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GameCube Hardware In Depth on Anandtech
plootid submitted linkage to a fairly technical look at the GameCube running over at AnandTech. You can learn about the hardware that makes the new Smash Bros. possible. Something about seeing Samus doing battle with Pikachu makes me want to know more about the PowerPC chip that powers the system ;)
Get the whole thing on one page, much less annoying.
It seems to me like the Gamecube is an attempt by Nintendo to get at a new domain of customers that they traditionally don't aim at.
Nintendo has been a console of the children. I would say ballpark 6 to 15 years of age is Nintendo time. After that, Playstation and the now-defunct Sega take over for the most part. N64 was still a very much "little kiddy" console, compared with the Playstation and Dreamcast. X-Box I'm not even going to factor in at this point, as I don't expect them to meet with tremendous success this go-around. Likely Microsoft wouldn't mind having the whole console gaming market, but that's not the issue.
Essentially it seems to me like Gamecube not only aims at the kids who are now 6-15 years old, but at those who were 6-15 years old and played on NES or SNES. Nintendo seems to be broadening their market.
This will play out pretty interestingly. I'd like to see a nice comparison of the Gamecube and the PS2. Sony is no lightweight and will not let go of their market easily.
In fact, I just had a revelation, albeit an obvious one. This is capitalism at work. Three strong companies duking it out. And since for once the sides are relatively balanced this might actually be at the benefit of the consumer. Who'd of thunk it?
The Xbox looks like it can crunch any other console, but you know, so many of the developers they grabbed will be porting to the PC. I wonder if they havn't underestimated the overlap of PC gamers and potential Xbox owner demographics.
.. and no harddrive (thank god). It's a console. The Xbox is a PC, to the extent the MS is trying VERY hard to keep developers from wanting to port their MS-sponsered Xbox titles back to the PC (where many of them probably started, in terms of development). I have a PC. :)
I got my Gamecube 3 days ago, and holy crap, it's amazing. The Xbox might look good, but I'll take a the Cube anyday. Better controllers, best 1st party games (Halo might be coming out for PC, isn't that right?), seriously WIKED ASS form factor
I think the one arena Nintendo may have screwed up is with going with no onboard ethernet card. They are dirt cheap, why didn't they just throw one on?
"Old man yells at systemd"
I stopped reading the article on the second page. The Gecko CPU is based on the Book E standard and IBM's (not yet released) PPC 440 processor. The only thing common between the "Book E" standard PPC and regular PowerPC's like the 750 are the usermode instructions are the same. Supervisory mode such as memory management, page tables, etc are all changed.
--Mark
I remember when first reading about the gameboy advance, I saw something about being able to use it as a controller for the GameCube. The example of when this would be a 'good thing' was a football game. Gameplay goes on on the main screen, but you can make your play selection, privately, on your own little screen.
Although the cost is currently prohibitive (to me, at least), this seemed like an absurdly cool idea. I haven't heard anything about it since. What happened?
I've had this sig for three days.
I am curious to see how the later games will play out on both systems. They may be about equivalent graphically now (maybe xbox has a slight edge) but all gamers have seen how much good developers can improve a system. Look at the original PlayStation - with some of the later games, you couldn't even tell you were playing on the same system!
With simple to program hardware, the GameCube devs will be able to write low-level code to really eke performance out of the system. I wonder if xbox programmers will be able to do the same, or if they will be restricted by the (godawful IMHO) directx apis.
Is this rock and roll, or a form of state control?
size comparison
XBox motherboard
GameCube motherboard
I think that the whole issue about which game system is the best comes down to a lesson my father taught me about of all things, cars.
Its about stability, reliability, and working out the kinks.
He said never, ever buy a car the year the new model comes out. The manufacturers have tested it, but not the way the consumers will. Usually, the best cars to drive are the ones where they are about to change the fundamental design (usually after three years or car generations) a few years after have worked out all of the major complaints brought in, and before they change the design again.
So what does this have to do with video consoles? Well, as I see it, Nintendo has gone through several generations of workign the bugs out in hardware and gameplay, and that in itself is its benefit and reason to buy.
There are at least 3 generations of Nintendo in major US release, even after they made coin ops.
Playstation is on generation 2.
Xbox is on its first generation.
Honestly, I can't even think of a in-house Nintendo game that I was ever dissatisfied with, other than the super-late shipping time.
It has worked so far very well with the cars.
It has done well with consoles.
I rented the XBox for five days from blockbuster and bought the hdtv adapter from Compusa using the takeback special(they deserve it for screwing me over so many times, like that time they held onto $200 of my money for two months without sending me the product I ordered and lied about receiving the money, but I digress). Anyway, one thing I can say is that composite output does not do the Xbox justice, you definitely need to use the high-definition component adapter to get an idea of the real power. None of the games currently support 1080i, however the startup screen does, and it is awesome. As far as the games that don't support hd, well, they still run at 480p (640x480x60hz for the hdtv illiterate). However, it's not widescreen 480p, widescreen at 480p is actually 720x480x60hz, if I remember correctly. I would say that the geforce 3 should easily support hd resolutions, unless the fillrate is being chewed up elsewhere, think about it, I run quake III at 1600x1200x32 at 90 + fps on my pc, so this card should be able to do 1920x1080ix16bits at the required framerate. I am in serious doubt of this artx chip that the gamecube is using however, there is a reason that nvidia is at the top of their game, and that is because their chips have an extreme amount of fillrate and performance. If you are looking for hdtv support, I would stick with the XBox, it has the kind of hardware that should be able to handle those kinds of resolutions.
P.S. If I were you I would rent the consoles before buying, for the XBox I would highly recommend checking out halo, and for pure graphics quality, Dead or Alive 3.
"Flipper always operates on 4 pixels at a time using its 4 pixel pipelines; each of those pipelines is capable of applying one texture per pipeline"
Nope, it can actually apply 8 textures using 16 combiner stages.
"The Flipper graphics core is a fairly simple fixed function GPU"
It can do z-texturing, dependant-texturing, 8-way multitexturing etc. There's no way you can describe it as simple or fixed function. I'd suggest that whoever wrote this article boot up Pikmin, walk out into the water on level four and take a look at what Flipper can do in a single pass over a flat polygon.