The Sony PlayStation Portable, as most of you may know, is a handheld gaming console with two 333 MHz MIPS32 R4000-based Processors, a Graphics Processing Unit with 2 MB onboard Video RAM running at 166 MHz. Main RAM is 32 MB, with 4 MB embedded DRAM.

Quite impressive specs, unfortunately a bit hobbled (depending where loyalties lie, this could also be called crippled) by reliance on optical disks, called “Universal Media Discs”, on which games, video (movies) and firmware updates are distributed. These are slower than the game cartridges used in the  Nintendo DS Lite, the Sony PSP’s main competitor.

Since this is about the latest iteration of the Sony PSP, I won’t go into the pros and cons of the Nintendo DS Lite versus the Sony PSP. I have played both handheld gaming consoles, and they each have  their good points.

The latest version of the Sony PlayStation Portable is called the PSP 3000. It adds built-in Skype with onboard microphone, and an improved screen which had several issues (see this article at CNET.COM).

The previous version, the PSP 2000, otherwise known as the PSP Slim, was 33% lighter and 19% thinner than the original PSP. The redesign also doubles the onboard RAM from 32 MB to 64 MB.

This being my first blog posting of 2009 I was intending to write about the future of the Android platform and maybe throw in some speculation about MacWorld which is coming up next week. However, I wasn’t in a speculative mood, and even the prospect of a 32GB iPhone didn’t excite me – especially since I’m not that far into the AT&T two year contract with my 3G iPhone.

Instead , after a break of about eight number of months or so, I decided to start up my Xbox 360. This was after I’d hooked it up to my small HDTV along with the PS3. I’d  briefly read about the new Xbox dashboard interface, the “New Xbox Experience” recently, but was still pleasantly surprised once update was downloaded and installed.

The NXE – the New Xbox Experience – has avatars which are reminiscent of the Wii Miis (Mii pronounced to rhyme with Wii). Anyone who has played on the Wii will think, hey, this looks slightly familiar. That’s were the similarity ends though, with the new interface a lot different from the old tabbed one, and actually quite impressive. Among the new options added are the ability to install games on the hard drive, and run them from there – but with the original disc in the DVD Drive. The interface relies a lot more on graphics than on text and seems a lot more fluid.

Firstly, I haven’t forgotten those handy folk among you who build your own PCs, including Gaming PCs. My expertise is in software - when it comes to hardware the most complicated thing I have done is install a second hard drive. I salute those who can build a PC or take one apart, diagnose it, and put it together again.

For a Build Your Own Box person, an Antec Three Hundred Gaming Case Midsize Tower is probably a good starting point.

The gaming PC featured today is so exclusive it is not listed on Pricegrabber.com. Actually, the reason is more to do with the fact that this gaming PC is not sold through retail outlets, only from the maker’s website. They are also among the most expensive Gaming PCs around. I refer of course to the Falcon Northwest Mach V (Intel Core i7-965 Extreme Edition). Falcon Midwest can be found here. For pictures of the Mach V, see the review here on Engadget.com.

I tried configuring a Falcon Northwest Mach V gaming desktop on the Falcon Midwest website. A “Budget” Mach V starts at about $2,600, and the midway “Bang for the Buck” system at $3,200, and the “Bragging Rights” Mach V starts at $11,000. Starts at is a relative term, as the cost can go down depending on your configuration choices. I reconfigured this by changing the SSDs (Solid State Disks) to a pair of raid 0 Hard drives and a 1 Terabyte drive (wow!) and some other minor changes and brought the price down to $8,100. The hardware techs I mentioned above could probably build their own machines with similar specs for a fraction of these prices.

In Part I and II of this series I left out something rather important – prices. The Pricegrabber pages I link to do have prices, but for the small percentage of blog readers who don’t click on the links, I’ll give an idea of relative pricing. At the time of blogging  the Velocity Micro Edge Z-55 went for for just over 2,000 US dollars. The Alienware Area-51 ALX Desktop I mentioned in Part II goes for over 4,500 US Dollars.

The gaming PC in this blog entry  is one of the cheapest. The Dell Studio XPS Desktop is a “Gaming-friendly System” which can be configured quite nicely for 1,500 US Dollars. This configuration would include 6GB RAM, a 500GB 7,200 rpm hard drive, and a 512MB ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics cars. The icing on the cake is the Intel’s Core i7 desktop CPU – currently the best “bang for your buck” quad-core processor.

The only thing this package is missing is a monitor, which is going to push the $1500 price tag up a couple of hundred dollars

The next gaming PC we are looking at has a distinctive shape, and a name that evokes images of space invaders of some sort.

It is the Alienware Area-51 ALX Desktop. People either love or hate the shiny “Alien’s head” case, which is actually plastic and not metal.

The specs are almost out of this world: starting with a quad core 3GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650, paired with 2GB DDR3 RAM and two 1GB Nvidia GeForce 9800 GX2 graphics cards, around a Terrabyte of hard drive space, DVD±RW DL, and 32-bit Windows Vista Home Premium. There is also the option of a Blu-ray burner.

The description from the Pricegrabber entry bears repeating: “The Alienware Area-51 ALX represents the best, the elite in computer performance. Overclocked for superior processing power and offering a choice of either NVIDIA SLI or ATI CrossFireX multi GPU graphics, the Area-51 ALX stands well above the masses. Low latency memory, 7.1 surround sound and Blu-ray compatibility are just a few features contained within an aggressively-styled, chrome-trimmed case that’s guaranteed to turn heads.”

According to Wikipedia “Alienware was originally established to tap a niche in the high performance game market“. Since 2006 Alienware has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Dell.

