can also work the slightly older audiences as well. $5-10 for some episodes of Aqua Teen Hunger Force on the go....that would be nearly an impulse buy for a lot of people. Each season is like 12 episodes, so maybe a half-season per disc or something like that.

The point of the Majesco example really was just that people are buying ludicrously inferior products at insane prices....so logically, I don't think it's a huge leap to think that they might buy superior products at lower prices. How low the price goes depends on Sony's royalty structure and production costs. UMDs will die quickly if they are the same price as DVDs.
 
tenchir said:
Wow, 15+ seconds just for Ridge Racer/Minna no Golf to start up. That doesn't sound too good, what about the loading time between maps for each game? Still no information on battery life for games, video, music though.

For ridge racers namco said you can play rally-x whil the game loads.
 
border said:
Well, anything other than cartoons is going to look atrocious at 15 fps.

The success of UMD movies depends on the price predominantly, and how well they are marketed. Sony really should consider including Spider-Man 2 UMD for free in the "Sorry You Bought The First Version You Stupid Bitches" Edition of Spider Man 2 that is coming out next year. A lot of people would buy it, wonder what the extra disc is, then find out more about the PSP and its capabilities.

Majesco/Cartoon Network can also work the slightly older audiences as well. $5-10 for some episodes of Aqua Teen Hunger Force on the go....that would be nearly an impulse buy for a lot of people. Each season is like 12 episodes, so maybe a half-season per disc or something like that.

The point of the Majesco example really was just that people are buying ludicrously inferior products at insane prices....so logically, I don't think it's a huge leap to think that they might buy superior products at lower prices. How low the price goes depends on Sony's royalty structure and production costs. UMDs will die quickly if they are the same price as DVDs.


well. people don't know what the quality is like til they buy them. And then its only for their 6-10 year olds. I say that'll keep them happy
 
CamHostage said:
It's all in memory. What's the RAM, 32MB? Fill that up (and wouldn't that be 32MB uncompressed, since it'd need to be decompressed in RAM, so you could actually compress the upload and ship over less data than that) and off you go. I don't think many racing games have to touch the disc for anything but music files once the track and game data is loaded.

:lol

Yeah, that's why they use UMD's that hold over a GB of data. 32MB will not hold an entire track, the textures and models for all the cars, track, etc. The music, the code for the physics, graphics, io, and network engines.

The only way the single disc multiplayer would work over the network is if the game was streamed to a memory stick at the beginning, and then run from it. Or if it was a really small game like retro games or some simple mahjong game.
 
Huh? If you are talking about a racing game, I think everything pretty much has to be in RAM. You can't be streaming physics off the disc. Music might be coming off a disc, but that would pretty much be the extent of it.
 
didn't the original ridge racer, the entire game, fit in PSone's 3.something megs of RAM?

Not saying RRs is as light as a PSone game, but I'm willing to bet it isn't as heavy as a PS2 game either, and the music is probably encoded in ATRAC, if they were smart, 105 kbps ATRAC3, wich is as damn close to CD quality as any videogame needs, that way you can stream it in lumps a la MD and keep off the drive the rest of the time.

So other than keeping a handfull of car models and the track in RAM, if the audio is managed correctly, the game would only need to load a race or load the frontend after the race, and in between, spin the drive for 3-4 seconds every 2 minutes to fetch a chunk of music. Depending on the memory footprint of it all, they could even push their luck and keep all tha audio in memory and just completely turn off the drive during races.
 
Loading times may well improve over time as they did on PS2. Just think about those *eons* WRC1 took to load compared to the 8 or so secs it takes now for WRC4.
 
:lol Yeah, that's why they use UMD's that hold over a GB of data. 32MB will not hold an entire track, the textures and models for all the cars, track, etc. The music, the code for the physics, graphics, io, and network engines.

Perhaps. But I just played a full race of KINETICA (a DVD release) with the disc out, so I'm not too worried about the size of my unit.
 
So other than keeping a handfull of car models and the track in RAM, if the audio is managed correctly, the game would only need to load a race or load the frontend after the race, and in between, spin the drive for 3-4 seconds every 2 minutes to fetch a chunk of music.

DS and GBA games ditch the music in multiboot mode usually. I would hate to suffer too many feature losses, but what do you expect for free?
 
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