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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."
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).
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Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
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.
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