A Tough Start for the PS3

the even bigger success of the PS two. This is one of those rare cases where the sequel outperforms the original. The PlayStation two was a phenomenal success. I also talked about how the dual shock controller debut late into the life cycle of the PS one, and that the PS two version became the real basis for all dual shock

style controllers moving for word with some exceptions. But I didn't spend any time talking about how those controllers actually work, so I thought I should give a moment to do that before we continue down the path of the history of the consoles. Because this is tech stuff, we do talk about how tech works. And besides, I like using these histories as a way to introduce people to different types of technologies. So the original PlayStation one controller did

not have the analog thumbsticks. It had fourteen buttons, and those were the eight that I've already mentioned in the previous episode, the four direction buttons on the left side and the four action buttons on the right side. Can't wait for people to yell at me for calling something that was pink red or whatever. But I was looking at a really bad photo and I didn't have my PlayStation controller in front of me, and this just tells

you I don't play the PlayStation very much anyway. The action that the buttons did all depended on the game. Right it might be a jump button or a weapon button, or it might have you speak or whatever. In between those two banks of buttons are a pair of buttons labeled start and select, and typically games would map these two functions like pause or an inventory button, or to back out of a menu or something similar to that. Then, on the back of the controller, or rather on the

the side of the controller that faces the television. Some people call it the front of the controller, um, but anyway, it's facing the same way you are toward the TV. There are four shoulder buttons, two on the left and two on the right, mounted in a top button bottom configuration, and under each button inside the controller is a metal disc.

Pressing on the button means that the button presses against the metal disc, which deforms, and a thin conductive strip that's mounted above a circuit board inside the controller is pushed so that it makes some contact with that circuit board, and that acts like an on switch in a regular old circuit. It completes a circuit. So when you press

down on the button, you complete that circuit. You let current move through that particular path, and that sends a signal to the game system that that specific button has been pressed and that the game maps that to whatever input it's uh it's it's keyed to, so that your character or whatever in the game does whatever it is supposed to do. The PS two's dual shock two controllers

introduced a new feature with those buttons. They were pressure sensitive, so it wasn't just that you could push the buttons, it was how you push the buttons that would determine actions in certain games. So game developers could actually design games in which the gameplay would change depending on how

hard they pressed a button. So a game developer could program a game so that if you tapped on a button, you might do a little hop in the game, but pushing harder on the button would make your character do a full jump in the game. Or you could map a melee attack buttons so that if you tapped on it, you just give a little love tap to somebody, and if you held the button down nice and hard, you

to really wallop them. So how did they do that from a tech perspective, Well, it's similar to what I already described, except when you push lightly on the button, only a small portion of that conductive strip would make contact with the circuit would be pressed down and make a light point of contact on the circuit. If you pressed harder than more of the conductive strip would make more of a contact with a circuit board, and the change in conductivity gets registered by the PS two. It's

essentially metering them, it's measuring it. So the PS two is looking not just from a for a signal and where it's from, but how strong that signal is if you can think of it that way and then interprets that as the appropriate in game action. Now I should add that this is a feature that wouldn't last through all dual shock controllers after the dual Shock too, Sony would end up dropping this further down the line, and that caused some gamers frustration because it meant that if

they were playing older games on newer consoles. Let's say you buy a new console that's got some backwards compatibility to it and you want to play an old game that had this capability build into it. Well, your current controller no longer has that function, so their game is somewhat hampered because of it. That's one of the risks of including new features in hardware, because further down the line, in a future iteration, you might drop that feature and

you might lose some access to legacy software. This supplies not just to video game consoles, to everything really anyway. At that point, you could argue that some of those games would turn into abandoned ware because you couldn't play them properly. Getting back to the controller, the thumbsticks are analog and they rely on potentiometers, which in turn are variable resistors, and that means that these components create electrical

resistance in a circuit. And these components are adjustable so that you can change the amount of electrical resistance that is applied and yeah, if you're like me, a sense like that doesn't necessarily clear stuff up right away, So let's break it all down. Resistance is what it sounds like. It describes how a particular material resists the flow of

electricity through it. And it's kind of like friction. If you think of a surface, like a rough surface, having a lot of friction, trying to push something across it is really hard. Trying to push something across a very smooth surface is much easier. You still have friction, but not nearly as much. Well, the same is true with electrical conductivity. Conductive materials have some level of electrical resistance. Some of them allow electricity to pass through pretty easily

and some don't. And like friction, typically the byproduct you get, you know, because you're losing that energy somehow. Energy cannot be created or destroyed, but it can be converted. Instead of that being electrical energy, you're losing it in the form of heat. So your electronics heat up because they're not perfect conductors. And uh so that's that's kind of a basic description of electrical resistance, and a lot of stuff can affect the resistance of a particular type of material.

