...and all of that free motion blur! Oh wait a second, thats one of the disadvantages to an LCD. Great for static, native resolution images (e.g. text), but the second something is animated, CRTs become king.
Its easier than that. Just use a language that supports static and/or dynamic array bounds checking. No new hardware is needed, and the performance hit is negligable when using an intelligent compiler or interpreter.
Lik-Sang should openly document their movie player, so that people can great new improved firmware for their device. It would help them sell more units. Maybe somebody could hack out a firmware that allowed larger games and saving to the CF card.
Will this porting of Gecko to KDE encourage Apple to base future versions of Safari on Gecko? Since they are both open rendering engines, I see no problem with everyone standardizing on one engine, as long as the chosen engine is the best pick.
Nintendo got a patent on their D-pad design. It has a nice balance of being able to hit "pure" directions (left, right, up, down) and diagonal directions ( down-left, up-left, down-right, up-right ). Most other D-pads make it too difficult to hit the diagonals, such as the Playstation family, and others make it far too easy to accidentally hit the diagonals, such as the XBOX.
Don't get me wrong, I am not a Nintendo fanboy... I don't own a Gamecube. In fact, I don't like the idea that Nintendo got a patent on a D-pad design. However, I calls it likes I sees it: Nintendo's directional-pad is and always has been the best.
Is it possible to modify this hack to make NES controllers work with the XBOX? The XBOX controller ports are USB, but regular USB game pads do not work when plugged into the XBOX (via a USB to XBOX adapter).
The XBOX controller's D-pad makes it far too easy to accidentally hit the diagonal directions, when you intended to hit a straight left, right, up, or down direction. This causes problems with many NES and SNES games, such as SUper Mario Bros, where straight down causes a Mario to crouch, but diagonal down does not do anything. This is really problematic when you need to pull off the crouch and slide trick. Other games have similar problems, since they were designed with the patented Nintendo D-pad in mind.
Why do people think that it is a good thing for uneducated, uninterested people to vote? These types of people will only worsen the signal to noise ratio in our already messed up election system. Voting should be based on a rational reasoning process, and it should _not_ be based on hype, fluf, bells, and whistles.
Most games see very little performance improvement from a second CPU. Since the game is the CPU heavy process, and since the other processes running behind the scene are extremely light on the CPU... even though the second CPU runs these ultra-light processes, it makes very little difference. The bottle kneck is still one of the CPUs in your system.
So when it comes to games that run on both systems, the highest end Pentium or AMD based systems will by far out perform the highest end Mac.
Finally, considering that this entire article resides within games.slashdot.com... and that Alienware targets gamers... it should be assumed that performance is with regards to games. In fact, considering that performance varies for every system depending on the tasks it is used for... performance is ALWAYS relative to the task. Some systems are better at server stuff, some better at games, some better at office apps, some better at graphics apps, etc.
Computer performance is hardly a one-dimensional attribute.
Yes, but games tend to not benefit much from multi-processor systems, while at the same time they tend to benefit allot from faster single CPU systems.
The CPUspeed daemon on Linux automatically scales my CPUs voltage and frequency depending on the system load, but I use a Pentium 4 based laptop. The Transmeta Crusoe has similar capabilities.
Anyway, its completely automatic, so I don't have to do anything. However, for those that want to tweak, you can hack kernel options, or use a separate program called "Laptop Mode". Note you don't need to use laptop mode with an actual laptop. Laptop mode has great features for tweaking harddrive power save features. Just google it, its great stuff.
Good games all have characters and stories? What about Tetris, Sokoban, fighting games, racing games, etc... stories do not make good games. A good game makes a good game.
Considering that most games with stories do not have interactive stories, I would claim that stories in games have as much to do with good gameplay as good textures and sounds.
I took part in the negative Amazon ratings bomb yesterday, and there were hundreds of slashdotters giving the book a negative rating. However, when I checked today, all of those ratings were removed, i.e. censored!
I bought a copy of Final Fantasy Adventure (i.e. Seiken Densetsu), but never got around to playing it. Maybe I will have to pop it into my SuperGameboy and play it on the big screen:)
Seiken Densetsu 2 (aka Secret of Mana or just SD2) is a great game! I still own my copy. It had some balance issues... for example, magic was extremely over-powering. The Sprite character could repeatidly cast drain MP, until the enemy lacked MP, and then drain HP until the enemy was dead.
Hence the Sprite was completely self sustaining because she never ran out of hit points or magic points.
Also, because there is no delay inbetween casting spells, the Sprite could easily blitz (i.e. spam) any enemy with a series of spell attacks before the enemy could do anything.
Seiken Densetsu 3 fixes those problems by enforcing a delay between the time when a spell is selected and the time in which it is cast. Hence you can't SPAM spells like in SD2.
Spell spamming was kind of fun, but it really killed any sense of challenge. Of course, its not like the Sprite starts out with all of the spells... but it doesn't take long for her to become a demi-god.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, CTRL-F1 is all you needed.
...and all of that free motion blur! Oh wait a second, thats one of the disadvantages to an LCD. Great for static, native resolution images (e.g. text), but the second something is animated, CRTs become king.
Its easier than that. Just use a language that supports static and/or dynamic array bounds checking. No new hardware is needed, and the performance hit is negligable when using an intelligent compiler or interpreter.
