Since the Playstation 3 was first launched people have been complaining they can't do the same things as you can on the xbox 360 with regards to online friends list, cross game communication and chat and the ability to play your own music in games. As time has went on the call has changed from we want to be able to chat to friends online, or we want to play our own music in game, to we want in game XMB.
Now why is this a bad thing to ask for? In game XMB isn't want we need you see and asking for it may harm the playstation 3 in the long run. Lets look at the Xbox 360 here and identify exactly what it does. You would be forgiven for thinking that the Xbox 360 has in game dashboard, it doesn't. When you press the centre Xbox button a little half screen menu pops up, on this menu is your gamertag, it shows you your gamerscore, and online status, which when pressed allows you to change personal info, below this the ability to send messages, see your friend list, and players met. Below that the voice chat and messenger section which allows voice and text chat with people on your friends list. Below this personal setting which allows tweaks to online status themes controller settings etc. Finally there is the music controller which allows access to music stored on the hard drive. Now these options are very powerful, and they allow great functionality, like the ability to chat to a friend while they play another game, and then when you are ready to jump into a multiplayer game together all without ever losing the voice chat. It's quite good and you can see that the playstation 3 suffers from the lack of it.
Now to the point, this menu, shall we call it the minidash, isn't the xbox 360 dashboard, i can't browse the marketplace, see the inside xbox news pages, see my demo and xbox live arcade game collection, browse my achievements list, look at pictures. watch video stored on the hard drive, or change some of the more important settings on the system blade. To put it bluntly the xbox360 has a dashboard with everything and a minidash with just the features you are likely to need while playing a game.
If we ask Sony blindly for in game XMB we run the risk of creating a rod for our own back, we might end up getting what we ask for, the ability to get to the XMB in it's entirety from within a game. The system overheads that this might entail for 512mb of ram might not be to our advantage in the long run.
We need to be specific, we need to say we want messaging and friends list access in game, we want to have voice chat in game and the ability to play music in game. Those really are the only options we need. On the Playstation 3 when you press the playstation button on the controller in game a menu much like the xbox's pops up, it has options to shut down controller and the system at present, all that is needed is for this to be expanded slightly.
Please see that asking for full in game XMB access is only going to hurt the playstation 3 in the long run.
Microsoft announced its financial results for Q3 of fiscal year 2026, including an update on its gaming Xbox business and more.
Not looking good. Hopefully Asha Sharma is able to turn Phil’s disaster around.
To me it's still quite remarkable how they can cash-in 5.3bn in revenue in a single quarter, since their hardware is basically dead.
The stock mark is what makes Microsoft remarkable, They have convinced every institutional and retail investor to just keep piling money into them. Like many big tech giants they are just a big growing pyramid scheme. As long as people keep dropping money into ETF's that cover the market Microsoft will always be liquid. At the same time it is completely stifling innovation and competition. People need to start being more discreet in how they invest their money as it's killing the system.
Riiiiight because people will just flock back to them for one or two games per year.
15+ years of bad performance is what they call irreparable in business. It is time for them to sell off the assets and get out of entertainment.
These declines are on the back of extra revenue received from releasing games like Forza horizon 5 on PlayStation. So I’m being sarcastic here when I said they should go back to exclusives. Killing off a revenue stream from Ps5 sales will only make things worse
The charity event will be streamed live from Gamescom in August.
Thanks to the slip-up of an artist working on the title, we now have more evidence that a new Injustice game is in the works.
You make it sound like once we get in-game xmb it can never be upgraded or improved.
Wait a minute, didn't i read this a long time ago?
That the system overhead can't get any bigger because all the current games run the risk of crashing. So if Sony was able to pull it off, it would be 100% to our benefit. The thing is, it's unknown if they can pull it off.
this is one of the main reasons i dont use my PS3 as much.
Oh, and you;ve made one error, you CAN look at acheivements in the mini dashboard.
And they've also recently updated it soyou can look at your friend's friend lists. There's also a bio section and some other stuff.
A little info about how the PS3 handles memory.
The cell broadband engine uses a direct link to its 256MB XDR memory, the size looks small, but running at 3.2GHz, its the exact same speed as the cell processor.
With a little math, you can see that scaling that number to around what the 360s own memory speeds are(about 700MHz), things become quite clear, the XDR memory becomes the equivalent to 1.9GBs of 700MHz DDR3 RAM.
This doesnt mean "oh the PS3 makes better games" or "all games look better on the PS3", this is showing, technically, the PS3 is at least two, to three times more powerful then the 360 in over all performance.
Another thing that people tend to mix up is the 256MBs of video memory, it is not used like a computers memory at all, it is post processing data that does not need to be done on the fly.
Most heavy graphical data is handled with the Cell processor and the 256MB XDR memory.
Because of how the cell is melded with the XDR memory, not only physics and calculations, as well as wire frame and basically any task you give it, will be calculated and spit out at the screen for your enjoyment.
An example of use for the RSX graphics chip is textures and shaders for post processing of objects, this is what can blur an image to the point of making it look that much more realistic with out taking from the quality, as well as not leaving jaggy lines made of pixels.
If you want more info on what all goes into the PS3, I would be glad to inform who ever has questions.
Also, for people wanting to blame the hardware for developers hardships, your better off blaming sony for not making proper software to make it an easier transition from there normal working platform.
As the PS3 is actually easier to develop on then most are lead to believe, the problems surface when trying to divide memory that is automatically swaped on the 360s 512MB memory, since the memory for the GPU does not work like the 360s, its pointless and just makes a game ported to the PS3 from the 360s code slow and full of error.
Again, any questions are open, and I'm not talking about game superiority(xbox360 has that in the bag so far), just over all performance.