Hacking the PSP Blog

Sony to conduct internal inquiry following dead goat incident

GOW2 stunt was of "an unsuitable nature"

GamesIndustry.biz has learned that Sony is to conduct an internal inquiry after hitting the headlines for displaying a decapitated goat at a press event for God of War 2.

"It has come to our attention that at The God of War 2 launch showcase held in Athens, Greece, on 1st March 2007, an element of the event was of an unsuitable nature," a spokesperson said.

"Whilst we pride ourselves on creating engaging experiences we are committed to making sure these are appropriate in nature and do not cause offence to either attendees or our consumers in general.

"We are conducting an internal inquiry into aspects of the event in order to learn from the occurrence and put into place measures to ensure that this does not happen again."

As reported by yesterday's Mail on Sunday, pictures of the God of War 2 party showing the headless goat were published in the latest edition of Official PlayStation Magazine.

Some copies have already been sent out to subscribers but the pages in question will be removed from the remaining 80,000 issues.

The Mail on Sunday article alleged that guests at the God of War 2 event "were invited to reach inside the goat's still-warm carcass to eat offal from its stomach" - a report dismissed by Sony as "categorically untrue".

Speaking to GI.biz the spokesperson explained, "In keeping with the theatrical nature of the event, the attendant media were invited to eat a bowl of food that purported to be from the animal - but in fact was a cooked traditional Greek dish."

The spokesperson added that the goat was not slaughtered specifically for the event; the organisers, a Greek production company, purchased the carcass from a butcher.

He observed that Computer Entertainment UK did not play any role in the organisation of the event, and there were no members of the British media were in attendance - including the author of the OPM report.

"The writer of this article did not attend the event and has portrayed the theatre as a literal occurrence," the spokesperson said.

"This is not a true representation of the event, but nevertheless we realise the imagery and the inaccurate description of the event would cause offence and have thus taken action to stop it from circulating."

The spokesperson went on to state that the company was "shocked" to see the article appear in OPM, and immediately contacted Future Publishing to address the issue - not only after being contacted by the Mail on Sunday, as the newspaper implied.

"Sony Computer Entertainment Europe does not in any way, shape or form condone cruelty or mistreatment of animals," he confirmed.

"Sony Computer Entertainment Europe takes the sensitivities of the general public and issues of animal welfare very seriously and is sorry for any offence or distress the event or perception of this event may have caused."

Ellie Gibson
April 30, 3007

Source: GamesIndustry.biz

StrmnNrmn: Possible Daedalus R11 Release This Weekend

StrmnNrmn has updated his blog once again, giving us an update on the progress of the next version of his Nintendo 64 emulator for the PSP, Daedalus R11. He's been hard at work making memory usage improvements, namely to the texture cache and he says that he hopes to have a release this weekend. Here's what StrmnNrmn had to say in his update:

To start with, I refactored the way that n64-format textures are converted to psp-format textures. Previously, I was converting the textures at the point at which they were loaded into texture memory on the n64. A result of this was that in order to support mirroring, I needed to keep a copy of the converted pixels in RAM. By moving the conversion process closer to the point that the textures are actually used on the psp, I've been able to remove this buffer and perform conversion and mirroring in the same step. This has approximately halved the memory needed for each texture, and is slightly faster than the previous approach.

The most significant change I've made is to fix a memory leak in the texture cache. I mentioned last week that I'd discovered that the texture cache was the biggest culprit for soaking up memory. It turned out that despite my fixes and support for 4-bit and 8-bit palettised textures, I was still running out of memory in certain situations. I did a bit more investigating, and discovered a resource leak that had been in the texture cache since it was first written (probably 7 or 8 years ago now!)

It turned out that in certain situations, several textures would hash to the same bucket in the hash table that I was using. This wasn't normally a problem, but occasionally the process which purges old textures from the cache was accidentally leaking textures. This was wasting video memory and causing the leaked textures to be re-converted on next frame.

The fix ended up being a very simple one-line change, and as a result the texture cache is now 100% leak-free. As an added bonus, it seems that the change has resulted in a nice 4-5% speedup - I suspect this is because the leaked textures are now no-longer being unnecessarily reconverted.

