Order a computer from Dell or Gateway, and the basic configuration will come with a CD-ROM drive. Most users who upgrade their optical drive will opt for a CD burner rather than a DVD-ROM drive or an expensive DVD/CD-RW combo drive. Thus, a large portion of your audience does not have a DVD-ROM drive. Thus, any PC program that comes on DVD has to come on a set of CDs as well (Riven, Diablo 2, etc). There's a reason why Windows XP came on a CD rather than a DVD, and why Microsoft told AOL to shove it when AOL couldn't slim down the AOL client distribution to fit in the few megabytes that Microsoft had allocated for AOL on the CD.
So I'm sitting at an AthlonXP starting a game I'm going to play in 1280x1024 with AA and watching the intro-movie (if there is one) in 320x240 bink.
If you were playing on a console, you'd get 320x480i due to the limitations of NTSC television, which isn't much better than 320x240. Either that, or do like many games do (especially on N64 and GCN) and run the intro movie in the game engine.
Besides, some games' intro movies just frustrate me. They introduce a character in such a manner that I assume he's probably the main character, and then they kill him at the very end of the movie *cough*Descent 2*cough*. Actually, that'd be a funny way of copy protecting a game: if you detect that you're running on an unauthorized system, don't allow skipping the intro movie and then display "Game Over" after the intro movie when the "hero" has died.
as most poeple don't go to all the trouble to figure out how to properly order cdrs from korea.
The heavy end-users do.
Do we even have any [CD-R manufacturers in Canada]?
That was the point. The (near-)absence of domestic CD-R manufacturers may have been partly a result of the CPCC, which incidentally has spent the entire levy so far on expenses and hasn't paid songwriters, artists, or publishers one thin dime. Not even a Canadian dime;-)
You can't get the aiming you get with a mouse, using a hand held controller.
Not all games are traditional first-person shooters. Console games such as Goldeneye and Super Mario Sunshine are designed to make aiming with an analog joystick relatively easy.
Add a keyboard to this mix and there is no way the console even rates close.
I'll play you in emulated Super Street Fighter II, with you on the keyboard and mouse and me on an LPT-converted Super NES joypad.
You can't play games from 1981 to 1995 on a computer that primarily boots to a Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional operating system or a Microsoft Windows XP operating system without emulation or virtualization, because 1. NT operating systems have poor support for DOS apps, and 2. those DOS games that do work with NT may run too fast to be playable.
on PC you can use a lot of freeware/shareware games, Free Software is also much closer to PC than consoles
There are over 1,000 Game Boy games published in the United States. Just buy one, put it in a cart reader, copy it to your PC, and emulate it. Cart readers are easy to find for the GBA, harder for the classic Game Boy and Game Boy Color. I will admit that the right controller does make a difference.
If the parents don't want to pay per month for online MMORPG play, and the games that can be played online without a subscription (FPS and RTS) are either too gory or too complex for the average 13-year-old, the 13-year-old will play Smash Bros. Melee instead.
High power computers are cheaper and cheaper every day
They're not down to $200; only the Walmart.com Microtel PCs are that cheap, and their video isn't exactly up to par for running the latest PC games. If a kid wants a new game player for Christmas, it's a lot cheaper for the parent to buy a $200 console than a $600 PC and a monitor.
When is the last time any gaming PC had 4MB of ram?
You forget that all of the RAM in the N64 can be used as heap and stack. The code and static data sit on a cartridge that's much faster to access than a rotating disk. A developer who had worked on CD consoles was quoted in a console gaming magazine as having compared the N64's cartridge to an 8 MB disk cache.
You forget further that console operating systems are much smaller than PC operating systems and don't have virus checkers, instant messengers, web browsers built into file managers (both Konqueror and Explorer are guilty), or SMB servers running in the background and eating RAM.
many games are released several months earlier for consoles, and PC gamers have to wait.
If the game is out on Game Boy Advance, and you can accept (or, like me, prefer) the 2D and limited 3D graphics that GBA games have, you can buy a GBA game, connect your GBA to your PC with an MBV2 cable, dump the cartridge, and enjoy it in VisualBoyAdvance.
