I just tried installing it, and the way it's done leaves them almost useless. By default, you do gestures with the left mouse button (which causes all sorts of selection problems)... and when you try to map it to other buttons, you get even worse problems. Middle button will paste things, which will often load an undesired web page after the gesture is finished, and using right button doesn't work at all because the right button immediately brings up a context menu which screws up any chance of a gesture! Worst off, they seemingly won't fix this on Linux at all. (It would seem to me that the best way to handle this would be to have the context menu appear when you stop pressing the button (assuming you made no gesture). This is the way Opera does it.)
The only option they give you is to combine button presses with the ctrl, alt or shift keys to do gestures... but this mostly defeats the purpose of gestures in the first place, since you're supposed to be able to do them with just the mouse.
I had high hopes for this, but unless they fix the problems with it, I find it very disappointing (It also took me quite some time to get the "automatic" installation to actually work properly, as it gave me no end of permission problems)
... and Sanity gets the puck, takes it across the blue line... passes to the Netherlands... he shoots HE SCORES!!! And in the first period the score is now Insanity 27, Sanity 1...
If they'd given this show a half-decent time slot, it would have done so much better. I was really pissed off when it was moved to make room for Malcolm in the Middle (a terrible show in my opinion), and where it currently is, it was pre-empted for football 90% of the time (thank god that foolishness is over for another season).
In my opinion, Futurama is better than the last few seasons of the Simpsons have been... I really hope Fox changes their mind (or at least that a channel like TeleToon picks it up...)
I don't think it's fair to say that Atari made good predictions about what arcades would look like... think about it, Atari *was* the arcade industry back then. They didn't predict the future, they determined the future. As you can tell from the picture, however, they didn't determine fashion... but that wasn't exactly their market:) (Which is too bad... Ahhhvocado would be a pretty cool t-shirt)
If you actually think this game has bad graphics, even for an Atari... then you obviously have no idea what Atari graphics look like. This game actually has some pretty amazing graphics when you compare it to some of the other Atari games out there.
Keep in mind some of the hardware limitations of the Atari:
1. You only have 20 bits for screen memory. Yes, you read that right... 20 bits. There is no fancy memory-mapped video RAM, you use that 20 bits to create the screen as it's being sent to the TV. Every scanline, you have to decide what goes into that 20 bits and is sent to the TV. The 20 bits are either mirrored or repeated to form an entire playfield scanline (which is 40 pixels wide). You can get playfields that are NOT simply mirrored or repeated by altering the 20 bits of screen memory before the raster beam gets to the middle of the screen... but you have to make sure you time this perfectly.
2. Aside from the playfield, you have sprites... but you can only have 5 objects on the screen at once: two sprite (8 bits of memory each), two missiles (1 bit each), and a ball (another bit). Each sprite essentially has height equal to that of the screen, and you alter what is shown for that scanline of the sprite by changing the 8 bits for it. Same goes for the missile and ball graphics, except you can only make squares and rectangles of various sizes. You can do some interesting things on top of this, such as having a sprite repeated across the screen (done in hardware), or changing the location, color, and appearance of the sprite halfway through the frame. You can only have two sprite per scanline, but there's nothing preventing you from moving it to a location the raster beam hasn't hit yet. Lastly, you can interlace your sprites, so that even though you have 4 sprites in play, at any given frame, only two of them appear. This makes things flicker. Remember Pacman for the 2600? That's how it managed four ghosts + Pacman.
3. To get meaningful graphics, like those in Lord Of The Rings, you have to write everything in assembly language, keeping track of exactly how many cycles you're using, and how much memory you're taking up (The Atari had only 128 bytes of memory overall... that's including registers used for sprite data and such). Not only did you have to alter screen memory on the fly even single scanline... but you also had to be able to read the joysticks, do any sound effects you need, and update the entire game status without losing track of the screen. It's not an easy thing to do, and it takes quite a bit of juggling to keep things in sync.
So next time you look at an Atari game and think "What the hell? Those graphics suck!", remember that this is NOT a Playstation... this is not even a Commodore 64... this is the 80's, and it is the beginnings of video games, and you're lucky to get graphics as good as those in Lord Of The Rings.
This game also was never released. The general believe is that no prototype of the game even exists, and the project was axed when the video game industry crashed hard in the 80's. The picture shown in the ad is a mock-up.
