My friend Todd has an Xbox 360, and he enjoys it quite a bit. One capability of that system that he doesn’t make use of, however, is the ability to customize soundtracks in his games. I find that inconceivable! I’m am so tired of crap music I don’t like (especially in EA’s games) that I usually just turn it off. PLAYSTATION 3 games haven’t had this ability to use your own music, but with the 1.80 PS3 SDK, it’s now possible for developers to support this!

This has me excited. I want to hear my own music, like Rhapsody, Rush, Nightwish, and other good music, in my games. And dag nabbit, I want to subject my friends to it, even though they don’t like it!

So developers now have the ability to put this feature in PS3 games. There is a catch, however. It’ll cost them 12MB of RAM to do so. Ouch! But on the other hand, Sony has decreased the overall RAM required by Sony’s OS by 12MB (since the 1.6 release), so you could look at it like a free feature instead, if you like. 🙂 (I know I know. It’s like those ads that say you save money by spending it.)

Sony has added some other capabilities to the system, including the ability to copy an image to the user’s Photo area. This will give you the ability to take screenshots of the game you’re playing and show them to friends. And other stuff too, I guess! 🙂 This costs the developer 3MB of RAM. Another new feature is the ability to use the PSP as a secondary display, like was shown last year where the PSP was used as a rear-view mirror in the F1 game. That particular use of the PSP seems retarded to me, but I’m sure devs will think up some cooler stuff. This ability costs 8MB. Small ouch!

I think this is some pretty cool stuff. These features are good for gamers, and it’s good to see that Sony is decreasing the amount of memory things require. For example, Friend List support has been reduced from an incredible 24MB to a still hefty 16MB, but they’re moving in the right direction. The most important thing, in my mind, is for Sony to continue decreasing these memory sizes. The less memory these features take up, the more of them we can have!

PS3 1.80 SDK