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Motorola, Nintendo, & Sony Towards Wireless Gaming
WeekendKruzr writes "CommsDesign is running an
article
about how
Motorola
has partnered with
Sony
and
Nintendo
to work on bringing 2.4Ghz wireless LAN tech to the console gaming community. They're calling it an "isochronous network" and it is "intended for streaming, near-real-time traffic..." with production scheduled for later this year."
Wow, this must be the first time Sony and Nintendo have more or less worked together since the SNES CD! Or would someone like to step in and correct me :)
IMHO this is just further proof that gaming is the Prime Evolutionary Factor in all technology. ; -)
Don't read this!
This could lead to LAN party type events in which you get the speed of LAN, but can still sit at home challenging all of your neighbors, I want this.
In other news, Microsoft has announced extensions tothe protocal for use in their XBox. The new extensions are not compatible but according to MS sources offer better value to the consumer.
Why else was the color video card created?
Soundcard?
Streaming Video?
Wonder if this will be supported in PS2 Linux. Can you imagine TuxRacer on one of these babies?
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
This would be great till someone tries to use the 2.4 ghz cordless phone, or fires up a WiFi laptop, or for that matter cooks some popcorn in the microwave. Not to mention the fact that you probably can't play it around grandpa because of his pacemaker ;)
Porn is
Je t'aime Stéphanie
All they need now is a wireless video adapter and a wireless power supply and we can say goodbye to copper.
Je t'aime Stéphanie
2.4Ghz has been in cordless phones for a while now. There's one right next to me. It's great that video game companies will finally take advantage of this.
We're Doomed
The way this is worded seems like they're inventing their own tech. My question here is, why are they reinventing the wheel? Why not use an existing wireless networking standard so that not only can the consoles interoperate with each other, but with your PC and anything else that uses an existing standard?
Doing otherwise just seems silly to me.
-- sudo.ca
From the article:
[But the multiuser gaming market required a very low latency network where traditional packet-collision problems precluded use of 802.11, [[the corporate vice president of Motorola]] said.]
Is TCP-like packet checking inherent in 802.11 (versus "UDP-like")? If not (and even if so -- I wonder what kinds of savings we're talking about), this sounds like a pretty sorry excuse for coming up with a new standard, and one that sounds like it might be closed.
I've played Quake online with a cable modem via 802.11b and the pings weren't too shabby at all! I wish Motorola would spend more time making something new than tweaking something old for profit -- they make great products and traditionally provide great support, but I'm not so impressed at first glance here.
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
Xaotik Designs
Thankfully I grew up with two brothers, but what if you're playing your wireless gamecube and all the sudden your sister starts talking on the 2.4Ghz phone? Man that would suck. Talk about video games causing violence...
~ now you know
"Because the network is intended for streaming, near-real-time traffic and does not have to use LAN contention methods, developers of such systems will not have to worry about packet collisions with home networks based on 802.11."
Am I misreading this? Could this be the begining of something bigger and better the current LAN and 802.11 standards?
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
That and a someone particularly mallicious could create a DoS attack by broadcasting junk packets at high power.
-Irony Irony ha ha ha
So its for copying ISOs? :-)
I wonder if the every day D.I.Y.er will get busted for putting his own 802.11b card in his "ps/2"
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
Wireless Gamecube? Who cares?
Seriously. I had the right idea aeons ago with designer computer cases. (Unfortunately, I was far too young to start a business, and my ideas were snatched from my clutches by those bastards over at Apple.) Nintendo tried to copy off of this with the idea of varying colored plastics. Ho hum.
Sega renewed the idea with the possibly evil Hello Kitty Dreamcast. And there was much rejoicing and throwing of holy water.
Oh screw it, I'm tired of attempting to sound rational. Why the hell don't they talk to Paramount and whatnot and put out a Borg Gamecube?
Damnit, now *that* is something I'd keep on a coffee table.
Maybe have a parental-controlled timer, and if yer kid's playing it too long, it shuts off while pointing out that recreation is futile, and that they will be assimilated and forced to do homework or something.
Yeah.
The GBA is what needs wireless gaming. Imagine sitting in your car on a road trip playing GBA games against other players in their cars on the other side of the country. Now Imagine a FF6 style MMORPG, that you carry around with you. Yeah, the MMORPG would eat your soul, BUT at least people wouldn't be sitting cooped up in their house playing everquest, they would walk around, go places, and just play in the meantime.
Boss: Joe do something blah blah blah
Joe: I gotta beat this dragon first hold on.
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last line in the article
Motorola and Nintendo have demonstrated the isochronous gaming LAN privately at gaming conferences over the last quarter. The RF subsystems will be ready for volume production in the second half of this year, Burgess said.
