Nintendo Revolution Details Emerge

Pyrohazard writes "Nintendo has posted some details on the Revolution to their official site, finally giving us some insight into what the console will be like. From the site: 'It will be about the thickness of three standard DVD cases and only slightly longer.' This makes it the smallest Nintendo console yet! It will also be able to stand up, similar to the PS2, and the Xbox 360. It will be backwards compatible, and it will also play '12cm optical disks in the same self-loading media drive'. It also states that it will have a very quick start-up time, and be very quiet. It finishes by stating 'Get ready for the Nintendo Revolution in 2006!'" C|Net has an article up arguing that Nintendo is making an error in missing the 2005 Holiday season.

Comments

Re:A revolution too late I'd say

[Jace of Fuse!]

Yes, because the absense of water cooling in the Gamecube meant the XBox was faster, too.

In all actuality, there is every indication to show that the Gamecube is for the most part every bit as powerful as the XBox, with the only real advantage the XBox has over the Gamecube is more memory, and arguably the hard drive (though since it's largely underutilized the fact that it isn't standard in the XBox 360 should speak for itself).

Anyway, when we start talking PowerPC instead of x86, the whole rules on heat and power as well as size totally change. It's entirely possible that the Revolution and Xbox could be more alike than unalike. Though with Revolution having Gamecube compatibility and the Xbox 360 not having much of anything, the XBox 360 could be more powerful and it would still have an uphill battle.

A large backlog of games to play can make or break a system. Anyone who doubts this needs to compare PSP and DS sales figures. (For those who haven't been watching, the DS is killing the PSP globally.)

Re:Whats the Revolution?

[Man In Black]

Back when the N64 was in development, Nintendo kept saying that the controller was something amazing and revolutionary, and kept it really hush-hush until they decided to unveil. They're pretty tight-lipped about stuff like this, so don't expect to see anything until Nintendo actually WANTS you to see it.

On the plus side though, the N64 controllers were revolutionary in a number of ways... it was the first major console to use analog sticks (Well, since the Atari 5200 I guess), it had slots on the back for memory cards and rumble packs (an idea later adopted by Sega and Microsoft), the odd three-staved design allowed it to be held in a number of different configurations (an idea which never really caught on), the C-buttons sort of led to the Gamecube's C-stick, and the system did four-player out of the box (although I suppose this is more a feature of the system rather than the controllers). I know a lot of people didn't like the N64 controllers, but they did have a good amount of influence after all.

Re:Backwards compatability - this will help

[drinkypoo]

The PS3 does not use PPC. It uses the cell architecture, and while IBM was part of the STI that created the Cell (which also includes Sony and Toshiba, as the 'S' and the 'T'), which in no way is the power pc archetecture.

...except the cells have a PPC core to handle basic processing and the feeding of instructions out to the cell cores, which handle your vector operations and floating point mathematics. This is a "new" PowerPC core which is "a two issue, in-order, 64 bit processor that supports 2 way SMT". It allegedly has a somewhat longer pipeline than other PPC processors (to allow higher clock rates) so it can be expected to perform somewhat more poorly clock-for-clock than the G5.