First off it's my Gaming companion the Playstation 2.
The history of the Playstation
Playstation
The history of the Playstation begins in 1988 when Sony and Nintendo were working together to develop the Super Disc.
The Super Disc was going to be a CD-ROM attachment that was intended to be part of Nintendo's soon to be released Super Nintendo
game. However, Sony and Nintendo parted ways business-wise and the Super Disc was never introduced or used by Nintendo. In
1991, Sony used a modified version of the Super Disk as part of their new game console - the Sony Playstation. Research and
development for the PlayStation had began in 1990, headed by Sony engineer, Ken Kutaragi.
Only two hundred models of the first Playstation (that could play Super Nintendo game cartridges) were manufactured by
Sony. The original Playstation was designed as a multi-media and multi-purpose entertainment unit. Besides being able to play
Super Nintendo games, the Playstation could play audio CDs and could read CDs with computer and video information as well.
In 1994, the new PlayStation X (PSX) was released that was no longer compatable with Nintendo game cartridges and only played
CD-ROM based games. A smart move that soon made Playstations the best selling game console.
Technical specs:
CPU: 32-bit RISC (33.9MHz).
RAM: 2MB, 1MB Video RAM.
Graphics: 3D Geometry Engine, with 2D rotation, scaling, transparency and fading and 3D texture mapping and shading.
Colors: 16.7 million.
Sprites: 4,000.
Polygons: 360,000 per second.
Resolution: 640x480.
Sound: 16-bit 24 channel PCM.
The History of Playstation 2
Playstation 2
The world was introduced to the original playstation December 3, 1994. In 1995 the USA got their first taste of PlayStation.
Finally Europe was let in on the fun, and the whole world was part of the PlayStation phenomenon.
Fast forward to 1998: there were more PlayStations in homes than people living in Spain - 40 million and rising - and
a sequel was due, a new machine that would be everything the original PlayStation was and more besides. Naturally, it was
called PlayStation 2.
The rest is history; the pre-launch anticipation, the biggest console launch ever seen, a string of next generation games....
Now here we are in 2004, with the PlayStation experience available in three packages (The reborn PlayStation in PS one, the
reborn playstation 2 as pstwo, with more PlayStations in homes around the world than any other console (almost 100m), and
with approximately 2000 games available to play. And at this year's E3, Ken Kutaragi, father of PlayStation, announced 'PSP'
or PlayStation Portable - so the future's looking brighter than ever.
PlayStation 2 and PS one: Facts and figures
In your PlayStation 2 box you'll find the system itself, along with a DUALSHOCK 2 controller, some cables, and some other
bits and pieces to help you set up. The whole process just takes minutes, and when you're done, you just put a game disc in
the console and close the disc tray. It's just like playing a CD or DVD, but the interaction doesn't end when you press the
'Play' button.
At the heart of PlayStation 2 sits a 128-bit computer chip called the Emotion Engine. This little package of silicon joy
makes PlayStation 2 games look, sound and play better than ever before. There's a lot more to it of course, and I could ramble
on endlessly about the graphics synthesiser, the I/O processor, the 3.2Gb/second bus bandwidth and the MPEG 2 decoder circuit,
but I don't want to put you to sleep. Suffice to say, you'll find more computing power under the hood of PlayStation 2 than
you will in your average NASA space probe.
There's also a little area tucked away in the corner that's devoted to the original PlayStation. PlayStation 2 has so
much power that you can in fact play almost all existing PS one games on PlayStation 2
Techical specs:
Processor clock speed: 300 MHz.
Floating point unit: (FPU) co-processor operating at 6.2 gigaflops.
Bus speed: 3.2 GB per second.
Original Play Station CPU core as I/O processor.
Graphics: "Graphics Synthesizer"
150 MHz.
Embedded cache: 4 MB VRAM .
Resolution: 640x480 or 320x240 interlaced.
Colors: (16,777,216) maximum, as well as 16-bit (65,536) mode.
Geometry engine: Alpha channel Anti-aliasing.
Bezier surfacing Gouraud shading.
Mip mapping.
Perspective correction.
Other features: Two memory card slots, Two USB ports and Fire wire port.
