[p900] P900 to P910...
- From: Alfonso Martone <a.martone@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: p900@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 8 Oct 2004 09:55:01 +0200
There have been lots of rumors about porting "P910 firmware" to the
P900; some guys on the howardsforum.com site got a P900 running the
"P910a" (not "P910i") firmware running, and getting compatibility with
memorystick Duo-Pro up to 1Gb.
Yes, the 128Mb limit is due to a software restraint. The P900 hardware
is {actually} good for Duo Pro up to 1Gb (and more, when those cards
will be released). But the {*!$!@#*} Sony Ericsson policy was (and is,
and will be) to not to release any P900 software driver for Duo Pro
cards (I also fear that we now shouldn't expect anymore firmware
upgrades).
The sad notes: the "P910a" firmware is not official, and thus there
won't be any updates; also, it needs more than 2Mb core memory than
the "P900" firmware (thus leaving only 5Mb core memory left); this
means more frequent error conditions (out of memory, etc) and possibly
some software incompatibilities (EDoom and VRally, for example).
Another note: you need a "Fighter" device (something more complex than
the standard USB cradle; it costs a few hundred dollars) to burn in
the P910a firmware. Try here to get some extra information:
http://www.howardforums.com/showthread.php?threadid=453090
Anyways, I don't think I will ever want to risk. At least for the next
13 months (burning in an unsupported firmware will invalidate the
two-year warranty). The only good reason to get that firmware is the
upto-1Gb-duopro support; no one will ever notice the difference
between "262k colors" and "64k" colors (remember: "64k" means 5 bits
blue, 6 green, 5 red; "262k" means 6 bits blue, 6 green, 6 red - that
is: the sixth least significant bit was added to the red and blue
components...! the P900 has a bright screen at 132dpi resolution: you
will barely notice the difference between 16million colors of the
forthcoming P1000 and 64k colors of the P900!!). This said, if you can
live without a thumb-keyboard and you don't need huge memory (256Mb to
1Gb), the only good reason to buy a P910i instead of a P900 is the
internal memory (doubled: 32Mb) and "disk C:" space (quadrupled:
64Mb).
While there has been a "big jump" from P800 to P900 (aesthetics, screen
colors, size, system stability, etc), there was a very "little jump"
from P900 to P910i (they just wanted to say "we need some months to
finish working on the P1000").
Final note: it seems that there is {actually} a sort of "graphics
accelerator processor" in the P900 and P910i... Someone told me that
the VRally does run very smooth in the P910i, like in the P900; since
the screen memory map has changed (16-bit pixels containing 16 bits of
information, to 32-bit pixels which contain 18-bit information) I must
argue that either VRally is a perfect software (exceedingly
optimized), or it uses some undocumented P900/P910i feature that does
not suffer from the 50% slowdown of the doubled screen memory size.
Given true the latter, I must also argue that except VRally, no other
noticeably "accelerated" software game is out.
As I said 11 months ago, if the P900 has a (sort of) "graphics
accelerator" inside (even a simple triangle/vertex engine), then it
has roughly the power of a PlayStation 1 (remember that the PS1 has an
R5900 processor and 4Mb RAM only). I expected great softwares
available for the P900 this year (tipically a 128Mb memorystickduo
filled with the game data, graphics and music, thus implicitly
protected) but nothing has appeared up to now...
Here (Naples, south Italy) a 128Mb Duo is still priced 70euro (street
price).
--
alf
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