Posts Tagged ‘PS3’

The Red Ring Strikes

Tuesday, February 24th, 2009

Just as I was getting back into GTA IV in a big way over the past few nights, my Xbox 360 Elite red ringed today.  It started with freezing and white vertical artifacts.  They were lines of a sort.  The 360 froze every time I booted it, but no red rings.  For a while I wasn’t getting any ring at all.  Once I unplugged the power and plugged it back in I got the red ring.

Microsoft’s online return website was easy to use.  I just registered the console and picked the option to have a box sent.  No muss no fuss.  Now I just have to wait for the box and the transfer to happen.

I didn’t expect to ever get the red ring.  My console is about 15 months old from the time of purchase (it is about 30 months since the manufacture date).  The console hasn’t had any prior problems.  I’d also heard anecdotally that Elites seemed to have less red ring problems.  It was probably just the case that there were less Elites out there to red ring so you don’t hear about them as much.  I can dream of getting a Jasper Elite as an exchange, but it’s doubtful.  I don’t think any have been found in the wild yet.

Now to figure out what I want to play on my PS3 or PC.  Maybe I’ll finally play through Crisis Core on the PSP.  My library is feeling very 360 slanted all of a sudden.

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Playstation 3′s Hard Drive Problem

Saturday, May 10th, 2008

Sometime during the past year, one of the Playstation 3′s advantages started to turn against it. Every PS3 has a hard drive and almost all of them are 40GB or larger. Mine are 60GB. Xbox 360 by contrast has the bulk of it’s consoles with only 20GB hard drives. I would guess that more of them have no hard drive than the 120GB Elite model that I bought. Particularly given all of the downloadable content offered by Xbox Live, the Xbox hard drives are undersized. This put Sony in a position to capitalize on leading in the download space. With the recently updated Playstation Store still lacking any movie or music downloads, Sony hasn’t really taken advantage of the opportunity.

Now, a new problem has crept in. The Blu-Ray drive that is probably the systems dominant selling feature right now is excruciatingly slow as a game disk reader. After getting my Xbox 360 I was shocked to see how much faster it loaded than my PS3. The PS3 was supposed to be the more advanced machine with a next generation media drive, but loading was a problem.

The first way that developers sought to alleviate the loading issue was by duplicating content on the disc. For instance a texture of a door might be used at the beginning and end of the game. If the texture is on the disc only once, the drive has to cycle back to find it. If you duplicate the file in the relevant section of the disc, it will read faster. This strategy led to some mildly poor PR early on when it was found that games touting how big the game files were conveniently ignored the duplicated content. Quotes about how games “wouldn’t have fit” on an Xbox DVD may actually have fit or been close without the duplicate content.

Now another solution has cropped up. The hard drive install. It is faster than the duplicate content solution and also allows the developer to use more of the disc. Now for the bad part. The hard drive installs are regularly taking 4-5GB of space. The process itself can take 20 minutes! That isn’t a console, it is a PC. The 40GB PS3s that have been selling over the past year would only fit 8 games at that install size. I can just see it a couple of years from now. You’ll be deleting old games to fit new ones. Want to play an old title out of your library? Be prepared for a 20 minute install and to delete something else.

Sony is in a tough place with this one. Hardware installs provide more competitive performance around loading times and may perform better than the Xbox 360. However, this slippery slope may create more problems than it is worth over the next couple of years. Personally I think I’d rather deal with some loading than give away massive amounts of hard drive space. At least then I wouldn’t have to wait 20 minutes before playing the game at all.

Add that to my Sony Playstation 3 hardware refresh list. 1) Add an IR port for on-off with a universal remote. 2) Fix the form factor to fit in a standard stacked media cabinet. 3) Put in a faster Blu-Ray drive to eliminate load-time work arounds.

