Portable Planet

Izumi Kawanishi Talks PS3

Since we’re always hungering for more PlayStation 3 information,we were delighted to learn that Izumi Kawanishi, the head of the Software Platform division of SCEI, gave a lengthy interview to Impress Watch.

Wequickly becameslightly sadder whenwe remembered that the publication, although online, is in Japanese. Thankfully, a forum member by the name of “one” over at Beyond3D has translated the bullet points into English. Here’s the summary of what Kawanishi had to say:

Using XMB and web browsing won’t spin the fan. Playing Blu-ray will spin the fan, but the load is still low especially for early MPEG2 titles. The fan spins steadily while gaming. The picture/audio quality for video playback is excellent. Though Cell does not do much postprocessing right now, they are doing research for it. TrueHD is converted to LPCM and outputted via HDMI. No DVD upscaling for the time being. But they are looking at user needs and have a plan for the support.

The Blu-ray player response is very quick. The interviewer says he felt it’s the fastest among Toshiba, Sony, Matsushita HD players/recorders he tested. Some contents holders say the speed of BD-Java in the PS3 is the fastest. By pressing the triangle button the XMB shows the folder tree structure as is just like Windows Explorer. It can connect with USB mass-storage devices such as PSP, but not with ones with special transfer methods such as iPod and Walkman. They are collaborating with the Walkman unit for some interaction in the future. It’s decided that the RSX clock stays undisclosed The EEGS embedded in the PS3 does emulation for PS1/PS2 for initial shipments PS3, so no graphics upgrade for the time being. The software emulation technology is almost complete but not ready for the launch. As soon as it becomes complete EEGS is removed from future units. In Remote Play with PSP for the 60GB version, the PS3 resolution becomes 480p (16:9) and converts the screen to MPEG-4 Simple Profile at around 1Mbps to send it to the PSP.

All control is transferred to the PSP and you can control the PS3 by pressing the PSP buttons. BD/DVD and other copyright-protected materials can’t be sent. As for games the support will come in the near future. Downloaded PS1 games are transferred from a PS3 to a PSP by a USB cable. PLAYSTATION TV (the demo kiosk) starts the download service too. The web browser can open up to 6 pages simultaneously. 64MB memory is always reserved for the browser, the instant messenger and other XMB OS activity even while in game. Installing Linux creates a new HDD partition separately from the PS3 partition. After the setup, you can select which system to use at the boot menu. You can choose to auto-boot Linux too. Aside from Linux, SCE’s developers are still seeking the way to publish proper software development environment for the PS3 main OS and PSP for general users. But right now the PS3 main OS can run only signed applications (while PS3 Linux can run whatever applications on it.)