Philip

Nick asked me what I thought of the PlayStation 3 since I’ve had a chance to play around with it for a while.

1) It’s hot

Just running GNU/Linux makes the PS3 fairly warm but quiet. I haven’t really bothered playing games on it yet, but I’d imagine they would do the following.

2) It’s even hotter playing Blu-Ray

That’s kind of interesting, I would have thought Blu-Ray wouldn’t have been straining the PS3 but it appears to do so. Kicks the PS3 into a higher fan speed mode and veritably blasts warm to hot air out the back. I got a free copy of Casino Royale for being one of the first 20,000 subscribers to the PlayStation network (bit of a worry, either there’s not many PS3’s sold or not many people are interested in online gaming and downloads?) and it plays OK, quality is head and shoulders over DVD for fine details however you get quite a bit of film grain now.

3) GNU/Linux is still immature

Linux on the PS3 is still rough around the edges, however thanks to Terra Soft Solutions and Yellow Dog Linux you have a relatively pain free (albeit long) installation. BlueTooth still requires patches and kernel recompiling to get the SixAxis working, WiFi support was just released sans WPA[2] support, sound support on different distributions is spotty, so there’s quite a long list of things to do.

4) No access to the RSX graphics in Linux

Sony for whatever reason has restricted access to the NVIDIA RSX which means exciting stuff like YUV -> RGB for video is off the table, forcing the PPE or SPE’s to do the hard grunt work. Hopefully they’ll open some of the 2D functionality up as well as perhaps a simplified OpenGL driver at some point.

5) H.264 and MPEG-4 @ SD is OK

This works OK, even though the PS3 takes a hit with no YUV -> RGB conversion and no optimised code to process video data. MPEG-4 works pretty well out of the box, scaling to 720p it starts to suffer slightly. H.264 at SD is fine, however it’s too much at the moment to scale to 720p. 1080i and 1080p are off the cards for now, but give it time I guess.

6) 0, 10 or 50 GB for OtherOS

Sony really needs to let a person choose between 10 GB and 40 GB for the OtherOS. Since the PS3 Game OS takes up 10 GB on its own, you really want to split it min 20 GB to Game OS otherwise you can’t really download much at all.

7) The PlayStation Store is great (?) for independent developers

If Sony plays the cards right, the online store for the PS3 will let independent developers get in on the ground floor to develop games without having to fork over their first born game to get published. Some sort of solution similar to XNA would be nice to let those budding game developers get on with it, and then have it available in the store.

Not much content on the PlayStation Store at the moment.

There’s not much on there right now. If they start releasing PS1 and PS2 games tuned for the PS3 this will see a revival of the old school games like CastleVania SOTN like on XBox 360. Maybe at the end of the year.

9) Not many games, either.

That I’m interested in, that is. Your milage may vary, but there’s nothing screaming to me to buy it. Again, it takes about a year to ramp up development for this, so we’ll see how the end of this year to early next year is.

10) Card reader

Not sure why Sony included this, I only used it to install the OtherOS booter since I didn’t have a USB stick handy. I’d say it’s easier to leave it out and then just offer a cheap $50 adaptor to do the job like the Memory Card reader if you really need it. I guess it’s part of Sony’s strategy, but I don’t see it being as useful as being able to just plug your camera in and reading it direct off that instead like iPhoto.

11) Software should be optional/XMB should be configurable

Again, you should have choices between photo and video handling programs. Maybe not Blu-Ray or DVD playing, but certainly your own videos/photos you should be able to install or purchase a 3rd party program that you like to handle it. Competition like this is a good thing. XMB is a tad… inflexible.

12) HDCP on HDMI

Personally, I don’t see why HDCP is enabled all the time. It should be on for content that needs it, but off for Linux and games. That would let me plug in a simple HDMI to DVI adaptor in and get 1080p pain free instead of using Component. Since Blu-Ray and HD-DVD have been cracked nicely, it seems to serve little point besides infuriating customers when stuff doesn’t work.

13) Region free games, region locked PS1/PS2, DVD and Blu-Ray

One step forward, but still saddled with region locked discs even though the ACCC was meant to have sorted this out. With these restrictions, modchips start to look mighty tempting to remove the locking and HDCP.

14) PS1/2 emulation incomplete

Sony should have held off on the EE+GS chip removal and made the emulation work a lot better. As it stands, there’s the NTSC PS3 that has the EE+GS, and the PAL PS3 that just has the GS. If they had worked on it further and didn’t jump the gun, they could have removed all of it (including the GS) once the emulation was up the scratch. Maybe for the 0.65 nm Cell PS3 revision?

Well, that’s a few thoughts. They come across more as gripes I guess, but it’s mostly as the system is still rough around the edges. Though, it’s certainly a lot more usable than the XBox 360 since you can get Linux going trivially and there’s a lot more interesting things you can do to make it your HTPC equivalent. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens in the next year or two for the PS3.