Actually, you've got it backwards. The DreamCast uses a PowerVR3 chip as it's graphics core, and has internal hardware to DOWNSAMPLE that to NTSC. That's one reason why the graphics tend to blow away even a PS2; it produces a 640p image, then interlaces it for NTSC television.
For an example, DOA2 vs DOA2: Hardcore. The PS2 version has jaggies harsh enough to cut the screen of your TV.
For me, the X-Box killer app is Dead or Alive 3.
You'll notice that pretty much EVERY 'killer app' is a sequal or remake of some sort. The x-box doesn't have a lot of those.:-)
Well, as per usual, a quick google search turns up the answer. Quoteh the browser:
It happend in my first fight with ghoma at the very beginning of the game, inside the deku tree. The fight was already going one for some rounds, as ghoma suddenly disappeared completely after beeing hit once more and returning to the ceiling. He did not reappear and i could walk around and look at that cave from all positions, waiting and serching for him. This kept going on as long as i tryed to shoot with my sling under the ceiling hoping to get ghoma out of his hide. At that moment, the game crased completely so i could only press the reset button.
I tryed to defeat him again afterwards and everything worked well. I have no idea what i could have done to cause this crash. Since that strange crash my copy of the game runs absolute stable, so i think it's a real bug and not a problem with my copy.
As with so many other neat things, this is in the DVD spec; you can assign a rating to a section of audio/video, and tell the player to play only a certain level or below.
Or, use seamless branching.
Or, buy your movies at Wal-Mart or Blockbuster where they're pre-censered for your convenience and safety.
Re:Why the bloody hell does the release day matter
on
Gamecube Hits US Early
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· Score: 2
Ah, but the X-box ISN'T Microsoft's first try at putting together graphics development. Talisman immediately comes to mind, for example. And we've all seen how far Direct3D has come in five or six years.
Because a surprisingly high number of the sales of PlayStation 2s in Japan was by people who wanted a DVD player. And companies lose money on the hardware, and make money selling the games. Buying for DVD capability = not buying games = no money.
Oh. Well, in that case, let me give you a quick primer on Roman legion battle tactics.
The legions were broken up into 'cohorts' which were supposed to hold, as I recall, 100 men a piece, broken up into 'maniples' of ten men each. The numbers changed at various times during Roman rule. This did, however, mean that a soldier always knew where he was supposed to be, and had buddies around. This, as we know now, greatly multiplies the battle ability of a human being.
Each soldier carried the following weaponry: A gladius, or short sword; a scutum, or heavy rectangular curved sheield, about shins to chin tall, IIRC, and two pilum, or spears with soft iron heads. The idea was to throw the two pilum at the enemy in mass vollies. The pilums would stick in the enemy shields, then the head would bend, and the weight and shaft would trip up the enemy, hopefully causing them to drop their shields. The legion would then advance, line abreast, in three rows, veterans in the back, to spur on the recruits. Every legionairre would hold scutum in left hand, and gladius in right (left handed legionairres would have their left hands tied to their sides during training until they figured it out.) Thus each soldier would be protected by the sheild of the man to his right, and would protect the man to his left. They'd march forwards, bash the opponents with the shields, then stab out.
They could, and did, also adopt some interesting formations with their sheilds, such as the anti-arrow formation, called the turtle, I think, that involved the first row hunkering down behind their scutums, and the second and third rows holding their shields overhead. There was also an anti-calvary/chariot formation that involved forming a circle, putting your sheilds out at angles, and sticking spears or swords out of the cracks.
The legions, in their heyday, were also expected, each night on the march, to build a full blown fortress, complete with wooden pallisades and earthworks, before bedding down for the night. The only defeats of the Roman legions came when they ignored their own tactics.
I'd go into more detail, but there are sources much better than myself.
Oh, and if I recall correctly, bokken are made of bamboo.:-)
Not really, when you think about it. The Roman Army was trained to do one of two things in battle; stab forwards, or adopt a shield formation. Their battle tactics didn't involve a whole lot of personal weapon finesse; thier advantage lay in their tactics. So all the Roman soldier needed to be able to do in battle was hold up his shield and wield his sword for a long time. Using a heavier sheild and sword in training was for stamina.
Read the afore mentioned books by Jack Whyte, especially the first two or three, for an incredibly good grounding in Roman history. Fascinating stuff.
Exactly. Those are just two that I remember off hand. The point, however, is that it wasn't done first by a bloody playstation game.:-)
Hell, Indiana Jones for the atari 2600, if I recall correctly, used the second joystick for inventory.
Music is a bunch of predefined units (notes), defined as pitch and duration, which are arranged in such a way as to produce a certain output.
Programming is a bunch of predefined units (instructions) defined as action and argument, which are arranged in such a way as to produce a certain output.
Interestingly, the two have merged. There was a certain monastic order which was taught to sing based on what the people beside and behind you were singing. In other words, if you're in the middle, and the guy behind you is singing a C, maybe you're supposed to sing a D. Then, notes would be given to one row, the 'song' would run through the ranks, and you'd get output in the last row.
