18th August 2011, 3:08 PM
(This post was last modified: 18th August 2011, 3:21 PM by Dark Jaguar.)
In just about every store there's Memory Sticks right by the SD cards, and they are a lot cheaper these days than when the PSP first came out. Just get the Panasonic brand instead of Sony's. They're licensed and high quality stuff. As for storage space, an 8 GB card can store around 7 games, depending on the size of the game. The max size of a UMD is 1.6 GB after all, and that seems to be the cap for online only PSP games as well.
I have yet to see a single PS3 game install the entire disk to the drive. Mind you, one would need a really large drive for games like MGS4 that take up a whole blu ray disk. However, most games just take up around a DVD or 2 worth of that space, so most of the time the standard hard disk would be enough. I don't know if there's an internal policy for what Sony allows developers to do, but I do know that even if they are allowed to make their "optional" install copy the whole disk, in practice no developer has done that.
That's why it's best not to leave it up to the developer to code it in themselves and simply make full disk installs a feature of the system's OS instead, like Microsoft did. MS learned the hard way that often such features need to be designed themselves if they are going to become ubiquitous with the original XBox. If you remember, that system advertised "custom soundtracks", but it was left up to the developer to code it in themselves. Microsoft did two things with the 360. They set up multiple sound channels right in the OS so the OS would handle doing things to the different channels instead of the game, and they also set up a developer requirement to put the music track on one specific channel and anything else on the other channels. The first one alone means that channel can always be replaced with custom music, but the second one is required simply so certain lazy or "clever" developers don't decide to just load all the sound into the same channel (depending on the channel, meaning either the custom music plays along with all in game music, or replaces both sound effects and music together), or just get the channels reversed (so it replaces voices or sound effects instead of music).
In the case of a full disk copy, the only requirement that needs to be made to developers is that they make sure all disk content can be used without the need of whatever in-game disk install options they provide. By that, I'm referring to the latest Metal Gear game for the PSP, Peace Walker. That game has built-in data install to speed up load times. The problem is, the game streams a lot of data, so when it's all loaded straight from the UMD, that bottleneck means that voice data over the codec (played in real time in this game) can't be streamed fast enough. Their solution was to dummy that voice playback out unless at least the smallest level of data install was installed to the card (that smallest one basically just being all the codec conversations). This works, but if you happen to have hacked firmware, it means that even if you copy it to the card, it can't detect that that's where it's being played from and still dummies out the voice data unless you install the voice data to the card (again). Now, this is partially a result of the hacked firmware being unofficial. However, it would be an issue that would need to be addressed if Sony ever decided to put in a full disk copy OS option on the system (unlikely now that they're focused on the Vita, which uses cartridges just to annoy OB1, making this a moot point). Honestly I'm not sure how the PS Store version of the game handles things. Those games, by all accounts, are all just rips of the UMDs, so unless it's a rare specially altered version, then it may be they actually had to package the voice data "install" along with the UMD image for that version, making that download actually larger than the max size of a UMD game.
I have yet to see a single PS3 game install the entire disk to the drive. Mind you, one would need a really large drive for games like MGS4 that take up a whole blu ray disk. However, most games just take up around a DVD or 2 worth of that space, so most of the time the standard hard disk would be enough. I don't know if there's an internal policy for what Sony allows developers to do, but I do know that even if they are allowed to make their "optional" install copy the whole disk, in practice no developer has done that.
That's why it's best not to leave it up to the developer to code it in themselves and simply make full disk installs a feature of the system's OS instead, like Microsoft did. MS learned the hard way that often such features need to be designed themselves if they are going to become ubiquitous with the original XBox. If you remember, that system advertised "custom soundtracks", but it was left up to the developer to code it in themselves. Microsoft did two things with the 360. They set up multiple sound channels right in the OS so the OS would handle doing things to the different channels instead of the game, and they also set up a developer requirement to put the music track on one specific channel and anything else on the other channels. The first one alone means that channel can always be replaced with custom music, but the second one is required simply so certain lazy or "clever" developers don't decide to just load all the sound into the same channel (depending on the channel, meaning either the custom music plays along with all in game music, or replaces both sound effects and music together), or just get the channels reversed (so it replaces voices or sound effects instead of music).
In the case of a full disk copy, the only requirement that needs to be made to developers is that they make sure all disk content can be used without the need of whatever in-game disk install options they provide. By that, I'm referring to the latest Metal Gear game for the PSP, Peace Walker. That game has built-in data install to speed up load times. The problem is, the game streams a lot of data, so when it's all loaded straight from the UMD, that bottleneck means that voice data over the codec (played in real time in this game) can't be streamed fast enough. Their solution was to dummy that voice playback out unless at least the smallest level of data install was installed to the card (that smallest one basically just being all the codec conversations). This works, but if you happen to have hacked firmware, it means that even if you copy it to the card, it can't detect that that's where it's being played from and still dummies out the voice data unless you install the voice data to the card (again). Now, this is partially a result of the hacked firmware being unofficial. However, it would be an issue that would need to be addressed if Sony ever decided to put in a full disk copy OS option on the system (unlikely now that they're focused on the Vita, which uses cartridges just to annoy OB1, making this a moot point). Honestly I'm not sure how the PS Store version of the game handles things. Those games, by all accounts, are all just rips of the UMDs, so unless it's a rare specially altered version, then it may be they actually had to package the voice data "install" along with the UMD image for that version, making that download actually larger than the max size of a UMD game.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)