I'm already paying for cable, yet I have to suffer through ads anyway?
You're paying the cable company for a cable connection. The ads support the content. If cable went ad-free, every channel would likely become a premium channel.
Actually the GB is usually regarded as a 1 Mhz system, (and the GBC as 2 Mhz, even Nintendo themselves says that they are 1/2 Mhz systems...), since the fastest instructions uses 4 clock-cycles to execute.
The 6502 architecture, used in NES and (in 65c816 form) in Super NES, requires anywhere from 2 to 6 cycles to execute an instruction, as it normally performs a memory access (to an 8-bit data bus) every cycle and apparently has only one ALU (no pipelining).
The slower instructions uses multiples of 4 cycles (8, 12, 16 and so on...)
Same with the Sega Genesis's 68000 processor, I'm told.
Unless you use the Super NES's additive and subtractive color modes, which make it relatively easy to display 4,096 colors in backgrounds. There are three scrolling planes with 16 colors each; set their palettes to redscale, greenscale, and bluescale and you can overlay them to produce lots and lots of pretty colors.
with 8xN sprite size
Super NES can display sprites up to 64x64. Up to 256 pixels of sprites can be on one scanline.
The GBA can even stream sound directly off the cart. (It doesn't have to be copied to RAM first.)
Heck, the 8-bit NES could do that; it was used for the drums in Contra and Super Mario Bros. 3 and for the explosions in Bomberman. Interplay's sound engine on Super NES could do something similar: streaming sound data from the cart to the SPC700's RAM while the game is playing.
Reality: how comfortable are you in sending star office attachment to someone you dont know, like at another company? truth: 0% sure. A word attachment? truth: 90% sure it is ok.
Well-written valid HTML: 99.999% sure it is OK on ie, konqueror, lynx, mozilla, and opera.
but try teaching a 45 year-old english teacher Linux if all he's ever used is an old mac.
The GNOME people call this phenomenon Baby Duck Syndrome. Users believe that the first software product they use is how all software should work from then on, because like baby ducks and geese, they've "imprinted" on the first thing they saw.
I believe what I'm thinking about was the Sega Genesis. I might be wrong on the name. It was portable, horizontally aligned and in color, and that was nearly a decade ago.
The one that played 8-bit Master System games was the Game Gear. The one that played 16-bit Mega Drive games (such as Zero Wing) was the Genesis Nomad.
160x144. Eighteen rows of twenty tiles each. Count the lines of text on the original Tetris®'s copyright screen (including the blank lines). Picky, but when you use numbers, you should use the correct ones.
If Sony ever decided to make a handheld device that could play PS One games (which has been rumored for years now)
Then they would need to invent shock protection like I've never seen. Kids. Drop. Game. Boys. And they use them in moving vehicles, where vibration and ever-changing effective-g directions are big concerns.
and a tinny sounding speaker to hear the grunts
Assuming you don't have it hooked up to the car stereo (with the big thumping 12" subwoofer; all your bass are belong to us) or Sennheiser headphones.
but lets set the minimum requirement as needing a 500MHz PIII or better and at least a Geforce2 or Radeon. Anything cannot be considered an innovation
All those first-person shooters seem to be innovating off each other;-)
or cutting-edge in any way...Unless it meets those requirements, it's not breaking new ground.
Not everybody has US$2500+ to spend on a mobile system that meets those requirements. US$100 for a Game Boy Advance system buys you an awful lot.
C'mon, now...the GBA raises a sub-NES quality game system to sub-SNES status now.
Bull. GBA is as powerful as the Super NES ever was, and it's easier to code for because of good C compilers for ARM (the Super NES's 65c816 is very NOT C friendly). It's even more powerful because GBA includes sprite scaling and rotation, which required Super FX acceleration on Super NES. We're talking 3DO or Saturn graphics here.
I saw people playing one of those ancient Atari 2600s a while back (ATTN: 70% of slashdot readers werent even born when these things were in use...so stop talking about them, they're DINOSAURS) -- it gave me a headache just looking at that awful blocky crap
Atari 2600 had backgrounds of 2 colors (out of about 16) per scanline and 40x100 pixels. It also had only 128 bytes of RAM and half a scanline's worth of VRAM. Heck, it was just barely Tetris-complete[?]. GBA, on the other hand, has a 240x160 display with 511 simultaneous colors and sprite scaling and 384 kilobytes of RAM.
If you want the best graphics, get GIMP, WinGIMP, or Photoshop. If you want the best animated 3D graphics, get a DVD player. If you want gameplay and don't want to waste money, get a GBA.
Question - Given that this is for a Nintendo platform, will this be butchered as badly as I'm told Castle Wolfenstein was?