Had it come out, it probably would have been something like Pressure Cooker, or that part in Space Quest 4 where you have to put burgers together... screw up too many burgers, and you're fired. Luckily, like in real life, you can just flip the switch and get re-hired!
This game was programmed by Parker Bros a long time ago, and was pretty much finished (I'm not sure what (if anything) they left out... it looks finished to me). However, there are two parties that apparently own the rights to the LOTR stuff, and there were problems getting the liscensing rights and other legal mumbo jumbo. As a result, the game couldn't be released because the two sides couldn't come to terms on things.
As for what to do in the game, the other goons at AtariAge and I have figured out this much:
1. You have to get to Rivendell, the city at the top of the map. To do this, you basically run up and to the left. When you find the path, follow it. It's much faster. If you need to look at your map, duck into the forest (or a town) and press the button.
2. You can pick up other party members along the way. I'm not sure exactly where they all are, but one is for sure in the city on the left.
3. The birds don't seem to do anything (we haven't figured that part out yet), and the only way we know of to get the horseman off your back is to dodge into the forest. He won't follow you. As for turning white when you press the button? I have no idea what that does either.
4. Eventually, if you get far enough along the path, you'll come to a river (It's flashing for some reason). There's a bridge across it if you look for it.
By the way, AtariAge is back up... sort of. You can view the LOTR article and associated material, and you can get to the forums... but everything else is offline until their MySQL server is put back online.
Haven't comics been telling us this for years? I suppose it's good to have some scientific proof of it though. Didn't everyone pretty much believe radiation caused mutations anyways? Even if they wouldn't make your eyes shoot lasers, or give you super healing or such...
I think it's a little more involved than just adding a few more lines of code and releasing. The sample implementation they release doesn't have to include all the video drivers that people would need, it doesn't have to be optimized (Which would probably take a lot of time), and they don't have to support it. They probably realize that all the above stuff is being done by XFree86 (Who would probably still do it even if X.Org did it themselves... liscencing issues and all), so why bother duplicating the effort that they might not be able to accomplish? I'm not sure how many people they employ down at the Open Group, but I'd rather they spend their time working on what they can add for X11R6.6/X11R7/X12 rather than writing drivers and replying to bug reports.
How can you not know what X is? I would think anyone who read this site often enough to have an account would know how important X is to the Unix community. Yes, this is a software release announcement, but it's not just a new release of some unknown console game. X is important enough to be announced here.
Personally, I hope CodeWarrior never sees the light of day on Linux. My university has it on all the IBM's and Mac's on campus. Unfortunately, the program crashes left, right and center. This crashing is especially hard on the Mac's, and has killed a number of them so bad as to leave them OS-less. Besides being poorly written, I'd rather see people do their coding themselves rather than having the computer do most of it for them (Back in my days, we made our classes by hand, and we LIKED it!)
What kind of comparison is this if it leaves out *BSD, Linux and WinNT? Those are the three most popular operating systems! Plus, *BSD and Linux are free, which should allow a MUCH cheaper system...
I agree with it being a good thing that kernels won't be such huge steps, but there's another problem too. Those people that are sticking with 2.0.x right now are going to have to leap even higher because they'll have to clear the 2.2.x step as well (Not to mention those poor bastards running 1.2.x...) Not only will they have to do all the upgrades that 2.2.x needs, but 2.4.x will probably need it's own stuff too. Then if 2.6.x comes out, they'll get farther and farther behind. This is one of the reasons I don't agree with staying with 2.0.x. Chances are you'll have to upgrade because you'll get a new ethernet card or somesuch. Might as well take things one step at a time.
I've been going for a while now on a (very) old Slackware distribution, and I didn't have much trouble upgrading to glibc. As long as you read the installation instructions, and trust that the person who wrote them know what they're doing, you'll probably get through it fine (Then again, maybe I just had a very similar system to the person who wrote the INSTALL file...) The only major trouble was when I went to a glibc XFree86, and the install erased my libc5 X libraries....
