Nakayama Takuya signaled for his assistant to bring over two cups of tea, then went straight to the point. "Director Sato, the Jupiter console still has a long life cycle ahead of it, but as the Hardware Department, you need to start building up the technical reserves for the architecture of the next-generation console now."
Sato Hideki's expression turned solemn, and he immediately took the notebook he carried with him out of his pocket. "Do you have any specific instructions?"
"First, storage media." Nakayama Takuya raised one finger. "The capacity of CD-ROM has already begun to show its bottleneck on this generation of consoles. RPGs like Final Fantasy or Arc the Lad, which require large amounts of CG animation and high-quality audio, often need two or three, even four discs. The next-generation console must use a higher-capacity medium."
"You mean DVD-ROM?" Sato Hideki reacted quickly.
At the end of last year, several electronics giants led by Toshiba, Panasonic, Sony, and others had only just unified the technical standards for DVD.
At present, the technology was still in the very earliest stages of commercial exploration.
"That's right, DVD-ROM." Nakayama Takuya nodded in confirmation. "A single-sided, single-layer disc can reach 4.7GB, roughly seven times the capacity of a CD-ROM. That will be enough for developers to squander for quite a long while."
Sato Hideki frowned slightly and raised a technical concern. "Managing Director, Sony is one of the core formulators of the DVD Standard. They have a technical advantage in manufacturing the read components of optical drives. If our next-generation console adopts DVD-ROM, we'll very likely need to purchase core components from Sony. Considering our competitive relationship in the console market, Sony may not be willing to sell us the latest optical-drive technology, or they may choke us on price and delivery