Tag Archives | Sony

Sony's Playstation 2 Backwards Compatibility Patent: Don't Count On It

Posted by Jared Newman on September 15, 2010 at 8:07 am

From the wild world of Sony video game patents comes a little adapter box that can supposedly run Playstation 2 games when attached to a Playstation 3.

According to Eurogamer, the patent application calls for a device with its own DVD decoder and emulator, CPU, GPU, sound processor and memory. The adapter would read information from Playstation 2 discs, inserted into the PS3, and perform all the legwork, possibly sending compressed audio and video back to the PS3 via ethernet connection. This would allow PS2 support without the Emotion Engine, a processor Sony included in early PS3 models specifically for playing last-generation games.

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Sony Playstation Turns 15

Posted by Jared Newman on September 9, 2010 at 11:31 am

Sony’s Playstation is making me feel pretty old today, the 15th anniversary of its North American launch. The original Playstation console was released stateside on September 9, 1995. I remember getting one shortly before summer camp, and not wanting to be yanked away.

The milestone comes at a time in the Playstation 3’s console cycle — four years deep — that we usually start hearing about the next generation. But Sony, like its rival Microsoft, is keeping mum, and digging in for the long haul with new technology for the PS3.

One big push for Sony will be 3D, a source of excitement for the electronics industry, but also one of skepticism. The Playstation 3 is moving ahead with 3D gaming as Microsoft carefully waits for 3D adoption to grow (red-blue glasses experiments on the Xbox 360 aside), and Nintendo focuses on the glasses-free 3DS handheld.

Then, there’s motion control. The Playstation Move wand, however more accurate and capable than Nintendo’s Wii, is unquestionably “me-too” technology, and Sony’s goal of bringing motion control to enthusiast gamers is a risky undertaking. As I’ve said several times before, the starting lineup of games for Move and Microsoft’s Kinect aren’t miles ahead of what Nintendo has already done, despite the fancier technology behind them.

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Sony Cheers for Buttons Ahead of Playstation Move Launch

Posted by Jared Newman on September 8, 2010 at 9:19 am

The Playstation Move, Sony’s answer to the Wii, launches in nine days, and the marketing is getting predictably louder.

As PC World’s Matt Peckham points out, Sony has created a few websites to convince people that they need a Playstation Move, including a skewed product comparison chart and a silly video creation tool. But my favorite of these efforts is Yaybuttons.com, which, as the name suggests, defends the virtue of buttons against a faceless foe.

It’s clearly a takedown of Microsoft’s Kinect for Xbox 360, which uses only a camera to track real-world motion, and no actual controllers to hold. “It turns out that buttons are pretty important,” says a dialog box that appears when you click an image of the Move controller. “Not like ‘save the whales’ important. More like ‘not play games that suck’ important.”

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The Curse of 3D TV

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 3, 2010 at 5:10 pm

(At Panasonic’s IFA booth: People using 3D glasses and monitors to watch the live women in front of their faces.)

If you determine the big story here at the IFA tech show here in Berlin based on raw square footage in the booths, there’s no question what it is: 3D TV is everywhere.

The massive booths of consumer-electronics giants such as Sony, Samsung, Panasonic, and Toshiba are dominated by 3D. There’s 3D that requires pricey active-shutter glasses. There’s 3D that uses cheaper passive specs. (There’s even 3D from the Fraunhofer Institute that doesn’t need glasses.) There are 3D games and 3D Blu-Ray players and 3D soccer broadcasts and 3D LCD sets and 3D plasmas and 3D projectors and giant walls made out of 3D screens.

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Sony's New Readers: Better Still, Still Pricey

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 31, 2010 at 11:38 pm

Back in 2006, before the world knew what a Kindle was, Sony released the first modern e-reader with a power-efficient, glare-free E-Ink screen. It’s upgraded them and added new models ever since–and it’s announcing improved versions of all its models today, a week after Amazon started shipping its newest Kindle. The company gave me a sneak peek last week.

As before, Sony is the only major e-reader maker that offers devices in three sizes: the 7″ Daily Edition, the 6″ Touch Edition (with a screen the same size as the one on the standard Kindle and on the Nook), and the 5″ Pocket Edition. Last year’s Touch and Daily Editions had touch-screen interfaces that worked with a fingertip (for general navigation) or a stylus (for note-taking and other precision work). The big news is that the whole line now sports touch, including the Pocket Edition–and Sony has come up with a way to implement technology without adding a layer to the screen. (Last year’s touch Sonys had murkier screens than the non-touch competition.)

In my brief hands-on time with the readers, the displays looked good. (I wasn’t able to compare them side-by-side with other e-readers, but they were noticeably more legible than last year’s Sonys.) The touch input worked reasonably well, too. But flipping pages didn’t have quite the effortless feel of e-reading apps on an iPad, an iPhone, or an Android phone, and I think the Kindle’s less fancy input system–physical buttons and a keyboard–works at least as well for the basics of exploring books.

