The success of Nintendo Co and Sega Enterprises Ltd with skinny, underpowered games machines has ensured that the dominant two players will face a host of competition in the 32- and 64-bit market, and a major new name looks certain to be Bandai Co Ltd, Japan’s biggest toy-maker, which knows it doesn’t know enough about electronics to go it alone, and so has found itself a powerful partner in the shape of Apple Computer Inc. Apple will jointly develop a PowerPC-based games machine with Bandai, Reuter reports from Tokyo. Bandai sealed a formal agreement with Apple in August and plans to finalise details by the end of this year. The CD-ROM-based box will be for education as well as games, but Bandai is saying no more, and Apple’s Japanese unit would not comment, saying the company was still probing possible links with a number of Japanese firms. The Nippon Kogyo Shimbun goes rather further, saying the companies plan to launch the machine next summer and would price it at under $500. The paper reckons it will be sold under both brand names. An unannounced PowerPC dubbed the 602 and aimed was mentioned in Infoworld this week: it is said to run at 66MHz, have 4Kb of cache, a non-standard double-precision floating point unit, memory manager and to deliver 80 MIPS, all to go for $30 in high volume.
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