Sony Creates A Monster

TOKYO - It's not just a rumor anymore. At a developers conference held Tuesday in Tokyo, Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. unveiled its next-generation console, known widely as the PlayStation 2. A price and a name for the new machine were not announced at the conference. The system will be released in Japan this winter (before March, 2000), followed by a US release in fall, 2000.

Sony confirmed the use of DVD (and CD) as the storage medium of choice for the next system. It's likely that developers will begin producing games on CD, eventually making a seamless move to DVDs, as needed. Rumors of backward compatibility were confirmed by Ken Kutaragi and cheered by attendees. The system will not improve the graphics of the current breed of PlayStation games, but it will be 100 percent compatible with PS1's games. It will include a modem, but details of how fast that modem will be have not been finalized.

Amidst the system's specifications are Sony's Graphics Synthesizer and Emotion Engine. Capitalizing on the ability of the system to produce human-like emotions, Sony and its top developers showed off demos of exactly what the system can do. One demo showed the old-man character from screenshots of Final Fantasy The Movie changing his various emotions in real time. Another Emotion demo starred the starting-gate girl from Namco's Ridge Racer series.

Sony says that the Graphics Synthesizer in the next-generation PlayStation hardware will aid in the development of richly detailed game worlds via the machine's massive floating-point processing power. It also allows for an incredible amount of realism. For instance, Sony showed off a "puff-ball" demo, where wind affected each strand of each puff ball differently. It can also simulate real-world physical attributes - like gravity, friction, mass, water, wood, metal, and so on - like no other machine. Sony dubbed this "Emotion Synthesis" - making game characters and environments behave just as they would in the real world. According to the company, this reaches beyond the capacity of current state-of-the-art workstations and approaches the power seen in large-scale super computers used for scientific simulations.

Sony's press material released today sums it up nicely: "Imagine walking into the screen and experiencing a movie in real-time... this is the world we are about to enter."

Aside from the game side of things, Sony has built an MPEG2 decoder into the hardware to use as its image decompression technology. Not only will DVD increase the storage capacity developers have to use, but it could makes it possible to play DVD movies on the system - much like you can play music CDs on the PlayStation today. The use of digital technology will not only help graphics, it will help sound, as well - and Sony is going all out, providing processing of audio formats, such as Dolby Digital AC-3 and DTS. Imagine playing a game with theater-quality surround sound. It's enough to pull you kicking and screaming into the game environment. In addition, Sony has thought about the future, adding support for Digital TV.

In the backwards-compatibility department, Sony has built in a new I/O Processor that uses the original PlayStation's 32-Bit core, allowing for 100 percent compatibility with the original system's games on the new machine. While no details were given, it's expected that you will be able to use data from the original PlayStation, including memory cards.

Development systems will begin making their way to developers this spring, with more announcements from Sony leading up to the machine's launch.