Sony PlayStation 2 article lifted from the Rambus thread. No source was posted for the article.
Any speculation on the implications for the PC industry?
Linux OS seems to have good karma.
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To: Doug McLeod (17157 )
From: MileHigh Sunday, Mar 7 1999 4:48PM ET
Reply # of 17215
PlayStation 2: Developers React
PSX2: As UK developers return from Sony's masterful PlayStation 2 launch, praise for the new machine continues to build. The implications of the tech specs are slowly sinking in and for many, it looks as if Sony are raising their game beyond Dreamcast to compete with Intel/Microsoft in the home PC market.
Jez San is MD of Argonaut software, one of the UK's biggest and most respected development houses which brought 3D to Nintendo with its co-production work on Starfox and the SFX chip. His company is also the chip business via ARC Cores. Even he admitted to be very impressed: "It's very, very powerful. I made a number of guesses all through last year about what would be the ideal PlayStation 2 spec and Sony's met all my most optimistic expectations. Its CPU is better than the best Pentium CPU. Its graphics chip is better than the best PC graphics card. It's far better than any PC.
"Compared to Dreamcast, the CPU is 50-100% faster without taking account of the additional processors. Taken all together, it's five to ten times more powerful than Dreamcast. We know that Sony have sold 50 million PlayStations so there's no question we're planning to product a lot of games for PlayStation 2. The atmosphere at the launch was great. Sony were very decent, they really wanted everyone onboard. There was no arrogance."
Martin Brown, Development Manager at Team 17, was no less impressed. He described his initial reaction to the machine's spec as distinctly mixed: "Shocked, excited and completely horrified. The potential is enormous. The amount of manpower to fullfill people's expectations will be huge." However when told of Squaresoft's statement that only five developers in the world had the resources to master the system, Brown laughed. "Don't believe that. It's just Squaresoft hype. Team 17 will put in the resources in to push this system, don't you worry!"
Trade newspaper MCV carries yet more praise for the new system.
Bruno Bonnell, president of Infogrames, perhaps most acutely realises Sega's worst fears with his comment: "Very impressive. We'll now look mostly towards ports for the Dreamcast and original projects for the new PlayStation." While Shiny Entertainment's Dave Perry is perhaps even blunter: "Sony bought my soul today." For Rob Dyer, President of Eidos USA, the impact was much the same: "They have raised the bar to such a level that Sony's competition is no longer who we all thought it was. They talked about vastly outperforming anything that Intel or Microsoft can produce, not Sega."
One of the most interesting aspects of the PlayStation 2's tech specs is the news that rather than use its own custom OS, as with PlayStation I, or license Microsoft's WinCE as with Sega's Dreamcast, Sony have instead licensed Linux. For those not in the know, Linux is a freeware clone of Unix. First created as a DIY project by a Finnish college student, it has subsequently grown into one of today's most respected and robust OS's thanks to an unprecedented effort by hackers the world over.
As with Dreamcast, the OS is entirely optional so developers can bypass it to go direct to the hardware, and in fact will need to do this to access some of the co-processors. However, what it does mean is that developers can use robust, well-tested elements of Linux for some functions, considerably speeding up development time. Moreover, while Linux is principally aimed at the business server market, there are a clutch of decent applications such as word processors and spreadsheets which could be swiftly retargetted for the home market.
It would be ironic, if after Japanese consoles such as the Mega Drive and SNES killed off non-PC home computers such as the Amiga and ST, that Sony might resurrect this concept via a PC-trashing home computer disguised as a console.
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