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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..."
all this vaporware is making me dizzy
Why would someone go to such elaborate measures and great expense(putting together a prototype, sending exhibitors to CES, et al.) just to fool... whom? If it *isn't* a hoax, how can they possibly compete against heavy hitters like MS and Sony? I don't get it, what's it all about?
S3 Deltachrome?
Competitive Game Console?
Looks like this is a marketing ploy. Make some money out of suckers by using the cheapest possible hardware.
Sony, Nitendo, Microsoft -- that's it. That's all the market can handle...
Sorry boys, there is no more room for you.
They will lose like all the consoles that have come and gone before. Xbox would have lost too... if they didn't have Microsoft's endless wealth behind them.
Keep it vapor guys... It'll be cheaper that way for you.
AC
I guess I should start knitting that sweater Satan wanted.
This whole console thing is starting to make me feel like its the 70's again, or early 80's anyway. Here a console there a console, everyones got a consol either out or coming out.
Remember some of the oddball consoles (some REALLY cool at the time) that just completley FLOPPED.
Why is another company with relatively little financial base compared to Sony and Microsoft trying to enter the console market?
Nintendo is already on its way out to becoming a software-only company like Sega was. Microsoft is doing reasonably well in the US, but flopping in Japan and Europe. Sony dominates in all three areas, because they've been the standard since the PS1 -- which they're still backwards compatible with, by the way.
With days of software being unportable due to heavy use of assembly language being a thing of the far past, and games being more modular, people are going to do what they do in the business world and bet on the winner.
The winner? Sony. They're too big, and most likely can't be dethroned. They're also in bed with Linux, which is a good thing. In Japan, they released a TIVO/DVD-R/PS2 combo, and are on their way to creating and dominating with a single living room device.
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."
Really, they should just give up. I still have a P-166 with an S3 'Da Vinci' Virge, and for it's purposes it's worked great. However, they've been out of the graphics market for far too long...so unless they can grab some engineers from Nvidia or ATI, I don't see them rolling out anything better in a performance/cost ratio. If they had a lot of money, I could see them pulling back into serious competition, but it would require some serious investment and the understanding that there wouldn't be much payback. Then again, that's on eof the reasons the ApeXtreme is so cheap, the POS graphics card (and processor...and sound...etc etc). They must be able to churn out their components really cheaply for the entire setup to be $399. (especially because it's a PC game running setup, so no licensing profits, the entire profit is from the console sale itself which is counter-intuitive in that market) I don't think it's going to last, and on their next tax filing, the ApeXtreme development is going to be labeled 'capital loss' or something to that effect.
Very. Assuming that Xtreme means overhyped, pointless, and stupid.
Sweet! Finally, the Olympics, the circus and the X Games come together for the most exciting simian sporting event ever! I can hardly wait!
Oh, wait...
"In a 32-bit world, you're a 2-bit user. You've got your own newsgroup, alt.total.loser." -Weird Al
Kind of a tangent, but I've had good experiences with Apex equipment. I've had a few Apex DVD players, I have an Apex TV, and my girlfriend has an Apex TV as well. All for great prices.
:P
I'm not affiliated with them in any way, but I just wanted to say that they make some quality stuff in my experience- a lot of people might be misled by their low prices. They're not Aiwa... their stuff seems to hold up well.
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
Let me explain. Many great games are being ported to Linux, and blockbusters are being announced on a practically weekly basis. With a GNU/Debian Linux based gaming system, all the required infrastructure for grabbing game updates and patches would be in place with apt-get. Of course, most consoles aren't going to be equipped with a keyboard, but it is easy to imagine something like dselect being extended with an SVGAlib written wrapper that would allow an inexperienced games console user to 'type' in using an onscreen keyboard commands like 'apt-get update nethack', or 'apt-get install xbill'. Of course access charges to such a service would be completely free. This could be the thing that really blows Microsoft and Xbox Live! out of the water.
What I want to know is...has anyone tried a Linux-based games console before? Just take some commodity hardware, package Linux, and let the community do the rest? If not, it's high time. I think it would be a massive success. If only VA Linux was still in the Linux hardware game, they could potentially manufacture these boxes and provide support too.
