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July 6, 2008
The Sony PlayStation console gaming system originally began as an agreement between Nintendo and Sony to develop a CD based add on to the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES). Because Sony and Nintendo could not come to an agreement about licensing and profit sharing, Nintendo went to another company for the add on, leaving Sony with a half finished product. Rather than abandoning their work and research, Sony decided to develop the add on into a stand alone system of its own, which was launched as the PlayStation console at the end of 1994 in Japan. Less than a year later, it was launched in North America and Europe. Nintendo filed an injunction against Sony for using what they claimed was a named they had a copyright to, however their injunction was denied.
Almost every one of the PlayStation consoles original games were well received globally, and spawned a series of sequels, some of which continued onto Sony’s follow up console, the PlayStation 2. Tomb Raider, Final Fantasy, Grand Turismo, Resident Evil, and Metal Gear Solid are some such examples.
As Sony’s first gaming system, the PlayStation console met with tremendous success around the world. It was the first console system to use CD’s instead of the traditional gaming cartridges used by what would become its major competitor, Nintendo’s N64. It also relied on a polygon form of graphics, instead of the pixels used by the N64, giving its games a graphical realism that many feel rivals the more advanced N64.
The Sony PlayStation console uses a 32 bit RISC chip that runs at a 33.8688 megahertz clock speed. The video processor was state of the art of its time, using 3D transformed polygons and displaying them at a rate of 360,000 polygons per second at a maximum resolution of 680 x 480. It has two megabytes of system RAM, one megabyte of video RAM, and 512 kilobytes of sound RAM.
One of the only criticisms of the PlayStation console is that the laser reading system it uses to scan the CD’s tends to burn out with time, giving the system an often limited lifespan of use. Fortunately, this is a problem that Sony seems to have worked around with their newer system, the PlayStation 2.
Although these specifications are almost laughable by today’s standards, the PlayStation Console still remains one of the most popular gaming systems around the world. It has the most extensive library of games available for it, and with its now very affordable price, continues to be bought in large numbers.
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