Pre PSP sony handheld had games,

Now if we can only find a picture of the beast.

Yakumo

 

I swear if Ken becomes pres of Sony, the apacolypse is among us.

 

Surely he can't be much worse than whoever's CEO now. Sony sure have done some retarded things recently - Memory Stick with its three different confusing variations, MicroMV (a video tape format that seemed to come out of nowhere), Hi-MD (I really don't know what future they see in MiniDiscs with shit like 4GB flash RAM becoming available last year), SACD (the Betamax of the 21st century, though it's also partially Philips' fault too), and about a million other things...

 

Don't know if we'll ever see this portable surface... One can hope of course, PlayStation's initial controller designs were shown to the public as well... (with some of them looking like real MegaDrive and SNES clones, only with more buttons ^^)

They might have canned it because Dreamcast was posing such a threat back then, Sony even released their console earlier than intended to counter Sega.

I think they also anticipated the release of Wonderswan and GameBoy Advance as a high risk.

 

Waaaaay back on the old board somebody posted this, too. Apparently Capcom and some other where already working on games when Sony management stopped the project.

 

Minidisc is still pretty popular, especially in Japan.

You've got to think of it in terms of cost for storage.

What do those 4GB flash RAM (in whatever format) components cost?

I bet it's less than making 4GB on $6.95/GB HI-MDs.

Besides, random playlists suck, I want to individually select one track after another. MD is good about letting you do that.

 

Yeah, Mini Discs are still very popular here in Japan with MP3 players taking the back seat unlike Europe which it the complete opposite. I bought the wife a RIO MP3 player for when she goes out or what ever. It's tinny and only takes one AAA battery which lasts for 8 hours. Shit thing is that it only has a 128 MB memory on it so it's of no use to me since I like to have a huge selection at one so I'll stick with my RIO MP3 CD. For the wife however it's great except for when she pestering me to upload songs to it.

Yakumo

 

MD was initially meant as a medium to sell music, like cd's. It failed horribly, but thanks to the rewriteable capabilities of the medium, it still exists today.

 

that's right. I remember seeing a few MD albums when I worked for HMV as well as a few albums on Digital Tape or what ever that failed tape was. At least MD did better than that.

Yakumo

 

Here in the states its mostly the ipod thats the standard mp3 player,however mini discs are still bougth as a cheaper alternative to an ipod (who wouldnt whent the priced ranges from $299-499 depending on how much space is avalible).

 

DAT was provably the worst idea ever. I bet Phillips is still hitting themselfs on the head over that. One can still buy a large selection of comercial MD's (from, well, Sony artists) including recent albuns, if you know where to look.

 

CELL was made in cooperation between Sony, Toshiba and IBM, two of them are Japanese companies and more than half of the funding came from Japan. Since it was such a huge investment, which could only have worked out in cooperation between different companies, I wouldn't speak of a lack of brainpower. I think this is the biggest investment Sony has ever made.

CELL will be integrated in tons of electonics devices, and if it's more than just PR talk I would speak of a big innovation.

 

Didn't they make DCC? At least DAT got used as backup solution whereas DCC died off very fast. And BTW, Assembler, MIPS is not a Japanese design either (so there go PSX and N64), neither is 68000 - only SuperH is (and then there's custom designs like EE that use an "American" ISA)

 

Indeed! Oh Pippin, your unlamented death was not in vain! :-D

But on the other hand, you might say that the PPC is currently the most innovative/efficient CPU design, just like MIPS was in 1994 and ARM still is in the embedded area, and apart from the CPU all devices are converging (ie Macs using GFX hardware similar to PC).

 

I remeber when DAT first came out, and my dad got one of the first DAT players for like $900, and now you can't give those things away.

They use DAT a lot in yes music production, and also things like sound for movies and TV shows, etc. But as a commercial product for the masses it's dead.

 

You have a point there, but the money invested in EE is 'nothing' compared to CELL really. They would be 'quite' stupid to do nothing with it, but as you pointed out, the future will tell. After all, how many promises were kept with PlayStation 2 (downloadable content, movies, music,...)?