Any player that came with the old loopholed A8 firmware won't be flash-upgradeable, as there is no flash rom inside, only an EPROM.
Only the newer players that were sold with N6 firmware contain a flash rom, and can be flashed via CD-R to a patched N6 version. That way you can easily change to a different zone firmware, or just use the region/RCE/macrovision-free patch.
True, I can do that (assuming of course that there exists CSS-capable "approved" DVD player software for my choice of OS).
But I didn't buy a DVD to watch banded video on a small screen with tinny 2-channel sound. VHS can do better than that, and doesn't have zoning restrictions. I bought my DVDs to watch on my large-screen TV with full DTS 5.1 sound through a real hifi system.
As for Australia vs. Canada, I like the cheap high-bandwidth net access here, and Canadian culture shares a lot with Australian. OTOH, I like the Aussie climate & beaches more:-) I've been having fun working over here, but I think I'll go back to Australia to raise my kids.
I used to live in Australia, where I legally bought Region 4 discs. Now I live in Canada, and have legally bought Region 1 discs too. What are my options for playing the discs that I paid for?
I couldn't even bring a Region 4 DVD player with me when I moved, as not only is the voltage wrong, so is the video standard (and forget trying to find a PAL-capable TV in this part of the world, at any reasonable price!)
I too have an Apex 600A, and used the Loopholes menu to play my Region 4 discs (I live in Canada these days). Back in Australia, region-free DVD players are very common (our consumer protection body even supports this). But in this country, they seem very rare.
However, I couldn't keep using the original loopholed Apex ROM, as bugs in the firmware made playing some discs very difficult, particularly those with "extended mixes" of the movies (e.g. Abyss, T2).
6 months ago, I replaced the EPROM with a double-sized equivalent, burned newer release ROMs patched to Region 1 and Region 0, one on each side, and added a simple switch. Details here (thanks Darren!)
Now I no longer have troubles with X-Men et al, I can play both my Region 1 and Region 4 discs on the region-free setting, and switch back to Region 1 for the two RCE discs I own (Charlie's Angels and Crouching Tiger).
In fact, checking again, it seems the latest firmware has been patched again to give both region-free playback and RCE defeat - I won't even need my switch anymore:-)
Last time I looked, Win32 display contexts also let me work in independant, transformable (rot/scale/shear etc) world coordinates, and supported beziers & advanced clipping.
GDI+ (in WinXP) adds better alpha support, amongst other things, which Quartz already does. Haven't programmed in Quartz so I can't compare directly though.
So now the PC platform has finally come full circle in it's design...
It's not a circle, it's a spiral - and this time round, we're a few rungs higher up the ladder (speaking as a die-hard - but still dead - ex-Amigan here).
The Amiga was of course cool in its day, but 4x 8bit sound channels vs. 256x 16 bit 2D/3D channels into AC-3, 14 MB/s gfx RAM b/w vs. 4.2 GB/s, 1 Mpix/s blitter vs. 350 Mpix/s multitextured 3D + T&L... I think we've advanced a little:-)
OK, so DSL doesn't work for many people, and cable ditto, but you'd have to be living in a deep hole (with no line-of-sight) not to get LEO satellite access.
Teledesic to the rescue! And Hughes, Motorola, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Loral, Alcatel, Orbital Sciences, etc.
Compared to an internal combustion engine, it produces *way* less pollution.
Apart from the greater efficiencies of power stations and the possibility of completely clean electricity generation, electric (also hybrid) cars don't waste fuel idling, and they often don't waste energy braking either, thanks to regenerative braking.
I believe he meant kilohertz, since that's what sampling rates are measured in, not kilobits
You may be right, but 70 kHz is an odd sampling rate to quote (as is 500 Khz). The numbers seemed to fit bitrates better.
Yeah, we should have stayed with 8 bit CPUs...
on
More on the GeForce 3
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I remember an article in a computer mag back in 1980 that was concerned at the growing trend of making faster CPUs.
The author felt that his 8 bit Z80 ran his text-based CP/M wordprocessor & spreadsheet quite fast enough, thank you, and 16 bit CPUs were just overkill. "And now they're even talking about 32 bit CPUs... when will it end? What's the point?"
