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If someone else ever gets confused about the ports on the back of a TV, point them to cable finder.

Not needed. XNA is a C# SDK -> quite fast already.

XNA has a few problems.

• Your game has to be written from scratch in C#, not a port of a game for another platform written in C++. That's the same problem Mozilla faces in the article: it doesn't want to rewrite Firefox in C#. Sure, you'd have to write a new front end (graphics, sound), but if XNA supported C++, your back end (physics, AI) would stay the same. (Technically you can use C++/CLI, but the restrictions of /clr:safe and lack of the C and C++ standard library make it painful.)
• XNA 3.x has no way to output PCM audio; everything has to be pre-rendered streaming music and sound effects through XACT. (4.0 may fix this.)
• the language restrictions may make it difficult to create a convincing fantasy world without "grossly misrepresenting content in content info". (details)

can anyone point me to a homebrew game for ds, iPhone or psp that doesn't suck or is a port?

What exactly did you mean by "is a port"? When was the last major label title that wasn't a port of a major label title from some other console? The last time that happened was the mid 1990s with Parappa the Rapper. If you're talking about a direct clone with the same rules, then sure, Lockjaw is a Tetris clone, but The Tetris Company has never made a game with as many switches for changing the rules to set up training scenarios.

Unless you jailbreak.

There are drawbacks to jailbreaking. Apple could fix the jail, ban you from going legit in the future, or threaten you once you try to sell copies of an app that requires a jailbreak.

all you have to do is not use undocumented API's (that are inherently harder to find anyway)

There exists no documented API to do several things that users demand, such as playing Internet radio in the background or finding Wi-Fi hotspots in a large area.

or make an application that falls into a category they will not approve.

The perception is that these categories are too broad.

True, XNA is a big improvement over the other consoles, but it's still not perfect. There are two major things you can't do with XNA: synthesize the speech of game characters (there's no streaming PCM API) or write text in the languages of fictional cultures in your game (your game will fail peer review if Microsoft's criteria are to be believed).

1. My Windows PC is too old to run Visual Studio 2008, on which XNA Game Studio is based. The effort to get XNA running in Mono has stalled.
2. I have decided not to buy an Xbox 360 until Microsoft has finally solved red ring of death and other issues that make its hardware less reliable than, say, a Wii or an Aspire Revo. Has it?
3. No runtime audio synthesis means I'd have to hire voice actors and bloat my binary instead of using speech synthesis to read game characters' lines.
4. The ban on text or speech in an unsupported language means the characters in the hidden elf village can't speak an elvish language.

In any case, if you want to compare OS cache performance you might at least try to use the same compiler and the same language on both machines.

Use GCC on both machines? The last time I tried GCC on Windows, it produced bloated binaries for any C++ program that uses <iostream>. A quarter megabyte for Hello World, on two platforms (MinGW targeting Windows/x86 and devkitARM targeting GBA/ARM7)? Give me a break.

Try GCC in Cygwin. Yes it requires cygwin, but it doesn't produce a overhead for each compile.

In any case, if you want to compare OS cache performance you might at least try to use the same compiler and the same language on both machines.

Use Visual C++ on both machines? Good luck getting it to run in Wine.

Use GCC on both machines? The last time I tried GCC on Windows, it produced bloated binaries for any C++ program that uses <iostream>. A quarter megabyte for Hello World, on two platforms (MinGW targeting Windows/x86 and devkitARM targeting GBA/ARM7)? Give me a break.

If tinkering was addressed separately

Then it would be called XNA. Not that it's without flaws, but at least Microsoft is trying to make a sandbox for Xbox 360 tinkerers, doing more than Nintendo has ever done.

TVs have PC inputs nowadays.

The average TV is much bigger then the average monitor.

I am aware of that. But TVs display PC video just as easily as console video, as long as the right cable is between the two. A VGA-to-composite adapter for a PC is no more expensive than an official component cable for a console. If the problem is that the TV and the PC are in separate rooms, Acer Aspire Revo and other nettop PCs with an NVIDIA chipset solve that handily. So why aren't PC games designed to use TVs?

