As someone with some game development experience, let me throw in some observations. (*based on the specs mentioned here).
The 3.2 Ghz Power PC CPUs in the Xbox 360 and PS3 were in-order execution units. As I remember, code on the 360 typically executed about 0.2 IPC -(Instructions per cycle), sometimes worse. The very best hand optimized assembler doing tasks like video decoding could execute about 0.9 IPC once properly cached and unrolled.
AMD and Intel have decades of R&D now into out-of-order x86 execution (the x86/x64 opcodes being translated to internal micro ops), which is a major factor in their performance. Even the Power PC G5 chip devoted a good chunk of its silicon to Out-or-order execution. The 360 and PS3 CPUs - designed almost 10 years ago - traded Out of Order execution for die size and clock speed.
The specs say that the 1.6 Ghz CPUs can issue up to 2 instructions per cycle. If real world performance works out to an IPC of 1.2 to 1.6, which seems very doable, then you will see a 3x to 4x increase in the real-world rate of instructions being performed . ( 0.2 IPC @ 3.2Ghz == 0.4 IPC @ 1.6Ghz ). This doesn't take into account any efficiency gains due to the instruction set, cache, etc.
And at the same time, I would imagine it's a whole lot easier to deal with other things on the chipsets at 1,.6Ghz than at 3.2 Ghz (mature tech and all that)
When I first watched Space:1999 season 1 in the mid-70s, one of the things they did made a big impression on me: Some of the episodes would end with something like this:
John: What the hell was that and how did we survive? Victor: I don't know. We don't know. There's a lot of stuff in the universe that we have no idea about, and it could just as easily have killed us all. We survived due to sheer luck and not because we're anything special.
That's paraphrased of course, but compared to the tone and formula/attitude of all the other action and sci-fi on TV in that era, and it was downright subversive.
I must be getting very old. Back in the 8-bit heyday (1979-1983), Softside Magazine (for TRS-80, Apple ][ and Atari 800 users) used to have 2 submission contests that they ran in almost every issue: One line programs ( "one-liners" I think they called them) and 1K programs (program size without running = 1023 bytes or less).
The TRS-80 was probably the best machine for one-liners as a single line could be 245 or so characters long (the Atari was limited to 120 characters, but you could abbreviate some keywords, I don't recall the Apple ][ Basic line limit).
The one-liner I remember the most was a graphical version of the old "Lunar Lander" game for the TRS-80. Yes, graphical. A loop (X =0 to X= 127) created the lunar landscape, followed by a loop which updated the state machine of your ship (a single "dot" drawn with the SET and RESET commands) that factored in which keys you were holding down (PEEK of the keyboard matrix I think), and tested to see if you hit the ground with your velocity under some threshold. *THAT* single-line effort was certainly more interesting that the one presented here.
I was working 'down the street' if you will at the time, as a programmer on one of their direct competitors (Age of Empires), and it's easy to forget the circumstances we all were working under at the time.
People weren't using Templates in games for a couple of reasons - Familiarity being one, but the state of the code was new, and especially the asm outputted by compilers was often very inefficient which it was not outright BUGGY if you pushed it. Templates were still very new then.
Also, you tend to forget how slow and limited PCs were then -- Your phone today probably runs circles around not just the machines that games were run on, but the PCs used to develop them.
The System Specifications "On the Box " for Starcraft were - A Pentium 90 (or equivalent - that could be a 486-133) , 16MB of RAM and Windows 95 or NT 4.0, and a SVGA video card with 512kb or 1MB of VRAM. Think about that for a minute. These were 2d video cards, not 3D. Age had almost identical specs. A full rebuild of AoE on our Dev machines (Pentium Pro) took 15-20 minutes to make.
It was very normal to worry about saving 2 bytes, or just a few cycles of CPU time back then. So you did everything bespoke by hand, and didn't genericsize much.
And to be honest. We didn't know then what we know now. The programming practices most of my peers just do automatically today -- we hadn't developed/learned them yet. We did what we could with what we had in knowledge and tools, and shipped complete AAA games for costs in man-hours and dollars that seem ludicrously small today.
Don't get me wrong, Besides being a lot of work, It was a lot of fun too. One thing I remember was our companies putting each other on the Beta Test list for our upcoming games.