You're right, of course. We really shouldn't have bothered going further, once we achieved 9600 baud terminals. Information can be conveyed perfectly well as text, and 9600 baud is faster than any human eye can read, after all...
any fool that would spend more than they spent on an entire system should be institutionalized...
I would guess most semi-serious graphics developers would pay double to get these features. John Carmack isn't particularly foolish (he got his for free, didn't he?;-) and he's already recommended that every developer rush out & buy one now. And he's not known for non-impartiality (is that "partiality?" "non-anti-dis-apartiality?)
The programmable shaders are very cool, but don't forget the other features:
- "Lightspeed Memory Architecture", similar to ATI's HyperZ (but more effective), with an interesting crossbar memory controller & Z compression, requires no support, and makes your existing games run faster.
- "Quincunx multisampling FSAA", a high-quality, more efficient AA method makes your existing games look nicer at considerably less performance cost than previously possible.
Increasing fillrate is pointless, when things are already so memory-bound. T&L is improved, in the way that developers have been asking for most: programmability. And as mentioned elsewhere, these are all standard DirectX8 features, so you're not required to be "nVidia compatible", just DX8 compatible, which is expected anyway.
Why is it people are complaining about "having" to upgrade twice yearly at great expense (supposedly because it's required to run the latest games), and then at the same time they complain that the features won't be used by the latest games for 12-18 months anyway!
Come on people, make up your mind. If you like it now, buy it now. If you can wait, buy it later and save some money. I just don't understand all this moaning about it.
Why not just get a cheap card from yesteryear, that will provide the same percieved perfomance on todays bunch of games?
Good idea, if you can't perceive the difference.
Noone can tell the difference between 30fps and 200fps anyway
That's been done to death already. In short, a *minimum* of 60fps *is* important.
So it is intuitively obvious to all that a video card with a performance in excess of 37million polygons per second will not provide any better performance under those conditions. Why pay extra for something you can't see?
Far too simplistic a view. Overdraw alone can easily chew 10x the polys you can actually see. Offline renderers now use micro-polygons smaller than an individual pixel, to better approximate reality. And of course, who wants to be limited to 1024x768 anyway? I'd hate my eyes to be stuck at that rez when driving my car in the Real World.
It is like insisting on a 500kbit sampling rate, when 70kbit sampling rates are perfect to the human ear.
Not my ear, and I still class myself as human. 70 kb/s will barely get you FM radio quality, and that's compressed as well as possible. At uncompressed rates, which is what you should be talking about, a stereo 96kHz/24bit stream gives quite good (though still not perfect) quality, and clocks in at 4500 kb/s. Even a CD uses 1378 kb/s.
You could argue that to sterilize the mice in a presumably fairly painless way is considerably more humane than breaking their backs in a rat trap, or than a convulsive death from rat poison.
I have a 1.6GHz P4 computer system (prerelease, not overclocked) and a IA64 system here at work, and as *Tom's Hardware Guide* clearly points out here in their *latest* comparison...
Can't say I entirely trust Tom's these days. He's inclined to be a little slipshod and biased, IMHO. Look how much he raved about DivX;-) - "as good as DVD", indeed.
If you'll look at the very next page from that link you posted, the P4 gets roundly beaten on the next test, and further, Tom tells us that BapCO (who wrote that particular benchmark) actually have their offices inside Intel's Santa Clara building! Guess which CPUs they optimised for?
The truth is, the P4 has strong areas and weak areas. In RAM-bandwidth and SIMD-optimised benchmarks, it flies very nicely. In straight FP and complex decision code, it suffers, sometimes very badly. I saw a benchmark, SuperPI, where a 1.5 GHz P4 performed at less than half the speed of a 1.2 GHz Athlon.
In fact, forget this article. Read the one at Ace's Hardware instead - it's much more informed.
OK, speaking as a software developer here, and someone who uses a P4 regularly...
According to our own software, a 1.5 GHz P4 clocks in at just over a 1.1 GHz PIII. Not too bad in absolute terms, though there's no doubt the TBird kills it in price/performance, especially when the whole system price (including RAM) is considered. Still, I'm not ashamed to have one on my desk, I just don't want to be the one paying for it. Nothing new there - the Pentium Pro sucked at 16 bit software and cost far more, but it (and the P6 core) were still very successful.
