PlayStation Classic Has Already Drastically Dropped in Price Following Middling Sales

Megalith

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Sales data out of Amazon and Japan suggest that Sony’s PlayStation Classic is a flop: the console’s MSRP has already been reduced by 30% at the former, while its first-week numbers in the Land of the Rising Sun have been very disappointing (120,000 vs. SNES Classic’s 369,000). Interestingly, PlayStation games appear to run better on SNES Classic than on PS Classic.

Outside of the sales data, there is more than enough bad news being handed to the PlayStation Classic. There was a surprisingly easy way to access the game’s emulator settings, which YouTubers discovered in the first few days. Many critics (including DualShockers) weighed in on the mediocrity of the line-up, and even offered a quick guide on how to build a better lineup of classics under budget with more games using your PlayStation Vita.
 
How do u fuck up a retro console this badly?
easy: use an ARM processor to emulate a fucking SLOWER MIPS.

when are people going to start caring about ISAs and how incredibly crippled ARM's FPU ISA is in comparison to MIPS?

ARM is a straight up clusterfuck and it will never have the homogeneity MIPS offers across 32 and 64 bit offerings.

in fact, it is MIPS whose ISA retains the best conceptual elements of intel's x86, if they didn't improve upon it.
 
I definitely have more fond memories of PS2 than PS1. I vastly preferred N64 over PS1.

I see this as junk though. I love the idea of buying hardware that isn't locked down so it can be used for many things.

Kinda reminds of what Alton Brown says about Unitaskers in cooking:

"The enemy of this ease, in my mind, is the stubbornly popular trend of “single use” kitchen gadgets: little artifacts of consumerist exploitation like avocado slicers and crepe makers, which can’t justify their existence in a kitchen that also contains a knife and a pan. My problem with these contraptions isn’t that they seduce people to spend money on objects whose only real purpose is clutter; apparently, we owe a significant slice of our economic recovery to Americans buying crap they don’t need—so, have at, my fellow citizens."
 
Picked one up for $75 on Amazon and got a free $25 gift card with it. It's worth $50 to hack and tinker with.

But yeah it sucks that Sony totally phoned this one in.
 
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I was really excited for this and was getting myself one for Xmas until it turned out to be a piece of shit :cry:
 
Why would anyone buy the PS Classic when the Vita-TV is a thing?

Imagine what a great retro system they could've made using Vita hardware instead of the tech they chose for the PS Classic?

Place it in an enclosure that mimics the original Playstation, bundle it with classic games, and allow it access to Vita's Playstation classic library (also adding PS3+PS4 controller support) - would've been great!
 
Pointless when you can just use an emulator with a PC. They overrated the nostalgia people would have.

They didn't overrate people's nostalgia, they overrated people's willingness to deal with rushed garbage. Just like with SNK, Sony decided to shit out a Classic system quickly with no real regard to quality or game selection and expected people to eat it up. Both companies completely missed why the NES and SNES Mini systems sold so damn well. A well done PS1 Classic system with a good selection of games, that weren't stuck running in PAL mode by default, could sell a shit ton.
 
They didn't overrate people's nostalgia, they overrated people's willingness to deal with rushed garbage. Just like with SNK, Sony decided to shit out a Classic system quickly with no real regard to quality or game selection and expected people to eat it up. Both companies completely missed why the NES and SNES Mini systems sold so damn well. A well done PS1 Classic system with a good selection of games, that weren't stuck running in PAL mode by default, could sell a shit ton.

Honestly, It would be nice for consumers if they worked together and made a computer system with net access and a virtual store front, that would allow access to all the retro goodness. Its almost like the MAME cabinet scene, people may bitch hey these people are pirating...then give them a reasonable option, grant it I like what Arcade 1up is doing, but I don't need a real life minicade of 20 machines at the rate they are going.
 
Sony really dropped the ball on this one. Half of the games are the European PAL versions with 50hz caps, translating into performance loss and noticeable frame drops. I can't believe they would be so lazy in releasing something like this when it could have been great. They even included a dummy expansion slot on the back which THEY COULD HAVE used for a real expansion slot and sold games in Micro SD form.

The lazy boggles the mind.
 