Lik-Sang should openly document their movie player, so that people can great new improved firmware for their device. It would help them sell more units. Maybe somebody could hack out a firmware that allowed larger games and saving to the CF card.
Will this porting of Gecko to KDE encourage Apple to base future versions of Safari on Gecko? Since they are both open rendering engines, I see no problem with everyone standardizing on one engine, as long as the chosen engine is the best pick.
Nintendo got a patent on their D-pad design. It has a nice balance of being able to hit "pure" directions (left, right, up, down) and diagonal directions ( down-left, up-left, down-right, up-right ). Most other D-pads make it too difficult to hit the diagonals, such as the Playstation family, and others make it far too easy to accidentally hit the diagonals, such as the XBOX.
Don't get me wrong, I am not a Nintendo fanboy... I don't own a Gamecube. In fact, I don't like the idea that Nintendo got a patent on a D-pad design. However, I calls it likes I sees it: Nintendo's directional-pad is and always has been the best.
Is it possible to modify this hack to make NES controllers work with the XBOX? The XBOX controller ports are USB, but regular USB game pads do not work when plugged into the XBOX (via a USB to XBOX adapter).
The XBOX controller's D-pad makes it far too easy to accidentally hit the diagonal directions, when you intended to hit a straight left, right, up, or down direction. This causes problems with many NES and SNES games, such as SUper Mario Bros, where straight down causes a Mario to crouch, but diagonal down does not do anything. This is really problematic when you need to pull off the crouch and slide trick. Other games have similar problems, since they were designed with the patented Nintendo D-pad in mind.
The PS2 controller's D-pad is crap compared to the SNES controller's D-pad.
Why do people think that it is a good thing for uneducated, uninterested people to vote? These types of people will only worsen the signal to noise ratio in our already messed up election system. Voting should be based on a rational reasoning process, and it should _not_ be based on hype, fluf, bells, and whistles.
Do they charge your card or something? Whats the catch?
Sorry, most games are single-threaded.
There is a niche market for Alienware's expensive computers. They are not even for the average gamer.
Most games see very little performance improvement from a second CPU. Since the game is the CPU heavy process, and since the other processes running behind the scene are extremely light on the CPU... even though the second CPU runs these ultra-light processes, it makes very little difference. The bottle kneck is still one of the CPUs in your system.
So when it comes to games that run on both systems, the highest end Pentium or AMD based systems will by far out perform the highest end Mac.
Finally, considering that this entire article resides within games.slashdot.com... and that Alienware targets gamers... it should be assumed that performance is with regards to games. In fact, considering that performance varies for every system depending on the tasks it is used for... performance is ALWAYS relative to the task. Some systems are better at server stuff, some better at games, some better at office apps, some better at graphics apps, etc.
Computer performance is hardly a one-dimensional attribute.
Yes, but games tend to not benefit much from multi-processor systems, while at the same time they tend to benefit allot from faster single CPU systems.
The CPUspeed daemon on Linux automatically scales my CPUs voltage and frequency depending on the system load, but I use a Pentium 4 based laptop. The Transmeta Crusoe has similar capabilities.
Anyway, its completely automatic, so I don't have to do anything. However, for those that want to tweak, you can hack kernel options, or use a separate program called "Laptop Mode". Note you don't need to use laptop mode with an actual laptop. Laptop mode has great features for tweaking harddrive power save features. Just google it, its great stuff.
Why does Slashdot render incorrectly in Mozilla? I would have figured that Slashdot would try to be Mozilla friendly? Guess not.
Good games all have characters and stories? What about Tetris, Sokoban, fighting games, racing games, etc... stories do not make good games. A good game makes a good game.
Considering that most games with stories do not have interactive stories, I would claim that stories in games have as much to do with good gameplay as good textures and sounds.
Why does Slashdot keep banning me?
http://www.mail2web.com/
Mod parent up! Free web based email services such as www.mail2web.com and www.mailinator.com are invaluable resources!
I really like to play video games. They are good.
I took part in the negative Amazon ratings bomb yesterday, and there were hundreds of slashdotters giving the book a negative rating. However, when I checked today, all of those ratings were removed, i.e. censored!
I bought a copy of Final Fantasy Adventure (i.e. Seiken Densetsu), but never got around to playing it. Maybe I will have to pop it into my SuperGameboy and play it on the big screen :)
Seiken Densetsu 2 (aka Secret of Mana or just SD2) is a great game! I still own my copy. It had some balance issues... for example, magic was extremely over-powering. The Sprite character could repeatidly cast drain MP, until the enemy lacked MP, and then drain HP until the enemy was dead.
Hence the Sprite was completely self sustaining because she never ran out of hit points or magic points.
Also, because there is no delay inbetween casting spells, the Sprite could easily blitz (i.e. spam) any enemy with a series of spell attacks before the enemy could do anything.
Seiken Densetsu 3 fixes those problems by enforcing a delay between the time when a spell is selected and the time in which it is cast. Hence you can't SPAM spells like in SD2.
Spell spamming was kind of fun, but it really killed any sense of challenge. Of course, its not like the Sprite starts out with all of the spells... but it doesn't take long for her to become a demi-god.