I think the keyword here is "official". Even when ext3 becomes the accepted "standard" for Linux that ext2 is right now, there will probably still be some people who stick back and use ext2 for a while (much like 2.0.x kernels, and libc5). I can see a new kernel supporting it, but not having it on by default until it's probation is up. Hell, some of the fs's don't even support writing yet, and they're in there
Don't get me wrong, I love Slack... it's what I installed way back when I started with Linux, and it hasn't once left my system. However, I'm a little worried about it keeping up with Redhat and Debian and the others. Without most of the newer trinkets like GlibC and Gnome/KDE, I think it's really losing out. I hope Patrick reconsiders and adds these things in soon... I've always liked Slack's way of doing things (install, config, etc) and I'd hate to see it die on us
3:00? They started selling at 2:00 here in Winnipeg. I guess Lucas also dropped his restriction about it having to be in THX too, because only two of the three theatres showing it here will have THX (Of course, there's also the third option that this theatre is disobeying the agreements). Oh well, I have my Wed. 12:05am tickets, so I'm happy:)
I for one am damn glad to hear that these two forces are getting together and cooperating on this project. Linux may have a lot of cool apps, but it seems too often that there are multiple teams doing the same thing. Why do we need 20 different word processors when the authors could get together and make one kick-ass one that would dwarf word perfect or M$Word? It's too bad the Gnome and KDE teams haven't cooperated like this...
Installing Glibc2 on Slackware is actually a lot easier than it sounds... as long as you follow the documentation and HOWTO's, and don't try anything funny (remember, the guys who wrote the documentation know a hell of a lot more about it than you do, so if you disagree with them, chances are they're right), it should work without any problems. The only strange thing that happens to me is that I get messages from ldconfig about libraries linked against multiple libc's (though when I run ldd, it only mentions libc6...), anyone know what that's all about?
Blah, how can Carmack like CodeWarrior? It's not even the fact that it's an IDE that bothers me, it's just such a piss-poor program. We use it at my university, and I'm sure it causes at least 90% of the crashes on the machines there. Almost all of our Mac's (we have Windows machines, Unix (Solaris), and Macs... sometimes all in the same room) are literally killed because of CodeWarrior, and I hear my friends complaining about CodeWarrior's speed all the time. It's complexity is too high for our simple comp.sci 101 programs, though I suppose with a program as complex as Quake 3 it would help.
I've never liked IDE's anyway... I think typing out all the structs and classes yourself will teach you to be a better programmer than using all the goofy wizards will.
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I just tried installing it, and the way it's done leaves them almost useless. By default, you do gestures with the left mouse button (which causes all sorts of selection problems)... and when you try to map it to other buttons, you get even worse problems. Middle button will paste things, which will often load an undesired web page after the gesture is finished, and using right button doesn't work at all because the right button immediately brings up a context menu which screws up any chance of a gesture! Worst off, they seemingly won't fix this on Linux at all. (It would seem to me that the best way to handle this would be to have the context menu appear when you stop pressing the button (assuming you made no gesture). This is the way Opera does it.)
The only option they give you is to combine button presses with the ctrl, alt or shift keys to do gestures... but this mostly defeats the purpose of gestures in the first place, since you're supposed to be able to do them with just the mouse.
I had high hopes for this, but unless they fix the problems with it, I find it very disappointing (It also took me quite some time to get the "automatic" installation to actually work properly, as it gave me no end of permission problems)
... and Sanity gets the puck, takes it across the blue line... passes to the Netherlands... he shoots HE SCORES!!! And in the first period the score is now Insanity 27, Sanity 1...
If they'd given this show a half-decent time slot, it would have done so much better. I was really pissed off when it was moved to make room for Malcolm in the Middle (a terrible show in my opinion), and where it currently is, it was pre-empted for football 90% of the time (thank god that foolishness is over for another season).
In my opinion, Futurama is better than the last few seasons of the Simpsons have been... I really hope Fox changes their mind (or at least that a channel like TeleToon picks it up...)
I don't think it's fair to say that Atari made good predictions about what arcades would look like... think about it, Atari *was* the arcade industry back then. They didn't predict the future, they determined the future. As you can tell from the picture, however, they didn't determine fashion... but that wasn't exactly their market :) (Which is too bad... Ahhhvocado would be a pretty cool t-shirt)
If you actually think this game has bad graphics, even for an Atari... then you obviously have no idea what Atari graphics look like. This game actually has some pretty amazing graphics when you compare it to some of the other Atari games out there.
