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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?
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 hadn't seen that name for years. I'd completely forgotten about him. Great game developer, but is he still developing? Anyone know if he has released any games in the last few years.
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
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
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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?
Which immediately shows you to not have been a fan of his work for as long as you might think. Real Minter fans look back with fondness on Gridrunner on the Vic 20 and Mutant Camels on the C64...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
It already there, built into NUON DVD Players. It was written by Jeff Minter and called VLM(Video Light Machine). A hundred+ effects, synced to the music(and not just the beats). 'Trippy' doesnt even begin to describe it.
D
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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.
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
Which immediately shows you to not have been a fan of his work for as long as you might think
.. well.. great!
No Need!
I was just showing off that I had a Falcon! I too remember the old Grid Runner - my mate Paul had a Vic 20 - but I had to wait until my C64 to own my own Minter games. He was the reason I bought an ST instead of an Amiga as revenge of the mutant camels was
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
Just get MAME for Dreamcast...and if you don't have a Dreamcast, what's wrong with you? It's a neat system, cheap as dirt, you can put NetBSD on it, etc.
"That's Tron. He fights for the Users."
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
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
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?
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
And who can forget Llamatron? I loved that game. :)
...gonna have to dust off the 'ol ST one of these days and see if it still works.
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...gonna have to dust off the 'ol ST one of these days and see if it still works
The PC version worked fine under DOSEMU last time I tried...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
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!
Yeah, but it's not quite the same experience. :)