Did Nintendo have any presence at E3? I'm guessing no, cause the only thing any reporters talked about was Doom III, and this is WAY more important than another pretty FPS engine. And that last part means like from now on right, this is the 2nd half of 2002 already?? Sign me up!!
Does anyone have any information about how well this 2.4ghz band works? Will you have to yell at your family members not to stand or walk past a certain area between the machines?
ObBeowulfComment: Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these! Um. Or something. Still, the wireless network part is kinda nifty, although somehow I don't think it would be quite that useful unless you had some kind of cross-platform computing structure in place. Also, the wireless nature might make it harder to scale past a certain number of machines (interference and packet storms and all that good stuff...)
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Now instead of getting into sensitive corporate data, I'll be able to erase someone's saved season of Madden 200X! w00t!
Lots of petrified grits
All they need now is a wireless video adapter
Or a video display built into the console unit.
and a wireless power supply
That's called Batteries(tm).
Will I retire or break 10K?
Another person posting a question without actually reading the article. They came up with the new standard for 2 reasons, both of which are explained in the article. 1:All off the shelf standards were not made with gaming as the number 1 priority. 2:Here I'll quote him "We went with a proprietary modulation method, because we really don't need any alliances except with our gaming partners," They WANT it to be a closed standard, at least for the time being. My guess, IMHO, is a stiff arm against the X-box.
(X)
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
In other news.........
Motorola announces CAT5 networking will be included in all future cell phones to allow game play while preventing game play while driving.
Boioioingggg!!!!
i sure hope it works with phantasy star and FFIX. if it works with pahntasy star il buy it.
I want 2D games back.
Well, if there is one thing that Nintendo has been tight lipped about, it is online gaming. This might be there plan though. They have always promoted multiplayer/party atmosphere's with there games (think Mario Party). This would be an amazing technology for a lot of there stuff. I can see it now, 16 people over on 4 TV with 4 Cube's playing Mario Kart with 16 Wavebirds (cause we might as well have our controllers be wireless too!).
Unstable Apps: Our Android Apps Don't Suck
Note to self: No more arguing with the faithful.
Consoles are made to be simple, and I dont know any non-technical people who could set up a 16 Xbox wired LAN. This could be a big step forward for cross-platform multiplayer gaming, where a lot of games are twitch based (Soul Calibur 2 wireless realtime tournaments, anyone?)
When Nintendo unveiled the GameCube at their Spaceworld event in Japan in 2000, one of the technologies touted was Bluetooth. I was there - they had it projected up on a big screen (along with a list of their technology partners - ATI, Panasonic, IBM, etc.), and when prompted in a Q&A session about it, stated vaguely that they were investigating various forms of wireless gaming. So they've been working on this for quite a while and always intended it to be part of the GameCube system. It's only natural that Sony would offer their input as well (and please, read the article - Nintendo and Sony aren't working together, they're offering their input individually to Motorola). What's surprising to me is that Microsoft doesn't seem to be involving themselves at all in wireless network gaming. Considering the reported $1-$2 billion investment in Xbox Live, you'd think they'd be heartily working on a wireless option. In the end, MS may be the one looking like they're stuck in the stone ages - seems like Sony and Nintendo's plans are a bit more forward-thinking than most people thought (even though Nintendo's plan, at least, was really revealed 2 years ago).
first let's see someone make use of the broadband capabilities of consoles to begin with
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
When I was a kid, we'd lug our Nintendo over to someone's house if they didn't have a Nintendo (granted, this was a theoretical use after a few years) as well as games.
We would also move from room to room. When I had friends over, we'd get kicked across the house to not disturb my parents. With this tech, your friend could bring their Gamecube over and you could play that way.
While Slashdot users will have no problems with cross-over cables or Network hubs, that seems like more of a pain. Besides, while 20-something gamers that LAN party may be able to put the TVs nearby, most kids are stuck with the TVs in place.
I certainly can think of times we'd have used TVs in nearby rooms but couldn't run a network cable.
Remember, Console gaming isn't about tech, its JUST about fun. The tech can enhacne the fun, but don't expect people to read manuals.
Hell, games explain the controls inside the game now, as people don't read the manual. You want them to setup a TCP/IP network?
Alex
"But the multiuser gaming market required a very low latency network where traditional packet-collision problems precluded use of 802.11, he said. In order to develop such products, a coalition resembling Bluetooth was a hindrance rather than an advantage, he said."
this could be awesome for those rat-packed college dorms that aren't wired to a uni-network. hella coole!
Do they mean they have a protocol that is synced with the tv framerate then? If all active machines can send and recieve enough information within a 60th of a second that could mean no-lag gameplay, with the exception of the extra one-frame controller delay (you already get one because of double buffering, adding another to sync all controllers).
a 1/30th controller delay is perfectly acceptable for non-predictive user control. at about 1/10th of a second it starts feeling really bad.