If Fox News wanted a Libertarian to have a chance, a Libertarian would have a chance. For example, Glenn Beck might dis President Obama and praise the (L) candidate for President in 2012 on air. But MPAA-owned TV news networks have their reasons for keeping anyone who's not a Republicrat off the public's mind.

DRM is a defect and needs to die in the marketplace.

But unfortunately, the proponents of this defect own the incumbent news media. This makes it more difficult for free culture advocates to get the message out that DRM is a defect.

Sony owns Columbia Pictures and MGM. In fact, the big difference between Columbia and the five other members of the MPAA is that Columbia doesn't share a corporate parent with a U.S. television news outlet.

The reason why we punish all these things is that we perceive them as unjust.

Voters as a whole perceive as unjust what the public schools and the TV tell them to perceive as unjust. And guess who owns American TV news.

The fact is, the majority of the population favors keeping drugs illegal. If you want to change the law, all you have to do is convince people that drugs should be legalized.

Let me pick an example with which some Slashdot users might be more familiar: Do the majority of the people think copyright should last a century? I don't see any evidence of popular support for copyright term extension, but it passed anyway because the MAFIAA controls TV news and therefore federal elections. Likewise, the synthetic fiber and pharmaceutical industries can't stand a bit of competition from natural hemp and natural dronabinol, so they lobby against uses the cannabis plant.

The reason copyright terms have been extended so many times for so long is that large corporate media has exerted its large influence in Congress to get these laws passed.

And that's because the MPAA, which benefits from long copyright terms, owns all five major television news outlets.

Thanks.

The reason is that no clone brings any innovation or evolution.

That's totally false. Canonical example: Tetanus On Drugs.

A truly original and inovative product will take some time to clone

But it won't really matter if the original publisher plans a staggered release. For example, Lumines was out in the United States in March 2005, giving one developer several months to get a GPL'd clone going before the European release six months later. And Tetris still isn't on the PSP, but the homebrew clones are.

[A record label lawyer] approached me and asked if I knew anything about flashing a Nintendo DS for their kids so they can play copies.

By "copies", do you include homebrew games that implement the same rules as a non-free commercial game? Would Lockjaw, for instance, be considered a "copy" of Tetris DS?

ObTopic: I've seen torrents of just homebrew. I imagine they'd go away too because Nintendo would object to including them in "Content Distribution" on patent grounds.

Compare BlueHippo's logo to Demby Wishingwell from Playskool's Weebles videos and toys. Is it coincidental?

I don't care if you call it downloading or streaming. It still has to move across something with a hell of a lot of bandwidth.

Comcast is in on this. If Comcast runs a caching proxy for Keychest users on its High Speed Internet and Digital Cable services, it can get the bandwidth cheap.

I suspect that most people don't save movies on hard disks (other than those they've saved on their DVR's hard disk).

Exactly. Keychest users would be able to stream any unlocked video to their STB.

When I can get a computer or a phone with a 57" screen

Most HDTVs support PC video formats. See Cable finder for details.

Modern consoles put an end to that. They're just the thing for when you have some friends over; you don't want to play games sitting in the den crowded around a keyboard

That hasn't been the case since about 2000. By that time, every new PC came with a port for a multitap that takes four controllers.

and a tiny crt

Tiny CRT? It used to be the case that TVs couldn't use a PC's video output because CRT SDTVs ran at 15.7 kHz (480i) and PC monitors ran at twice that (480p or higher). But that changed in 2008 when LCD HDTVs with a VGA input displaced CRT SDTVs in electronics stores. At the start of the 2008 holiday shopping season, HDTV had already entered one-third of U.S. households. Two aspects of the "far to go" that I mentioned involve 1. the major labels of PC gaming noticing the increasing HDTV market share and 2. PC game developers educating the market about HTPC possibilities.

The big drawback to consoles is that console makers like Nintendo and Sony have historically been dead-set against people who develop video games as a hobby or as a part-time business. Either it's your day job from day one, or you're not allowed in. They don't even allow mods developed by members of the gaming community. Microsoft and Apple, on the other hand, provide downloadable SDKs to all owners of an authentic copy of their respective PC operating system (Visual Studio Express for Windows or Xcode for Mac OS X).

