Saturday 11th October 2003
Nothing's actually new. Except that I'm back.
The actual PS2 finally came out in 2000. It was about three hundred bucks. Of course, by then, any given DVP [DVDPlayer] was less than a PS2. And, of course, it doubled as a DVP. Whether the PS2 was a 128bit or a 256bit is still open to debate. No one really discusses these things in bits anymore. Half the sites I hit call it a 128bit machine, and half call it a 256bit machine. At least among those who call it either.
For those who have been wondering: I'm not dead. I just took some time off. I've pretty well been dealing with gremlin.net since the beginning of 1997, in some form or other, and I thought I'd let it go for a bit while I did other stuff.
Not that I really did much other stuff, exactly. I just didn't do this for a while.
Okay. I did some other stuff.
I did a lot of shopping, for example. Mostly for toys. Although I did finally find a decent trenchcoat. I had a decent trenchcoat already, insofar as a black London Fog is decent. Which is what I generally wore instead of my other dozen trenchcoats. But I found a black gloveleather coat which is nearly identical to the one I used to have. Which is a longish story.
Actually, it's a shortish story. It's just dumb. I was wearing it one night in 1986 when it got kinda lose and worked its way into the rear axle of a Ninja1050 at 185MPH. It doesn't exist anymore. Neither does the Ninja. I'm mostly still here.
So I replaced the trenchcoat. I'm in somewhat less of a hurry to replace the motorbike. If I lock up the rear wheels on the Formula at 185MPH, things are easier to survive.
Anyway: I'm pretty pleased with it. Partly because it's actually long enough to reach the tops of my jumpboots. I hate coats which are lucky to reach my knees. It's also that strangely perfect design which isn't really hot at eighty degrees, but stays warm enough at zero. Which shouldn't actually be possible. Which is why I don't care much about thermodynamics.
On the subject, I picked up a few books. Including Hawking's rewrite of A Brief History of Time. I've been avoiding contact with the ToE to date, just because the name Theory of Everything sounded so dumb. But, looking into it a bit, it's making some sense. Not quite enough to care much about, but enough to acknowledge. Otherwise, the book is unusually funny [an astronaut in a black hole couldn't use his knowledge of the future since he'd be trapped behind the event horizon; also, he'd be turning into spaghetti (paraphrased)], which makes up for the simplicity of it. It's worth reading if you have even the slightest interest in that sort of thing.
I also picked up Why God Won't Go away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief--a really useful book on the neurological disease of theism. It's less vernacular and more specific; but it's pretty good at explaining how and why these people are able to pretend that deities exist.
I also picked up--finally--Smith's The Case against God, although I haven't had a chance to read it yet. I've just had enough people recommend it [mostly to theists, of course] that I thought I'd take a look at it. Until I have, there's probably not much more to say about it for now.
Otherwise, I've mostly been buying films and videogames. I think I've got roughly everything in the survival horror genre now. And I've been moving into car games, too. I already had all the TwistedMetal games, of course; but I've been getting the Need for Speed and GranTurismo games too. Officially--as far as the IRS know--they're all for researching Deadache; that aside, they're kinda fun. Especially on the GameCube, since it's faster than the PS2 and has better controllers.
Which reminds me. The PS3 is in the works. Just in time to convince me that people are morons. Again.
The PS3. Or, really, what the thing might look like in a year or two.
The PSX. Sony, 1995.
Look familiar? This is a PSX.
The PSDevThingy.Am I really the only one who remembers what a PSX was? I've got a few, if that makes me particularly special.
And yet: everyone who thinks they know what they're blathering about is calling the PS3 a PSX. Which, if anything, equates to the PS10. This bugs me. A lot.
Beyond that, there are all sorts of kooky ideas about this machine. But let's start earlier. Let's start with the actual PSX. The Sony PlayStation. The machine predating the N64.
Okay. 1995. Existing machines include the SuperNintendo, the Sega ProductMix, the Amiga CD32, and the Atari Jaguar. The Atari, which was actually the most advanced, flunked. The CD32, which was a decent machine, flunked too. The Sega Mess--everything from the Genesis to the Saturn to the SegaCD--flunked. Not because no one liked them; not because there were no games; simply because Sega would release a new machine every damned week and nothing was backward compatible. That left the SNES.
The SNES sucked. But, it had a lot of games, and it wasn't going anywhere. Also, it was better than the NES, which really sucked, and which was only slightly better than the Atari5200.
Then, one day, Sony released the PSX. It was called a PSX because no one was ready for a two-letter acronym yet. The Sony PS didn't sound right. PSX was effectively short for the PlayStation Console.
About a year later, the N64 was released, following the same TLA convention.
Meanwhile, Sony kinda unofficially released what was arguably the PS2.
It was just another PSX in basic function. But it was multiregion, so you could play the imported games, and it had a CDR in it. Known by myriad names [including any given spelling of Eurosi], it was a PSX SDK. It let you bugtest PSX games in a real machine, without going through the hassle of encoding a literal PSX disc. And, it was only a thousand bucks. No one really bought one.