Keep in mind some of the hardware limitations of the Atari:
1. You only have 20 bits for screen memory. Yes, you read that right... 20 bits. There is no fancy memory-mapped video RAM, you use that 20 bits to create the screen as it's being sent to the TV. Every scanline, you have to decide what goes into that 20 bits and is sent to the TV. The 20 bits are either mirrored or repeated to form an entire playfield scanline (which is 40 pixels wide). You can get playfields that are NOT simply mirrored or repeated by altering the 20 bits of screen memory before the raster beam gets to the middle of the screen... but you have to make sure you time this perfectly.
2. Aside from the playfield, you have sprites... but you can only have 5 objects on the screen at once: two sprite (8 bits of memory each), two missiles (1 bit each), and a ball (another bit). Each sprite essentially has height equal to that of the screen, and you alter what is shown for that scanline of the sprite by changing the 8 bits for it. Same goes for the missile and ball graphics, except you can only make squares and rectangles of various sizes. You can do some interesting things on top of this, such as having a sprite repeated across the screen (done in hardware), or changing the location, color, and appearance of the sprite halfway through the frame. You can only have two sprite per scanline, but there's nothing preventing you from moving it to a location the raster beam hasn't hit yet. Lastly, you can interlace your sprites, so that even though you have 4 sprites in play, at any given frame, only two of them appear. This makes things flicker. Remember Pacman for the 2600? That's how it managed four ghosts + Pacman.
3. To get meaningful graphics, like those in Lord Of The Rings, you have to write everything in assembly language, keeping track of exactly how many cycles you're using, and how much memory you're taking up (The Atari had only 128 bytes of memory overall... that's including registers used for sprite data and such). Not only did you have to alter screen memory on the fly even single scanline... but you also had to be able to read the joysticks, do any sound effects you need, and update the entire game status without losing track of the screen. It's not an easy thing to do, and it takes quite a bit of juggling to keep things in sync.
So next time you look at an Atari game and think "What the hell? Those graphics suck!", remember that this is NOT a Playstation... this is not even a Commodore 64... this is the 80's, and it is the beginnings of video games, and you're lucky to get graphics as good as those in Lord Of The Rings.
This game also was never released. The general believe is that no prototype of the game even exists, and the project was axed when the video game industry crashed hard in the 80's. The picture shown in the ad is a mock-up.
Had it come out, it probably would have been something like Pressure Cooker, or that part in Space Quest 4 where you have to put burgers together... screw up too many burgers, and you're fired. Luckily, like in real life, you can just flip the switch and get re-hired!
Here's what I know about the game:
This game was programmed by Parker Bros a long time ago, and was pretty much finished (I'm not sure what (if anything) they left out... it looks finished to me). However, there are two parties that apparently own the rights to the LOTR stuff, and there were problems getting the liscensing rights and other legal mumbo jumbo. As a result, the game couldn't be released because the two sides couldn't come to terms on things.
As for what to do in the game, the other goons at AtariAge and I have figured out this much:
1. You have to get to Rivendell, the city at the top of the map. To do this, you basically run up and to the left. When you find the path, follow it. It's much faster. If you need to look at your map, duck into the forest (or a town) and press the button.
2. You can pick up other party members along the way. I'm not sure exactly where they all are, but one is for sure in the city on the left.
3. The birds don't seem to do anything (we haven't figured that part out yet), and the only way we know of to get the horseman off your back is to dodge into the forest. He won't follow you. As for turning white when you press the button? I have no idea what that does either.
4. Eventually, if you get far enough along the path, you'll come to a river (It's flashing for some reason). There's a bridge across it if you look for it.
By the way, AtariAge is back up... sort of. You can view the LOTR article and associated material, and you can get to the forums... but everything else is offline until their MySQL server is put back online.
Haven't comics been telling us this for years? I suppose it's good to have some scientific proof of it though. Didn't everyone pretty much believe radiation caused mutations anyways? Even if they wouldn't make your eyes shoot lasers, or give you super healing or such...
I think it's a little more involved than just adding a few more lines of code and releasing. The sample implementation they release doesn't have to include all the video drivers that people would need, it doesn't have to be optimized (Which would probably take a lot of time), and they don't have to support it. They probably realize that all the above stuff is being done by XFree86 (Who would probably still do it even if X.Org did it themselves... liscencing issues and all), so why bother duplicating the effort that they might not be able to accomplish? I'm not sure how many people they employ down at the Open Group, but I'd rather they spend their time working on what they can add for X11R6.6/X11R7/X12 rather than writing drivers and replying to bug reports.
