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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
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.
"They're too big, and most likely can't be dethroned."
You could have said that about Nintendo in the 80's and early 90's... Then along came a blunder called the Nintendo 64.
If we've learned anything, it's that you can never predict what will happen when the next generation of concoles comes out.
And as far as Nintendo being on the way out... The price drop to 99$ has (arguably) put them back in the #2 spot. They're still the undisputed king of the handheld market (N-Gage being as good as say... N'Sync- AND as cleverly named), and unlike Microsoft, they actually make a profit everytime they sell a console.
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.
i c=2048
pictures here:
http://forum.phantom.net/index.php?showtop
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.
Nintendo is hardly on its way out.
The Gamecube is globally selling as much as, or more than, the XBox (depending on which particular analyst you listen to), and Nintendo aren't pumping cash into it like Microsoft are to prop up the XBox. The Gameboy is of course selling in the millions.
Sony has certainly outsold both Nintendo and Microsoft, but neither of the second placed companies are going to be moving out of consoles any time soon. Expect to see a new Nintendo box released, along with the PS3 and the XBox 2, and expect it to perform well.
Contrary to popular belief, a company does not have to be in the number 1 position to be either profitable or successful.
There is room in most markets for multiple competitors. This is something for which I'm exceedingly grateful given that the current incumbent number 1 companies are producing, invariably, lesser experiences than those on a smaller scale.
Calls for a Highlander-esque "there can be only one!" death match are usually only by fanboys who can't see that there must be more than a single "winner".
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.
In regards to PC games, you're somewhat correct, as usage of assembly is pretty much limited to discrete pieces that need extreme performance. These pieces are easier to re-write than the entire application. However, console games are a different beast. As consoles age and developers become more familiar with the hardware (and at the same time are required to squeeze more and more out of the hardware, because a third or fourth generation title is expected to be more impressive than a first generation title), developers develop their own libraries for the console using low-level languages. This is especially common on Sony platforms, because 1) the PS1 was alive for so long, the initial development libraries were completely inadequate near its end of life, and 2) Sony totally dropped the ball with the PS2, not even providing a higher-level set of libraries*. Now, a lot of these are portable across platforms with a recompile, because the developers will write the backends for multiple consoles while the library's interface remains the same. These games are not portable simply by putting the disc in a different console, however.
So, how does the PS2 achieve backwards compatibility with PS1 games? Sleight of hand. The PS2 includes a PSOne-on-a-chip (the development of which made it possible to release the cheap, compact PSOne redesign of the PS1). It shares memory and hardware devices with the PS2 hardware, but when you pop in a PS1 game the Emotion Engine and so forth are not working at all. It's all being done via the PSOne-on-a-chip.
* Sony saw that 5 years after the PS1 launch no developers were using the Sony-provided tools (well, outside of hobbyist-level startup shops that didn't have the time or money to develop their own libraries or buy a good set from established parties like EA). If no developers are going to use the tools, why should they spend time and money on developing those tools for the PS2? Of course, they didn't look back and see that the PS1 would not have been as popular in its early life if it had not been easy to write for initially. This forced companies to spend millions of dollars and months of work to gear up for PS2 development, and is why there were very few good early launch titles for PS2. The PS2 was almost totally carried by its PS1 compatibility in the first 6-12 months of its life.
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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