So. We've got the PSX, the N64, and the SDK no one's willing to pay for. Next: the Sega DreamCast shows up to cause the instant extinction of Sega.
The Sega DC did a couple of neat things. It eradicated the future of Sega, of course. Because it totally failed to do anything useful for all the games from all the older Sega machines, convincing everyone that the DreamCast would be replaced by something newer and better and even more retrophobic next week. It also became known as the DC. Not the DCX, not the SDC, occasionally as the PoS--but that's another matter. Now we can name these things with only two letters. Which is great timing, since the 1296 two-letter DotComs had all pretty well evaporated by the time the thing came out.
Most DC games showed up ported to the N64 or the PSX. Sega died out and, like Atari, stuck to making games for real systems.
Then, one day in 1998, people started talking about the PS2.
The PS2 was going to be this amazing machine. It would be a 256bit system which would play DVDs. Therefore, it would be about a thousand bucks.
Realise that, every time a new system came out, it attempted to double the competition's stuff. Usually. The CD32 and the PSX were 32bit machines; the N64 and Jaguar were 64bit; and so on. The DC was reportedly a 128bit machine; I'm not sure what it ended up being, other than extinct. Logically, the PS2 should be 256bit. And, logically, since the PSX played CDs and the PSDev played CDRs, the PS2 should play DVDs. Mostly because DVDPlayers were still a thousand bucks and everyone wanted a 256bit PlayStation which they could watch films on too. Which logically equated to a machine costing at least a thousand bucks.
As of 1999, this was the PSX2:
Whatever it was, it finally came out. And it played DVDs. and it broke instantly. Mostly because all the prototype shots had it positioned vertically, which, it turned out, led directly to the Click of Death. Which was what happened when the machine broke because it really wasn't built to stand vertically like that. Later models reportedly fixed the problem. Although, personally, I still leave the thing horizontal--it's a good table for my N64 anyway.
Next to the PS2 supporting my N64 is, of course, my DVP table, which looks a lot like a VCR, except I never use it for anything. My DVP then serves as a table for my GameCube.
Because that showed up one day to replace the N64. And, while it's a far better system than pretty much anything else, it's dangerously close to something Sega would have come up with.
The GameCube plays DVDs, after a fashion. Which is to say that it'll play a DVD fashioned down to the three-inch discs GC games come on. Probably. It's not something I've personally tried to do. The GameCube is a 128bit machine which plays only GameCube games. Although Hunter's got a patchcable letting her send her GameBoy through the GameCube and into the television; but that's another matter altogether--I've been avoiding the GameBoy thing since Sega couldn't decide whether they wanted a GameGear or a Nomad.
Based on the 128bit graphics of the GameCube, I'm siding with those calling the PS2 a 128bit system. So: the PS3 should probably be a 256bit machine, at least.
Whether the PS3 will have a DVR in it--which is the latest certainty proffered by those who have no idea what they're talking about--is anyone's guess. Some of the designs I've seen for the PS3 allow for it--dualdisc setups, allowing you to play one disc while recording another. Not that I'm expecting the thing to copy DVDs without a lot of aftermarket modifications.
Otherwise, I'm not seeing a lot of purpose for a DVR in this thing. Even given the potential tunercard and tivo drive which may or may not be involved.
I've got a hunch about it, of course. And that leads us to yet another disaster.
About the time that the GameCube showed up without much warning, everyone was theorising to hell and back about the XBox.
I've never bought an XBox. I suppose I might pick one up now that it's getting colder out and I might have some use for a spaceheater. But I've looked at it.
The XBox is a 128bit toy. You can upgrade to a DVP for another hundred bucks, having spent two hundred on the machine itself. The thing has the basic mass of the VCR I'm using as a shelf for my DVP, but it's a toploader, so that doesn't really help me much. Otherwise, every XBox game I've seen to date is cloned on the PS2, the GameCube, or both. The only difference I've noticed is that Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters cost me twenty bucks on the GameCube and didn't cost me fifty when I didn't buy it for the XBox I didn't buy. I dont see a good reason for the XBox to exist. Unless you really wanted a Microsoft iMac, or something.
Based on the XBox, which proved that people will buy anything when it comes out, and will buy anything required to make the first anything work even as a basic fifty-dollar DVP for only four hundred bucks, I'm thinking that the PS3 will probably do most or all of the different things people are accusing it of being capable of, once you drop a couple thousand bucks into all the additional junk needed to make that happen. The actual PS3 will probably be about three hundred bucks [possibly available by giftmas 2004, but probably delayed until just after Episode Three: Fall of the Rebublic has been released], and will probably be little more than a 256bit PS2 with 128meg memory sticks instead of 8meg memory cards. It might have a tunercard and a 120gig drive to record things on, but I currently doubt it. More likely, the tivo option will end up being a plugnplay thing sold separately.
What the PS3 probably will have, though, is an integrated network card. With all the PS2 games expecting a cablemodem coming out, it would make sense to include the twenty-dollar port as standard; I could see that much happening.
Right now, it's simply too early to bet on things. Except for the most obvious part: the PS3 will be called the PS3. The PSX came out in 1995; some of us have the mental prowess to remember that.
More later....
--Gremlin