Why? It actually used the 2nd analog stick as control for weapons! It was a work of art - it forced us to think about controlling differently.
Really? And all the other games that did that (Smash TV and Virtual On immediately come to mind) didn't force us to think about controlling differently?
I'm an Assistant Professor of Classics at Bates College in Lewiston, Me. and teach in the Department of Classical and Romance Languages and the Program in Classical and Medieval Studies.
Offhand, I tend to put a LOT of trust into the homepages of UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS as written on UNIVERSITY WEBSITES with what look to be COURSE NOTES on the subject.
Fine, a little more research. Adding the word 'heavy' to the original google search returns this:
Next in line, after the training for marching and fitness, came the training of handling weapons.
For this they primarily used wickerwork shields and
wooden swords. Both the shields and the swords were made to standards which made them twice as heavy as the original weapons. Evidently it was thought, that if a soldier could fight with these heavy dummy weapons, he would be twice as effective with the proper ones.
Emphasis mine.
But don't take my word for it. Go find a real, live professor, or somebody with a degree in military history.
There's a huge bloody difference between 'will boot and run' and 'will make use of all hardware features in a stable and efficient manner.' Linux is simply not designed for large memory/many processors/that sort of stuff. Probably mainly because it's design goal was to run on a 386.
See, it's not what it CAN do, it's what it COULD do.
Linux/Oracle/4 way P4 Xeon may very well be on par with a four-way sun e450. But what if you need to move up to an E10K? What if you need a fully fault-tolerant cluster? What if you want one that any competant admin could drop into? It's not there yet.
Remember, for the high end stuff, one doesn't buy hardware, database, OS and go. One buys a solution. "This solution WILL perform as follows, and WILL cost this much..." whereas the Linux setups are all very custom, and very hacked, and strictly for cost or strictly because it's Linux. Well, either way, you're stuck.
Oh, for Christ's sake. I hope, for your own sake, that before you hit high school, or should you make it that far, college or university, that you learn how to do basic research. Typing 'roman practice sword' into Google returns, for example, this:
Roman soldiers practiced sword combat with wooden swords that were twice as heavy as common ones. The reason for this was that when they started to carry the common swords they were much lighter and this helped them to act with greater precision and force at times of action.
But, no, of course not. It's a VERY bad idea. After all, what did the Romans know? It's not like they conquered the world, or influenced the organization and training of pretty much any successful professional army since, right? Nope, nosirree Bob. Thanks for clearing that up.
By the way, if you're looking for a wonderful primer on Roman life and military, not to mention history, but in a fun to read format, assuming you like to read, try The Dream of Eagles cycle (or, for you Americans, The Camulod Chronicles by Jack Whyte.
It's probably partially hype, but some infatrymen came out of the Gulf War claiming that the training was more difficult than actual combat
As the Roman Legions used to say, Training should be bloodless battles and battles should be bloody training.
For example, the Roman 'practice sword' was made of wood, and weight twice as much as an actual Gladius. Thus, during combat, the actual sword seemed light as a feather....
Had this happen at me last job, and me boss (hi Jeremy!) found a really really neat thingy. You plug it into a laptop HD, and the other end is standard IDE and four pin AT/ATX power. Then you can plug it into any old PC.
Nope, it's Executive Orders. The follow on, Rainbox Six, comingled with the game of the same name, follows an american biotech firm, headed by a radical envrionmentalist, fortifying the Ebola virus and attempting much the same thing.
Sum of All Fears is the one where the terrorists find the missing Isreali nuke, build a bomb, and plant it at, I think the SuperBowl, but some large football game.
and then they came after me a day later with all their buddies, it's vigilantism or revenge.
See, this is where I disagree. It's vigilantism only if there's a body of law to cover it, and you're acting outside that body of law. What are the international/UN laws on state-sponsered, or possibly state-condoned, terrorism?
As to revenge, no. Deterrance. Take a look at the animal world. An animal won't attack another of his own species for fun, or for a cheap thrill. An animal attacks another to defend something. Period. Dominance struggles rarely make it even to the RITUAL combat stage, let alone full blown combat. Humans are unique in that regard.
If you fuck somebody up in the street, and there's no consequences, you just might decide to do it again. And again. And again. If America doesn't respond forcefully to this attack, they'll suffer more. The problem is that if they DO respond forcefully, they'll suffer more, but for different reasons.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, you've got it backwards. The DreamCast uses a PowerVR3 chip as it's graphics core, and has internal hardware to DOWNSAMPLE that to NTSC. That's one reason why the graphics tend to blow away even a PS2; it produces a 640p image, then interlaces it for NTSC television. For an example, DOA2 vs DOA2: Hardcore. The PS2 version has jaggies harsh enough to cut the screen of your TV.
VGA adapters for DC are fairly cheap.
For me, the X-Box killer app is Dead or Alive 3. You'll notice that pretty much EVERY 'killer app' is a sequal or remake of some sort. The x-box doesn't have a lot of those. :-)
Ever see how a Dell server ships? 50 pound server, 70 pounds of package and pallet.