How can you not know what X is? I would think anyone who read this site often enough to have an account would know how important X is to the Unix community. Yes, this is a software release announcement, but it's not just a new release of some unknown console game. X is important enough to be announced here.
Personally, I hope CodeWarrior never sees the light of day on Linux. My university has it on all the IBM's and Mac's on campus. Unfortunately, the program crashes left, right and center. This crashing is especially hard on the Mac's, and has killed a number of them so bad as to leave them OS-less. Besides being poorly written, I'd rather see people do their coding themselves rather than having the computer do most of it for them (Back in my days, we made our classes by hand, and we LIKED it!)
What kind of comparison is this if it leaves out *BSD, Linux and WinNT? Those are the three most popular operating systems! Plus, *BSD and Linux are free, which should allow a MUCH cheaper system...
I agree with it being a good thing that kernels won't be such huge steps, but there's another problem too. Those people that are sticking with 2.0.x right now are going to have to leap even higher because they'll have to clear the 2.2.x step as well (Not to mention those poor bastards running 1.2.x...) Not only will they have to do all the upgrades that 2.2.x needs, but 2.4.x will probably need it's own stuff too. Then if 2.6.x comes out, they'll get farther and farther behind. This is one of the reasons I don't agree with staying with 2.0.x. Chances are you'll have to upgrade because you'll get a new ethernet card or somesuch. Might as well take things one step at a time.
I've been going for a while now on a (very) old Slackware distribution, and I didn't have much trouble upgrading to glibc. As long as you read the installation instructions, and trust that the person who wrote them know what they're doing, you'll probably get through it fine (Then again, maybe I just had a very similar system to the person who wrote the INSTALL file...) The only major trouble was when I went to a glibc XFree86, and the install erased my libc5 X libraries....
I think the keyword here is "official". Even when ext3 becomes the accepted "standard" for Linux that ext2 is right now, there will probably still be some people who stick back and use ext2 for a while (much like 2.0.x kernels, and libc5). I can see a new kernel supporting it, but not having it on by default until it's probation is up. Hell, some of the fs's don't even support writing yet, and they're in there
Don't get me wrong, I love Slack... it's what I installed way back when I started with Linux, and it hasn't once left my system. However, I'm a little worried about it keeping up with Redhat and Debian and the others. Without most of the newer trinkets like GlibC and Gnome/KDE, I think it's really losing out. I hope Patrick reconsiders and adds these things in soon... I've always liked Slack's way of doing things (install, config, etc) and I'd hate to see it die on us
Well I edit the inodes on the hard disk by hand with magnets, so there :P
3:00? They started selling at 2:00 here in Winnipeg. I guess Lucas also dropped his restriction about it having to be in THX too, because only two of the three theatres showing it here will have THX (Of course, there's also the third option that this theatre is disobeying the agreements). Oh well, I have my Wed. 12:05am tickets, so I'm happy :)
I for one am damn glad to hear that these two forces are getting together and cooperating on this project. Linux may have a lot of cool apps, but it seems too often that there are multiple teams doing the same thing. Why do we need 20 different word processors when the authors could get together and make one kick-ass one that would dwarf word perfect or M$Word? It's too bad the Gnome and KDE teams haven't cooperated like this...
Installing Glibc2 on Slackware is actually a lot easier than it sounds... as long as you follow the documentation and HOWTO's, and don't try anything funny (remember, the guys who wrote the documentation know a hell of a lot more about it than you do, so if you disagree with them, chances are they're right), it should work without any problems. The only strange thing that happens to me is that I get messages from ldconfig about libraries linked against multiple libc's (though when I run ldd, it only mentions libc6...), anyone know what that's all about?
Blah, how can Carmack like CodeWarrior? It's not even the fact that it's an IDE that bothers me, it's just such a piss-poor program. We use it at my university, and I'm sure it causes at least 90% of the crashes on the machines there. Almost all of our Mac's (we have Windows machines, Unix (Solaris), and Macs... sometimes all in the same room) are literally killed because of CodeWarrior, and I hear my friends complaining about CodeWarrior's speed all the time. It's complexity is too high for our simple comp.sci 101 programs, though I suppose with a program as complex as Quake 3 it would help.
I've never liked IDE's anyway... I think typing out all the structs and classes yourself will teach you to be a better programmer than using all the goofy wizards will.