You know, you can't just say that copper has a specific electrical resistance, because things like the thickness of a copper wire can determine that the thinner a copper wire, the higher the resistance. So if you have a thick copper cable has a much lower electrical resistance than a thin copper wire. But also temperature can affect it. If

you cool conductors down, then their resistance decreases. That's why things like the large Hadron collider have these super cooled elements to make super conductors, and those are conductors in which you don't lose any electrical energy at all to heat. They just what you put in is what's getting out the other side. Essentially, potentiometers are slightly different. They have components that let you adjust the amount of resistance that's

in a circuit. You can turn it up or turn it down, and that allows you to control the amount of current flowing through a circuit, assuming you've got a constant voltage. And if you want to think about it in terms of pipes and water, a potentiometer is kind of like an adjustable valve that can either let more or less water through it. And I'm oversimplifying here just to kind of give you an analogy, but you get

the point. So back to the controller. The thumbsticks on the dual shock controller have two potentiometers each, and they're under the controllers and they're mounted at right angles to one another. And the what happens is when you move the thumbstick, it changes the potentiometers slightly, and current flows through these at a steady rate. As you move the thumbstick,

it changes the resistance in those potentiometers. And by monitoring the current flowing through these circuits, the PlayStation can determine the exact position of that thumbstick. So moving it one way might affect the electrical resistance of one of those two potentiometers and not the other. But owing that, the PlayStation knows which way the thumbstick was moved and exactly how far it was moved, because this is in degrees, right, Maybe you move it one way, both potentiometers increase the

electrical resistance. You move it another way, both the potentiometers decrease the electrical resistance. All of this is invisible to the player. You know, we would not be aware of it, but this is how the PlayStation is able to determine exactly where the thumbstick is at any given moment, and it gives very precise controls to the player. So a game developer can create a game where you can have these very precise requirements for players to maneuver their characters through.

It's really what allowed game developers to create that frame perfect kind of rage inducing platforming game that I am so bad at. Anyway, that's how the thumbsticks work, and it's all about converting that information into essentially a location on an X Y access. It's just the same as if you were to get a bunch of chart paper and you were to start plotting points on the chart. It's the same sort of thing. The points would represent

the position of the thumbsticks. It's pretty neat and and I think it was a clever way to engineer these uh these thumbsticks in an analog way. Now, not all games support this feature, right Like some games might have it where you have a character and if you push the thumbstick a little bit, your character starts to creep across the screen, and if you push the thumbstick all the way to its stopping point, then your character will

break out into a run. But some games take a more digital approach, meaning it's either happening or it's not happening. So if you push the thumbstick a little or a lot, your character moves the same either way that that sometimes happens. That's that's sort of a good way of understanding the difference between digital and analog. Analog is a is a nice smooth curve, right, it's it's degrees, it's uh, you're moving in a nice smooth motion from one state to another.

Dig All is much more step like. It's either on or off, or it's in steps, so it has a discrete amount that is added with each step. It's not something that's a smooth curve. Now, you can have lots of tiny little steps, and if you have enough tiny little steps, you can simulate a smooth curve. But in reality, if you were to zoom weigh in, you would see it's more like a staircase, not a not an unbroken

curve the way analog is. Then there's the vibrating component to the dual shot controller and this works the same way vibrating motors work and stuff like cell phones, and it's pretty simple gun electric motor or in the case of a dual shot controller, you actually have two electric motors.

They're both in the base on either side of the controller where your your hands go, and on the shaft of this electric motor is a slightly offset unbalanced weight, and so as the shaft spins, that unbalanced weight causes some wobble in the electric motor. Except the electric motor is actually firmly mounted inside the controller, it can't wobble because it's mounted to a larger structure. However, that wobble then gets transmitted to the controller as a whole as

this sort of vibrating, buzzing thing. And that's where that technology comes from as how it works, and it's used in all sorts of stuff like cell phones, for example, have these If you have a cellphone with a vibrate function, that's what's happening. So let's jump back to the PS

two now. As I mentioned in the last episode, the PS two had a phenomenal launch and it would go on to become the best selling home console of all time as of the recording of this podcast, And in case you're wondering, second place would go to the Nintendo d S handheld system. And even that's about a million

units behind the PlayStation two. Pretty phenomenal, especially when you look at the you know, the expense of both of those consoles, and the fact that the handheld one being portable, has its own level of of pros and cons to it. I mentioned in the previous episode that Sony did not jump on the internet bandwagon right away. Back during the original PlayStation days, Sony did introduce a link cable that would let players link to PlayStation systems together for network play.