I just can't be arsed to drag the [NES, Super NES, or N64] out, wire it up to my TV and spend 10 minutes wiggling cartridges until they work.

You can spend an order of magnitude less time wiggling if you spend one minute with a cotton swab and a bottle of rubbing alcohol. With a properly cleaned cartridge, it shouldn't take more than 30 seconds to start, which is about how long it takes to line up the Sensor Bar, navigate through the Wii Menu, and start the VC channel that you bought.

The iPlayer team are quite proud of the fact that their cartridge is one of the few that doesn't allow piracy. Having a GBA emulator goes against this.

How would it even be possible to emulate homemade GBA games like Luminesweeper without also emulating pirated GBA games of the same size?

If we're rewriting freecell, shouldn't that be a license minesweeper, not a license minefield?

That or a license luminesweeper. (I wrote it and GPLed it because I wanted to prove that the PSP's flagship launch title didn't really need the features of a PSP.)

You say it as if limiting capabilities is a bad thing. Hopefully it will force the developers to be more creative and we'll get some decent games instead of the same repackaged shite with slightly higher framerate/pixel count/level of detail.

But if the limitations are sufficiently severe, some game designs just aren't possible. Consider even Nintendo's Animal Crossing: Wild World, a game with "kiddie" graphics. I'm working on a detailed explanation of why it couldn't have been made in the NES era.

24. Terminals accessing the mainframe.

It's back, and it's called the World Wide Web.

28. Counting in kilobytes.

Sure, the dial-up days are over, but to a web developer trying to make the most of satellite and mobile broadband, every kilobyte still counts.

30. Blowing the dust out of a NES cartridge in the hopes that itâ(TM)ll load this time.

Nintendo never recommended that. The official technique in the cleaning kit manual was more like the one described in this guide.

31. Turning a PlayStation on its end to try and get a game to load.

Xbox 360.

32. Joysticks.

Every game console since the Nintendo 64. Street Fighter 4. Tetris the Grand Master.

33. Having to delete something to make room on your hard drive.

SSD notebooks.

37. Finding out information from an encyclopedia.

Alexa confirms it: an encyclopedia is ranked #7 among web sites.

40. Shopping only during the day, Monday to Saturday.

Some fast food chains are still closed at night and on Sundays, as are the shipping companies.

45. Not knowing exactly what all of your friends are doing and thinking at every moment.

At the moment, I'm a proud non-user of Twitter. Am I behind the times?

49. Concatenating and UUDecoding binaries from Usenet.

Is this referring to the fact that more Usenet clients have migrated from uuencode to yEnc?

53. Waiting several minutes (or even hours!) to download something.

Wired broadband is not available in the country, and satellite broadband and mobile broadband still lag in speed for the price. Besides, even on cable and DSL, people are trying to download multi-gigabyte operating systems and movies nowadays, and those can still take hours.

To this day, I think of the buttons on my PlayStation or XBOX in terms of the SNES layout. "Hit the Y button! I mean the Square one!"

Some of my friends have played games on PlayStation, Xbox, GameCube, and Super NES. The X button is in a different place on every controller. In fact, it has shown up in all four positions. So when I tell them what button to hit, and it's not the one on the bottom, I tend to say triangle, square, or O because they're less ambiguous than A, B, and Y.

You've got to be a team player - for the RIGHT team!

Slashdot has trained me to fight for free software developers and other "little guys". So until Nintendo embraces microISVs, which it hasn't, I'm a team player for the PC team.

I hope this game is as cool as it sounds, but I have one major concern - balance.

Lack of balance has never stopped other sandbox games like Animal Crossing, which really is that easy. If they make Scribblenauts too easy, players will create self-imposed challenges: "Try to beat level X of Scribblenauts with only words meeting criteria Y and Z."

It's one thing to balance 20 races in a game

In some fans' minds, NASCAR has failed to balance even two of its highest profile races: Daytona and Talladega have become bumper cars. Or did you mean something else?