Isn't 2.4 GHz getting a little crowded? This is just what I need. It's bad enough that Bluetooth interferes with 802.11b, but now my PS2 is going to be messing shit up, too? Great.
blog |
About time! I want my own distributed wireless cluster of ps2 machines.
Talk about seti at home!
http://www.dlink.com/products/dwl810/
My WiFi is supposed to do the same thing, but more often then not I get some nice digital static on my cordless (which is also supposed to frequency hop).
I've been playing a wireless game for years: it's called Frisbee.
/me ducks incoming barrage of spinning NICs
For those of you who might be new to the term, Isochronus is a term to describe protocols that can guarantee that you'll have:
1) a certain minimum amount of bandwidth
and
2) a certian maximum amount of latency
This is achieved by placing some limitations on the protocol, of course, but when it's really clearly worked out it can achieve some really amazing stuff.
A good example of a really smooth isochronus implementation is Firewire. It has this ability so that, for example, video devices can claim part of the bandwidth of the bus for isochronus communication and always be guaranteed that little bit of timeslice so that the receiving device (say... a TV) will always get smooth video without drops. What's super-cool in the FW implementation is that it also integrates an async protocol so that they two play nice together simultaneously. But I digress....
This is a really cool development and I really want to see this integrated with other wireless protocols. Of course, this is with a limited range system, but still... So COOL!
Doesn't anyone realize that FF6 doesn't really scale up to a MMORPG? Unless by "FF6-like" you mean 3/4 overhead perspective with 2D graphics.
Well, maybe if the game world was hundreds upon hundreds of times bigger, and they got rid of the story arc so you could keep playing forever, and made all the quests reset after you complete them (so others could have their turn), and removed personality from the party members in favor of character customization (can't have everyone running around as Terra, now can we?)
See? Not so hard. But is it still FF6? Would it even fit on a GBA cartridge?
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
Microsoft is probably not far from releasing a product of thier own completely incompatible and proprietary invention. We were talking about developing cross console realtime networks and games when I was at Midway. Microsoft would not support anything that could talk to consoles other than XBOX. XBOX will fail in the wired/wireless market, and eventually everywhere else.
I would have preferred to see something along the lines of "Motorola partners with Apple to bring you the 2.4Ghz G5".
Games are cool and all but I want Motorola to get off their collective asses and get with the faster CPU making.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
trolling and bsing as usual are you?
Thats what? 100 ms? Maybe the games I play have systems to counteract this, but I rarely notice how bad things are until around 250ms pingtimes.
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Open Source Sysadmin
It's been established that the next-generation consoles will do more than just gaming, they'll also become hubs of your entertainment center. At the very least, they'll probably have PVR capabilities, and probably will be able to handle music libraries and Video On Demand. With the addition of a high speed wireless LAN capable of reaching the neighbors, that potentially could give you access to your neighbor's resources... and if configured for a neighborhood mesh network it could reach far further. Advanced P2P filesharing and a common archival framework (sharing drives prevents duplication of files and allows more efficient use of the total space).
I should note that all this ties in nicely with the recent slashdot article about Playstation 3 Grid Computing. It practically demanded a high speed network... might as well be a local one.
I doubt Sony would actually do something that the MPAA disapproves of so strongly, but modding your console is not out of the question... of course, a virus or worm might help such capabilities along.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
"The isochronous network, developed with input from Nintendo Co. Ltd., Sony Corp. and other game platform developers" Gee, I wonder who that could be. Could it be, hmm, I don't know....SATAN!
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Yes, I love the Xbox, Yes, I hate Microsoft, Sorry !
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If my GBA is powering some sort of transmitter which lets me game with someone across the country, I think the MMORPG will have to have a discussion with the Energizer Bunny about whose soul, exactly, it belongs to.
--
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That's still not a reasonable arguement to me, considering we don't have huge collision problems on campus with 802.11, and we do gaming just fine on it with standard ethernet-type latency. Plus, is this a problem with Bluetooth as well?
-- sudo.ca
My kids love the gameboy system. Especially what is fun is to be able to link the gameboys together. One thing noticed is that the infared is wireless yet only works well within two inches. Connector cables can be bought to network with the PC or Nintendo consoles.
What happen to wireless connectors to the gameboy system. Perhaps the wireless device could use an extra set energizers.
When we go to the park there are several other children with gameboys. The wireless connector could allows friends to communicate with each other at the park. (Maybe just the thing to circumvent another Samantha R. case!)
The gameboy systems also would make great programmable RCX controller for the Lego systems.
Check out Shade, a MMORPG on a Cellphone/PDA that resembles old-world Ultima.