You could do system to system play. However, that also required both of these consoles to be connected to their own respective television sets, so you would need to PS ones and two televisions to make this work, but it wasn't capable of connecting online. The PS two initially didn't

come out with any way to connect to the internet either. Instead, two years after they launched the system, Sony released a modem as a peripheral most of the PlayStation two models, and keep in mind there were a lot of different PlayStation two models. You can say PlayStation two and you've got the same basic idea of what it is, but there are a lot of variations. The company would refine the design and production largely in an effort to streamline things and also to cut down on costs over the

entire course of the life cycle of PlayStation two. Anyway, the original ones had an expansion bay on the back of the console. So if you looked at the back of the console, you would see that there was a cover, and you could take the cover off and it would remove that cover to the bay. You could see the bay. It was a compartment that was large enough to hold

a hard drive. Sony would also introduce hard drives that you could purchase in addition to the base console, and it also had a port that the cover would cover up. Sony offered up a network adapter, which in North America had a phone jack and an Ethernet port on it. Everywhere else pretty much just stuck with the Ethernet port and it would fit on the back of the console. It would just plug directly into that that port, that outlet I had talked about a second ago in the

back of the PS two. It did not fill up the bay. It just covered up the bay. However, if you wanted to get a hard drive, you would need the network adapter and the hard drive. You would connect the hard drive to the network adapter. Then you would slide the hard drive into the bay. It would be nestled in there. The network adapter would plug into the outlet in the PS two, so the network adapter acted as its own outlet for the hard drive. You couldn't

just bypass it. There were third party companies that would make a type of UH plug that essentially acted like the network adapter, except it didn't have a network adapter in it. It was just the plug so that you could use your own hard drive. But that's another story.

But now you could have online capabilities after running a special startup disc that is in your PS two, and you could play games online, certain ones, very few not only if you had online capability, the hard drive would let the PS to load more game data into the memory area. Essentially, it was acting like memory and it would bring loading times down during game play, and it could also be used as a memory card. You could

store saves to the hard drive, for example. Some enterprising gamers even figured out how to load full games onto the hard drive using this system, and that removed the need to have a disk to run certain games. It also circumvented copy part action, so that would become something of a headache for Sony down the line, but not many people did it. The people who knew how to do it, we're doing it like crazy, but but that

was a small percentage of the overall population. The PS two would also feature an innovation that Sony would build on later, and that would be the Eye Toy, and that debut in two thousand three. The Eye Toy was essentially a webcam. You would set it on your television or a shell or whatever. You plug it into the PS two. You would have to adjust the focus manually. You know, you have to actually turn the lens to get it and focus. And you could play certain games

through motion capture technology. One of my friends is actually married to a guy who worked on the Eye Toy back in the day, so I got to hear all about it back when it was first launching. That was pretty cool. A typical Eye Toy game would actually put you in the middle of the action. You would see a video image of yourself on the television. Your image was captured by the Eye Toy, and so as you would flail around on the screen, you would get attacked

by flying monkeys or whatever. So you'd swatted stuff that you saw on the sreen and UH that's how gameplay typically would unfold. The Eye Toy also featured a microphone so it could pick up voice commands, so again it's a little prescient. This was years before Microsoft would introduce the Connect that wouldn't come out until The Eye Toy wasn't quite as sophisticated as the Connect. That's putting it lightly, but many of the same design concepts applied to both

pieces of hardware. Both have cameras and software or firmware. They could interpret your movements as input commands for games, and both were you could argue, criminally undersupported. Games using the Sony Eye Toy were few and far between. From what I can tell, there were a fewer than thirty titles that actually required the Eye Toy, and only eight

of those were ever available in the United States. There were some other games that included eye toy support so as an option, not a requirement, but those were more

like games that had some added features. They weren't created with the Eye Toy experience mind, and most of those games would end up being really similar most of the Eye toy games that you could buy, they were all like variations on the same themes like rhythm games that would require you to reach towards certain points around you on a timed beat, so kind of like Beat Saber,

but on a very primitive level. Or there might be a fighting game where you're you know, moving your arms around, flailing wildly trying to fight off a boxer or martial arts opponent. You know, the details changed from game to game, but the basic gameplay was really similar across the board. Microsoft would go through its own kind of the same story with the Connect years later, and also the Second

Connect even after that, but that's a different story. Another game type debuted on the PS two and that required a peripheral and that would be singing games. Harmonics was the first to do this with Karaoke Revolution in two thousand three, which shipped with a Logitech headset that included a microphone. Later, game like sing Star would launch with a handheld USB mic or a pair of them, and you could plug them into the PS two, and both games had players try to match the pitch of a

song that's indicated on screen. The closer you were to being on pitch, the higher your score would be. Harmonics would follow this up in two thousand five with Guitar Hero and the iconic guitar shaped controller that debuted on the PS two. So a lot of very innovative style games were starting to make their first appearance on the PS two, and that really helped the console as well. They had tons of iconic games from established developers as

well as uh. They were acting like a platform where you could find some really interesting or downright weird games from more obscure companies and developers, and that mix would be something that Sony would foster throughout the life cycle of the console and beyond. I'll talk more about them in a little bit later, and when we come back, i'll wrap up with the PS two, and then we'll start to look at the console that would follow in its footsteps by taking some pretty drastic changes to the model.

