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NUON As Open Source Gaming Platform
jjustice writes: "About a month ago, Richard Miller, CEO of VM Labs, announced that "In the near future (I don't want to commit to a date until we are sure of it), we will release to the open development community the tools and documentation that were used to develop these titles - both the games and the movie enhancements. We will also release a few sample applications that can be freely downloaded from the Internet, burned onto CD-R discs, and run on NUON DVD players that can read CD-Rs. Currently only the N501 has this capability, but we anticipate that all future NUON based DVD players will read CD-R and DVD-R media." It's not Linux, but unlike Indrema, the boxes are available. And the technology may not rival PS2 or XBox, but he also says the latest version of the chip is 2-3 times the power of the existing model and cheaper to produce. Besides, I'll support any platform with games from Jeff Minter." No use for all those electronics going to waste, eh?
Anyway, I think I can do without Tempest 4000, or whatever version Jeff Minter is developing now.
This would definetly be a nice christmas gift to give to your geek friends. hint hint.
mod me up(all my friends read at 20+ and they aint gonna see it if its not modded up) j/k
I had an opportunity to play T3K on a DVD player with the nuon chip at the last E3 in LA with none other than Jeff Minter. T3K didn't seem too hot though but it wasn't really finished yet. I still prefer the Jag version myself. As for nuon, the other titles I saw on it weren't that impressive but I don't think it's targeted as being a killer gaming platform but rather an inexpensive add-on to DVD players and the like that can support some cool graphics and multimedia.
The N501 sounds like a nice enough deck. It has the new "expanded" VLM and supports MP3 CD-R/RW. I will probably pick one up as an "extra" DVD deck and for T3K of course. I was in Best Buy last week, and they DID have some retail NUON presence as promoted months back. On impulse, I got a Logitech pad and T3K "while I still could", planning to pick up the N501 at its EOL pricecut.
I remember the time when Jef was hard at work on some transputer board Atari gave him, writing some "awesome game" or other- and nothing came of that.
On the other hand TRIP-A-TRON was cool (for its day) and metagalactic llamas battle at the end (edge?) of time was a classic.
graspee
This is at once the coolest and saddest of guys. I've been a fan of his for longer than I care to mention - his games were the only good thing about my Atari Falcon030 (I went all out and got the 56Mb HD version!!!).
But, thats the problem, he only ever develops for crappy hardware no one actually owns! Anyone know why!!!
The edge of time. Wonderful game, download it now.
However, NUON is mainly a DVD enhancement technology that "happens to" play games (as opposed to PS2, a game console that "happens to" play movies). There are few NUON titles other than Atari Jaguar sequels and the occasional CD-ROM shovelware (Myst). Therefore they can't convince DVD player manufacturers to place NUON chips in their systems. However if they make it an "open" console technology, then they can convince hobbyists and the like to make software for it. Then the increased demand makes for more of a push to put the NUON technology in DVD players, and NUON then has a more viable platform to encourage development for.
On the other hand, it could just be that NUON is on its way out the door and his handing off its source to people so that something can become of the technology eventually. They release the tools and such, then go out of business. Like DIVX players, NUON players become cheap and get snatched up by /.-ers.
Schnapple
Nay. They will not. Tis a shame, really. I do, however, receive many approbations from number lines.
What are we gonna make for that platform? anyone have any ideas?
;-)
I was thinking about a pingus port or make interactive movies out of ordianry ones (however that would be pretty much impossible)
I think it is going to be very hard to make useful games/apps for this thing...
disclaimer: this is not a flamebait
Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity
The man is a freaking genius! (apart from a slight fetish with goats...)
Who else still programs in pure assembler to acheieve what no-one else can!!!
Baaaaaah!
"Guns for show, knives for a pro..." - Fletcher
Every once in a blue moon, I come across a Slashdot story like this. It assumes that I understand a particular frame of reference which, unfortunately, I don't. For those of us who aren't in the know, can someone back up a step or two and explain what a NUON is? A processor? Media storage standrd?
Games are nice, but what I really want is a nice screen saver/visualizer on the order of G-Force to dance across the TV screen while I listen to the stereo.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
NUON and VM Labs are hopelessly behind and will never catch up. They have technology that's supposed to be amazing, but it goes off in a different direction than hardware for rendering millions of triangles per second. So there's no way NUON games are going to compete with Sony or Nintendo in terms of content.
That said, the NUON hardware has been described in some intriguing ways, like "non-von Neumann" and "non-traditional" which certain piques my interest." Even though I think learning the NUON system at this time is best left to those few die-hard Atari fans who never know when to drop something, it will still be interesting to see how it works.
