Cody Taylor

Hugh Pickens writes “June marks the launch across Brazil of Zeebo, a console that aims to tap an enormous new market for videogaming for the billion-strong, emerging middle classes of such countries as Brazil, India, Mexico, Russia and China. Zeebo uses the same Qualcomm chipsets contained in high-end smartphones, together with 1GB of flash memory, three USB slots and a proprietary dual analogue gamepad. It plugs into a TV and outputs at a 640 x 480 pixel resolution. ‘The key thing is we’re using off-the-shelf components,’ says Mike Yuen, director of the gaming group at Qualcomm. This approach means that, while Zeebo can be priced appropriately for its markets — it will launch at US 9 in Brazil compared to around US 0 (plus another US for a mod chip to play pirated games) for a PlayStation 2 in the region — and next year the company plans to drop the price of the console to 9. But the most important part of the Zeebo ecosystem is its wireless digital distribution that gets around the low penetration of wired broadband in many of these countries, negates the cost of dealing with packaged retail goods, and removes the risk of piracy, with the games priced at about locked to the consoles they’re downloaded to. Zeebo is not meant to directly compete with powerful devices like Sony’s PlayStation 3, Microsoft’s Xbox 360, or the Wii. ‘In Latin America, where there’s a strong gaming culture, that’s what we’ll be, but in India and China we can be more educational or lifestyle-oriented,’ says Yuen. One Indian gaming blog predicts Zeebo will struggle, in part due to the cultural reluctance toward digital distribution and also the lack of piratable games.”

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If you’re only using your 0 PlayStation 3 for console gaming, you’re missing out on half of its hidden versatility: the ability to upgrade into a fully functional PC!

Marty writes “The PlayStation 3 has recently seen an explosion of releases of emulators and games for the Yellow Dog Linux distro for PS3; once you have installed Yellow Dog Linux you then have the ability to try out MAME, SNES, Amiga, Dos, Commodore and Atari emulators (that’s the tip of the iceberg) and such games as Quake 2, Duke Nukem 3D, Hexen 2 and Alephone. Time to start installing Linux on your PS3?”

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adeelarshad82 writes “CNet reports on a bizarre comment from Sony’s Computer Entertainment CEO in response to complaints from developers on how hard it is to develop games for the Playstation 3. ‘We don’t provide the “easy to program for” console that (developers) want, because “easy to program for” means that anybody will be able to take advantage of pretty much what the hardware can do, so then the question is, what do you do for the rest of the nine-and-a-half years?’ Given that games heavily drive console sales, and the fact that the PS3 is already 8 million units behind the Xbox 360, I think making a developer’s job harder is the last thing Sony needs.”

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