Sony really dropped the ball on this one. Half of the games are the European PAL versions with 50hz caps, translating into performance loss and noticeable frame drops. I can't believe they would be so lazy in releasing something like this when it could have been great. They even included a dummy expansion slot on the back which THEY COULD HAVE used for a real expansion slot and sold games in Micro SD form.

The lazy boggles the mind.


That's actually a brilliant notion:

A small, compact all-in-one PS1, PS2, and maybe even PS3 classic NTSC with games sold on little cartridges/cards with code that triggers which console path the game works with.

I think that a "series" of cartridges, each with a number of games on them, would have been the way to go:

(a handful of games each volume)
PS1 Series 1, Volumes 1-5
PS1 Series 2, Volumes 1-5
PS2 Series 1, Volumes 1-5
PS3 Series 1, Volumes 1-5
Etc
Etc
Etc
 
I wonder if Sony even developed this, or they outsourced it and slapped their logo onto it
 
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When planning the release of this thing did Sony just draw out all the title names out of a hat? This thing is so underwhelming. And I usually like picking up nostalgia gear like this.
 
Easy, crap game choices.
Also crap emulation and PAL version of some games: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2018-playstation-classic-review
PS3 and PS Vita/PSTV handle emulation of PS1 games waaay the fuck better than this damn thing. PS2 of course had PS1 hardware built in. Literally every official Sony method for playing PS1 games demolishes the PS Classic. After I started playing PS1 games on emulators on PC I never went back to the hardware. In addition to heavy emulator use, I still use the hardware for many game consoles, but PS1 is not one of those consoles. NES Classic and SNES Classic have come in really handy for people I know who aren't very PC literate. I modded their systems and threw a fuckton of games on them (including emulators and games for other systems). No one is fucking interested in the PS Classic though, and for good reason. Sony also probably should've thrown in a DualShock-style controller.
 
easy: use an ARM processor to emulate a fucking SLOWER MIPS.

when are people going to start caring about ISAs and how incredibly crippled ARM's FPU ISA is in comparison to MIPS?

ARM is a straight up clusterfuck and it will never have the homogeneity MIPS offers across 32 and 64 bit offerings.

in fact, it is MIPS whose ISA retains the best conceptual elements of intel's x86, if they didn't improve upon it.

Eh, you think that ISA differences between MIPS and ARM can cause a 1.5GHz ARM to not be able to emulate a 33MHz MIPS? Nope. Just watch the linked video where he explains a slower quad A7 @ 1.2GHz on the SNES can run ridge racer fine, while the faster quad A35 @ 1.5Hz on the Sony cannot. The problem is not the CPU.
 
No one is fucking interested in the PS Classic though, and for good reason.

You have no idea what you are talking about. I know someone in RL who was so interested in the PS Classic, that he pre-ordered one and picked it up from the store on day-one. You must be mentally slow to think that people who pre-order or buy consoles for themselves aren't interested in them.
 
You have no idea what you are talking about. I know someone in RL who was so interested in the PS Classic, that he pre-ordered one and picked it up from the store on day-one. You must be mentally slow to think that people who pre-order or buy consoles for themselves aren't interested in them.

i think he's on the right track.

the NES and SNES classic not only flew off shelves but went out of stock within a week i think it was.

the PS classics collects dust.
 
i think he's on the right track.

the NES and SNES classic not only flew off shelves but went out of stock within a week i think it was.

the PS classics collects dust.


My friend is someone. Their interest in anything, much less the PS Classic has no relevance on if they are a person or not. The only thing you've got to do in order to be someone is to be born a person.
 
i think he's on the right track.

the NES and SNES classic not only flew off shelves but went out of stock within a week i think it was.

the PS classics collects dust.

Anyone paying attention to the media knew the PS Classic was jacked up before it was even in customer's hands. My preorder hadn't shipped yet and I recall being pissed when it did, that I forgot to cancel after I read how poorly it was handled.
 
I wonder if Sony even developed this, or they outsourced it and slapped their logo onto it

It definitely feels like something AtGames would shit out. I would not be at all surprised if Sony paid some lowest bidder to make it as fast as possible.
 