I should clarify that I am talking about guys with wives who are stay at home moms and have kids in the single digit age range.
If the wife has not ever held a similar job (in terms of work demands, etc), and especially if she has never worked at all, she usually will have a huge misconception of what it's like for her Husband, which fuels the lack of respect. When you are waiting for something to compile, or thinking through a tricky problem, she will see you as just sitting there motionless, so to her of course you are "doing nothing" and are free, because her frame of reference usually involves physical labor or interaction.
As for small kids, you're can be screwed even with a locked door on your office. When I did the work-from-home remote contracting gig, My 4-year old son would pound on the door screaming his lungs out for me for 30 minutes straight (my now ex- wife was no help because of the above - she would actively send the kids to bother me so she could get a break).
I was about to say if you have a wife and young kids - DON'T WORK FROM HOME. Your work won't be taken seriously, and you will be CONSTANTLY interrupted and your marriage will likely suffer.
Seriously, this has happened to myself and EVERY other guy I know who has young kids and tried working from home (admittedly, 5 guys total) . Their wives didn't respect the need for isolation, and saw them as available to watch the kids and do anything else they wanted to. They would interrupt any time they felt like it, and ignore repeated requests not to. To them, it was like "Hey I work from home too! He's just sitting here on the computer not doing much. If that was me, then I would be able to stop and do something else. He can take the kids while I take a nap and then go to a movie with my girlfriends!".
Mod parents up. I've been making games professionally for over 15 years, and I was going to mention both of those sites.
My general advice, when asked, "How do I learn to make games" is to 1) Look around online as there are communities and resources all over, and 2) Just start making something, anything. Do it rather than talk about it. Start with something small - an early Atari 2600-class game project - and expand as you become comfortable and more knowledgeable and experienced.
... because just before drive production went offline I finally outfitted my new home server with 9TB of storage for just $420. Pretty much my entire life, it's been that once I go and buy some computer hardware, two weeks (or however long the return period is) later, the price is guaranteed to be cut significantly (or a much better version is released).
Someone needs to check the alignment of the universe.
Something I noticed for the last three weeks was the absence of hard drives specials or sales in the weekly adverts from retailers like Fry's electronics.
When newegg sent out their "November Madness" and "Black Friday" emails to subscribes, there was *not a single* hard drive to be found in the sales.
Normally I'd try for a witty or insightful comment here, but I just don't have much more to say as I don't know if it more due to profit taking on the retailer's part, or if they are more concerned about running short/out of supply in the near future.
very coincidentally, I was having a conversation about Atari 2600 emulation last night, and it was suggested that "perfect" emulation of the early consoles might be impossible due to the change from CRTs to LCD TVs (and monitors).
The culprit in this case is the latency added by digital displays (and PC style video hardware) and packet-based input devices (USB, etc).
On pre NES hardware like the Atari 2600, the games would (at times) be synchronized to the video output signal of the CRT (see for a discussion), and they also had specialized video hardware which often did collision detection between various video elements (sprites, missiles, backgrounds, etc) meaning that results were detected as the frame was outputted, and available to the game code instantly .
This *can* be emulated perfectly by the emulator/ PC CPU
But these games ran their main loops at 60 hz (or 50 for PAL), and many of them required near perfect reflexes and timing.
Once the emulator has completed and rendered a frame of the old console game, how long until the player actually sees the result?
The answer is: It varies.
Will there be a 1/60th second delay before the video card swaps the rendered frame to the front buffer?
And how long will it take for the front buffer to be sent over HDMI/DVI to the LCD Tv set or PC Monitor? another 1/60th of a second?
And how long before the TV or monitor actually displays the frame? Another 1 or 2 60ths of a second? more? (The TV/Monitor takes time to buffer, filter/process and scale the image). You usually don't notice this on TV sets because the audio is buffered and delayed so it stays in sync with the video.
And now that the next frame is finally visible to the player, he/she can sees that they need to react to save their on-screen character, so they press the controller appropriately.
And how long does it take the USB adapter/controller to send to a packet to the PC, and for the PC to process it and make it available to the emulator? Compare that to the original hardware where pushing a button or joystick caused an individual circuit to open/close and whose status was polled immediately and directly by the console CPU. Maybe it's fast enough, maybe it adds another frame of latency.