Note: Just because I mentioned an emulator doesn't mean I'm advocating piracy. Rather, I'm advocating fair-use format-shifting as recognized by the US Supreme Court in Sony v. Universal and RIAA v. Diamond.
I think the loss of computers that boot into BASIC
Line-numbered BASIC? Ecch. The overuse of GOTO constructs in programs for old 8-bit BASIC interpreters has been known to stunt the growth of a sense of structure in some programmers who started out on such a system. Luckily for me, I used Logo (Lisp without the parentheses and with a plotting library) before BASIC.
will lead to far fewer kids picking up programming for fun.
What about computers that boot into a terminal and have perl and gcc available?
A significant fraction of people who have enough free time to spend a significant amount of time and money on video games are people who have not graduated from high school. Thus, kiddie games make money.
Even if you leave out the fact that most children can save up their allowance and afford a console but not a PC, most of the PC titles available nowadays are first-person shooters, real-time tactical sims, or massively multiplayer online role-playing games. Most FPS games are rated M for graphic violence; stores will card buyers, and many parents will shy away. Most RTS games require more concentration than the average elementary or middle school age player can handle; kids won't want them. Most MMORPG games are rated M for signing a contract and paying real money every month; kids can't buy them.
Oh man, the console games just blow the PC games away in terms of depth and playability...
If you intended this as sarcasm, then you probably haven't played many good console games. Have you played Super Mario Sunshine? But have you actually played it, or are you answering based on your preconceptions of what a "Mario" game is like? There's more depth in Sunshine than in some of the more mindless FPS games.
Im paying the ass raping equivilent of 79.99 USD (49.99 GBP!) for games over in the UK!
Prices in U.S. dollars are typically quoted before adding sales tax, which typically runs around 6 percent. Europe, on the other hand, often includes sales taxes in the quoted price of goods, and sales taxes can run as high as 20 percent (France) or higher. Thus, your game may actually cost 64 USD (40 GBP) before taxes. That sounds about right; Warcraft 3 cost 60 USD at Best Buy when I first saw it on the shelf.
(At least Blizzard didn't go completely greedy and pull a "Pokemon", making four separate editions of the game that each contain the single-player for only one race.)
Furthermore, it's a levy on items imported for resale, or manufactured. It's NOT import duty; you can still import CDR from Korea or wherever you want without paying the tax, as long as it's not for resale.
Which sort of puts Canadian CD-R manufacturers at a serious disadvantage to the Korean competition, no? By levying only domestic production, look what Canada is doing to its balance of trade.
Only in the United States of America. In Canada, the CPCC collects a levy for all digital storage devices and media. Some European countries have much the same arrangement.
If somebody asked me how to burn CDs in Linux, I'd tell him/her to RTFM
On the other hand, I'd help the user learn to formulate a query: "Go to Google.com, enter [ linux burn cd ], and click Google Search." Or, if a question is answered in the FAQ: "Look in the DJGPP FAQ, section 8.3."
Downloading 10 MB of binaries from Mozilla.org, Windows Update, or apt-get upgrade is not fun on 56K in geographical areas where local calls to your ISP are toll calls at 10c/min.
You *do* need to have multiple windows loading while you're browsing instead of click-wait-load but I do that anyway...
Slashdot Mirror
so why don't they use DVDs
Order a computer from Dell or Gateway, and the basic configuration will come with a CD-ROM drive. Most users who upgrade their optical drive will opt for a CD burner rather than a DVD-ROM drive or an expensive DVD/CD-RW combo drive. Thus, a large portion of your audience does not have a DVD-ROM drive. Thus, any PC program that comes on DVD has to come on a set of CDs as well (Riven, Diablo 2, etc). There's a reason why Windows XP came on a CD rather than a DVD, and why Microsoft told AOL to shove it when AOL couldn't slim down the AOL client distribution to fit in the few megabytes that Microsoft had allocated for AOL on the CD.
So I'm sitting at an AthlonXP starting a game I'm going to play in 1280x1024 with AA and watching the intro-movie (if there is one) in 320x240 bink.
If you were playing on a console, you'd get 320x480i due to the limitations of NTSC television, which isn't much better than 320x240. Either that, or do like many games do (especially on N64 and GCN) and run the intro movie in the game engine.