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Why Playstation Controller Buttons Are Symbols, Not Letters

Posted by Jared Newman on August 26, 2010 at 9:20 am

From the Nintendo era onward, the vast majority of video game controllers have named their face buttons after letters in the alphabet — almost always picking from A, B, C, X, Y and Z — with the exception of the Sony Playstation and its progeny.

I never thought to question the Playstation’s combination of square, circle, triangle and X, but the folks at Famitsu magazine did. 1UP relays the magazine’s conversation with Sony designer Teiyu Goto:

We wanted something simple to remember, which is why we went with icons or symbols … I gave each symbol a meaning and a color. The triangle refers to viewpoint; I had it represent one’s head or direction and made it green. Square refers to a piece of paper; I had it represent menus or documents and made it pink. The circle and X represent ‘yes’ or ‘no’ decision-making and I made them red and blue respectively.

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If the PS3 is Jailbroken, Can We Have Other OS Back?

Posted by Jared Newman on August 20, 2010 at 10:13 am

Although I never found much utility in Other OS, a Playstation 3 feature that could turn the console into a basic computer running Linux, my heart went out to people who used Other OS before Sony scrapped it.

Sony said it removed Other OS in March to “protect the integrity of the console,” possibly because one hacker came too close to exploiting the feature in a way that would allow piracy. But now, OzModChips claims to have the first PS3 modchip on a USB stick. In theory, this allows people to play bootleg and homebrew games and make disc backups. Supposedly, it can also bypass firmware updates that Sony might use to banish the hack.

If Sony’s piracy safeguards have indeed fallen, I propose that Sony should bring back Other OS. After all, once the integrity of the console is lost, there’s no point in protecting it at the expense of users who did no harm.

A typical argument against draconian anti-piracy measures goes like this: Such attempts are pointless, because they eventually fail, and the only people who suffer are paying customers who have to jump through hoops. That argument didn’t apply to the Playstation 3, because it was rock solid against hackers for almost four years, and legitimate customers were none the wiser.

With the removal of Other OS, everything changed. A feature was lost, and now it appears that Sony’s previously unhackable machine is defeated through unrelated means. I’m skeptical of OzModChips’ solution, which costs $170, until it’s verified by an independent source, but if it’s legitimate, why should Sony pretend that removing Other OS keeps the Playstation 3’s integrity intact?

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PS3 Bundle Speaks Volumes About Playstation Move

Posted by Jared Newman on August 18, 2010 at 8:39 am

I’m not in Germany for GamesCom, but Sony’s big announcement from the video game trade show was a Playstation 3 bundle that includes the Playstation Move camera and motion control wand, one game and a 320 GB hard drive, for $400.

Interesting strategy. By opting for a motion control bundle with a bigger hard drive and price tag than the standard PS3 model, Sony is sending a clear message: This is motion control for the devoted gamer. Come for the roomier hard drive, stay for the fancy new peripheral that lets you play real-time strategy games on a console.

At least I hope that’s the message. After all, a $400 console is twice the price of Nintendo’s Wii, and $100 more than the Kinect Xbox 360 bundle Microsoft announced last month. Sony’s kidding itself if it thinks the occasional gamer is going to sink $400 into a game console, especially now that so many cheaper options exist.

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We Need Real Answers on Playstation Plus and Hulu Plus

Posted by Jared Newman on July 5, 2010 at 7:44 pm

Sony’s customers are still in the dark on whether the premium Playstation Plus service will be required to watch Hulu Plus on the Playstation 3, even as more unverified information comes in.

Last week, I discovered that Hulu Plus on the PS3 may require a Playstation Plus subscription ($50 per year or $18 quarterly), based on some code hidden in one of Hulu’s Web pages. I e-mailed Sony and Hulu for a response, but heard nothing. Sony later dismissed the report as “rumors and speculation,” which is an odd thing to say given that Hulu’s own website provided the evidence.

Now, Playstation Lifestyle reports that PS Plus will only be required during Hulu Plus’ preview period. Invitations for that preview are going out in batches, but there’s no word on when the service will be available to all.

But Playstation Lifestyle’s story doesn’t come straight from Sony or Hulu, either. The source may actually be a Reddit commenter who reached out to Hulu’s generic support line. By Sony’s rules, we can dismiss the second-hand response as “rumors and speculation” as well.

This isn’t the first time Sony has gone dark, letting unverified information fill the news vacuum. At the end of February, owners of non-Slim Playstation 3s discovered that their consoles weren’t working, and they risked losing data just by turning on their consoles. Sony didn’t warn people about the data loss until 16 hours after first acknowledging problems. Meanwhile, PS3 owners were left to fend for themselves in Internet forums, attempting to answer many of the questions Sony never did.

The Hulu Plus situation isn’t as urgent, but with Playstation Plus up and running, subscribers shouldn’t have to get their information from the rumor mill. Sony should explain Hulu Plus pricing to its customers, either by confirming what we’ve seen and heard or acknowledging that the details are still up in the air.

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