The PlayStation 2 is a home video game console developed and marketed by Sony Interactive Entertainment, first released in March 2000. Insiders stated that it was developed in the U.S. West Coast by former members of Argonaut Software. By 1997 word had leaked to the press that the console would have backwards compatibility with the original PlayStation, a built-in DVD player, and Internet connectivity. The success of the PS2 at the end of 2000 caused Sega problems both financially and competitively, and Sega announced the discontinuation of the Dreamcast in March 2001, just 18 months after its successful Western launch. The PS2 hardware uses the Emotion Engine CPU, a custom-designed processor based on the MIPS architecture with a floating point performance of 6.2 GFLOPS, and the custom-designed Graphics Synthesizer GPU, with a fillrate of 2.4 gigapixels/second, capable of rendering up to 75 million polygons per second. Download PS2 Bios
