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More ApeXtreme Info
Hack Jandy writes "AnandTech has some pretty interesting follow up information to last week's sneak peek and discussion concerning VIA's attempt to penetrate the console market. By the looks of it, the S3 DeltaChrome GPU is horribly incapable of making VIA/Apex a formidable gaming console." More on vaporware at CES: Bob Gortician points to this "interesting, if terse, piece on the Phantom game console's debut..."
Ahh, well in the late 70's early 80's a company ran tons of ads in Byte and other computer mags, had nonworking display's at all the major shows, even had "fake" reviews, they pre-ordered and disappeared. I cant remeber the name maybe someone else can I think it was World Compter Systems or something of the like. But anyhow THATS why someone MIGHT want to do something like this, (I am not saying this is what they are doing at all) I am just saying this is why someone MIGHT want to
It was shown in operation to any press who signed up for the demo. They had a party in a penthouse with the Phantom being demo'd.
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pictures here:
http://forum.phantom.net/index.php?showtop
RTFA. There's no porting involved. This thing is meant to run regular PC games. The only thing that needs to be done is that DISCover (the company that wrote the "insert and play" software) has to write a script that automates game installation and runs the game when the disc is popped in.
"Each time you smile, it'll only last awhile. Life may be scary, but it's only temporary."
By the looks of it, the S3 DeltaChrome GPU is horribly incapable of making VIA/Apex a formidable gaming console.
It quite obviously isn't supposed to be a formidable gaming console. It's a fancy dvd player with some extra gaming functionality.
The most interesting thing in the article is this...
Any manufacturer could buy the VIA motherboard, chipset, GPU and CPU that went into the ApeXtreme and design their own solution. If you aren't happy with the way the ApeXtreme was done the solution is simple - make your own. VIA is doing their best to make that challenge as easy as possible for manufacturers, with a fairly large name like Apex taking the first steps we'd hope that other manufacturers will follow - for VIA's sake at least.
When MS decided to create a console based on a PC lots of people predicted that it might force all gaming platforms to coverge (a little bit like how people thought the 3DO would become the VHS of consoles). But this plan to effectively turn a vanilla PC into living room multimedia machine may actually acheive that kind of convergance. I guess it all depends on whether hardware manafacturers see any profit in it.
This all seemed to make sense. Videogames were primarly seen as a kids thing. Adults didn't play them, by and large. Well Sony decided that adults would like to play games, and released lots of adult target titles. Funny thing, turns out adults have more money than kids and hence can spend more on games.
This is what people widely seem to believe, but it's only partially right. If you look at Sony's strategy with the PS1, you'll see that they weren't targeting adults just for the sake of targeting adults, or even by going for mature-rated games. They were going strictly after Nintendo's original fanbase, those that played the NES and maybe the SNES. Those people that played the original NES as kids were generally born between the mid-70s and early-80s, meaning that they were teenagers or in their early 20s when the PS1 came out. In order to appeal to NES gamers, they went after the companies (other than Nintendo) that made the games kids played on the NES. This meant Capcom, Konami, Square, (Enix in Japan) and many others that did 3rd party games for Nintendo. It meant Metal Gear, Final Fantasy, Castlevania, and any title that did really well on the NES that wasn't made by Nintendo themselves. It also meant targeting the arcade developers, because the kids that played NES games were playing in the arcades at the time, thereby targeting Sega's 3rd party developers as well (because Sega was always strong in the arcades and arcade ports on their consoles).
Additionally, they went with a strong push towards 3D games only, and Nintendo, at the time, did not have a 3D console, as the N64 came out a few years after the PS1. Also, although Nintendo had loosened up on their content restrictions after the mess with Mortal Kombat, many of the 3rd parties were still concerned about those restrictions, so they had games on the design boards that weren't slated for a Nintendo console for this reason. Nintendo did have a handful of mature games on the SNES, and another handful on the N64, but Sony had already signed a number of exclusive contracts with many of these 3rd parties for titles that those 3rd parties had thought wouldn't get by Nintendo's censors, or wouldn't have worked on a Nintendo console at the time. Between pulling ahead by releasing a "32-bit" console in the middle of the 16-bit generation (and perhaps Nintendo rode the 16-bit generation a bit long when they skipped to "64-bit"), pushing for 3D graphics the SNES couldn't handle, and signing exclusivity deals with companies that were worried about censors, or moving towards 3D themselves, or worried about cartridge limitations (Square, specifically), Sony sucked up a lot of the 3rd parties that were Nintendo's bread & butter. By making their console a valid method for easy arcade ports, they also sucked up a lot of Sega's 3rd parties, pulling in Namco's Tekken and Soul Blade/Edge lines, for example.
Once they had all of this in place they also pushed the "games for adults" angle, knowing full well that the age group they were going for in Nintendo's original NES market was also the group most concerned with perceptions, as most 13-21 year-olds tend to be. What they knew when they started, though, was that not only was this age group the group that originally played the NES, but they were also the group with the largest expendable income. If the games targeted them well, they could pull in a larger audience than the NES had, and that's exactly what happened. The PS1 opened a larger market to games by aiming at this age group's insecurities as well as offernig games that were familiar to those that had played games as kids. Most of Nintendo's 3rd parties didn't really change their games beyond the shift to 3D and some gameplay enhancements, and neither did Nintendo. It was simply that most of the "adult-oriented" games were given an "edge" by the more realistic graphics capabilities, and a willingness by both developers and the console's developer to push the boundaries. Nintendo's games were always somewhat less violent than their 3rd
-PainKilleR-[CE]