But first let's take a quick break. So the PS two saw incredible success, that's loving it. Lightly huge games like God of War got their start on the PS two. Grand Theft Auto three, which, while it was the third entry in a series, took a game that had previously been a top down view game you were looking at the world from above and you would control a car that way. They switched it to a third person style game.

They helped launch the sandbox game genre, not that it was the first or only one of its type, but it was one of the most popular ones, and it got a lot of other game developers getting into that realm of game, and we've seen so many since then. Shadow of the Colossus was a game that gave people who argued the video games are a form of art. They gave them a lot of momentum because that game is gorgeous. The Final Fantasy series continued to dominate on

the PS two. Ratchett and Clank became a franchise on the PS two. The series would go on through many future generations of the PlayStation console. Katamari Demassi was one of the stranger games for the console that got mainstream support. So if you don't know what that game is, you are in charge of rolling around a little sticky ball that picks up stuff in game environments. The ball gets bigger as you do it, and you pick up bigger

and bigger stuff. And it's also that you can rebuild the cosmos because your dad done blowed it up real good by accident. There are literally hundreds of popular titles on the PS two that either got their start there or they found incredible success there, and justice Sony had done with the PS one, the company would continue to support the PS two long after introducing the next generation of PlayStation. The PS two would be in production well

into the life cycle of the p S three. Uh. In fact, I'm to say it was about eleven or twelve year life cycle. That's an incredible run, and people were still buying PS two's and PS two games well after the PS three had hit the shelves. But now it's time to kind of switch over to the PS three. And this one is a really complicated story, largely because

of some controversial decisions in the design process. Now these weren't necessarily bad decisions, mind you, but Kudaragi, that's the father of the PlayStation kin Kudaraki and his team had made some choices that would present some unique challenges to developers. So in two thousand five, Microsoft releases its second console, the Xbox three sixty, and that opened up the seventh generation of consoles, era, the three six. He got a

head start on both Sony and Nintendo. Both of them would release their competing consoles, the PS three and we, respectively, in two thousand and six the fall of two thousand six, so Microsoft had kind of an open playing field to really establish itself for almost a full year. Now, if you've listened to the previous episodes in this series, you know that each generation of video game consoles has its

own defining characteristics. The third generation of video game consoles was the eight bit gaming system era, the original Nintendo. In other words, the fourth generation was a sixteen bit system like the Super Nintendo. The next generation, the fifth generation, was the thirty two bit era. The sixth generation was sometimes called bit era, but that was about when we were finally getting away from using raw processing power as a way to describe consoles because it became less important,

and we started to see this. In fact, we continue to see this where the hardware advances to a point where the the real differentiators lie not necessarily in the processing power, but in other ways that the console sense games. So the seventh generation saw the consoles diverging even more than they had before. On the Microsoft side, the Xbox three sixty would really emphasize HD video games and online

play with the Xbox Live service. That was kind of the bet they were they were placing uh that sort of became. The defining features for the Xbox three sixty were the HD video gaming for an HD era and this online play approach. The Nintendo we marked Nintendo's decision to focus not on traditional stuff like graphics, but instead innovating in control systems like the we mote and the we pad and new forms of gameplay. That was really where they were backing. Sony's PS three was going with

really incredible processing power. Plus it included a Blu ray player, which meant, just as the PS two would become a DVD player with benefits for a lot of people, the

PS three would do the same for Blu ray. When Blu ray players first came out, they were more than a thousand bucks, so when the PS three first came out, it was pretty expensive to It's like six hundred dollars, so it wasn't cheap, but it meant that if you were in the market for a Blu ray player, you might think of a PS three because it could also play games, just like the PS two could also play DVDs as well as games, So maybe that was a

deciding factor for a lot of people. Also, Sony had a big advantage over this because the company was behind Blu ray player technology, and Microsoft being a competitor, it would have been really hard to get that licensing agreement to get a Blu ray player into a three sixty. That was a real sticking point. Oh and also, the PS three would feature a radically different processing architecture that had a ton of potential but threw up more than

a few boundaries for developers. So the CPU was no longer the fabled Emotion Engine, although the early versions of the p S three still retained Emotion engine chips. Instead, we're talking about the Cell processor, which in turn was a short way of saying the full name Cell Broadband Engine architecture. The processor was a joint project between Sony, Tshiba and IBM, and they called their partnership S T I for short, the first letter of each of their

company names. The Cell is a multi core processor, something that's common these days, but was fairly new to the console world. It had been around for PCs for a while, but it was new for consoles. So what the heck is a multi core processor? Well, I've talked about these a lot in previous episodes, but it's one of my favorite analogies. So we're gonna do it again, gosh darn it. So think of cp us like they are math students.

