Slashdot Mirror
Wireless Controllers for Consoles
captaincucumber writes: "Robert X. Cringley has an interesting article on his PBS Pulpit site about a new technology called SPIKE coming out of the gaming industry that will compete with Bluetooth here. As an interesting plus Cringley talks a little bit about proprietary vs. open standards."
And if you find stuff that uses Flash instead of Boring Old HTML extremely irritating (I certainly do; I just want to read some text, not wait for some animated crap to pop up), you can get a Boring Old HTML version at http://www.spike-wireless.com/main.html .
How about ones that use a $6.25 chip that is shipping now that frequency hops, uses spread spectrum, outperforms bluetooth (which is at $100 a chip), and has a 50 MIPS RISC processor on-board that can be used as a processor for the unit itself, driving LCDs or other I/O panels.
Again, all for $6.25.
At least, that what he claims... now it's time to hit the site, and quite possibly order a few of these puppies (if they ship in low quantities).
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Nintendo is planning to launch a wireless controller, sold seperatly, with the Gamecube. It's going to be called the Wavebird, and it looks pretty much like the regular Gamecube controller, except that it's wireless and works from up to 30 feet away. IGN has some details.
Wireless controllers themselves are nothing new anyways in the third party world anyways.
Actually, there's something to be said for playing from five feet away, with no zones-of-death in front of you, where the dog, cat, and your mother all manage to rip the cable out of the system by walking into the damn thing for the eigth time.
A coupla weeks after getting my PS2 (word to the wise: Even in California, it's fucking COLD outside Wal-Mart at 3am) I ordered a Freedom Shock 2 wireless controller. How they could consider a product so entirely unusable fit for general market consumption is beyond me. Buttons would not work, or work at random, every 15 seconds or so. More annoying yet, the controller's "programmable" feature (really just allowed you to assign one button to the function of another) meant that buttons would entirely stop working every few minutes, and would be unfixable without removing and replacing the batteries. Sad, really, since the controller itself wasn't that bad.
The explanation amongst my friends was that, since the controller worked via radio signals, Britney Spears and NSync were kicking my ass. So I burned the controller. And the box. And a nearby tree, just to be safe.
Anyway, good to see a better technology on the horizon.
---
You're absolutely right. The company I work for recently got a quote for $2 for a Bluetooth chip containing up to the HCI layer. Obviously this is in mass quantities.
$100 must be for a completely integrated solution with every profile built-in and everything. That is not the normal way to go. - Either that, or he means a development kit of some kind.
Either way, it would be nice to know where he got those numbers from.