In the end, with emulators we likely have a longer feedback loop from the emulator to the display to the player to the controller and back to the emulator compared to the original console and CRT displays, and many old games just won't play the same as a result.
We can emulate the game perfectly from the standpoint of the hardware simulation and audio/visual display, but still not get the play experience emulated perfectly because of changes in the feedback loop to the player.
I was under the impression that there were no public APIs for getting at the audio data from the call in progress,specifically to keep people from making apps that could record calls due to legality issues (wiretapping, etc, depending on your location and jurisdiction).
The "recorder" programs that are out there recording directly from the mic, and are usually not able to pick up the output from the speaker (and if they do, it's usually very faint). iPhones / iOS lack the capability for the same reasons.
I think a lot of people would find it very useful, for a number of various reasons, to have the ability to have their calls automatically recorded, with metadata of who, when, etc, stored in.WAV or other easily playable format, and automatically synced with their PC.
Here's another website I can live without. There are very, very few site I frequent that I honestly need (my webmail, and... and... I'll think of something).
Seriously, I would expect these to be traffic killers.
I'll bet no one here remembers "CompuTrek" hosted on Computalk TCS in the Dallas/Ft.Worth Area circa 1986-1988. Up to 8 players squaring off in a real-time version of the old 'Star Trek' games (on a 64x64 sector grid if I recall correctly). The BBS itself was run on a cluster of 8 Atari 800's, sharing a Corvus 20 MB hard disk via a multiplexer, (and with a homemade synchronization device attached to joystick port 2 of each machine no less). The guys with 2400 baud modems had a definite advantage.
Whenever I hear "Galactic Empire" I always think of the TRS-80 game from br0derbund (conquer the 19 other planets in 1000 years) without FTL.
I seem to remember most all of these things were in (or experimented with) the RTS games I worked on a decade ago - Age of Empires/Kings/Mythology (Decentralized Intelligence, Strategic Tiers, Sub-Commanders, etc). Not all of those were exposed to the end-user via the AI script / expert system / etc, and things improved with each iteration.
I also remember that while some Ai things may have seemed like great ideas, and were neat to implement, they didn't always make for a better game experience.
And I personally say you should make an economic AI that is bound by exactly the same rules as human players, and doesn't cheat at all. And as I remember, the definition of 'doesn't cheat at all' was an occasional ongoing discussion and subtle things that could be considered as cheating, like 'Can I Path from here to there?' or the reactions times of the computer vs a human sometimes had massive implementation ramifications.
A good test in my book was 'can the AI handle a wide range of truly random maps / game worlds.
Humans will always be finding the limits of Computer player AIs, and saying you'll just put in counter code whenever someone tells you of your AI's limits... Hmmm... I think that's weak.
All this has been done before, and all this will be done again.
All the above is solely my opinion and recollections, and in no way speaks for anyone but myself.
It was 10 years ago when I bought a Rio PMP-300, the first readily available flash-based MP3 player. It came with 32MB of internal memory, and would accept a single SmartMedia card, 32MB max in size (which I quickly went out and bought).
Back then, the size of your MP3 files mattered a whole lot more. At 128K CBR, I could fit 6 to 9 songs on each bank, depending on how long they were. The artifacts were noticeable to even my poor hearing. So I then stepped up to 160kb CBR and then LAME -remix (VBR, average ~ 190K ) encoding setting. I will make a note here that not all MP3 encoders are created equal - there is no fixed encoding standard, just for decoding.
With the VBR files, I could only fit 3-6 songs per bank of the Rio, so yea, it mattered then. If I wanted a specific CD to take to the gym with me, I had to think about what I put on the Rio. Often I couldn't fit the whole CD on the device or I had to swap play order to better use the slack space in each memory partition.
Can you even buy a MP3 player with less than 1GB of internal flash memory today? Skip past something like the iPod shuffle or equivalent at 1 and 2 GB, and you are quickly looking at 4GB, 8GB, 16GB or more.
I just encoded my copy of Linkin park's Minutes to Midnight CD that I bought with LAME 3.97 high quality VBR and it came out to 77.6 MB for the whole thing with the average bit rates in the 230kb/s to 270kbs. It wouldn't fit on the RIO at this quality. On the cheapest iPod Shuffle, I could fit 13 similarly sized CDs at this quality encoding. On the cheapest iPod Nano, around 100 similarly sized and encoded CDs.
