orange wrote:
whats the resolution- 640x480??
Because it's being output at TV resolution for a capture card. (Now, the question would be, this being Sony, are you limited to displays that can authenticate themselves to the HDMI crapfest even when running Linux?* Not that delaced 1080i or 1080p is bad, but notice the markup on (low-resolution!) DTVs versus "computer" displays with DVI inputs.
...
Now, with everyone I know geared up to line up to buy one or the other console, I put some thought into trying to use either as a workstation. Linux, at least, is already available for both, the CPUs certainly have enough grunt for browsing and all the usual tasks, but there's one thing that sets both the Wii and the PS3 apart from even the A500 or A600:
No RAM expansion.The consoles have some wonderfully fast RAM installed, but this ranges from something like 64MB on the Wii to 256MB on the PS3 (GPU memory not included). Plenty to boot AmigaOS, at least for now, but more than a little crippling if you intend to deal with modern bloatware or the large datasets that half of anything interesting is starting to require.
I suppose you could solve for this by using a hard drive with a really, really, really ridiculous amount of cache (how many drive interfaces does the PS3 have?), but the fact is that once you're out of main memory you're down to ATA speeds in the best case, and more like USB2.0 or SD throughput in more practical, plug'n'play configurations.
If only some sort of actual 'internal'-grade expansion bus had been reserved (ExpressCard, a sidecar port, anything...), you could conceivably imagine replacing your desktop with one. As it is, even the Genesis and Saturn had more flexibility in that department.
[Obviously you don't want every developer to start requiring a RAM expansion and making the console side of the experience less plug'n'play, but... you didn't see that happen with Sega back then, did you?]
*
I'm not really up to speed on how HDMI works when devices actually try to honor the copy-protection^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H HDMI-membership-tax-enforcement aspect of it, but I assume the burden is on the display to prove it's a tax-paid, no-copy-bit honoring output device to the transmitting interface.