Uh, why should he make his game "more freely available?" Why would you hate him for protecting his property so that he can make a living?

But what exactly is his property? Had Pajitnov patented Tetris, it would have expired by now. Copyright is not intended to protect game rules, and I don't see how trademark would apply to games with names like Lockjaw. The Tetris Company's claim that other tetromino games are copies of Tetris starts to sound like SCO's claim that Linux is a copy of UNIX.

Let people build homebrew apps but prevent people from playing warez.

How is that possible? Homebrew apps include emulators such as PocketNES, and emulators can play pirated ROMs. Homebrew apps include Tetris clones such as Lockjaw, and The TetriSCOmpany thinks those are pirated.

I tell them that they're actually clicking "Yes please, install this virus on my computer" over and over again, every time they want a new free, useless desktop widget or application or game produced by a company no one's heard of

What company that you've heard of publishes applications like Pidgin or games like Lockjaw? But because these are free software, it's more likely that someone has looked over the source code for you.

Tetris Co is more like SCO than anything else

In fact, you can't spell The TetriS COmpany without SCO.

The game was copied/ripped off from a guy in Russia who doesn't even have any kind of relationship with the company claiming now to own the game.

The guy in Russia who invented Tetris was Alexey Pajitnov. An interview with Henk Rogers explains that Pajitnov and Rogers make up two-thirds of a committee in The Tetris Company that maintains the design document that defines modern Tetris.

(especially if you consider the fact that the makers of Tetris-like games are careful enough to avoid calling their game "Tetris" to avoid this issue)

But could a lawyer connect Tetris to tetanus to Lockjaw?

when I play with my friends online I don't bother going over to their house but rather meet them online (unless alcohol is involved).

If your family has taken a trip to another state for an extended family reunion, or if you're still under 15 and you're at a babysitter's, you might not have a choice to stay at home and play online. I run into both issues: I babysit, and I handle the video games at my family's annual party. The only alcohol involved is the isopropanol solution that I use to clean game cartridges.

Because 99.99% of this "homebrew" - pirated games.

Is Ubuntu a pirated copy of Solaris? No. Is GIMP a pirated copy of Paint Shop Pro? No. Is OpenOffice.org a pirated copy of Microsoft Office 2003? No. Are Lockjaw, Gnometris, and KSirtet pirated copies of Tetris? No.

Sony did sell open for development(but not for piracy) PS1 and PS2, guess how many bought?

The "Net Yaroze" PS1 and the PS2 with Linux were token efforts, discontinued in less than a year. Other than VAIO and PLAYSTATION 3, Sony hasn't kept a commitment to any computing platform without a lockout chip.

b) using the Zero-Page

I program for a 6502-based platform, and I use that method too. But on the Apple II family, assembly language was often used to write subroutines for programs written in Applesoft BASIC to call, and Applesoft BASIC used about 90 percent of zero page for itself, so it was more difficult to find "holes" in BASIC's usage for you to stick your addresses. But then that was no problem if you're writing pure-assembly programs; in that case, you only had to stay out of the way of the Monitor and DOS. Nor is it a problem on some 6502-based platforms such as the NES, which has no built-in BASIC.

GNU Emacs isn't licensed by The Tetris Company. Calling a Free tetromino game "Tetris" be like calling an OS based on GNOME and WINE "Microsoft Windows". Ordinarily, changing the name would fix things, as I did with my own tetromino game. But if Tetris prevails in Tetris v. BioSocia , might the company use the precedent to attack the Free Software Foundation?

Homebrew my arse. You want to run pirated games. Just admit it.

Is Linux a pirated copy of Solaris? No. Is Nintendo's Balloon Fight a pirated copy of Midway's Joust? No. Is Lockjaw a pirated copy of Tetris DS? No. Is MoonShell a pirated copy of Windows Media Player? No. Is DSOrganize a pirated copy of Hello Kitty Daily, an organizer for DS? Hell no.

It's like 10,000 cubes, when all you need is a line

Note: This doesn't happen in modern Tetris games. They deal out pieces in groups of 7, where each group contains all seven tetrominoes. So the longest wait for an I is 12 pieces.