These are microprocessors, but imagine that they are math students. Now, let's say you've got a really powerful single core prod assessor, and we're going to represent that by a super smart math student. Maybe she can solve complex equations in a third of the time of her fellow students. Then let's say we've got a multi core processor. This means we have a processor on a single chip, but as multiple units that each can process operations. They can do their

own tasks, and they all do work pretty well. But individually, none of them are as good as that single souped up single core right there. None of them are as powerful as that single core CPU. But they each of the of these multi core ones are good. They're just not great. This would be like a small group of smart math students. They're not as brilliant as the young woman who solves complicated problems in a flash. And let's say that this is a quad core processor. So we

have four cores. We've got four bright math students in this analogy. Now, if you were to give the same math problem to the gene yes, single core student and the four very smart but not as genius quad core students and then tim them. The single core would win out. The single core would finish the math problem first. She'd solve it the fastest. But let's say you hand out a quiz and the quiz has four math problems on it, and you tell the single core student that she has

to solve all four problems. But you look at the four bright students, the quad core group, and you say each of them has to solve one problem on that four problems tests, so they divide it up. Each student takes a different problem. In that case, you would expect the group of four students to finish first. They're not brilliant like the first student, but they're smart, and they're each only having to solve one fourth of the overall test. That is sort of how multi core processors work. They're

good at what is called parallel processing. That's when you have different processors tackling different operations all at the same time. And this only really works if the type of operations you're asking for it to do can be divided up like that. So if you need to do a single big task and there's no way to break up that

big task into smaller tasks. Multi cores don't have an advantage because the work can't be divvied up between them, But if the task can be separated into several different processes, then each core can take on a different part of that and the whole effort takes less time. And most of the processing that we work on tends to be in that category. Not all of it, but most of it. The cell processor in the PS three had two hundred thirty four million transistors on its spread across essentially nine

processing chips. At the time, that was a big deal. On top of the line PC CPU from Intel would sport two hundred million transistors, and it would also set you back a cool thousand buck in the US when the PS three debuted in two thousand six. These days, though, companies like Intel rarely advertised the number of transistors on a chip. But we are easily in the billions range, like three to seven billion transistors on a single chip.

We have left the millions far far behind. But again, back in two thousand five when they first unveiled the PS three, and then two thousand and six when it became available for purchase, this was incredible technology. The approach st I took in designing the cell was really interesting as well. So at the center of the PS three cell was a power PC microchip with a clock speed of three point two giga hurts. You can listen to my earlier episodes about the PlayStation to hear more about

what clock speed means. The chip had its own five D and twelve kilobytes of RAM or random acxis memory, and the chip kind of acts like a supervisor. Its main job is to assign tasks to the eight coprocessors on the same CPU chip and actively. These are all called the synergistic processing elements or SPEs. So you've got a boss who takes in assignments and then parcels out those assignments to each of his direct reports, will say,

and the direct reports are the sps. So the power PC core a k a. The power processing element or PPE in this system looks at what jobs need to be done. It looks at what the cores in the synergistic processing elements are already doing. Right, is anyone busy? Are there people who have availability? And then the PPE that power PC core assigns jobs to available processors. It says, oh, well, the process or number three is available, so I'll send

this job to process or three. And we're getting to the real crux of what the PS three was all about from the perspective of its creator, Ken Kutaragi. Now, past episodes, you've heard me talk about Kutaragi leading the charge in Sony getting into the video game console business. He argued that it was something they definitely wanted to do, and no one really was giving him much attention about it.

But as passionately as he argued about this stuff, it didn't mean that he was really that interested in video games. He saw it as an engineering challenge and a market opportunity, and also as a way that he can make his mark in the company and rise in the ranks. The cell architecture wasn't just about making the next generation game console. Ken Karagi's long term goal was to create a hardware

architecture for all sorts of products moving forward. The PS three would be the first consumer electronics product to feature it, but the idea would be he would use this same

architecture in all sorts of Sony products. It would be a stepping stone to even bigger things that would perhaps even put him on track for leading the entire company, all of Sony, not just Sony Computer Entertainment, which is where he was he was current Lee uh serving as the president, but to lead Sony overall the Sony corporation. So this was a really big deal for him, and the processor was super powerful for the time, and since that debut there have been a few other computer systems

that have taken advantage of that architecture. The cell design emphasized speed and a reduction in latency. A latency is the lag we experience between when we submit an input and when we get an output. Generally speaking, the simpler the application and the simpler the machine, the lower the

latency tends to be. So if you're working with something like a standard calculator, which by design only accepts limited kinds of input, and you do some simple arithmetic on it, you get results that are to us instantaneous, you can't even detect a delay. But as software gets more complex and requires greater amounts of processing power, stuff can slow them down. So in some applications this can be irritating

and others it can be dangerous. High latency in a standard video game is frustrating latency in a virtual reality game can be disorienting and cause motion sickness. You know. That's like if you turn your head in real life but your point of view in the game lags behind. That can make you feel really sick to your stomach. I speak from personal experience. Laten seeing something like an

autonomous car would be deadly well. In addition to these processors, the VS three also boasted a graphics processing unit or GPU, called the Reality Synthesizer or or SX. This was developed in a partnership with Nvidia, a company that's famous sports g p U s and the RSX was similar in design to the Nvidia G Force line of processors. This one chip had three hundred million transistors on it, so even more than the CPU did, but it operated at a much lower clock speed at five fifty mega hurts.