OK, I'm sold. I'm getting one.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
This has been a bit of an open-secret for a while but, unfortunately, it's not actually available _yet_
NUON, for those who don't know, is an integrated DVD processor produced by VMLabs, currently available in the US in three consumer models Toshiba SD2300, Samsung Extiva and Samsung N501. There are european models due RSN. It provides advanced processing capable of at least N64 level games as well as enhanced DVD playback (>20x digital zoom, advanced frame management) and NUON specific DVD content. It also features Jeff Minter's VLM2 which is an update to the Jag VLM and, were VMLabs to realise it, is about the coolest thing on the planet at the moment.
The NUON open SDK does exist, and _will_ be made available to the public RSN. But, it hasn't been released yet. There is a FAQ available at NuonDev.com which, although not official, does show the currently known state of open-NUON.
Cheers
Chris
I want a original classic Arcade games on my TV, Moon Patrol anyone?
Looking for any old 8-bit Heathkit/Zenith software/hardware - http://heathkit.garlanger.com
I've got a Samsung N2000 DVD player. The deck is great - user friendly controls, nice quality, and it only cost in the range of $200 US. It came with a game controller and some sample games, as well. I actually wanted the Nuon proc because if its enhanced DVD capabilities (viewing a DVD at 2x is much smoother than my expensive Sony deck that broke after 8 months), but I thought the games were a nice bonus. That is, until I played them. The included sample games are horrible - gaudy colors, and terrible gameplay - but maybe with this development that will all change. It would be nice to see somebody port a NES or SNES emulator to this platform. I could conceivably stick in a CD with every NES game known to man on it and play Excitebike till my thumbs fall off!
One other warning - the N2000 is a successor to the N501 player. Since the N501 could handle CD-Rs, I assumed that the N2000 could as well. I was wrong. CD-Rs aren't recognized at all, and VCDs burned onto CD-RWs will display "VCD" on the display, but they won't play. Buyer beware.
-JC
Actually, quite a few new NUON-enhanced DVD movies are coming out in the near future. Dr. Dolittle 2 on Tuesday, Planet of the Apes next month and The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai in January. This, along with the Public SDK becoming available shortly should prove to be a breath of fresh air for NUON. I'm looking forward to seeing the NUON development community grow. -Kevin
Actually the N501 is the successor to the N2000. The N2000 can handle CDRs but its pretty flaky from what I've seen. I'm quite happy w/my N501 there were a few problems w/certain DVDs @ first, but a firmware updated solved all my problems and now it runs flawlessly. I've seen them for around $200 and the DVD quality is great and has optical and analog audio outs and standard, component and s-video out for video. When you add the mp3 player/VLM and gaming support (agreed there are only a few good games so far) its really quite a good buy.
That'll show those damned terrorist!
Letter To Iran
It is a piece of crap, that takes forever to start up movies, and has a tendency to stall for seconds at a time between tracks (like its catching up on some computations of some sort).
Now they want to release enhanced-nuon-boxes, so buying the original nuon is even more of a joke.
This thing has been out for 2 or so years now, and it has less than 10 titles for it. Shut up and sit down, this thing is dead.
Letter To Iran
If my Toshiba SD2300 cannot read CD-Rs, how can I test apps created with the SDK?
More action using VERB.
oh wait, nevermind.
Ursula Andress, Catherine Deneuve, and Charo, twice...
XMAME, XMESS, ZSNES, .. all definitely need to be ported to this thing.
:)
Please?
Jason
There is clearly quite a bit of history about this. Reading about this chain, in a way, is like arriving on earth and being told by Palistinians and Israelies that both sides are evil, each trying to convince you they are right.
What does Jeff Minter and Atari have to do with it? Why is this guy an assembly programming genius or a smelly hippy?
There really isn't much software for it, is there? That is, no real compelling reason to run out and get one, aside from the upcoming open sourcing?
How good is the processor on this? Is it completely custom and doesn't fit anything out there? Need a special compiler? How much memory?
That's what I was working on for the Indrema before it went down (visualization stuff), and I definitely plan to do it for the NUON if they indeed do release the tools, and I can get my hands on a NUON-enabled DVD player (maybe I can finally convince my parents to ditch the VCR..).
--
I should live at home. I'm 17.