Only four things were changed in Wolfenstein 3d: Germany ==> Master State; Hitler ==> Staatmeister; Hitler photo ==> developer's mug; Swastika ==> Eagle. (Note: butcher is also the last name of the guy who claims to have created Precious Moments.)
I'm told that Nintendo has some pretty draconian content restrictions.
SNES Mortal Kombat's blood was always light gray. When Nintendo realized that the red blood code (a b a c a b b) on Sega Mortal Kombat was selling Genesis consoles the way pixel-perfect Street Fighter II had sold SNES consoles, it wisely allowed configurable red/green/no blood in Mortal Kombat II and subsequent games. There was a relatively unaltered Doom port (a few levels and a lot of framerate were lost in the 2 megabyte cartridge) to SNES+SuperFX, which is incidentally the model Nintendo uses to explain the graphics power of GBA.
The official word from Nintendo is that Game Boy Advance is comparable to a Super NES console with the Super FX accelerator (for sprite scaling and rotation).
Anyway, last I heard the GBA includes the GBC chip with it so it's 100% backwards compatible with all the old games
(Sega did the same thing with the Genesis, to play Master System games.) There was actually one title that required the original (green screen) Game Boy because it included a keyboard that plugged into the serial port on the side and didn't fit into the smaller connectors on GB Pocket and GB Color. This title was Workboy; it foreshadowed the modern PDA.
has everyone forgotten about the ill fated Sega Game Gear??? 3.58 mhz of pure gaming speed, who could ask for more!
Sega Game Gear has a 3.58 MHz Zilog Z80 microprocessor (and a reduced Sega Master System chipset). Zilog Z80 has several "advanced" instructions that are on the die but were not fully tested (or documented) in the first run of chips. Nintendo Game Boy has a 4.0 MHz Sharp Z80-clone processor with a different set of "advanced" instructions. Game Boy Color can overclock the gb-z80 (as emulator developers call it) to 8.0 MHz on newer games for more performance.
Taking a cue from Sega Genesis and Sony PlayStation 2 (the latter just recently came out where I live), Game Boy Advance contains a 4/8 MHz gb-z80 processor (and the rest of the original GB hardware) as an I/O controller. There's also a 17 MHz (?) ARM processor, sprite-scaling hardware (think Super NES with Super FX acceleration) with 511 simultaneous colors, and two digital PCM channels (left and right); software expands this to 16 or so voices (think.mod players for SB).
I suppose that it is once the terms of the original copyright run out, don't you?
Copyrights expire? Where'd you get that idea? Anything copyrightable first published on or after January 1, 1923, is under perpetual copyright in the United States.
The new Gameboy will plug into the upcoming Cube to act as a controller... a controller with a seperate screen. Wonder if you could use this to set up a second view?
Too much work for your eyes to keep looking back and forth between the TV and the GBA. Better to do what most Super NES games did and put the rear view in a window above the main screen.
I don't think there'd be enough bandwidth to shove that much video down the pipe. No, realtime DivX;-) is not the answer; I don't think the ARM processor in the GBA is that fast.
The digital pad doesn't provide much control in racing games. You need analog for steering nowadays.
Selecting plays for american football is a different matter entirely. But the Dreamcast did this how long ago? *cough*VMU*/cough*
The guys who run Everything2 and stand to make some money from it think it is better than the competition.
Of course they do, but the fellas who run E2 (Everything Development, a unit of Blockstackers Intergalactic LLC) aren't the same guys who run Slashdot (OSDN, a unit of VA Linux Systems Inc).
I remember that Clinton was able to do something on the federal level about assault weapons. Is this being challenged, or did they have some sort of loophole (anti-loophole?).
The second amendment to the U.S. Constitution: "A well-regulated militia being necessary to a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." USese adults have a right to bear arms in general, but which arms we may bear is "well-regulated" by Congress. Want a handgun or a recreational firearm? Wait a week and you can get one. Assault rifles are hard to keep "well-regulated" when they're sold on an open market; if you want to bear one, all you need to do is join the Army.
While representatives' votes are certainly a matter of public record
Not for an anonymous voice vote; both the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act[?] and the DMCA were passed this way. What are they supposed to record publicly, the decibel levels of the ayes and nays?
Imagine sending your content in a universally accessible fashion, rather than a proprietary format that requires a plugin.
What vector animation format doesn't require a plugin? Flash is the most universally viewable vector animation format on the Web today. (This may change with SMIL+JS+SVG but we'll see about that.)
Slashdot Mirror
set yourself up as a tin-pot dictator of your own website -- then you can decide what stories get posted.
Or just go to Kuro5hin, where the community chooses the stories.
We'd pay for zero Katz articles!
You don't need to pay. All you have to do is turn off author JonKatz in your preferences.
I was just thinking that I'd pay $30 a year for a goatse.cx free version of /.
Then block it in your hosts file.
