Slashdot Mirror
The Battle Of The Consoles: From Atari To The Xbox
msolnik writes: "There's been a lot of talk about Xbox, and GameCube, and even more speculation about the technology inside the box. However, the console wars are not going to be won based purely on technology. There's a long history of cyclical win and lose peaks and troughs for companies that have tried to stay the course in this business. Nintendo stands alone in having survived a number of generations of innovation and still managed to remain a contender in the market. Tom's Hardware has delivered this unique assessment of The Console Wars." Update: 12/06 16:28 GMT by M : Note that Tom's has updated some of the charts in the article - they note that there was a misunderstanding between Tom's and the article's author as to which version of the charts to post.
The history was superficial, and the information on the current consoles was wrong in respect to the Game Cube.
First, he makes the common mistake of giving the polygon/sec counts. MS and Sony have theoretical maximum counts while Nintendo's count is real-world with all of the eye candy turned on. He then uses this comparison to show the inferiority of the Cube hardware when the framerate of Cube games could be higher given the same games with complex action.
Look at the columns of features. See "N/A" next to most of the Cube's fetures? It makes it look like there's nothing there, yet the Cube has good marks in most of these rows, such as audio, HDTV, broadband and 56K modem.
I gave up on the article before the middle - Doom creating the market for "add-in sound and graphics cards" was the final straw. If only there were some people over the age of 16 with half a brain writing for these hardware sites .....
> Consoles have NEVER, EVER, featured backwards
> compatibility as a selling feature; the PS2 is
> anomaly.
Wrong! You can start back in the Atari days and see this sort of thing. The Colecovision, Intellivision, *and* the Atari 5200 had "expansion modules" allowing you to play Atari 2600 games on each console. Mind you, these were Atari 2600s in little cases that just used the video outputs of the consoles, but this *was* a selling point.
Fast forward to the Atari 7800 - which was truly backwards-compatible with the 2600. No "expansion modules" required. In fact, 2600 and 7800 carts plugged into the same slot! (In case you say my other examples were iffy, this one is functionally equivalent to what the PS2 does)
The TurboDuo could play TG-16 Hucard games as well. (Yes, a Duo is basically an expanded TG-16, but you could buy a duo in one piece.)
Note that not all of these consoles were terribly successful, but that's another story altogether.
Sort of. The graphics processor (part of "Tom") had a hybrid 32/64 bit architecture, but the majority of the system was indeed the full 64 bits (including the object processor, blitter and memory controller). The DSP was 32 bit though.
Saying it was a 32bit+32bit system is a bit disingenuous, although I remember it's what people used to say at the time. 8)
Also, I seem to remember reading somewhere that there was a 16 bit controller chip somewhere in the mix, so by your logic they should have called it an 80 bit system!
Read my online journal: http://chris.carline.org
I just read that piece last night because I stay about 6 months behind in all my magazine reading. I would like to say I do it deliberately to keep things "in perspective," but its more like I've got too many classes and too much work and too much web site to read the things when they first come in.
One more moderation and I'll hit the karma ceiling...
== Paul Rickard, Editor of The Microsoft Boycott Campaign ====