New Sony PlayStation with MPEG-2 decoding............
nikkeibp.asiabiztech.com
Sony Unit to Outline Next-Generation PlayStation Soon
November 17, 1998 (TOKYO) -- Sony Computer Entertainment Inc.
(SCE) may outline its next-generation PlayStation as early as late November,
informed sources told Nikkei Electronics.
PlayStation is Japan's most popular 32-bit video game machine.
The company sees November as a critical month, because rival Sega
Enterprises Ltd. plans to begin selling its new-generation game machine,
Dreamcast, in the Japanese market on Nov. 27, the sources explained.
Nikkei Electronics anticipates that following the release of details scheduled
for late November, SCE will put the PlayStation on sale at the end of 1999.
"The new machine will feature a function to receive data, such as music, via
the Internet," said an executive of a company that is joining forces with SCE
on a data delivery service for the machine.
SCE will also make public a microprocessor for digital signal processing and
a RISC-type microcontroller for video game machines, both of which SCE is
jointly developing with Toshiba Corp., next February at a meeting of the
International Solid State Circuits Conference in the United States. Nikkei
Electronics assumes that these chips will be used in the next-generation
PlayStation machine.
The digital signal processor can decode MPEG2 data. Therefore, some
industry analysts believe that a DVD-ROM drive will be incorporated into
the new PlayStation. |