The P4 has two decent advantages - RAM bandwidth (for those who need it), and SSE2, which is finally really useful to me. I can double and sometimes even triple the performance of all my MMX code, and that easily outstrips the Athlon. This won't apply to most code, true, but it sure makes a difference to my software.
However, 95% of all my customers don't use P4s, or even Athlons - they use dual PIIIs. 2 x 900 MHz PIII chips beats any P4 or Athlon system comfortably, and is still doesn't quite break the bank:-) This, and only this, is what has kept my customer base loyal to Intel while the Athlon has been storming the castle.
Biggest flaw in the P4? No SMP! I still can't believe it. Their one big advantage over AMD in the higher end systems, the one they've been pushing to all their workstation customers, and the P4 WILL NOT DO IT. And now, of course, when AMD are finally on the verge of releasing their SMP chipset (can it be true?), Intel neatly snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, letting AMD through the gate, and locking themselves outside...
Of course, there's still the Foster, AKA P4 Xeon. It will do dual, quad and 8-way systems, and this promises to be the ultimate system for my software (I use a dual Foster too, and it is nice, no question). But at what price? It's bad enough my customers having to mortgage their homes for 1 GB or 2 GB of Rambus RAM, but to have to pay Xeon-level prices for a dual system as well is going to drive them into the welcoming arms of a waiting DDR dual Athlon.
Guess which system I'll be buying next for myself.
...Microsoft isn't listening to ATI, Matrox, 3Dfx...
ATI are promoting their Radeon as "fully DX8 compliant", and 3dfx are on record stating, "nVidia and ourselves are probably responsible for about 90% of DX8's featureset" (which admittedly still leaves the possibility of 3dfx only contributing 5%;-)
That article is interesting, but makes some flawed comments, IMHO. The XBox is not a replacement PC - MS would actually lose money everytime someone bought one for non-gaming applications. And the complaints about "overdesign" seem a bit specious.
I'm wondering about those legacy PC bottlenecks on the xbox. It's on a x86 based processor going against a 100% 128-bit PS2 Emotion Engine that's got a main 300 mhz CPU and two vector coprocessors that blow Pentium III floating point ops out of the water.
You're forgetting a few things. Not only is the PIII over twice the speed of the PS2's CPU, it can also issue 4 SSE instructions every clock, effectively a vector processor in itself. I think you'd find its FP performance is faster, not slower, more than comparable to the PS2's CPU and 1 vector unit together..
The CPU won't have to do double duty on the graphics, either. The nVidia programmable T&L engine will do that, and reportedly faster than the PS2's vector units. Add to that the 4 DSPs assisting in the sound generation (Dolby Digital 5.1 with no CPU effort required:-), and you have an enormous amount of computing power.
The XBox's RAM bandwidth should be more than sufficient for the 640x480 resolution that TV games will be running at, even considering the 2-3 GB/s used by the T&L and CPU. Dr. Michael Abrash wrote a very interesting article about that a little while ago. The PS2's VRAM is fast, but small - developers will have to go easy on the textures, or it'll get swamped by thrashing.
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Only the newer players that were sold with N6 firmware contain a flash rom, and can be flashed via CD-R to a patched N6 version. That way you can easily change to a different zone firmware, or just use the region/RCE/macrovision-free patch.
But I didn't buy a DVD to watch banded video on a small screen with tinny 2-channel sound. VHS can do better than that, and doesn't have zoning restrictions. I bought my DVDs to watch on my large-screen TV with full DTS 5.1 sound through a real hifi system.
As for Australia vs. Canada, I like the cheap high-bandwidth net access here, and Canadian culture shares a lot with Australian. OTOH, I like the Aussie climate & beaches more :-) I've been having fun working over here, but I think I'll go back to Australia to raise my kids.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is considering that...
I couldn't even bring a Region 4 DVD player with me when I moved, as not only is the voltage wrong, so is the video standard (and forget trying to find a PAL-capable TV in this part of the world, at any reasonable price!)
The patch came too late to stop my own 3 year old badly scratching my Toy Story DVD, though... TS2 is on VHS now :-/
However, I couldn't keep using the original loopholed Apex ROM, as bugs in the firmware made playing some discs very difficult, particularly those with "extended mixes" of the movies (e.g. Abyss, T2).
