when Ritsuko times out

So over the weekend I had some time to play around with my PS3 at last.
The GameOS, naturally, sucks. The web browser sucks. The photo viewer cannot play animated GIFs nor open PNGs in 5000×8000 resolution (I’d expect it to at least be flexible about that), the audio player does not recognize ID3v2/APEv2 tags in M4A/MP4 AAC files and insists on upsampling my 44.1kHz tracks to 48kHz if I want to do anything else on the XMB while listening to music, AND cannot group music files by directory, the video player doesn’t recognize SRT subtitles inside MP4 video files, not to mention it has very limited codec support. Vorbis? FLAC? Proper H.264 support that doesn’t require me to reencode most of my movie collection? Where’s MKV? Have they still not fixed this yet after 3 years?
So I hastily backuped, reformatted and installed Yellow Dog Linux 6.2. At this point I hit another major pitfall. They still only allow you to choose 10GB for the OtherOS or 10GB for the GameOS. Obviously, the 10GB for the GameOS is totally unacceptable, the major reason being that Valkyria Chronicles, which I played the LIVING HELL out of, takes up 3GBs. But seriously, can’t they even let me choose what size I want to split the disk up in?

Whatever. I install YDL. YDL 6.2 by default is fucking stupid, it installs 2GB of worthless shit I don’t need (500MB GNOME+KDE) on a system that lets you either have 10GB for Linux or for the GameOS. Seriously, couldn’t they trim it down a little? Who the fuck uses GNOME/KDE on a system with only 256MB RAM+224MB ps3vram swap anyway? So I wrapped my head around yum and got some extra repositories up and running. Lo and behold, mplayer on the PS3! Time to play all my MKV and AVI and FLAC/Vorbis/M4A with proper tag support and… no, wait, no, there’s a problem here. Oh damn, I should have known. There’s no 2D graphics hardware acceleration, so everything is done by the in-order 3.2GHz PPE. And the rest of the 6 SPEs, where the PS3’s bulk computing power lies, are sleeping. Idle. Dormant. GREAT. As a result, the PPE spends most of its time performing colorspace conversion and can’t even play a 720p H.264 file smoothly. What’s worse, it doesn’t even stretch the video fullscreen, obviously because it’s just a framebuffer and there’s no 2D accel/XVideo support for it.

It seems I have to download lots of weird SPE libraries and then patch the latest mplayer source with mplayer-ps3 which makes the SPEs do the colorspace conversion and then allows the video to be output via -vo ps3. Then another SPE will kick in and resize the output into whatever size I want the window to be. Decoding is still handled by the PPE. What’s more, there’s no guarantee that it works.

And you’d expect that since it’s Linux, you would be able to run X11 at some PC resolution, like 1680×1050. NOOOOO, it only supports 720p and 1080p. Bullshit. You know what? I think Sony isn’t really serious about this computing thing. They even stripped it out from the PS3 Slim, so you can clearly see where their heart lies. A little 2D accel never hurt anybody. They’re just in it for the publicity. And now that enough publicity has been garnered, they take it away.

I still love my PS3, in case you’re wondering. It does play nice with all your hardware, like FAT32 formatted partitions, USB keyboards+mice, and even third party USB gamepads. Hell, it even rips CDs for you, something I wouldn’t expect from Sony. Plus, Persona 4 and Valkyria Chronicles = major win. I’ll buy GTA4 for it next.

I just had an experience of PS3 bliss, where I took my friend’s monitor, bought a HDMI-DVI cable and RCA-3.5mm minijack Y-cable, and spent over 40 hours this weekend on my PS3.

Of course, all this had to come at a price. I didn’t get any homework done, and when breakfast came around I realized I had bought buttermilk instead of milk, thereby totally wasting my cereal. I ate it anyway, wouldn’t do that again.

Valkyria Chronicles: OH YES BABY, this was fun. I’m at chapter 8 now, but I really need to cool off on this game. It’s quite fun.

Persona 4: well it got conquered by Valkyria Chronicles. Sorry. But it does run way better on my PS3 than on PCSX2.

Dead or Alive 2: I have no idea how to do combos with Ayane. Will have to learn.

Uncharted: what? I had that game?

Sup guys. So you probably thought ritchan was on a two week honeymoon with his PS3, playing Uncharted and Valkyria Chronicles, perhaps even trying out Ratchet and Clank, waiting fervently for his genuine copy of Persona 4 to arrive from the UK, and trying to budget for FFXII at the same time.

Nope, no such luck.

You see, on the day I got it, my friend’s TV gave up the ghost after about 6 hours. So I was left with a PS3 and a non-working television. And, after I went to my other friends’ places and plugged my PS3 in, about 20GBs of PS2 ISOs that didn’t work except for Rez and FFX. Come to think of it, a PS2 Slim was 3 times cheaper than a PS3, and if we include the games, infinitely cheaper. Oh well, I’ll definitely get that in December then.

So what am I left with? Next month, trying hard as hell to sell off my RISC workstation stuff in order to afford a lovely little Samsung Syncmaster F2380. Oh, I did my research. Dell 2209WA, eIPS panel, yadda yadda. But the fact remains that PS3 Linux doesn’t do 1680×1050, and the 2209WA just doesn’t display black that well.

I’ve been playing Pokemon Gold and Advance Wars 2 on my PSP instead. Good old faithful, even lets me play downloaded games!!!!! Speaking of which, Beaterator is fun. If you have even the slightest interest in electronic music, play it. God of War for PSP is also a nice introduction to the God of War series. I’m gonna wait for the God of War Collection for PS3 to get jiggy with 1 and 2, of course. Yggdra Union’s the same as it was on GBA, except that the graphics don’t look as pixelated and I gain morale when I level up.

Final Fantasy X International NTSC: doesn’t work
Dead or Alive 2 Hardcore NTSC: doesn’t work
Rez: works, B&W
Oneechanbara (Zombie Hunters) PAL: doesn’t work
OKAMI NTSC: doesn’t work
Odin Sphere PAL: doesn’t work
Persona 3 FES/4 NTSC: doesn’t work
Final Fantasy 12 NTSC: works for the first second, screen doesn’t update after that

God I’m so discouraged. I need to get OpenUSBLD 0.4 working on the PAL PS3 ASAP.

EDIT: Final Fantasy 10 PAL works, AWESOME! but FMV stutters really badly. It’s just too bad, it looks like I’ll have to buy the originals after all.

I was so impressed with the pictures on this eBay article that I bought it on the spot. Of course, they omitted the rear, which might mean that the rear has some horrible scratches on it, but it doesn’t matter. I missed the earlier auction of a USA 60GB PS3, which was snapped up before somebody bought my Intellistation.

Having 5 PS2 games to test it with and Ratchet and Clank isn’t a bad deal either, the game got quite good reviews. I look forward to loading Swap Magic 3.6+/3.8 on it and playing Oneechanbara/Oneechanpon!

Well, all things told, that was way easier than I thought. I just sell a IBM Intellistation for about 340EURs, and I buy this for 328EURs. I mean, an Intellistation POWER 275 doesn’t usually fetch more than 250 on eBay. Granted, I still have to fix the Intellistation up for shipping and actually call the shippers over to ship it away, but I was expecting it to be a little more… dramatic, climactic than this. Oh well, I get one, and with that I can finally play Xenosaga without watching a slideshow on PCSX2.

Now, I just need to get a screen. Yes, I know, shoulda bought the screen first, yadda yadda, I’ll just plug it into my friend’s TV.