Why are you in such a hurry to leave ze DDR?

Because I got tired of stepping on arrows.

No one is going to take your post seriously when it is laden with ethnic slurs.

Good point. Please mod #26997793 as Redundant if you must, in favor of the following correction:

DS flash carts (what Nintendo is calling "game copiers") are cheap, and the South Korean people are turning to them in part as a solution to not being able to afford every game they want.

I have an R4 copier. If I use my R4 to play OGGs and videos in MoonShell on a DS Lite, am I conning Nintendo out of the sale of a DSi, which doesn't come out until April anyway? If I use my R4 to play DSOrganize, which has web and IRC functions in it, am I conning Nintendo out of the sale of Nintendo DS Browser, which is out of print anyway? If I use my R4 to play Lockjaw Tetromino Game, am I conning Nintendo out of the sale of a copy of Tetris DS, which is out of print anyway? And when I use my R4 to run things like MegaETK, Colors!, Setsuzoku no Puzzle, or a lot of the other stuff from pdroms.de and gbadev.org, I don't even know what close substitute Nintendo sells.

DS flash carts (what Nintendo is calling "game copiers") are cheap, and the South Korean people are turning to them in part as a solution to not being able to afford every game they want.

I have an R4 copier. If I use my R4 to play OGGs and videos in MoonShell on a DS Lite, am I gypping Nintendo out of the sale of a DSi, which doesn't come out until April anyway? If I use my R4 to play DSOrganize, which has web and IRC functions in it, am I gypping Nintendo out of the sale of Nintendo DS Browser, which is out of print anyway? If I use my R4 to play Lockjaw Tetromino Game, am I gypping Nintendo out of the sale of a copy of Tetris DS, which is out of print anyway? And when I use my R4 to run things like MegaETK, Colors!, Setsuzoku no Puzzle, or a lot of the other stuff from pdroms.de and gbadev.org, I don't even know what close substitute Nintendo sells.

In reality how often do you play split screens anyway

I'd say every other weekend when my cousins visit. We play falling block games (Dr. Mario, Pokemon Puzzle League, and Tetramino), which fit nicely on a split screen because they're naturally portrait. We also play a lot of Super Smash Bros. Brawl, which (like the Bomberman series) doesn't need to split the screen because it can show the whole arena in one view that fills all 32 inches of my Vizio TV.

What is wrong with having the options?

More options means a potential for more software defects arising from unexpected interactions between options. I learned this the hard way when developing Lockjaw Tetromino Game.

And there is a very good reason why the terminal should have a separate setting for textfields: it's not a textfield and it doesn't act like one.

What is a terminal other than an 80-column-wide text field that both you and a program can write to?

I'm gonna make 100,000 versions of tetris and then the goverment will owe ME money!

What, are you going to recompile LOCKJAW Tetromino Game with the options hardcoded to 100,000 different configurations?

Seriously, the solution is simple. Just do it like they do in NZ. Exactly the same system for video games as for movies.

The film and game rating systems in the United States already have a one-to-one correspondence: E==G, E10+==PG, T==PG-13, M==R, and AO==NC-17. The only way I can see that it could be made more like the OFLC systems in place in Australia and New Zealand would be if the ESRB were to refuse classification to any video game that would be rated R if it were a film.

R18 - Sexual content / Drugs / Extreme violence - GTA
[...]
G - Everyone - Tetris

But how would you rate Dr. Mario or Lockjaw: The Overdose? They're Tetris-style puzzle games with thinly veiled drug references.

You're obviously not talking about the NES version, so which one are you referring to?

Microsoft's ancient port of Tetris to Windows 3.1 used a type equivalent to int16_t for the player's score. Certainly Tetramino for NES can track up to 6.5 million points, and Lockjaw can track up to 2 billion.

You're obviously not talking about the NES version, so which one are you referring to?

Microsoft's ancient port of Tetris to Windows 3.1 used a type equivalent to int16_t for the player's score. Certainly Tetramino for NES can track up to 6.5 million points, and Lockjaw can track up to 2 billion.