Unlike the PS two, the p S three came with an Ethernet port as a standard feature rather than as an add on peripheral. However, originally it was supposed to have three Ethernet ports when it was first announced. When it debuted, that had been whittled down to one. It supported Bluetooth two point oh, and it had an optical audio output. I'll have to talk about optical audio in some future episode. It also had four USB ports for other accessories. It had an HDMI output to go to

a television. It was actually supposed to have two of them, but that got whittled down too. And it also had composite component and s video ports. And since we're on the subject, why not explain what those are really quickly? Or were? Most people these days wouldn't use them. H d M I is really the standard way to hook up a television to other components. But back in the day we had a whole smorgage board of options. So we're gonna go from most primitive to most advanced. So

that means we start with composite cables. These cables are yellow video cable and they're typically bundled with a red and a white cable. But the red and white cables aren't video. Those are audio channels. They actually carry audio to stereo channels to the left stereo and the right stereo channels. The yellow cable carries a video signal and these cables are limited to standard definition resolution all in one channel on the cable, so all the all the

data is in one channel of information. So this gives you the lowest resolution, the lowest uh color representation, Like it's it's the lowest quality of all the different options. Next up, we have the S video cable now that would carry two channels of video information. It's separated the colors from black and white, so you got black and white and one channel and all the other colors in another channel, and that would create a better image quality

than composite video. However, like composite, S video cable was limited to standard definition signals of four A d I or five seventy six I for some markets. Then you've got component video cables. These cables were red, green, and blue, and they represented the three colors used to create all colors in video. However, they didn't each carry, you know, their respective colors. The red didn't carry red, the blue

didn't carry blue, and the green didn't carry green. One cable carried luminants or brightness information, and the other two carried information about the hue of colors that should appear on screen. And through combinations of all of those elements, you could get a really wide range of colors displayed on screen and brightness as well. And you could also get up to high definition levels of resolution up to ten A d I. So this was finally getting into

the h D side of things. H d M I, or high Definition Multimedia Interface, can carry uncompressed video and audio to the other elements. I just talked about composite component and s video. None of those carried audio. You would need separate audio cables to get sound from the PlayStation into your entertainment system. HDMI cables can carry both video and audio to the same source, so they are

UH superior in that respect. There's a whole thing I could go in about UH with copy protection that relates to which cables would get supported or would lose support over time, but that's a topic for a future episode. Anyway, h d m I, or High Definition Multimedia Interface is now essentially the standard we use to connect things together for video game consoles, DVD players, that kind of stuff, two televisions. So the p S three was the first

of the PlayStations to have an HDMI port. Now, the combination of the cell processor and the GPU made the PS three a truly intimidating console. On paper, it clearly overshadowed the Xbox three sixty and the we wasn't even in the same weight class. But that's on paper. In reality, Sony would see PS three sales get off to a slow start and trail behind the Xbox three sixty, and even the we that would launch like a week after the PS three would end up beating the PS three

in sales in many markets. So why is that? Why was the successor to the greatest selling video game console of all time more of a slow burn? While I'll tell you after we take a quick break. So kim Kutaragi made his big move setting up the CPU system for the PS three to be the foundation for a new generation of electronics and computer systems at Sony. That didn't turn out so well. And it's not because the

tech wasn't good. For one thing, the new design required hundreds of engineers working primarily in Austin, Texas, and getting it right was challenging, so the project hit some delays, and that in turn made Sony have to push back the PS three's launched by about half a year, which gave Microsoft a lot more time to really entrench the three sixty as the definitive seventh generation game console, at

least for a while. PS three sales would ultimately eclipse Microsoft, but it took some doing to make matters more complicated. Nintendo launched the Wii console shortly after the PS three debut, and at first a lot of people were ready to dismiss the Wei. The name struck many as being laughable.

The console clearly didn't emphasize graphics or realistic gameplay, but nintendo strategy was to take aim at casual gamers, at non gamers, maybe people who had been gamers but they hadn't really played any video games and years those kind of folks weren't really being marketed to, and Nintendo saw an opportunity and people flocked to buy the Wii. It would lead to shortages and stores, so competition was stiff

against Sony even when it launched. On top of that, Sony had to do some quick backtracking after receiving a powerfully negative reaction when going off the PS three and its new controller at E three two five, so this is one year before the console was to launch. The new PS three controller looked radically different from the basic design introduced with the PS one and refined into the

dual shock form factor. UH. It had all the same buttons as those controllers, but it was a totally different shape. It was a Boomerang shape and still have the two thumbsticks, still had all the old buttons. But this shape caught people off guard, and a lot of people had a very strong negative reaction to it. I mean, it was meant so that you could hold either end of the PlayStation easily in your hands. Uh. At the E three presentations,