Let's see, it's vaporware except for a big, fairly ugly box which has never been turned on, it's sponsored by a guy whose known for getting capital for loser projects, it's competing against three other boxes which are still going strong in sales...maybe the Phantom is exactly what it claims to be...nothing. A ghost box.
Besides, Sony will probably have a working prototype of PS3 before it's even released, by which time it'll have no chance, just like Dreamcast.
So my first thought was "Forget the hardware, where are the games?". Turns out the ApeXtreme is designed to run PC games via special "installer scripts". In other words, it's just like buying a PC to play games...only you don't get any of the benefits of actually owning a PC.
Riiiight.
The way the console world works is that you buy one piece of hardware and get 3-5 years of games out of it. If you keep the console around, you can still play those games many years later(raise your hand if you still have an NES/C64/etc). You never have to deal with patches, hardware upgrades, incompatibility, or any of the other woes of the PC. The downside is that you have a limited feature set and no option to upgrade the hardware and remain on the same platform. Since the hardware is fixed, the life and death of the various consoles are determined solely by the choice of games.
Anyone who tells you that hardware is anything more than a tertiary concern in the console market does not know what they are talking about
Consider, for instance, the success of the NES against the Sega Genesis, or the utter failure of the Atari Jaguar and countless others like it. Sony took control of the console market by being easier for third party licensees to work with than Nintendo or Sega.
Contrast this with the PC game market, in which the hardware is king. PC gaming web sites spend lots of time talking about hardware, and game developers write games so that future hardware will be able to take full advantage of them. Games themselves are generally of lower quality upon release than their console brethren, and it's not uncommon for it to take many patches to iron out all the problems. The upside of this is that patches will often improve the game as well as fix bugs.
Lower quality combined with the ever-increasing cost of hardware upgrades have caused the game industry to decline somewhat in the past few years. Successful PC games will likely have a console port, but the reverse is less often true.
Into this scenario comes VIA, proposing to combine the worst aspects of a console(non-upgradability, limited functionality) with the worst aspects of the PC game market(low quality, patches, quick obsolescence). Couple this with the fact that for the price of this console you can upgrade your CPU and video card anyway, and I can't see this as anything other than a disaster waiting to happen. There is absolutely no reason to buy this system.
[1] When I say "PC game market", I mean games like Warcraft and Half-Life, not Snood and its ilk.
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I hear that word and I almost want to punch somebody.
--
Power to the Peaceful
ApeXtreme may not have the best specs but a reliable source inside Via told me that the CromagnonXtreme and NeandertalXtreme will have better processors. Those will be followed of course by the 64 bit HomoErectusXtreme.
What if Digg added local news and a Slashdot inspired comment karma system? ---
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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.
S3's latest line of GPU's is utter crap by comparison to anything from ATI or Nvidia, even at similar prices. The flagship is like a geforce 2 Ti but less stable. It won't even run a lot of directX 8.1 games. Geez, by now the radeon 9600 GPU chip is cheap to make and under $40 wholesale. Why didn't they use that to give their $300 console some good performance?
Repeal the DMCA!
According to this article Apex already beat Sony on their own turf by selling more DVD players in the US than any other manufacturer.
Personaly, I think the Apextreme box would make a fine HTPC (like a frontend to MythTV).
- Competing directly in the retail market against Sony and MS would be difficult in any case.
- Phantom relys on content delivery over the network rather than on disks. (Why would any games store want to sell one of these things, they'd get no customers coming in to buy more games like they do with XBox or PS?)
It would make a lot of sense for them to partner with cable companies and the option of an inbuild cable modem could make it an attractive "drop in" package to some.Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
While you may be one of the sad, sad fans of the Dreamcast, you have forgotten a major reason for Sega exiting the hardware business.
The hardware business is expensive, and Sega ran out of money. That's all there is to it, no 'sony lied about sega' or 'sony slept with segas wife' or any other crap. After the horrible debacle that started with the 32X and SegaCD, they never really got their footing back. The 32X was a financial disaster, probably second only to the ET cartridges made by Atari. The Sega Saturn never really took hold and the 3d hardware was inadequate (not to mention seriously lacking in developer support). I mean, come on, it couldn't even do transparencies. That's sad. Even the 2d games on the Saturn had to use horrible cross-hatching from the 8 bit nintendo days (since the snes could do hardware transparencies and blending).