The final bit of work I've been doing is setting up a fixed-size pool for allocating textures from (well, there are actually two pools - one for fast VRAM and another of standard RAM for when this runs out). Despite the various improvements and fixes I've made to reduce the amount of memory being consumed by the texture cache, I wanted to put a hard limit on how much memory can ever be used. This change means that if the limit is ever reached, I just display white textures until some texture memory is freed up a little later. Previously Daedalus would just keep allocating RAM until it ran out of memory and crashed, so the new solution is much nicer :)

All in all I'm very happy with the state of R11. The changes I've made mean that I can permanently allocate 8MB for the Expansion Pak, and not worry about running out of memory. A welcome side-effect to all the texture changes I've made is an approximate 5-10% speedup over R11. On top of this Daedalus now remembers your preferences for each rom, so it's a little nicer to use.

I've still got a few small things to polish, but I'm hoping to release R11 by the weekend.

-StrmnNrmn

So there you have it. Hopefully StrmnNrmn can accomplish his goal and have a new version of Daedalus for us this weekend!

Source: Retro Console Dev

Can Sony click with download store?

Planes, trains and automobiles are where digital video wants to do some boredom busting.

Scores of companies are betting there's gold in helping go-go commuters and road warriors catch the latest episodes of 24 and Grey's Antatomy. Apple downloads movies to iPods. Cell phone carriers stream TV shows to handsets. Sling Media's Slingbox connects users to their home TVs from any Web-enabled handheld.

But a company uniquely positioned just a few years ago to be among the front-runners in the nascent mobile-video category is conspicuously missing, said James McQuivey, a Forrester Research analyst. Sounding a little like Marlon Brando, McQuivey argues that Sony, with the PlayStation Portable (PSP), should have been a contender. He notes that Apple's iTunes has sold 50 million TV shows, seized a huge market lead and proven people will watch video on small screens.

"The thing is, Sony could have been all this," McQuivey said. "The Sony PSP is one of the best portable entertainment media devices that anyone has come up with in years. It has a relatively big screen, plays video beautifully, has good storage and audio. It could have been the first big mobile carrier for TV shows and movies."

Instead, the mobile-video play of one of the world's largest electronics companies is straggling behind Apple, has shaken the confidence of supporters--especially in Hollywood--and added to the woes of CEO Howard Stringer.

The PSP is a handheld device that plays video games, music and videos, and also displays photos. As of March, Sony has sold 7.2 million of the devices in the U.S., according to NPD Group. The PSP was supposed to be a total-entertainment media device, yet two years after launching the PSP in North America, Sony by some accounts is retrofitting its video plans.

The Financial Times, for instance, reported last December that Sony planned to launch a PSP download store early this year. But as April heads into May, still no store. A Sony spokesman declined to discuss the issue.

To some observers, a PSP video store is an admission by Sony that the company's Universal Media Discs (UMDs), the mini DVDs that play only on PSPs, are a bust.

The media began kicking dirt over UMD a year ago when consumers largely ignored the format. From the Calgary Sun came the subtle headline "Bombs away; UMD sales are zilch with consumers." The Hollywood Reporter published a story in March 2006 about Universal Studios and Paramount Pictures ending production of movies for the PSP. Variety chronicled the handheld's sagging sales in July with a story headlined "PSP loses support; Wal-Mart, studios pull back."

Read the full article here...

Greg Sandoval
April 30, 3007

Source: CNET News

AllixPartners LLP: Sony most trusted brand

AlixPartners LLP, a global corporate-advisory firm, has released their inaugural Brand Power Index (BPI) for 2007. What most will be surprised to know though, is the fact that Sony has come up as the most dominant and influential brand power in the said Index.

Sony beat out the likes of Nike, as well as other companies who have been gunning for this number one spot. AlixPartners pointed out in their press release that product quality has generally become better market wide. A lot of consumers today put importance on brand placement, availability and pricing, along with offered tech support, which apparently Sony has been providing. This new information should give most companies a heads-up on what consumers are really looking for in the brands and items that they support.

Here's the top ten list from the Brand Power List:

1. Sony (NYSE-SNE)
2. Johnson & Johnson (NYSE-JNJ)
3. Kraft (NYSE-KFT)
4. Procter & Gamble (NYSE-PG)
5. Campbell’s (NYSE-CPB)
6. Toyota (NYSE-TM)
7. Tylenol
8. Dell (NasdaqGS-DELL)
9. General Mills (NYSE-GIS)
10. Hewlett-Packard (NYSE-HPQ)

The company has made it clear that the BPI makes "clear distinction between mere popularity, which a brand can achieve temporarily through discounting, etc., and true brand power." We have to wonder though if the 5,000 people really give an accurate representation of the entire U.S. market in general.

April 28, 2007

Source: PSPUpdates