Kutaragi really didn't say anything about the controllers. They never got an official name to the public, and the fan reaction was pretty brutal. So Sony made the call to scrap the Boomerang controller and to build out a new game pad modeled on the more standard duel shock form factor,

so the Boomerang never even to consumer stores. Instead, Sony would introduce a controller called the six Axis, and it was called this because it included accelerometers inside the controller that could pick up movement along the X, y, and Z axes, and that allows for six degrees of freedom of motion, so the controller could detect when and how it was moving, which in turn could be leveraged by

game developers. So you know, if you designed a game with this in mind, you could create one where let's say it's a survival horror game, you know, saying like Resident Evil, and it's got stealth based mechanics in it where you need to be really quiet and sneaky so that the bad guys don't see you. And if you were to move too much while holding the controller as you're trying to sneak around, your character in the game

would give away their position. You know, they'd stumble, or they'd make noise or something and they would become a target for some sort of clever wielding pumpkin monster or something. One thing the six Access controller didn't have besides the boom ring shape, was a rumble feature. A lawsuit that was between Sony and a company called Immersion had led to Sony temporarily at least stripping the vibrating motors out of the six Excess controllers, so the controllers that launched

with the PS three did not have haptic feedback. The six Excess controller would be the official controller for the PS three for just two years, when the company would then replace it with the dual Shock three. I'll probably talk about that a little bit more in the next episode, but the controller wasn't the really big problem that Sony faced with the PS three, It really was that the architecture of that CPU was so different from what video

game developers were used to. It took time a lot of time for game developers to really make titles that tapped into the PS three's capabilities. Essentially, developing games for the p S three was hard. Specifically leveraging those sp s that those eight co processors effectively was not easy to do. According to one developer, creating a Hello World message, which is typically one of the first things any programmer does when they're learning, you know, how to code for

any given system. Typically that would require three to five lines of code for most systems, but to have one spe processor you take this request and follow it through would require an incredible one hundred forty four lines of code. Sony even took some amount of pride in this. They essentially said, it all boils down to nothing worth having is ever easy. So they said, yeah, it's hard to program for this thing, but this thing is super powerful,

so it's worth it. The design of those co processors made coding for them really hard to do, and using them effectively would be a big challenge. So many of the early games weren't great at showing off the PS three's true potential because they couldn't tap into that processing power. On top of that, many game develop helpers were creating games that would be available on multiple platforms, right cross

platform game titles. Typically that involves a core design team that are building out a game for specific platform, maybe the PC, maybe an Xbox whatever, and then they poured it over to other platforms. So many titles that were already available for the Xbox three sixty we're going through this porting process to the PS three. But due to that complexity in the p S three's design, the developers had to take a lot of shortcuts. Some of them

even skipped using those coprocessors entirely. They said, these sp s are too hard to code for. Instead, and you know, we're working on a timeframe here. We could learn how to code for those sps, but it would set us behind schedule. So instead they focused on just that central power pc, you know, the one who's supposed to act as an administrator and hand out jobs. Instead of that, they're saying no, no, no, no, you do the work. Don't don't hand it to your direct reports. We just

want you to do it. So the power pc had to act as the CPU for the whole console, and so some titles that were available for both platforms, particularly early on in the PC PS three's life cycle, just they ran better on the three sixty. If you did a side by side comparison, the three sixty just ran better. And it wasn't that the PS three was not as

good a system. It was a great system. It's that people had not figured out how to program for it effectively yet, so the development process in general was slow, and in gaming circles this led to a somewhat incorrect observation that there were no games for the p S three. This is a meme. You can look it up now. The three sixty had been around for months and had built up a pretty substantial library of games bout the time the PS three launched, so no matter what, Sony

was going to be playing catch up. But the general since was that there just weren't enough really compelling titles on the PS three early on, and thus PS three doesn't have any games. Was born as a meme, and you can see lots of different variations of that same statement that wouldn't be true in the long run. I don't even think it was a fair assessment. Towards the beginning, the PS three had games, and it introduced some games that in times that have passed have become real classics.