After the low sales of the Saturn and waning developer support, the Dreamcast was a last-ditch effort to stay in the market. It sold well in Japan but it was hard to find games for. Release dates kept getting pushed further back every week. Meanwhile Sony had a viable alternative with a growing library of hits. Namco and other big hitters were in Sony's pocket. The rest, as they say, was history. Sega's wisest decision was to get out of the hardware business and stick with what they've always done best: making games.
Now, you can get Sega games for multiple platforms. Sega just has to develop games and not worry about who wins or who loses the hardware wars. Their fate was probably ultimately unavoidable, and I'm glad they're still making fun games.
I just want to know, how the HECK is this thing going to make money for VIA or Apex? It has enough "asshole technology" to limit its usability to the level that unless nice people at Apex kindly allowed you to play a particular game, it won't run it at all, however PC games give no revenue to the hardware makers -- just the opposite, Apex has to make installer/uninstaller scripts for them. At its $400 price it is barely below similarly-specced PCs, so I guess, there is some slim profit margin in that, considering that all chips are VIA.
But the problem is, it competes with small PCs made mostly from... VIA's chips! VIA sells the same parts, probably at the same or higher profit, to PC makers, and those produce small "media/games" PCs for a bit higher price and infinitely higher flexibility. So VIA gets an inflexible product squeezed between traditional consoles ($100-$200 price range) and cheap gaming-capable PCs ($400-$600 price range), and to add insult to the stupid situation, the latter, that they are so busy undercutting, is also their best client.
If VIA just wanted to undercut the PCs it could just produce a fully-functional PC, price it at $400-$500, and enjoy the results. But with $400 thing that costs almost as much as an equivalent $500 PC, but does much less (not to mention, can't be upgraded to be able to meet new games' requirements in a few years), they just can't get enough users that buy that thing instead of either cheaper console, or a PC.
So why bother?
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
So it's not ok to have fun playing adult oriented games? Look dipstick, I'm not talking about adult games as in sexual content, i'm talking about games pitched to adults. Let's try some examples in other media to maybe help you get an idea of what I mean:
A TV show like Law and Order. Law and Order is a hugely successful show (as is apparant by them running it all the time on every channel) but try and get your average 6 year old to watch it. They'll be bored in 5 minutes with most episodes.
A movie like Boondock Saints. A kid might think that the violence in Boondock's is cool, but I doubt they get the humour or much in the way of the message of the movie. They and their friends are not going to discuss the moral implications.
These are both examples of adult oriented entertainment. They were designed with an adult audience in mind. Compare this to something like Aladin, which clearly had a young audience in mind.
Now this doesn't mean that adults don't enjoy kid-oriented entertainment or that some kids don't enjoy adult oriented entertainment, or even that there's a hard line between the two. However it is quite clear that you can design something with different audiences in mind, and which one you choose will affect the demographic that buys your product.
Games have an even wider range since there is not only the topic and content to consider, but the mechanics and difficulty. Some games are simply too difficult for most kids. One I clearly remember was Master of Orion 2. When it first came out I decided to try it, and hated it. I just couldn't figure the damn thing out. Too complecated. A few years later I tried it again and loved it, still play it to this day. Other games are the opposite, I found them challenging when I first played them as a kid and find them trivial now.
So look, it's not bad that game companies are relasing games targeted to adults. Don't get in a huff because your chosen console provider didn't tend to go for that. Nintendo had always been a kid oriented platform, with mainly kid titles. Sony went witha more adult orient platform. It was a real winner. Doesn't mean there's no market for kid games, as is obvious from the ample supply, or that adults don't enjoy playing them.
However there are those of us that want games that present something different, things that most kids won't enjoy. There's nothing wrong with that and doesn't mean we are playing games to "determine our dick size", it just means we choose to be entertained in a different way or on a different level.
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]