Yesterday news broke that the Sony DualShock 3 controller for the PS3 had been spotted at big box retailers stateside. After reading the news, I proceeded to check the store stock for local Best Buy and Future Shop stores to see if they were in Canada too. Future Shop didn’t have them, but the Best Buy near my house did. I then remembered I had a growing stack of games at home that I had either finished or otherwise wasn’t likely to play again, so I called the EBGames near home to see if they had them, which they did.
So a quick stop at home to collect my unused games and I was off to EBGames to pick up a couple of DualShock 3’s. After coming home from my little shopping excursion, and struggling with the hulk-proof plastic packaging, I was finally able to plug the two new controllers in to charge them. This is the bittersweet thing about most geek kit. The euphoria experienced by getting a new toy home and unboxed is invariably doused by the unfortunate necessity to charge it’s batteries for 8 hours. Not wanting to use the controller while it’s charging for fear of upsetting the battery Gods (hey, the first charge is the most important one in a young battery’s life!), at least I could hold and visually inspect it.
My first impressions:
- It’s a tad heavier, but not in a bad way, more in a good way.
- It feels much more solid. My old Sixaxis controllers seemed to creak and flex a bit if I applied twisting pressure with both my hands. When I do the same on the DualShock 3, it doesn’t budge. It’s solid as a rock.
- It’s plastic shell is completely opaque, unlike the Sixaxis which was slightly transluscent.
- Besides the above and the DualShock 3 badge on the front, it looks and feels identical to my old Sixaxis controller, which is good because the Sixaxis is the most comfortable controller I have ever used for long periods of time.
So overall, I’d say the DualShock 3 is a nice improvement over the Sixaxis, and there’s absolutely nothing to complain about as far as I’m concerned. Sure, it still doesn’t come with a USB cable, but I think in this day and age of conservation, we have to support such decisions, even if their reasons for doing so were purely economic. Given that the controller is essentially disposable, at least we won’t start building up a collection of redundant USB cables. It’s bad enough we’re throwing out the entire controller when the battery dies. OK, so maybe there’s one thing to complain about: a removable battery would have been nicer to the environment, although most likely at the cost of aesthetics and rigidity.
Before I got to bed, and after the dual DualShock 3’s had had a good 7-1/2 hours of charging, I decided I didn’t want to wait until the next day to feel the force feedback love. So I fired up Super Stardust HD for a quick asteroid smashing session and was pleasantly greeted by the soothing pulses of Immersion’s patented force feedback technology. While SSHD might not be the best game to showcase the new controller’s capabilities, it was enough just to get a feel for it and also to confirm that you can easily turn force feedback on/off via the menu that appears when the PS button is pushed. It felt good to have force feedback back, as though for a brief moment all was right with the world. Now if Infinity Ward just adds force feedback support to Call of Duty 4 for PS3, all would be right with the world.
April 8th, 2008
Holy penguins Batman! Terra Soft Solutions has just announced plans to release Yellow Dog Linux for the Sony Playstation 3! For those not familiar, Terra Soft got it’s claim to fame for it’s Yellow Dog Linux distribution for PowerPC based Macintosh computers, and even did some good business selling Macs with Linux pre-installed–the only company to ever get authorized by Apple to do so.
After Apple dropped the Intel bomb at WWDC 2005, Terra Soft has stayed commited to the Power CPU architecture. They seem to have done well for themselves by switching focus away from Apple hardware towards IBMs Power and PowerPC based servers. No doubt putting Terra Soft on the short list of favored linux developers for the IBM/Sony/Toshiba developed Cell platform. Yes, this is no unauthorized hack boys and girls, according to the Terra Soft press release, they’ve got Sony’s blessing (and even their support) to release their Linux distro for the upcoming PS3 game console:
Under basic agreement with SCEI, Terra Soft was granted a unique opportunity to develop and bring to market a complete Linux OS for the Sony PLAYSTATION 3.
The video game console market is like the cell phone and razor blade business. Sell your expensive console at a loss to gain market share, and make back the money on the sale of video games, services and accessories. This is the reason why Microsoft and Sony have been so protective of their consoles and tried to thwart attempts to install unauthorized home brew software on their consoles. If you are losing say $100 per console sold, and 10,000 people buy your console just to use them as an inexpensive Linux web server, then you’re going to lose $1 million on those sales, that you’re never going to recoup from those customers. Likewise, video game piracy is a big threat to profitability as well.