Besides, some games' intro movies just frustrate me. They introduce a character in such a manner that I assume he's probably the main character, and then they kill him at the very end of the movie *cough*Descent 2*cough*. Actually, that'd be a funny way of copy protecting a game: if you detect that you're running on an unauthorized system, don't allow skipping the intro movie and then display "Game Over" after the intro movie when the "hero" has died.
as most poeple don't go to all the trouble to figure out how to properly order cdrs from korea.
The heavy end-users do.
Do we even have any [CD-R manufacturers in Canada]?
That was the point. The (near-)absence of domestic CD-R manufacturers may have been partly a result of the CPCC, which incidentally has spent the entire levy so far on expenses and hasn't paid songwriters, artists, or publishers one thin dime. Not even a Canadian dime ;-)
You can't get the aiming you get with a mouse, using a hand held controller.
Not all games are traditional first-person shooters. Console games such as Goldeneye and Super Mario Sunshine are designed to make aiming with an analog joystick relatively easy.
Add a keyboard to this mix and there is no way the console even rates close.
I'll play you in emulated Super Street Fighter II, with you on the keyboard and mouse and me on an LPT-converted Super NES joypad.
Too steep a learning curve
How is C's or Perl's learning curve any steeper than the learning curve of a typical recent BASIC environment?
no obvious way to get to making the cool graphical stuff
man allegro
And what about JavaScript? Windows boots into it (explorer.exe), and it's at least as powerful as the BASIC that the 8-bit micros booted into.
I remember reading that a million copies of Starcraft (for PC) had been sold in Korea alone
Korea? How many of those million copies of Starcraft were legitimate under Berne Convention copyright law?
on PC you can play games from 1980s to 2002
You can't play games from 1981 to 1995 on a computer that primarily boots to a Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional operating system or a Microsoft Windows XP operating system without emulation or virtualization, because 1. NT operating systems have poor support for DOS apps, and 2. those DOS games that do work with NT may run too fast to be playable.
on PC you can use a lot of freeware/shareware games, Free Software is also much closer to PC than consoles
Same on GBA. Have you played Tetanus On Drugs for GBA?
Are you able to play a lot of games on Linux?
There are over 1,000 Game Boy games published in the United States. Just buy one, put it in a cart reader, copy it to your PC, and emulate it. Cart readers are easy to find for the GBA, harder for the classic Game Boy and Game Boy Color. I will admit that the right controller does make a difference.
online play is what will keep pc gaming going
If the parents don't want to pay per month for online MMORPG play, and the games that can be played online without a subscription (FPS and RTS) are either too gory or too complex for the average 13-year-old, the 13-year-old will play Smash Bros. Melee instead.
High power computers are cheaper and cheaper every day
They're not down to $200; only the Walmart.com Microtel PCs are that cheap, and their video isn't exactly up to par for running the latest PC games. If a kid wants a new game player for Christmas, it's a lot cheaper for the parent to buy a $200 console than a $600 PC and a monitor.
More specifically the N64 is a ~95Mhz 64-bit RISC core [dunno which series] with 4MB of ram.
MIPS R4K series, 93.7 MHz. Reality Coprocessor, 62 MHz.
When is the last time any gaming PC had 4MB of ram?
You forget that all of the RAM in the N64 can be used as heap and stack. The code and static data sit on a cartridge that's much faster to access than a rotating disk. A developer who had worked on CD consoles was quoted in a console gaming magazine as having compared the N64's cartridge to an 8 MB disk cache.
You forget further that console operating systems are much smaller than PC operating systems and don't have virus checkers, instant messengers, web browsers built into file managers (both Konqueror and Explorer are guilty), or SMB servers running in the background and eating RAM.
many games are released several months earlier for consoles, and PC gamers have to wait.
If the game is out on Game Boy Advance, and you can accept (or, like me, prefer) the 2D and limited 3D graphics that GBA games have, you can buy a GBA game, connect your GBA to your PC with an MBV2 cable, dump the cartridge, and enjoy it in VisualBoyAdvance.
Note: Just because I mentioned an emulator doesn't mean I'm advocating piracy. Rather, I'm advocating fair-use format-shifting as recognized by the US Supreme Court in Sony v. Universal and RIAA v. Diamond.
