Multiplayer PSP games with one UMD to be a feature, not a hack?
posted April 6th 2005 2:00PM
We reported earlier on a hack that enables
you to play multiplayer games on the PSP with only one
copy of the game. This stirred a deeply (well, not that deeply) buried memory in the hive mind that is Engadget,
and we hunted down a Sony ad that's run on Japanese TV recently, which shows popular magician Tomohiro Maeda messing
with a couple of PSPs and demonstrating playing a networked game on them with a UMD inserted into only one. The
voiceover at the end confirms that there's a feature called Game Sharing that works at least in the game shown, Namco
Museum, which is out already in Japan. Unfortunately the title seems to be a run-of-the-mill collection of Namco faves
from the past; not like they'd encourage you to buy less copies of anything new, right? (The "Read" link below is to a
Windows Media stream of the commercial.)
[UPDATE: OK, seems from the comments like this was old hat to some people. We promise to do penance by ritually beating ourselves with a whip made from UMDs.]
Not a new feature. Epyx built that concept into the "Handy", allowing up to 8 machines networked to use a single cartridge. Atari toyed with the idea of keeping the feature when they acquired the product and renamed it the "Lynx" but then concluded it would destroy title sales and thus they wouldn't recoup any of the monies lost on the Lynx hardware to begin with. It is really funny to me that both Nintendo and Sony are getting around to using concepts that were first incorporated into the previously mentioned product 15+ years ago.
This has been posted for weeks...
http://www.us.playstation.com/psp.aspx?id=faq#9
Doesn't seem too impressive. A lot (well, some) DS games use this openly. Download Play it's called. Players wirelessly download part or all of a game onto their DS, until it is powered down, and they can play multiplayer. Of course, DS games probably aren't as big as PSP games.
Wow. I hope that wasn't gameplay footage of namco museum. That looked terrible.
MEGA wide bars on the side of the game is a REALLY bad idea.
I'd almost live with a scrolling game surface as opposed to that.
Guys, Just look on the back of a psp game holder and you'll see it says some games have the capability to play with only one game.
This is not a new feature, as others already mentioned.
From what I understand, the available memory to run shared games is amazingly low.
Why has Engadget turned into a PSP billboard?
These are two entirely unrelated things. Namco Museum downloads a small type of game (not the entire Namco Museum game) to the RAM of your friends PSP and then they can play Galaga or whatever old games are part of Namco Museum. What was discussed before, playing MP with only one UMD, is entirely different. It is unsupported by the game, etc. It is just a coincidence that wouldn't be too reliable I think. The PSP lets you take the disc out without even acting like anything happened (like the PS2 did) which is really a stupid design decision. The PSP also requires game developers try to stay off of the UMD as much as possible. So, you mix a game that loads itself into RAM and needs the UMD seldom, if at all, and the fact you can take it out without the PSP complaining and voila, you can have two people playing off of one UMD.
Oh, and the web browsing stuff is a completely inconsequential thing also, it's not a hack or anything like that. It's neat to see another website running on the PSP, but until they get homebrewed code running on there, everything else will just be little tricks. There are really great development forums out there with very smart people making tremendous progress almost every day. You'll know when a real hack hits. I don't link the forums just because they've been flooded recently by loads of really stupid people posting every random thing that pops into their head when others are trying to have serious development discussions.
Game Sharing is not the same as the disc swapping that has been discovered recently.
I believe that the game sharing feature is for downloadable game sharing, ala NDS.
I believe some future games will allow limited game sharing via wi-fi.
I have a question, that's a bit unrelated to all of this: if you're watching converted pROn mp4s on your PSP, what should it be called: Laystation Pornable?
So does the PSP have the same single disc play technique as the NDS or not?
From the soundes of things the NDS is the only system capable of doing so (aside from the GBA) - granted it can take a while to download the game but you get the full experience of the game.
This was even in the manual included with the system, was it not? I read something about it while flipping through.
"We promise to do penance by ritually beating ourselves with a whip made from UMDs."
Make sure you post pics or video of that!
interesting