So the original Uncharted came out, that was a game by Naughty Dog. That one came out for the PS three, So did Uncharted two and Uncharted three. They all came out for the PS three. And this is a great example to show how developers got a better handle on the PS three in general, because if you were to look at a side by side comparison of the original Uncharted on the PS three and then Uncharted three, you would see an incredible jump in graphics quality. The two

games would look like they belong to different systems. So with PCs we expect this because developers are always pushing the limits of what hardware can do with every release of every title. But the PS three is a video game console. You don't grade the GPU chip and a video game console, you know when you buy it off the shelf, that console is that console for the life of that console. It doesn't. You don't. You don't take it apart and upgrade components. If you're going to do that,

you should be a PC gamer. The hardware and a PS three towards the end of the console's life cycle was identical to all intents and purposes as the hardware and the original PS three's that launched in two thousand six. The game developer, in this case, Naughty Dog, just learned how to develop games for that hardware. More effectively, they learned the system, so using the exact same hardware that they developed Uncharted one four, they produced Uncharted three, and

the differences are astounding. Naughty Dog, in fact, has even said that maybe Uncharted the first game took advantage of thirty percent of the PS three's processing power, So that all comes back to that complexity of learning how to program for the PS three. It was a real barrier. The PS three supported some backwards compatibility, which honestly was a bit of an achievement considering how dramatically different the consoles cpu architecture was from earlier models. The PS three

could play nearly all of the PlayStation one games. PS two games were another story, and that one is a little more complicated. So the original PS three consoles often called the fat consoles because they were much larger than future models. You had the the slim and the super slim PS three, but those original ones contained hardware that made them compatible with at least some, but not all PS two games, So you can get one of those original PlayStation three's and you can still play some PS

two titles. However, future versions of the PS three would remove that compatible hardware and you just couldn't play a PS two game in a PS three, especially a hard disc.

You could play PS two games that were emulated to run on a PS three, but the the experience wasn't always ideal, and there were a lot of different very of the PlayStation three console, mostly in hard drive size, so you had twenty, forty sixty eight and one sixty gigabyte hard drive versions of the PlayStation three that were available at one point or another during its life cycle. Most models also supported WiFi, so you didn't have to have a physical cable to connect to a network. One

exception was the twenty gigabyte model. That one only had the hardwired ethernetport, not a WiFi connective ability. Now, this means for the early years of the p S three's life cycle, the console underperformed. This wasn't helped by the fact that the launch price for the PS three was six hundred dollars here in the United States and made it the most expensive of the seventh generation consoles, and

it would have been a challenge to overperform. Obviously, because the company's expectations had to have been incredibly high given the amazing success of the PS two. They were probably thinking this was just gonna be a hockey stick, that it was just gonna keep going up and up and up. Kim Kutaragi, who at this point was the head of Sony Computer Entertainment, must have had some complicated feelings about this.

He had created an entire division within Sony, an entire business that Sony had not been in, and had seen impress of success over the course of just a decade. But in November two thousand six he would change positions, going from being the president and group CEO of Sony

Computer Entertainment to its chairman and group CEO. Now that sounds like a promotion, right president to CEO, But according to most sources I was reading, it was really showing that the company was moving him out of a role where he would have day to day operations control of the division. It was more of a general oversight, but he would no longer be the person calling the shots day to day. Sony was dealing with a serious shortfall

with this PS three. The sales were falling behind Microsoft in those early days, and Nintendo's WE was winning out as well. And I should add that when it was all said and done, when everything is done with the seventh generation of consoles, WE would be the king. They sold far more consoles of the week Nintendo did than Sony or Microsoft did with their consoles. But then Sony would make up lost ground. It would actually take second place.

So while the Xbox three sixty led the way for most of the early years of the P S three, Sony would ultimately make up that lost ground before the end of its life cycle. Of course, this is also helped by the fact that Sony supports its consoles much longer than the other companies do. Howard Stringer, the CEO for Sony around this time, said that Kutaragi was a

star executive with um let's say communications issues. Stringer said that kudarag he wasn't very good when it came to communicating with other folks in the company, including people higher up on the hierarchy like his boss. He was seen as brilliant, but stubborn, difficult to work with, and maybe

a little bit arrogant. Kazhai, who had been with Sony Computer Entertainment since nine and who had been a large part of the success story of the PS two, would shift from being the head of Sony Computer in North America to stepping in as president for the entire Sony Computer Division, the global head of that part of Sony, and he would also later on go on to become the head of Sony Corporation overall. That again, was probably something Kutaragi had hoped for at one point. He didn't

make it. His protege did. In two thousand seven, Kutaragi surprised a few people by announcing he was stepping down and retiring. He would be named an honorary chairman of Sony Computer Entertainment, but his formal leadership role had come to an end, and so the father of the PlayStation

would leave Sony. But the story of the PlayStation was far from over, So in our next episode, I'll wrap up the rest of the PlayStation three story talking a little bit about the duel Shock three controller, which would come out a year after Kutaragi left the company. And also how the PlayStation for change direction again, how all the course that was laid with a PS three switched again with the PS four, and how that leads up

to the PS five. I anticipate that next episode will be the last one in this in this series for now, with a little bit at the end to talk about the announcements of the PS five. We'll see. As you guys have noticed, I am luquacious in nature, and sometimes these episodes end up having more to them than I anticipated. But if you guys have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, whether it's a quick one off, maybe there's a company you want to hear about, a specific

product you want to hear about. Maybe there's a trend in technology you want to know more about, let me know. Send me a message on Facebook or Twitter. The handle for both is text stuff H s W and now I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio, you app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H