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In a shot fired directly across Sony's bow, Nintendo has announced not only that it too will adopt ing the DVD format for its games, but that, unlike Sony, it is committed right now to playing DVD Movies on the platform. Nintendo is partnered with Matsushita, other wise known as Panasonic in this country, with Pansonic providing the DVD harware and software.
There are sure to be ranters and ravers all across the Internet solemnly proclaiming that Dolphin will ray trace while transforming 80 million polygons per second. For those who don't want to pick through specs, the only info that points to performance of the system is the CPU, Gekko, has a clock speed of 400MHz and the graphics chip, being co-designed by ARTX, is clocking at 200MHz. The other salient tidbit is that the system's memory bandwidth is 3.2GB/sec.But Nintendo has not revealed what sort of floating point the CPU is pushing or, indeed, whether the system will use traditional 3D rendering. The information announced leves open the possibility that Nintendo is exploring some kind of crazy NURB surface acceleration. |
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| Nintendo recently mentioned that it will not be making any Dolphin or Game Boy Advance announcements at the forthcoming Electronics Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles. Nintendo also admitted that there will be no Dolphin or Game Boy Advance hardware, software or technical demos shown behind closed doors. Nintendo stated that E3 is much more about showing off the Nintendo 64's fourth-quarter lineup than it is previewing next-generation consoles. The first time you should expect to see any major Dolphin or Game Boy Advance announcements along with a pinch of hardware and software is this coming August at Space World in Japan. This doesn't surprise us at all. We might here a few minor announcements regarding the Dolphin and GBA games in the upcoming months but no major announcements are expected. Nintendo is saving everything for Space World in August where they will show their weapons for the next few years. |
| What's the new system called?
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| Playstation 2, or for short, PS2.
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| In Japan, the official launch date is Saturday, March 4, 2000. The specific official North American launch date has not yet been announced, but it will might be around September the 30th. |
| SCEI has announced the price of the Playstation 2 in Japan--and in Japan only--at 39,800 yen(about $360-$370).SCEA has not annouced a US price. But it is sure to announce the PS2 at a reasonable price, probably $299, we suspect. After all, that is what the original PlayStation was first priced at in 1995. But, again, SCEA has not announced a price yet.
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| Will it be backward compatible with all older PlayStation games? |
| Yes, the PlayStation 2 will be able to play original PlayStation games. Because the system's I/O (input/output) processor is essentially the core (main processor) of the original PlayStation, the system will use this processor to insure backward compatibility with all existing PlayStation games. Sony will most likely continue to institute the territorial lockout to make sure that only US PlayStation 2s play original US PlayStation games.
Answers to questions as to whether or not the PlayStation 2 will "enhance" original games with effects like a high-resolution mode and texture filtering has been answered. Sony has said that the system will not enhance PlayStation games, but rather play them in their original look, speed and context. |