LOW SUPPLY AND HIGH DEMAND.

Byline: David Bloom Staff Writer

If you didn't preorder your PlayStation 2, don't count on picking one up Thursday. In fact, don't count on picking one up for the holidays.

Local stores are now taking orders for next spring.

Moreover, Sony admits it's a month behind on PlayStation 2 production going into its U.S. debut, which means it'll have only half as many machines available as it initially expected, about 500,000 total, with another 100,000 a week arriving through Christmas.

Babbage's - the computer software retailer that also owns Software Etc., Funcoland and Gamespot - alone had more than 200,000 preorders for the PlayStation 2 in its 962 stores, said Russ Howard, the chain's vice president of brand marketing.

Actually, the Babbage's preorder list could have been much bigger, Howard said. The company first started taking reservations way back in December. That list grew so big that the company shut it down in March, starting a second list of people willing to get a guaranteed machine within a few weeks of launch. That list was shut down, as was a third, and now a fourth that guarantees a PS2 sometime in the spring.

The demand was strong enough that Babbage's has been trying to reduce expectations, so that it wouldn't annoy its customers with unmet promises.

``We never set out to say unequivocally here's our stamp of approval that you will get a PS2 on this day,'' Howard said. ``We were being cautious throughout.''

Meanwhile, Sony has launched a revamped version of PlayStation, planing the boring gray box down to a sleek, white console barely half the original's size and rechristening it the PSone, to differentiate it from its ballyhooed successor, the PlayStation 2.

Sony has sold nearly 28 million of the original PlayStations in North America alone since the machine launched five years ago, though with the PS2 on its way, the PlayStation's sales sagged badly this year, even at a bargain price of $99.

But Sony officials said they didn't want to walk away from a potentially still-lucrative market, especially because Sony gets a hefty licensing fee from every PlayStation game sold.

So they rolled out the PSone in late September, quickly selling 200,000 of the little machines on opening day with tens of thousands more being sold every week, said Sony Executive Vice President Jack Tretton.

``We're going to support the platform for the foreseeable future,'' at least two more years, said Andrew House, a Sony senior vice president.

Tretton said Sony is expecting that developers will continue making games for the PSone platform, which has about 800 titles currently in print and another 230 expected to debut this year.

Sony expects to have about as many PSone titles sell 300,000 units or more this year as last, a testament to the enduring popularity of the platform. It doesn't hurt, of course, that the PlayStation 2 will also play all the PSone games, which Sony officials said will protect gameplayers' substantial investments in their libraries of games.

And Sony itself is planning to create some new add-ons for the PSone to take advantage of its smaller size, including a 4-inch LCD video screen that will clip onto the machine and allow it to be played in such places as the backseat of a car.

``We envision the reduction in size and the LCD screen as an opportunity to make the PSone more of a portable unit but not a handheld unit,'' said Tretton.