Slashdot Mirror
Andre Lamothe Launches XGameStation
TheAdventurer writes "Andre Lamothe, author of many popular video game programming books, has released his XGameStation. The initial offering, the XGameStation Micro Edition, is a retro level hardware platform, similar to the old Atari and NES systems, designed to teach enthusiasts and students the elements of console hardware design and effective low level programming skills. The unit comes with an e-book written by Andre on how to develop on the platform using its assembly language IDE (included) and how to make your own extensions to the device. It is priced at $199."
You haven't done much PS2 programming, have you? I have, and yes they do.
word.
Game code still uses alot of assembly, unless you want it to go at 10 FPS. Letting API's handle stuff isn't always freat, theres overhead and at leasy 99% of the time bulk. (You rarely use 100% of the features of anything) Reinventing the wheel is bad, but I have code I've made myself that I reuse in games, and just play around with it a bit so it so it perfectly fits the games needs. For other stuff though, I agree with you, unless your programming for some special case (Embedded stuff, robots, games etc) then there is no need for ASM, and API's are great.
The XGS was changed beyond recognition. Before, it had a Super NES style GPU. Now it has one more similar to that of the Atari 2600, where the CPU has to output each pixel one by one.
Its great to see someone using their skills to educate other people instead of just trying to make money....
/.'ers probably do, but I used to hate it becuase I was rasied being told it was 'hard' and that i wouldnt want to do it etc....
I really consider the main problem with America in whole to be that we stress the point of our exsistance to 'live for whatever we want to' for our own desires etc, instead of living for the better of humanity, society, earth as a whole, or anything... I myself enjoy learning, as most
The American ideal is that school is work and hard and you shouldnt want to be there, if I wasnt raised with that set of ideals I probably would of gained my love for learning and knowledge when I was alot younger instead of now when im not in an enviornment where I can learn as often/much as I like....
Wow that turned into a rant... But yeah, great to see something like this, ESPECIALLY when hardware enginering/hard coding just ISNT popular like common applicaiton programming is today(how many kids do you know hardware engineering, and how many that knowsome c++?), things like this will help it to catch on...
Yeah, that's where I'm heading too. Even the $80 Linksys WRT54GS has a faster processor, right? I don't know how economical these Single-Board-Computers are, but you can get pretty fast CPUs for a reasonable amount of money, and low-power enough to still not require a fan. Are these sort of things in the realm of hobbyists, or does it become to expensive/difficult to engineer single quantities of these?
200$ is a bit expensive for a hobby video game programming system. Why not just pick up a dreamcast for cheap and use it?
There are plenty of resources for it and some good examples of homebrewed games and applications already out there.
Not to mention it's a lot more modern and you can use some nice rendering hardware.
Linkage:
Dreamcast Programming
Dreamcast Homebrew
Dreamcast Emulation
"And phone lines have send/recieve pairs"
. ht m
There are "complete and total morons," and then there is you. Phone lines do not have "send and receive pairs". There are just two wires (one pair) in most telephone systems in the world. Some European systems may carrry a high voltage ring signal on an additional wire, bur that's not necessary.
May I suggest you take a quick google before you "spew" yourself:
http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/telephone2
-S
An 80 MIP RISC doesn't have the power for abstraction layers.
Blup?
As someone who started out on 0.25 MIPS CISC processors, I can comfortably say that you don't have the faintest idea what you are talking about. Abstraction layers appeared shortly after the stored-program architecture. 80 MIPS is serious, serious luxury.
I have two of his books on my desk right now, since they're what the public library had available, and I've had nothing but a headache reading them. He assumes way too many concepts that a novice programmer would not be able to pick up--and this is in his "beginning X game programming" series of books, where X = type of api. They go back to the library today.
Hmm, unless, perhaps the array was sized 320 rows of 256 elements, and you looked up [width][height] rather than [height][width]:
unsigned short lookupTable[320 * 256];
#define offset(x,y) lookupTable[((x) << 8) + (y)]
Not that it's a GOOD idea (it's not--it's dumb, especially in the days of Mode 13h) but since the Y values range 0-199, that fits in 8 bits. So if you transpose the lookup table like this, you can avoid multiplying by 320 and instead shift left by 8, which will be faster, and look up the pre-multiplied values. (You are wasting 56 elements per row, which will always be unused, and that array won't even fit into a single segment in 16-bit mode.)
Even though THAT might be faster than calculating the offset directly, it's even FASTER to instead pre-multiply each of the 200 row values by 320 and add the X offset, using a ONE dimensional lookup table:
unsigned short lookupTable[200];
void InitLookupTable ( )
{
int i;
for ( i = 0; i < 200; ++i ) { lookupTable[i] = i * 320; }
}
#define offset(x,y) (lookupTable[y] + (x))
That uses way less memory and even avoids the left-shift. And that's why Andre is an idiot.
C is low level, you nitwit. It's just portable assembly...
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
Yeah it was easier in those days, but "those days" are never going to come back, so this whole idea has missed a fundamental point - games programming has changed. Not that LaMothe would know, he's written more clueless books and pulp articles than games.
... *never*.
I've been a game programmer (PC/XBOX/NGC/PS2) for around 4 years and I have used assembly language approximately
Yes for some roles in game programming, there is a need for low-level assembly knowledge. But the biggest challenges nowdays on multi-platform, multi-million dollar projects are not shaving a few cycles off a loop. Solid software engineering skills, working as a team with various disciplines (tool design/art/QA) are far more useful to aspiring games programmers than assembly skills.
Unfortunantly even the games industry hasn't realised this yet.
"My cat's breath smells like cat food." - The Tao of Ralph Wiggum.