Games
Stupid Sony! Ridiculous PSX!
The PSX has been released in Japan, and despite a high price and harsh industry criticism for Sony’s yanking of the MP3 + DVD recording facilities at the last minute it’s selling well, tho apparently because of preorders and not launch-day demand. PC Watch (Japanese page) has a PSX dissection and it’s quite interesting, moreso for what’s outside the box than in.
The joystick ports are on the back, so you’ll not be swapping in specialized controllers easily or often. All the other ports are, unsurprisingly, in the rear as well. They’re also under a ridiculous overhanging platform so you can’t reach it from the top at all.
There are HDD access+write and DVD write LEDs on both the top face and front face, tho one seems to be present on one side and not the other (HDD access is only on top). Why they put a DVD-write light on there when this feature is disabled is beyond me. Rushing to meet the New Years sales season is the reason bandied about by those in the know, and sony says both this and the MP3 feature will be updatable. According to PC Watch no small amount of anti-dust measures were employed to allow what is apparently one of the first slot-in DVD recorders.
PC Watch also has a significant amount of detail on the manus and actual use of the system (All in Japanese). It is revealed that the music ripping and compression technology is Sony’s better than * ATRAC, but strangely it uses ATRAC 3, where MD recorders have used 4 + 4.5 for years (And Sharp has even gone to ATRAC5).
Pre-orders were apparently significant, but launch-day sales were ‘quiet’ because of the late announcement of cancelled features. Bottom line appears to be that the system is crippled, rushed and user-unfriendly (at least from a cabling point of view).
--NFG
[ Dec 18 2003 ]
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