I'm already paying for cable, yet I have to suffer through ads anyway?
You're paying the cable company for a cable connection. The ads support the content. If cable went ad-free, every channel would likely become a premium channel.
Actually the GB is usually regarded as a 1 Mhz system, (and the GBC as 2 Mhz, even Nintendo themselves says that they are 1/2 Mhz systems...), since the fastest instructions uses 4 clock-cycles to execute.
The 6502 architecture, used in NES and (in 65c816 form) in Super NES, requires anywhere from 2 to 6 cycles to execute an instruction, as it normally performs a memory access (to an 8-bit data bus) every cycle and apparently has only one ALU (no pipelining).
The slower instructions uses multiples of 4 cycles (8, 12, 16 and so on...)
Same with the Sega Genesis's 68000 processor, I'm told.
The SNES can only handle 256 colors
Unless you use the Super NES's additive and subtractive color modes, which make it relatively easy to display 4,096 colors in backgrounds. There are three scrolling planes with 16 colors each; set their palettes to redscale, greenscale, and bluescale and you can overlay them to produce lots and lots of pretty colors.
with 8xN sprite size
Super NES can display sprites up to 64x64. Up to 256 pixels of sprites can be on one scanline.
The GBA can even stream sound directly off the cart. (It doesn't have to be copied to RAM first.)
Heck, the 8-bit NES could do that; it was used for the drums in Contra and Super Mario Bros. 3 and for the explosions in Bomberman. Interplay's sound engine on Super NES could do something similar: streaming sound data from the cart to the SPC700's RAM while the game is playing.
Reminds me of the time i got admin access and cowed my entire college network. moooo...
By "cowed" I assume you mean "installed the distributed.net client on." But cows don't say "moo"; what they do say is closer to "nur."
Reality: how comfortable are you in sending star office attachment to someone you dont know, like at another company? truth: 0% sure. A word attachment? truth: 90% sure it is ok.
Well-written valid HTML: 99.999% sure it is OK on ie, konqueror, lynx, mozilla, and opera.
but try teaching a 45 year-old english teacher Linux if all he's ever used is an old mac.
The GNOME people call this phenomenon Baby Duck Syndrome. Users believe that the first software product they use is how all software should work from then on, because like baby ducks and geese, they've "imprinted" on the first thing they saw.
I believe what I'm thinking about was the Sega Genesis. I might be wrong on the name. It was portable, horizontally aligned and in color, and that was nearly a decade ago.
The one that played 8-bit Master System games was the Game Gear. The one that played 16-bit Mega Drive games (such as Zero Wing) was the Genesis Nomad.
a paltry 160x120
160x144. Eighteen rows of twenty tiles each. Count the lines of text on the original Tetris®'s copyright screen (including the blank lines). Picky, but when you use numbers, you should use the correct ones.
If Sony ever decided to make a handheld device that could play PS One games (which has been rumored for years now)
Then they would need to invent shock protection like I've never seen. Kids. Drop. Game. Boys. And they use them in moving vehicles, where vibration and ever-changing effective-g directions are big concerns.
and a tinny sounding speaker to hear the grunts
Assuming you don't have it hooked up to the car stereo (with the big thumping 12" subwoofer; all your bass are belong to us) or Sennheiser headphones.
What I really want to see is a port of Zero Wing.
FYI, 'Mode 7' doesn't exist on the GBA, only a better implemenation that results in the same, but better effect
Mode 7 is rotation and scaling of background scanlines to produce planar 3D effects. See a demo of Mode 7-style effects here.
but lets set the minimum requirement as needing a 500MHz PIII or better and at least a Geforce2 or Radeon. Anything cannot be considered an innovation
All those first-person shooters seem to be innovating off each other ;-)
or cutting-edge in any way...Unless it meets those requirements, it's not breaking new ground.
Not everybody has US$2500+ to spend on a mobile system that meets those requirements. US$100 for a Game Boy Advance system buys you an awful lot.
C'mon, now...the GBA raises a sub-NES quality game system to sub-SNES status now.
Bull. GBA is as powerful as the Super NES ever was, and it's easier to code for because of good C compilers for ARM (the Super NES's 65c816 is very NOT C friendly). It's even more powerful because GBA includes sprite scaling and rotation, which required Super FX acceleration on Super NES. We're talking 3DO or Saturn graphics here.
I saw people playing one of those ancient Atari 2600s a while back (ATTN: 70% of slashdot readers werent even born when these things were in use...so stop talking about them, they're DINOSAURS) -- it gave me a headache just looking at that awful blocky crap
Atari 2600 had backgrounds of 2 colors (out of about 16) per scanline and 40x100 pixels. It also had only 128 bytes of RAM and half a scanline's worth of VRAM. Heck, it was just barely Tetris-complete[?]. GBA, on the other hand, has a 240x160 display with 511 simultaneous colors and sprite scaling and 384 kilobytes of RAM.