First I must admit that I’m not much of a PC gamer. Console gaming is more my thing, Xbox 360, Sony PlayStation and handheld consoles like the sony PSP and Nintendo DS. The closest I have to a gaming computer was a Tapwave Zodiac, and that is a gaming handheld computer, which doesn’t count with these mean machines.
I do see the attraction with PC Gaming (as opposed to console gaming): the actual hardware and software tweaks made to the Gaming PC are going to have some influence on whether or not you win.

The first gaming PC I’ll look at is one CNET refers to as “upper midrange“. For me this would be beyond my upper range, but I enjoy going over the specs of these PCs the way I would a Porsche 911 Carrera.
The gaming PC in question is the Velocity Micro Edge Z-55, it has an Intel Core i7 (Quad-core) processor, 6GB of DDR3 RAM, and the CPU has been overclocked to 3.0GHz. The machine uses 64-bit Windows Vista. Oh yes, and 2 (that’s right two)  512MB ATI Radeon Graphics cards. Finish that off with a 500 or 750GB hard drive, and this is one fast machine.

If like me you are feeling a bit of a “3G iPhone!!” information overload, here is something to possibly counteract the high-tech marketing hysteria.

A story is told of sometime ago in the days of Windows 98, about a father who used to let his young son play games on the family computer. The father was quite proud of his son, who could find his way around the computer without a problem. Then one day the son cried out “Help me dad, I’m stuck in the black space”. Puzzled, and wondering what game his son could be playing, the father went to have a look. The son was really stuck, no amount of mouse clicks could get him out of the DOS Prompt. The Dad quickly typed “exit” and the computer was back into colorful GUI Windows.

Since then it has become harder to get into the black space of the DOS prompt, it will now open in a non-maximized Window which can be closed with a mouse click. It no long gives dire warnings about closing a Dos Box, since it is no longer DOS, just an emulation.

Out of interest I found a Y2K compliant version of IBM PC DOS right here on PriceGrabber.com. This is real DOS, it actually comes on a CD, like software sometimes still does.

One of the things which distinguishes the Sony PlayStation 3 from its competitors is that you are legally allowed to install another operating system onto the the gaming console which will run alongside its gaming system. This is particularly unusual, especially for Sony, who are in a constant battle to keep hackers from running homebrew applications on the Sony PlayStation Portable. Of course the only operating system you can install is Linux. This is not really restrictive, since there are so many different flavors or distributions of Linux. Also there probably would be some legal ramifications if Sony allowed you to install Windows XP on the Sony PS3. This functionality has been available since the PS3 was released.

There is a small problem though; the Sony PlayStation 3 currently comes with a maximum of 80GB of hard disk space. This is really not enough for a modern PC. The PS3’s hard drive can be upgraded, although not as easily as a PC hard drive.

Popular Mechanics has an article on “How to Turn Your PlayStation 3 Into a Linux PC“, which describes in detail how to upgrade the hard drive of a 40GB PS3 to 250GB and install Ubuntu, one of the most popular Linux distributions.

In previous blog entries I’ve mentioned Virtualization more than once. VMware Workstation is basically a PC emulator, although on OSFaqWiki they say it is not (see “VMWare PC Emulator“). Well, that is confusing, but I’d like to mention other emulators and simulators which I have come across.

One simulator that many people have heard of is the Microsoft Flight Simulator. The last version of the Flight Simulator I used was Microsoft Flight Simulator 2000. Although each version is more realistic than the previous one, I must admit becoming bored with just flying around, and never really becoming good enough to take part in the missions.

When developing for the Palm (quite a popular pastime several years back), there was POSE (Palm OS Emulator) for testing and debugging Palm programs. POSE requires an actual Palm ROM image to boot. This can be obtained from Palm, or uploaded from a real Palm device. POSE only worked up until Palm OS version 4.x, for Palm OS version 5.x and later you had to use the Palm OS Simulator, which was essentially the Palm OS recompiled to run on the x86 (Intel and AMD PC) platform.

There are two other Palm OS emulators which are available for purposes other than debugging programs. One is the commercial StyleTap Palm OS emulator for the Windows Mobile operating system. It is aimed at handheld users who have moved from Palm OS-based devices to Windows Mobile devices. It allows users to install and run Palm applications which then run inside StyleTap on the Windows Mobile device. Another Palm OS emulator is the Palm OS Garnet emulator for Nokia’s Internet Tablets. Released as a free beta by the Access, it allows users of Nokia N770, N800 and N810 to run Palm Applications in a similar fashion. (see “Garnet VM Beta for Nokia N Series“) . Garnet is another name for Palm OS 5.

Sony has officially announced VoIP (voice over IP) for the Sony PlayStation Portable. Unfortunately owners of the original Sony PSP “1001″ model like myself are excluded, as this will only work with the new updated Slim PSP model. Somehow visions come to mind of holding the 6.7 inch by 2.8 inch PSP awkwardly to your ear, like the first generation Nokia nGage. Of course VoIP will most likely require a headset with a microphone.

Although the updated Slim (aka Slim and Lite) PSP has several enhancements which improve the gaming experience it is not a “must have” upgrade.

The Sony PSP is already a multifunction device, with the ability to play videos and music as well as browse the internet. It is rather large to use as an MP3 Player, even though the Memory Stick Pro Duo media is currently available in capacities up to 8GB. I’ve watched a couple of video clips on my PSP, and the screen is excellent. Of course, having the Sony Media Manager to copy the video files in the right format to the right directory on the Memory stick (with the right filename) helps. Mostly though, I play games on it. Slow load times aside, this is where the PSP excels - and I’ve played with a number of different handheld gaming consoles, each with its own unique qualities.