6 months ago, I replaced the EPROM with a double-sized equivalent, burned newer release ROMs patched to Region 1 and Region 0, one on each side, and added a simple switch. Details here (thanks Darren!)
Now I no longer have troubles with X-Men et al, I can play both my Region 1 and Region 4 discs on the region-free setting, and switch back to Region 1 for the two RCE discs I own (Charlie's Angels and Crouching Tiger).
In fact, checking again, it seems the latest firmware has been patched again to give both region-free playback and RCE defeat - I won't even need my switch anymore :-)
GDI+ (in WinXP) adds better alpha support, amongst other things, which Quartz already does. Haven't programmed in Quartz so I can't compare directly though.
Lookie here!
It's not a circle, it's a spiral - and this time round, we're a few rungs higher up the ladder (speaking as a die-hard - but still dead - ex-Amigan here).
The Amiga was of course cool in its day, but 4x 8bit sound channels vs. 256x 16 bit 2D/3D channels into AC-3, 14 MB/s gfx RAM b/w vs. 4.2 GB/s, 1 Mpix/s blitter vs. 350 Mpix/s multitextured 3D + T&L... I think we've advanced a little :-)
Yes (from Asus), dunno (but look here for benchmarks), and I think so :-)
Teledesic to the rescue! And Hughes, Motorola, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Loral, Alcatel, Orbital Sciences, etc.
Apart from the greater efficiencies of power stations and the possibility of completely clean electricity generation, electric (also hybrid) cars don't waste fuel idling, and they often don't waste energy braking either, thanks to regenerative braking.
Read the article yourself. Read the website too.
You may be right, but 70 kHz is an odd sampling rate to quote (as is 500 Khz). The numbers seemed to fit bitrates better.
The author felt that his 8 bit Z80 ran his text-based CP/M wordprocessor & spreadsheet quite fast enough, thank you, and 16 bit CPUs were just overkill. "And now they're even talking about 32 bit CPUs... when will it end? What's the point?"
You're right, of course. We really shouldn't have bothered going further, once we achieved 9600 baud terminals. Information can be conveyed perfectly well as text, and 9600 baud is faster than any human eye can read, after all...
I would guess most semi-serious graphics developers would pay double to get these features. John Carmack isn't particularly foolish (he got his for free, didn't he? ;-) and he's already recommended that every developer rush out & buy one now. And he's not known for non-impartiality (is that "partiality?" "non-anti-dis-apartiality?)
If you can't keep up, then get out of the fast lane. Some of us are going places :-)
- "Lightspeed Memory Architecture", similar to ATI's HyperZ (but more effective), with an interesting crossbar memory controller & Z compression, requires no support, and makes your existing games run faster.
- "Quincunx multisampling FSAA", a high-quality, more efficient AA method makes your existing games look nicer at considerably less performance cost than previously possible.
Increasing fillrate is pointless, when things are already so memory-bound. T&L is improved, in the way that developers have been asking for most: programmability. And as mentioned elsewhere, these are all standard DirectX8 features, so you're not required to be "nVidia compatible", just DX8 compatible, which is expected anyway.
Why is it people are complaining about "having" to upgrade twice yearly at great expense (supposedly because it's required to run the latest games), and then at the same time they complain that the features won't be used by the latest games for 12-18 months anyway!
Come on people, make up your mind. If you like it now, buy it now. If you can wait, buy it later and save some money. I just don't understand all this moaning about it.
Good idea, if you can't perceive the difference.
That's been done to death already. In short, a *minimum* of 60fps *is* important.
Far too simplistic a view. Overdraw alone can easily chew 10x the polys you can actually see. Offline renderers now use micro-polygons smaller than an individual pixel, to better approximate reality. And of course, who wants to be limited to 1024x768 anyway? I'd hate my eyes to be stuck at that rez when driving my car in the Real World.
Not my ear, and I still class myself as human. 70 kb/s will barely get you FM radio quality, and that's compressed as well as possible. At uncompressed rates, which is what you should be talking about, a stereo 96kHz/24bit stream gives quite good (though still not perfect) quality, and clocks in at 4500 kb/s. Even a CD uses 1378 kb/s.
You could argue that to sterilize the mice in a presumably fairly painless way is considerably more humane than breaking their backs in a rat trap, or than a convulsive death from rat poison.