Well, for the N64 at least, Goldeneye had crash bugs. Turok (both, I think) had crash bugs. Zelda:OOT had crash bugs.
As with so many other neat things, this is in the DVD spec; you can assign a rating to a section of audio/video, and tell the player to play only a certain level or below. Or, use seamless branching. Or, buy your movies at Wal-Mart or Blockbuster where they're pre-censered for your convenience and safety.
Ah, but the X-box ISN'T Microsoft's first try at putting together graphics development. Talisman immediately comes to mind, for example. And we've all seen how far Direct3D has come in five or six years.
I will buy a gamecube the very day that a street date for a Conker game is announced.
Because a surprisingly high number of the sales of PlayStation 2s in Japan was by people who wanted a DVD player. And companies lose money on the hardware, and make money selling the games. Buying for DVD capability = not buying games = no money.
Oh. Well, in that case, let me give you a quick primer on Roman legion battle tactics. The legions were broken up into 'cohorts' which were supposed to hold, as I recall, 100 men a piece, broken up into 'maniples' of ten men each. The numbers changed at various times during Roman rule. This did, however, mean that a soldier always knew where he was supposed to be, and had buddies around. This, as we know now, greatly multiplies the battle ability of a human being. Each soldier carried the following weaponry: A gladius, or short sword; a scutum, or heavy rectangular curved sheield, about shins to chin tall, IIRC, and two pilum, or spears with soft iron heads. The idea was to throw the two pilum at the enemy in mass vollies. The pilums would stick in the enemy shields, then the head would bend, and the weight and shaft would trip up the enemy, hopefully causing them to drop their shields. The legion would then advance, line abreast, in three rows, veterans in the back, to spur on the recruits. Every legionairre would hold scutum in left hand, and gladius in right (left handed legionairres would have their left hands tied to their sides during training until they figured it out.) Thus each soldier would be protected by the sheild of the man to his right, and would protect the man to his left. They'd march forwards, bash the opponents with the shields, then stab out. They could, and did, also adopt some interesting formations with their sheilds, such as the anti-arrow formation, called the turtle, I think, that involved the first row hunkering down behind their scutums, and the second and third rows holding their shields overhead. There was also an anti-calvary/chariot formation that involved forming a circle, putting your sheilds out at angles, and sticking spears or swords out of the cracks. The legions, in their heyday, were also expected, each night on the march, to build a full blown fortress, complete with wooden pallisades and earthworks, before bedding down for the night. The only defeats of the Roman legions came when they ignored their own tactics. I'd go into more detail, but there are sources much better than myself. Oh, and if I recall correctly, bokken are made of bamboo. :-)
Not really, when you think about it. The Roman Army was trained to do one of two things in battle; stab forwards, or adopt a shield formation. Their battle tactics didn't involve a whole lot of personal weapon finesse; thier advantage lay in their tactics. So all the Roman soldier needed to be able to do in battle was hold up his shield and wield his sword for a long time. Using a heavier sheild and sword in training was for stamina. Read the afore mentioned books by Jack Whyte, especially the first two or three, for an incredibly good grounding in Roman history. Fascinating stuff.
Exactly. Those are just two that I remember off hand. The point, however, is that it wasn't done first by a bloody playstation game. :-)
Hell, Indiana Jones for the atari 2600, if I recall correctly, used the second joystick for inventory.
Music is a bunch of predefined units (notes), defined as pitch and duration, which are arranged in such a way as to produce a certain output. Programming is a bunch of predefined units (instructions) defined as action and argument, which are arranged in such a way as to produce a certain output. Interestingly, the two have merged. There was a certain monastic order which was taught to sing based on what the people beside and behind you were singing. In other words, if you're in the middle, and the guy behind you is singing a C, maybe you're supposed to sing a D. Then, notes would be given to one row, the 'song' would run through the ranks, and you'd get output in the last row.
See, it's not what it CAN do, it's what it COULD do. Linux/Oracle/4 way P4 Xeon may very well be on par with a four-way sun e450. But what if you need to move up to an E10K? What if you need a fully fault-tolerant cluster? What if you want one that any competant admin could drop into? It's not there yet. Remember, for the high end stuff, one doesn't buy hardware, database, OS and go. One buys a solution. "This solution WILL perform as follows, and WILL cost this much..." whereas the Linux setups are all very custom, and very hacked, and strictly for cost or strictly because it's Linux. Well, either way, you're stuck.
Had this happen at me last job, and me boss (hi Jeremy!) found a really really neat thingy. You plug it into a laptop HD, and the other end is standard IDE and four pin AT/ATX power. Then you can plug it into any old PC.
Nope, it's Executive Orders. The follow on, Rainbox Six, comingled with the game of the same name, follows an american biotech firm, headed by a radical envrionmentalist, fortifying the Ebola virus and attempting much the same thing. Sum of All Fears is the one where the terrorists find the missing Isreali nuke, build a bomb, and plant it at, I think the SuperBowl, but some large football game.
As an aside, the 'H' in 'Sonderkommando-H' stands for 'Hexen' which translates as 'witch.'