If you want the best graphics, get GIMP, WinGIMP, or Photoshop. If you want the best animated 3D graphics, get a DVD player. If you want gameplay and don't want to waste money, get a GBA.
Question - Given that this is for a Nintendo platform, will this be butchered as badly as I'm told Castle Wolfenstein was?
Only four things were changed in Wolfenstein 3d: Germany ==> Master State; Hitler ==> Staatmeister; Hitler photo ==> developer's mug; Swastika ==> Eagle. (Note: butcher is also the last name of the guy who claims to have created Precious Moments.)
I'm told that Nintendo has some pretty draconian content restrictions.
SNES Mortal Kombat's blood was always light gray. When Nintendo realized that the red blood code (a b a c a b b) on Sega Mortal Kombat was selling Genesis consoles the way pixel-perfect Street Fighter II had sold SNES consoles, it wisely allowed configurable red/green/no blood in Mortal Kombat II and subsequent games. There was a relatively unaltered Doom port (a few levels and a lot of framerate were lost in the 2 megabyte cartridge) to SNES+SuperFX, which is incidentally the model Nintendo uses to explain the graphics power of GBA.
The official word from Nintendo is that Game Boy Advance is comparable to a Super NES console with the Super FX accelerator (for sprite scaling and rotation).
Anyway, last I heard the GBA includes the GBC chip with it so it's 100% backwards compatible with all the old games
(Sega did the same thing with the Genesis, to play Master System games.) There was actually one title that required the original (green screen) Game Boy because it included a keyboard that plugged into the serial port on the side and didn't fit into the smaller connectors on GB Pocket and GB Color. This title was Workboy; it foreshadowed the modern PDA.
has everyone forgotten about the ill fated Sega Game Gear??? 3.58 mhz of pure gaming speed, who could ask for more!
Sega Game Gear has a 3.58 MHz Zilog Z80 microprocessor (and a reduced Sega Master System chipset). Zilog Z80 has several "advanced" instructions that are on the die but were not fully tested (or documented) in the first run of chips. Nintendo Game Boy has a 4.0 MHz Sharp Z80-clone processor with a different set of "advanced" instructions. Game Boy Color can overclock the gb-z80 (as emulator developers call it) to 8.0 MHz on newer games for more performance.
Taking a cue from Sega Genesis and Sony PlayStation 2 (the latter just recently came out where I live), Game Boy Advance contains a 4/8 MHz gb-z80 processor (and the rest of the original GB hardware) as an I/O controller. There's also a 17 MHz (?) ARM processor, sprite-scaling hardware (think Super NES with Super FX acceleration) with 511 simultaneous colors, and two digital PCM channels (left and right); software expands this to 16 or so voices (think .mod players for SB).
I suppose that it is once the terms of the original copyright run out, don't you?
Copyrights expire? Where'd you get that idea? Anything copyrightable first published on or after January 1, 1923, is under perpetual copyright in the United States.
The new Gameboy will plug into the upcoming Cube to act as a controller... a controller with a seperate screen. Wonder if you could use this to set up a second view?
Selecting plays for american football is a different matter entirely. But the Dreamcast did this how long ago? *cough*VMU*/cough*
It was distributed by Artisan Entertainment
At least Artisan doesn't practice the price discrimination that is region coding.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
The guys who run Everything2 and stand to make some money from it think it is better than the competition.
Of course they do, but the fellas who run E2 (Everything Development, a unit of Blockstackers Intergalactic LLC) aren't the same guys who run Slashdot (OSDN, a unit of VA Linux Systems Inc).
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
I remember that Clinton was able to do something on the federal level about assault weapons. Is this being challenged, or did they have some sort of loophole (anti-loophole?).
The second amendment to the U.S. Constitution: "A well-regulated militia being necessary to a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." USese adults have a right to bear arms in general, but which arms we may bear is "well-regulated" by Congress. Want a handgun or a recreational firearm? Wait a week and you can get one. Assault rifles are hard to keep "well-regulated" when they're sold on an open market; if you want to bear one, all you need to do is join the Army.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
While representatives' votes are certainly a matter of public record
Not for an anonymous voice vote; both the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act[?] and the DMCA were passed this way. What are they supposed to record publicly, the decibel levels of the ayes and nays?
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
Imagine sending your content in a universally accessible fashion, rather than a proprietary format that requires a plugin.
What vector animation format doesn't require a plugin? Flash is the most universally viewable vector animation format on the Web today. (This may change with SMIL+JS+SVG but we'll see about that.)
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
Then someone on a 56k or less dialup has to download the heavy content site...just to switch it to lite.
That's easy to solve: place the link to light content at the top of the page, outside of any nested tables.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.