Eh, you think that ISA differences between MIPS and ARM can cause a 1.5GHz ARM to not be able to emulate a 33MHz MIPS? Nope. Just watch the linked video where he explains a slower quad A7 @ 1.2GHz on the SNES can run ridge racer fine, while the faster quad A35 @ 1.5Hz on the Sony cannot. The problem is not the CPU.

i also believe the reviewer stated the *hacked* SNES is running the same emulator with retroarch, which if i understood correctly he said is not available on the classic PSX.

"RetroArch has advanced features like shaders, netplay, rewinding, next-frame response times, and more!"

keep in mind retroarch is, from what a poster is intimating, an ARM-exclusive, so what we're seeing are the fruits of someone's extensive labour to make these games run.

i'm not sure how much GPU acceleratino is going on, but since it's a powerVX (used in many smart phones), i can't think the difference between optimising for it, or the FPU that comes with these A7/A35s, would be much different.
  • hopefully you can see how the ISA comes into play here. whether we're talking about optimising for either powerVX or the FPU, both have their own instruction sets and thus admit a comparison to MIPS (which internally offloads FPU calculations)
so while i understand you have a video that shows improved performance on a lower-clocked processor, what you did not intimate is that this lower-clocked proc is also running retroarch unlike the faster-clocked PSX classic.

i bet a classic console MIPS that was running at a fraction of the clock speed would cost more than these smartphone-spinoff ASICs, which is why we are getting weak offerings such as this. they don't want to spend any money and would prefer to leverage existing designs (for better or for worse).

edit: one other thing i'd like to add, is i believe both the PS2 and dreamcast had an "evolved" ASIC design compared to the PSX (somewhat expected). in both cases, if i recall correctly, they used sophisticated FPUs that exploited vector calculations, which could allow them to be interpreted as GPUs. however, i think their functionality was more FPU than GPU.

so i hope you can see how this is not all about clock speed, but instead how MIPS had a superior ISA that allowed the FPU to perform serious 3d calculations, and in some ways act as a "GPU", but not as we understand them today.

it is definitely not about clockspeed.
 
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so i hope you can see how this is not all about clock speed, but instead how MIPS had a superior ISA that allowed the FPU to perform serious 3d calculations, and in some ways act as a "GPU", but not as we understand them today.

Huh. No, actually all I see is that you make no sense. Never mind, just forget about it...
 
These old 3d games don't age as well as the sprite classics.

I can hardly stomach playing ps1/2/n64 games these days. They look so awful.
 
These old 3d games don't age as well as the sprite classics.

I can hardly stomach playing ps1/2/n64 games these days. They look so awful.
You just have to find the ones that "aged" well.
 
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I like that Nintendo is waiting on the N64 mini. Until they can get MS give permission to use Rare Games, it shouldn't see the shelves.
 
I like that Nintendo is waiting on the N64 mini. Until they can get MS give permission to use Rare Games, it shouldn't see the shelves.

Seeing how Nintendo is actively selling Donkey Kong Land on 3DS, they obviously do have the rights or else Microsoft would have sued them years ago.
 
Seeing how Nintendo is actively selling Donkey Kong Land on 3DS, they obviously do have the rights or else Microsoft would have sued them years ago.

Donkey Kong is a Nintendo owned IP. They simply hired RARE to make DK games. Banjo and Conker are different stories.
 
Donkey Kong is a Nintendo owned IP. They simply hired RARE to make DK games. Banjo and Conker are different stories.

Nah, if that were true then Nintendo never would have delisted The Donkey Kong Country trilogy from the Wii right when Microsoft bought Rare.
 
I canceled my preorder for PSC the moment I saw the game lineup, and I think many of us wouldn't want to spend our cash on some half-baked cashgrab.
 
lol surprise. tried to copy nintendo again and the same result. they never learn. :confused::ROFLMAO:
 
You have no idea what you are talking about. I know someone in RL who was so interested in the PS Classic, that he pre-ordered one and picked it up from the store on day-one. You must be mentally slow to think that people who pre-order or buy consoles for themselves aren't interested in them.

Well the sales numbers really, really stand in the face of your n=1 example.
 
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