XBox, PS2 or GC?

Ohhh the Gamecube rocks! Rock on Gamecube! Thug life

I don't think we'll see a PS3 until 2005 at the earliest, but there is a new portable Sony games unit in development; the PSP.



The PSP design certainly looks a league ahead of rival products, such as Nokia's new N-Gage and Nintendo's hugely popular GameBoy Advance. Of course, this is simply the concept design, and the final result may be less sleek, depending on such factors as ergonomics and manufacturing costs.

The device in the top right corner is the PSP Universal Media Disc (UMD), a DVD-like dual-layer medium offering 1.8GB of storage. UMD comes with DVD-style region coding and copy-protection mechanism based on the Advanced Encryption System (AES). Each disc has a unique ID number too.

Sony has already said that the PSP will be powered by a 90nm processor built from a MIPS 32-bit R4000 core. The chip will feature a SIMD vector processing engine along the lines of Intel's SSE 2 and PowerPC's AltiVec. It will feature 8MB of embedded memory clocked to 333MHz and operating at 1.2V. The memory bandwidth is quoted as 2.6GBps.

A second MIPS R4000 core will be used as the basis for the PSP's media engine, with 2MB of embedded DRAM, and again fabbed at 90nm.

Alongside these two chips will sit two dedicated graphics processors, one for high-level graphics manipulation, the other for the raw pixel shunting. This second core contains 2MB of embedded video memory operating across a 256-bit 5.3GBps bus. It can deliver a fill rate of 664 million pixels per second in 24-bit colour and churn out 33 million polygons per second with transform and lighting effects.

The PSP will feature Dolby 7.1 multi-channel audio, with 3D sound. It will support MP3, AAC and Sony's own ATRAC3 sound formats. It uses AVC (H.264) and MPEG4 for video. The machine's UMD media can hold up to two hours' of DVD-quality video or four hours 'standard' quality, whatever that is. Either way, movies are displayed on the unit's 4.5in 16:9 widescreen ratio 480 x 272-pixel LCD, seen here.

One of the key features of the PSP is 802.11b wireless networking for multi-player gaming. However, speaking at a news conference yesterday, Kutaragi said Sony will at some point add phone facilities, bringing the device even more into line with Nokia's console-cum-phone N-Gage.

Kutaragi also said that PSP will not be a single device, but a range of machines targeting different users. He also stressed that the handheld's design has yet to be finalised.

One of the greatest lines of games ever, they are simply brilliant.

I hardly play on my PS2 anymore, as I hardly have the time to, but I bought Tekken 4 last week (finally) and it's quite good. I've not played it much, but there are a lot more moves for the characters now, and whereas the characters themselves don;t look better than before the backgrounds are much better.

I feel inspired to play some more games later (of my limited collection)...probably Gran Turismo 3, which has the best in game graphics I've ever seen.

my mates gamebou advance sp with mario kart has helped me survive more than a few monday morning law lectures

I never liked Gamecube, primarily because of the controllers...they're crap. X-Box is all right if you don't mind the fact that the games are all graphics and nothing more (except for Halo which is an exceptional game). PS2 is by far the best among the three.

XBOX XBOX XBOX XBOX XBOX!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Halo 2 is out of this world. Scares the heck out of me. :P

But then I am not really into any of Playstation and game cube stuff....

yeah, if you get into the whole modding scene you can do great things with the x-box

it still looks like a pile of shit though !

I vote for XBox too!! Halo rules. Splinter Cell is not so bad either.