(Nikkei BP Group)
(No.1 High-Tech News Site in Japanese)
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| Sony Unit to Outline Next-Generation PlayStation Soon
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November 17, 1998 (TOKYO) -- Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCE) may
outline its next-generation PlayStation as early as late November, informed
sources told Nikkei Electronics.
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PlayStation is Japan's most popular 32-bit video game machine.
The company sees November as a critical month, because rival Sega Enterprises
Ltd. plans to begin selling its new-generation game machine, Dreamcast,
in the Japanese market on Nov. 27, the sources explained.
Nikkei Electronics anticipates that following the release of details
scheduled for late November, SCE will put the PlayStation on sale at
the end of 1999.
"The new machine will feature a function to receive data, such as music,
via the Internet," said an executive of a company that is joining forces
with SCE on a data delivery service for the machine.
SCE will also make public a microprocessor for digital signal processing
and a RISC-type microcontroller for video game machines, both of which
SCE is jointly developing with Toshiba Corp., next February at a meeting
of the International
Solid State Circuits Conference in the United States. Nikkei Electronics
assumes that these chips will be used in the next-generation PlayStation
machine.
The digital signal processor can decode MPEG2 data. Therefore, some industry
analysts believe that a DVD-ROM drive will be incorporated into the
new PlayStation.
Related stories:
� Sega Unveils Prepaid Internet Access Service for
Dreamcast
� Sega to Introduce Dreamcast Video Game Machine
on Nov. 27
� Sony to Sell Small Game Machine Similar to PlayStation
(Nikkei
Electronics)
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