So what does Sony have up their sleeves? Reading the Terra Soft press release further provides some insight into just that very question.
In development of Yellow Dog Linux v5.0, Terra Soft integrated and enhanced code from Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Sony Group, and Fedora in order to offer the following:
- kernel 2.6.16
- gcc 3.4.4 and glibc 2.4
- Cell SDK 1.1
- OpenOffice.org 2.0.2
- FireFox 1.5.0 and Thunderbird 1.5.0
- Nautilus 2.1.4
… and a suite of Personal Accessories, Development Tools; Sound & Video, Internet, and Networking applications.
There’s no doubt that the idea is to turn the PS3 into a full fledged personal computer with all the basic apps most users would need/expect. Whether you’re an institutional or corporate client who wants to set up an inexpensive supercomputer cluster, or just your average home user who wants to surf the web, send/receive email and work on some Office documents, Yellow Dog Linux has everything you need right out of the box to get started.
But Linux isn’t ready for the home user, right? Will your average PS3 gamer have any clue of how to install and setup Linux on their PS3? Well Linux has come a long way over the last couple of years. Distributions like Ubuntu are making inroads into the desktop Linux market, and Linux adoption continues to grow as every new release gets more and more refined. Usability is near on-par with Windows and installation is as simple as anyone could expect. But when a company develops a Linux distro for a very specific set of hardware, it makes it easier to focus on improving ease of use. According to Terra Soft:
A single-click installer enables absolutely anyone to install without instruction. Post-install, the default suite of applications presents an intuitive, self-guided means of exploring Linux without the confusion of multiple applications in the same family. An Advanced installer mode enables selection from greater than fifteen hundred packages, as is expected from a complete Linux distribution.
Sounds like they’re catering to everyone from your average Linux novice to advanced users as well. This is a very good thing. While Microsoft is busy patching loopholes to prevent people from hacking the XBox 360 to run Linux, Sony seems to be embracing this open source OS completely. This has the potential to greatly shift the value proposition in the PS3’s favor. Now, not only are you getting an HD capable next gen game console AND BluRay movie disc player, but a personal computer with no limits on what you can run on it. It’s now obvious why Sony made sure every PS3 configuration includes a hard disk drive.
If you think Linux on the PS3 is all about attracting users though, you’re sadly mistaken. It’s probably more about developers than it is about end users. Linux has an absolutely huge following in the developer community. After all, Linux is all about developers working together to create great software. By fully supporting Linux on their upcoming console, and being the only console that does so, Sony will instantly gain the interest and support of a huge developer community, and a huge library of software which will be a recompile away from running on their hardware. Trust me, every Linux developer who has even considered buying a video game console will be counting their pennies to get a Playstation 3.
So the big question still stands. How is Sony going to make money off of the PS3? My guess is they figure they can afford to lose some money from the odd purchasers who buy a PS3 to only run Linux, because they can recoup more money from consumer PS3 sales than Microsoft can from the XBox 360 since they will also make money from BluRay movie sales, and licensing of BluRay and Cell technology to other companies. To Sony, the PS3 is an important part of winning market share in several different markets that they can’t afford to lose in. With this latest announcement from Terra Soft, Sony is finally starting to show all their cards. If Sony sees demand for Linux on PS3, can dedicated Cell based PCs and workstations be far behind?
I was sitting on the fence about which next generation game console I planned to buy (if at all). This announcement has just made my decision a lot easier for me. I currently have an XBox with a mod chip installed so I can run XBox Media Center on it for playing downloaded video content in my home theatre. But the XBox can’t handle HD video playback at 720p or higher, and my 50″ LCD projection TV is crying for HD content. Given that Microsoft is making the XBox 360 even harder to hack than it’s predecessor, I started to consider using a Mac mini to do the job of playing back video, with it’s great Front Row remote and on-screen interface. But if I can just install Linux on a PS3 then for around the same money as a Mac mini I’ll have the media playback capability, plus a sweet ass gaming console and a BluRay movie disc player. Sure, it won’t be able to run Mac software, but if I really want to do that in my living room, I’ll just use my Mac notebook. That’s what notebooks and WiFi are for after all.
October 17th, 2006