Gaming Consoles

Pictures shamelessly stolen from here

During my childhood, my dad tried to get me exposed to all sorts of indulgence, from music to even gaming. Back in the 80s, my dad bought me a set to get me hooked onto gaming. The Atari 2600 was first released in 1977, but probably only reached the shores of Singapore in the early 80s. It is the first successful video game console to use plug-in cartridges, and I could have so many game choices to change. It was well built and survived until the Computer PC AT/XT series came about and I was playing 5 1/4 floppy disc games which were under the 360kB the Double Density (DD) disk can hold.

Next came in the early 90s, where the graphics on the PC paled comparing to dedicated gaming consoles. And I was addicted to the Nintendo Famicom System (The Nintendo Family Computer aka Famicom was first released in 1983) which I purchased from a friend as I dabble back into game consoles again. It was tough convincing my parents as the focus for me now was studies. Thus pocket money saved bought me this wonderful console.

But then PC made its debut of improving medium from FDs to CDs and now DVDs, and the slew of graphics card, sound cards made it more worthwhile and enjoyable to be able to play using the computer. You can have controllers, keyboards, wheels to play FPS, racing, strategy games. This brought me to the present time where gamers can choose between consoles or computers as game developers release titles across all platforms.
What makes it interesting is, why should the game consoles survive?

Well I have previously mentioned that game consoles these days are value for money as the makers actually lose $ for every set they produce. I made my decision based on many other factors which I will explain now.

I currently have a PS3, 2 PSPs, a DS Lite and a Wii, besides the PS3 for local warranty, the rest of the devices are bought from Japan with no supporting warranty but have not much issues so far - it's been more than a year. These Japanese gaming toys are well built and provide a lot of entertainment for myself and my family and lately Rainbow Six on the PS3 has given myself and my girlfriend a lot of collaboration time. The only mishap so far was my 1st generation PSP (Black 2004) which has the button dropped off after much aggression playing the NBA Live 2008. 4 years and just a button drop off, that shouldn't be too much to ask right? Even my battery is made in Japan and is still the same one that came with the portable.

My first semiconductor engineering job was with a Japanese company which instilled quality in my workscope. They are very stringent with reliability, quality - it is shown in their attitude towards work, design etc. I used to manufacture Non-volatile memory (NVMs) otherwise widely know as Flash, the memory cards you used in your cameras and DS Lite, PSPs etc. The NVMs I built was tested with many parameters, going through many stages which explained why they used to cost so much, but I tell you - they last. I managed to perform reliability tests on my devices which showed a memory retention of about 200 years! But that was probably on your 32mb card which is probably obsolete right now.

With the Koreans, Taiwanese and Chinese coming into the memory business and slashing costs such as test, reliability monitoring etc. It is why memory is now a commodity business which is now so cheap, it can be considered as a Harddisk option. The price you pay now, is the price you pay for less reliable things. You pay peanut, you get monkeys. Everything comes at a price.

But saying that, who now still uses a 256mb memory stick? Within a year, everyone will be clamouring over a 16gb SDHC card or double that next year. There should be no issue with losing your pictures, as the memory card would be sitting around collecting dust.

That saying, I hope Jase is happy with his PS3 as the Microsoft Xbox 360 is making headline news on its quality and reliability. Apparently, this disc scratching issue was known before Xbox 360 was launch in 2005 and could have been avoided with a USD$0.50 solution. I remembered Microsoft rushing to release the console while Sony was having delays and prefer to lose market share rather than release a bad console.

Lately from the impending economic depression, I have observed that greed over integrity is the root cause of what is happening to the world. But let's not get depressed and enjoy life in some way or another.

Do check out this game console website covers the entire history of game consoles.