A solution to the problem with music today
I attended the Nuon developer conference back in 1998 (I think, might've been 97 or 99 - whichever one was the first one, in Redwood Shores). Their hardware is focused around the pixel rather than the polygon. It's versatile enough that it can do passable polygon rendering (with bilinear filtering), realtime raytracing (for simple scenes, not too much glass or mirrored surfaces) and so on.
It's moderately non-traditional, being a VLIW architecture with 5 functional units and 4 cores on the die in SMP, but it's certainly not non-von Neumann. You can develop in C (they ported GCC) or assembler. The low (for VLIW) number of functional units makes this eminently feasible. You'd probably only want to do that for your innermost rendering loops though. The only other significant oddness is the colour space is YCrCb native instead of RGB.
All in all I thought it was a fun piece of hardware, with a lot of potential. Get 16 cores on the die, with more cache each, a better memory controller and a decent process to bring the clockspeed up and you could probably rival PS2 for overall graphical appearance, more or less. No idea what the price-performance tradeoff would be like, however.
Graham
Amen, my brother! :)
VM Labs is having problems getting developers. No developers equals no software. And no software means that not even Toshiba will buy their chip, they'll go with c-cube.
A few years ago I tried to get a dev kit for my company, thinking perhaps this would be a way to transition into games. They would not return email, snail mail, or phone calls. This went on for 3 months.
When I finally did get in contact with them to find out the cost of the development hardware, I was basically told to fuck off. I was told in no uncertain terms that they had not heard of my company and they had the "big three" developing for their hardware. They did not have the time to support smaller developers.
I recommend you avoid them and let the company die.
Visit the mighty Yak here:
http://myweb.magicnet.net/~yak/
Sample quote:
Trawling my drive C yielded a total of 143 instances of file or folder names containing the string "sheep", and my HD is approximately 16 gigs, of which 11.8 gigs are currently in use. So my Total Sheep Index is 143, and my Sheepiness Quotient is 143/11.8 = approximately 12.12 sheepies per gigabyte.
"Tempest 3000, Freefall, Merlin Racing, Ballistic, Tetris, Space Invaders XL...Bedazzled, Dr. Doolittle 2, Buckaroo Banzai and Planet of the Apes."
With games like these, who needs Viagra!
AC's cheerfully ignored
Microsoft deserves to be out it's ill-gotten fortune for figuring it can just waltz in and screw Nintendo and Sony because they feel like it. If he's the Kiss of Death, let's put it to positive use:)
It would be nice to see somebody port a NES or SNES emulator to this platform. I could conceivably stick in a CD with every NES game known to man on it and play Excitebike till my thumbs fall off!
This is exactly what we all want - a decent games machine, with a stack of games, coming along with a bit of kit as standard. Even if Nuon came with a handful of b&w GAMEBOY games as demos it would excite people more than the dross thats there just now.
Sony should bundle the original PS with all their kit, DVD players, TiVos, anything that points at a TV. Put a handful of PS games on a few DVDs and away you go!
Or they should licence the old SNES and Genesis from Nintendo (yeah right!) and SEGA and put EVERY GAME EVER on a CD. That would be a neat little freebie with your new $300 DVD wouldn't it?
Certainly more fun that NUON!
everyone loves jeff minter =) we all wish that he would come over here and think about developing for Dreamcast/PS2/Xbox/GameCube or the PC/MAC/Linux!!! =) we want THE YAK! we want THE YAK! =) we should all chant this together another thing, i don't know why people dislike the nuon, did it do anything to you? are you angry because you think you wasted your money? i think you wasted your money by being on the interent, conserve power and the enviornment, not you money =) nuon is a nice comfy system , i love my atari jaguar better, but i'd rather play those games on my computer or dreamcast, especially if there were some jeff minter games there =) the king of assembler? we should petition this (k3v) to get him to produce games for a syster we could actuallly by games for at a store =) i really think tempest 3000 looks nice, why bad mouth tempest 4k? when its not even out yet? i was never hooked to tempest(the original) because i wasn't really "alive" yet =) im 14, and i got hooked to atari jaguar, in 1998, 2 years after the demise of atari, i had a dreamcast and n64 but still was interested in the lost system, because of my love for games, i even thought about buying a saturn once just for the game "nights" =) i would also really like to see nights 2 for Dreamcast. i never got into tempest, but tempest 2k was beautiful, eye candy and unresistable, i had to play hours and hours and hours on till i had to sleep and eat and do other bodily functions. its just plain old fun. tempest 3k is even MORE eye candy and even harder to resist. iron soldier was nice, even the psx version was fun to play, those kind of games get you hooked and you want to buy a system, just for that one game.