In light of Sony's revelations last week, there is much to talk about. Future Gamer went out and curried opinion from a broad spectrum of the development community...

Paul Pettengale (editor of technology magazine T3)

With the recent announcement of the (frankly mind-boggling) capabilties of the forthcoming Emotion Engine (PS2) hardware, I think it's essential that we look beyond the system as merely a games console, and start to appreciate its potential as the hub of a complete home entertainment and mulitmedia system.

There's no question: with DVD storage capabilities, processing power rivalling supercomputers (and pissing all over Intel's PIII), DTS and AC3 sound decompression and graphical abilities that will enable the system to produce broadcast quality images, the games for the Emotion Engine will massively exceed anything we've ever dreamt of - they may play like dogs, of course, but the graphics and the sound will be untouchable.

But what about the wider implications? The I/O, being based on the IEEE 1394 (FireWire) interface, will enable connectivity to a massively broad range of peripherals - just as broad as currently enjoyed by multimedia PCs. We will see printers, scanners, modems and so on, meaning that the Emotion Engine has PC-like capabilties with increased processing potential. Why buy a PC? Er, dunno.

And then there's the home entertainment aspect. With its DVD-ROM drive, DVD movie playback is almost a certainty (and even DVD audio playback - the format's final details having just been announced).

AC3 (Dolby Digital) and DTS processing gives the machine full digital surround capabilties - feed the signal into your home cinema amp and you've got sound to rival (in terms of quality if not volume) that of the best cinemas.

What we've seen of the Emotion Engine thus far is just the gloss - some demos featuring super hi-res graphics being rendered on the fly. Impressive? Oh yes, but believe me: games are just the beginning. Sony almost certainly has its sights aimed much higher.