Can't say I entirely trust Tom's these days. He's inclined to be a little slipshod and biased, IMHO. Look how much he raved about DivX ;-) - "as good as DVD", indeed.
If you'll look at the very next page from that link you posted, the P4 gets roundly beaten on the next test, and further, Tom tells us that BapCO (who wrote that particular benchmark) actually have their offices inside Intel's Santa Clara building! Guess which CPUs they optimised for?
The truth is, the P4 has strong areas and weak areas. In RAM-bandwidth and SIMD-optimised benchmarks, it flies very nicely. In straight FP and complex decision code, it suffers, sometimes very badly. I saw a benchmark, SuperPI, where a 1.5 GHz P4 performed at less than half the speed of a 1.2 GHz Athlon.
In fact, forget this article. Read the one at Ace's Hardware instead - it's much more informed.
Namarrgon
According to our own software, a 1.5 GHz P4 clocks in at just over a 1.1 GHz PIII. Not too bad in absolute terms, though there's no doubt the TBird kills it in price/performance, especially when the whole system price (including RAM) is considered. Still, I'm not ashamed to have one on my desk, I just don't want to be the one paying for it. Nothing new there - the Pentium Pro sucked at 16 bit software and cost far more, but it (and the P6 core) were still very successful.
The P4 has two decent advantages - RAM bandwidth (for those who need it), and SSE2, which is finally really useful to me. I can double and sometimes even triple the performance of all my MMX code, and that easily outstrips the Athlon. This won't apply to most code, true, but it sure makes a difference to my software.
However, 95% of all my customers don't use P4s, or even Athlons - they use dual PIIIs. 2 x 900 MHz PIII chips beats any P4 or Athlon system comfortably, and is still doesn't quite break the bank :-) This, and only this, is what has kept my customer base loyal to Intel while the Athlon has been storming the castle.
Biggest flaw in the P4? No SMP! I still can't believe it. Their one big advantage over AMD in the higher end systems, the one they've been pushing to all their workstation customers, and the P4 WILL NOT DO IT. And now, of course, when AMD are finally on the verge of releasing their SMP chipset (can it be true?), Intel neatly snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, letting AMD through the gate, and locking themselves outside...
Of course, there's still the Foster, AKA P4 Xeon. It will do dual, quad and 8-way systems, and this promises to be the ultimate system for my software (I use a dual Foster too, and it is nice, no question). But at what price? It's bad enough my customers having to mortgage their homes for 1 GB or 2 GB of Rambus RAM, but to have to pay Xeon-level prices for a dual system as well is going to drive them into the welcoming arms of a waiting DDR dual Athlon.
Guess which system I'll be buying next for myself.
Namarrgon
...Microsoft isn't listening to ATI, Matrox, 3Dfx...
;-)
ATI are promoting their Radeon as "fully DX8 compliant", and 3dfx are on record stating, "nVidia and ourselves are probably responsible for about 90% of DX8's featureset" (which admittedly still leaves the possibility of 3dfx only contributing 5%
That article is interesting, but makes some flawed comments, IMHO. The XBox is not a replacement PC - MS would actually lose money everytime someone bought one for non-gaming applications. And the complaints about "overdesign" seem a bit specious.
:-), and you have an enormous amount of computing power.
I'm wondering about those legacy PC bottlenecks on the xbox. It's on a x86 based processor going against a 100% 128-bit PS2 Emotion Engine that's got a main 300 mhz CPU and two vector coprocessors that blow Pentium III floating point ops out of the water.
You're forgetting a few things. Not only is the PIII over twice the speed of the PS2's CPU, it can also issue 4 SSE instructions every clock, effectively a vector processor in itself. I think you'd find its FP performance is faster, not slower, more than comparable to the PS2's CPU and 1 vector unit together..
The CPU won't have to do double duty on the graphics, either. The nVidia programmable T&L engine will do that, and reportedly faster than the PS2's vector units. Add to that the 4 DSPs assisting in the sound generation (Dolby Digital 5.1 with no CPU effort required
The XBox's RAM bandwidth should be more than sufficient for the 640x480 resolution that TV games will be running at, even considering the 2-3 GB/s used by the T&L and CPU. Dr. Michael Abrash wrote a very interesting article about that a little while ago. The PS2's VRAM is fast, but small - developers will have to go easy on the textures, or it'll get swamped by thrashing.