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Rethinking the PS3 vs Xbox 360 Coding Divide

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008

In my previous post titled “Building a Wall…Playstation 3’s Cell Processor” I commented on the impact of console architectural strategy on the current console development environment. My conclusion was the the PS3′s architecture created a problematic barrier to entry for coding games on Sony’s system because the Xbox 360′s installed base makes it the primary development focus.

It seems that developers have discovered that coding for the PS3 first may actually force them to produce better games! Traditional programming has generally followed a linear path that is somewhat easily broken up when run on multiple symmetric processors. All the processors work the same, so the output when coding for one or four of the processors isn’t dramatically different. They can all work on pieces of the same problem without worrying about keeping them synchronized. The asymmetric nature of the PS3 doesn’t allow that to happen. The processors need to be given independent tasks and kept synchronized since they don’t all run the same way. The missing component here is that when code is optimized to run asymmetrically, it can be used on a symmetric processor the same way! The asymmetric structure forces the programmer to think differently about the underlying structure of the game engine, and that engine can work on Xbox 360 well too.

This is a great development for Sony, who can now say “told you so” to some of the cell processor naysayers. I’d imagine that this will bring a substantial increase in the number of games lead-developed on the PS3. No one seems to want to come out and say that though for fear of incurring Microsoft’s wrath. Even though PS3 is looking great over the long term, Xbox 360 is still the lead console today. (Yes, I know I’m leaving out the Wii, but I’m talking about cutting-edge gaming.) This bodes well for continued progress of the PS3. With the recent Blu Ray win and the increased comfort level of developers, things are looking good. Now why couldn’t Sony figure out that an IR port to be able to turn the PS3 on and off with a universal remote would be a good idea?

Disclosure: I own Sony stock (and Microsoft too for that matter).

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Sony, Please Revamp Your Playstation Store

Tuesday, November 27th, 2007

Dear Sony,

I really want the Playstation store to be the answer. You’ve built a device that is exceptionally powerful, albeit difficult to develop for, gaming device. You’ve included the ability to even install other operating systems and a user-upgradeable hard drive. The Playstation 3 is screaming to be that digital entertainment hub that you envisioned. So what is this poor excuse for an online distribution system called the Playstation Store?

I can forgive, at least temporarily, the lack of downloadable video on the site. It takes a while to craft agreements with all of the different content owners. Just remember, your console has been out for a year already and we haven’t seen anything yet. Microsoft has plenty of content. Please tell me that you are playing nice with the other providers. Youc could at least give me some Sony titles to download in the meantime. You do want my download $s don’t you?

I’m not terribly enthused with the way that content takes so long to download. Microsoft’s systems are much faster. A great first step would be to allow the content to download in the background. Why do systems updates need to be in the foreground to download? Why do game demos require me to leave my Playstation 3 on? Microsoft simply pops up a message on my Xbox 360 while I’m playing to let me know that it is done with a download.

The major, unforgivable item, is the atrocious interface design. The icons are tiny and tough to read. There is too much going on in each screen. The navigation is confusing. “Next” doesn’t work on the homepage to scroll, you have to use the arrow. The back button on the remote actually exists the application, it doesn’t go back to the previous screen. Some downloads are in the major categories, others are in subcategories that show up as icons within categories. For example, games are a category, but themes are a subcategory.

On my projection screen the store is ugly, slow, difficult to navigate, but legible. On my 37″ 1080i/720p family room LCD it is impossible to read. Unfortunately, that television is not one that we sit close to. I like having my Playstation there, but I can’t read a thing on it. Please see a recent post that I wrote on resolution independence.

Microsoft’s store by comparison is easy to navigate. There is far less on the screen. The scroll down with a split-screen blow-up of the selected item on the right works much better. Even if you can’t come up with a compelling innovation, please just copy the state of the art. Your store is essentially a webpage, so a redesign isn’t difficult. I recognize that some of my other requests might require a firmware update, but this one could be pulled off with simply a server change. I’m waiting.

Sincerely,

SD

P.S. – I really do enjoy my PS3. I just want to help you make it better.

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