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Next Generation Cat Fight
The gaming industry may be an ever more lucrative business, but in some ways it seems as if kids are still running the place. Gamespot has up an article in which they discuss the nasty things the Big 3 have said about each other. From the article: "Robbie Bach: The other two companies' presentations [at E3] weren't surprising. Sony's [PS3's] capabilities are the same as ours. Nintendo is aiming for the niche market [with its Revolution]. The current-generation Xbox sold more than the PlayStation 2 in North America last Christmas. We will become the market leader with our next-generation console." The Guardian Gamesblog has commentary on this.
And you know who makes out? IBM, they are the core processor for all 3 nextGen consoles. Good for them...
"I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection." -- Sigmund Freud
they use bluetooth. bluetooth is limited to 7. they're just saying you could connect 7 devices and a controller is a device. it has nothing to do with games having seven players or anything. it was probably started by a marketer, not a real person with sense.
Yeah, Robbie...I remember when it was difficult for Bill Gates to imagine a computer program that required more than 640K of memory...
That would be funny if he actually said that but he didn't fucking say it.
Now please take your trolls somewhere else.
Top 10 Reasons To Procrastinate
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You must have some insider info on Nintendo's console, then! From what I've read, Nintendo's console will, in terms of specs, be significantly less powerful than either PS3 or Xbox 360. Of course, Nintendo's counting on their console being superior in some way that turns out to be more important than pure processing power. (Maybe it will have a funnitude rating of 33!!!)
An Open Console would be really nice, but (like you pointed out) the only market-players with the means to mass-produce a new console have an economic motive not to do so. There have been hobbyist projects in the past to make small, Linux-based console systems, but none of them really took off, even among FOSS enthusiasts.
And of course, Joey Newshoes, age 13, doesn't want to build his own console just to play some crummy tetris clone. For an Open Console to become truly popular, it would have to a) be available in retail stores, and b) have a good selection of quality games. The latter might be possible as more commercial-quality games are being made/ported to Linux. The former is almost inconceivable, from an economic standpoint, because it would require a lot of resources to mass-produce the consoles, and a profit would have to be made without the licensing fees, which means trying to undercut the 3 major players on price.
Frankly, I think our best bet would be a regular Linux PC with a TV-out port and some USB controllers. Consoles all have standard hardware, but is variation in hardware a problem? With a couple abstraction layers between the hardware and the game, the difference between e.g. an AMD and an Intel approaches zero.
There will always be a difference in performance (e.g. 1Ghz vs 2Ghz), but games can have a low minimum requirements and scale up with additional hardware, if they are so programmed. The only problem I see with this in the Windows game market is that the developers are actually pushing for faster hardware, making the system requirements higher each year, so that consumers are pressured into upgrading. If anyone should be able to avoid that temptation, it's FOSS developers.
The numbers I've seen say the Rev is "2-3 times" more powerful than the GCN, while the Xbox 360 is "13-15 times" more powerful than the Xbox 1, and the PS3 is "35 times" more powerful than the PS2.
Looking at this page, it looks like Xbox's numbers are bigger than Gamecube's in every category. And while the PS2's are smaller, the reported 35-fold increase in performance would put them well above 2-3 times increase over GCN.
So, I hope you can understand how I came to the conclusion that the Xbox 360 and PS3 are more powerful. I'm not claiming that the numbers are what's important, only that (according to reports from the companies themselves), the Xbox360/PS3 have more "RAW CPU/GPU POWAH" than the Revolution.