I think the loss of computers that boot into BASIC
Line-numbered BASIC? Ecch. The overuse of GOTO constructs in programs for old 8-bit BASIC interpreters has been known to stunt the growth of a sense of structure in some programmers who started out on such a system. Luckily for me, I used Logo (Lisp without the parentheses and with a plotting library) before BASIC.
will lead to far fewer kids picking up programming for fun.
What about computers that boot into a terminal and have perl and gcc available?
Mario World and all the other kiddie games
A significant fraction of people who have enough free time to spend a significant amount of time and money on video games are people who have not graduated from high school. Thus, kiddie games make money.
Even if you leave out the fact that most children can save up their allowance and afford a console but not a PC, most of the PC titles available nowadays are first-person shooters, real-time tactical sims, or massively multiplayer online role-playing games. Most FPS games are rated M for graphic violence; stores will card buyers, and many parents will shy away. Most RTS games require more concentration than the average elementary or middle school age player can handle; kids won't want them. Most MMORPG games are rated M for signing a contract and paying real money every month; kids can't buy them.
Oh man, the console games just blow the PC games away in terms of depth and playability...
If you intended this as sarcasm, then you probably haven't played many good console games. Have you played Super Mario Sunshine? But have you actually played it, or are you answering based on your preconceptions of what a "Mario" game is like? There's more depth in Sunshine than in some of the more mindless FPS games.
Im paying the ass raping equivilent of 79.99 USD (49.99 GBP!) for games over in the UK!
Prices in U.S. dollars are typically quoted before adding sales tax, which typically runs around 6 percent. Europe, on the other hand, often includes sales taxes in the quoted price of goods, and sales taxes can run as high as 20 percent (France) or higher. Thus, your game may actually cost 64 USD (40 GBP) before taxes. That sounds about right; Warcraft 3 cost 60 USD at Best Buy when I first saw it on the shelf.
(At least Blizzard didn't go completely greedy and pull a "Pokemon", making four separate editions of the game that each contain the single-player for only one race.)
Last I checked, you can represent 64 values with a measly six bits. (2^6 = 64).
But if you're searching for some pattern, representing each possible alternate codon as a separate bit has its applications.
Yeah, the parent poster was making what is known as a "joke."
How can a fellow tell the difference between a bad joke and a serious but misinformed comment with 99% reliability?
Furthermore, it's a levy on items imported for resale, or manufactured. It's NOT import duty; you can still import CDR from Korea or wherever you want without paying the tax, as long as it's not for resale.
Which sort of puts Canadian CD-R manufacturers at a serious disadvantage to the Korean competition, no? By levying only domestic production, look what Canada is doing to its balance of trade.
The subsidies are for audio CD-Rs only.
Only in the United States of America. In Canada, the CPCC collects a levy for all digital storage devices and media. Some European countries have much the same arrangement.
My name will be LukeSk~1!
Actually, you can't play as a "famous" character in SWG. The "famous" characters will be NPCs.
you obviously didn't get the joke
Either that, or he got the joke and did not find it funny.
If somebody asked me how to burn CDs in Linux, I'd tell him/her to RTFM
On the other hand, I'd help the user learn to formulate a query: "Go to Google.com, enter [ linux burn cd ], and click Google Search." Or, if a question is answered in the FAQ: "Look in the DJGPP FAQ, section 8.3."
There is a shitload of dark fiber available and to charge the astronomical fees they continue to try to is absolutely criminal.
It's expensive to light up dark fiber because fiber modems are expensive.
when he's "looking" at pr0n he'll have to switchoff every now and again?
Whacks on, whacks off. Whacks on, whacks off. Whacks on, whacks off. Didn't you watch The Karate Kid?
but web browsing on a 56k modem is *fine*.
Downloading 10 MB of binaries from Mozilla.org, Windows Update, or apt-get upgrade is not fun on 56K in geographical areas where local calls to your ISP are toll calls at 10c/min.
You *do* need to have multiple windows loading while you're browsing instead of click-wait-load but I do that anyway...
You're right about tab browsing.
And anyway there's always Google.
But not everybody knows the secrets of forming a good Google query. Google is good, but not good enough to read your mind... yet.