My point??
128Kbs is sooo 1990s.. We've moved on. Storage, be it flash or Hard drives, has gotten order(s) of magnitude cheaper and bigger. So why aren't we moving our mindset about default MP3 quality UP to reflect the change? Make very High quality VBR the default and raise the average quality bar.
I will say, and this is my opinion only, that if anyone can pull of a successful RTS on the console, it will be the Halo Wars team. The core of their team was responsible for Age of Empires 1 & 2, and they have both superior technology and game design people.
(I recently owned a 1995 BMW M5 Station Wagon, for example)
Tell me, are they really exempt from the Laws of Physics, I mean, impossible to crash? Can you also go faster than c? Can you go from 150mph to 0 in 6 feet on ice? Or am I missing something?
No exemption from the laws of physics, but a real blast to drive. I used to take mine out to the track when the local chapter of the car club would have a DE (Driver Education) event. Nothing like seeing a station wagon hold its own in a pack of M3s.:)
I am assuming you just don't know that the BMW E34 M5 Touring was actually made. A total of 891 of them were built from '92 to '95 model years, but it was never sold in North America due to price and certifying the S38B38 engine (3.8L 340hp/295 ft-lb). I bought one in Germany and spent nearly a year to get it federalized and imported.
The quote of "only 4" cars is something I took from Car & Driver Magazine, and I am unsure how they may have qualified it.
Your list is very instructive though; all of those cars would be considered "exotics" (the Jag a little less so) and I do believe that some of them (the 512BBi and Jalpa for starters) were not available for sale in the US due primarily to emissions.
A little more research may be needed to be definitive, but I think the point I made is still valid; Power outputs that we take for granted in common cars today were very, very rare in *any* car back in 1982.
I guess not many posters here actually owned one. I had one for about 3 years in the late '80s, and am something of a car geek (I recently owned a 1995 BMW M5 Station Wagon, for example). Anyway, after reading the posting here, I feel the need to provide more accurate information about the car. The following are in no particular order.
Mobyy_6kl was basically right about the engine: The US saw a detuned version of the PVR 2.8L V6, though in US trim it's peak output was rated at 130hp (not 120) and ~165 lb-ft.
One important thing to realize is the state of automotive engineering at the time the DeLorean was sold. If you compare it to the cars being manufactured and sold today, things look very different.
While today's economy cars have engines as powerful as the DeLorean's; In 1982, there were only 4 car models being sold that were rated as having over 200 peak horsepower. Only 4. Today, virtually every family sedan has more power than that. DeLorean One now sells a tuned and upgraded version of the very same engine that puts out around 195 hp.
The build quality of "exotic" cars has drastically changed since the time of the DeLorean. For it's time, the quality, and fit-and-finish (of the later build cars especially) of the DeLorean were very good. If you ever go look at an exotic car from that era, say a Ferrari 308, look carefully at the interior and panels, check the gaps and how straight the lines and seams are. Examine the switchgear. The Ferrari of the time was not much better than a kit car, and can't compare the build quality of today's "exotics". We can thank very rapid technology and quality advancement, not to mention the Acura NSX for giving the rest of the industry a lesson on build quality and reliability.
The DeLorean was envisioned as more of a Luxury/Grand Touring coupe than a pure performance car. It also has its roots in a 1970's safety car design.
A lot of parts were sourced from other manufacturers, making service interesting and sometimes much less expensive than it otherwise would be. The 'backbone' the car sits on is from Lotus (Lotus Esprit) as well as the windshield. The brakes/pads were from the same company that was supplying Jaguar at the time. The A/C system was a GM/Delco unit, same as on some Cadillacs. And so on...
Though underpowered, the handling was good for the time, especially considering its 65/35 rear weight distribution (it was a true rear-engine car, not mid-engine). Lotus, whose engineering group is still doing chassis tuning for other car companies today, is responsible for the DeLoreans handling. Note the rear tires were larger than the fronts. Try tossing around a Fiero to see the difference the engineering makes. The brakes were pretty good for their time (pre ABS/Monster rotor size).
Build Quality and reliability increased with production (VIN) number. The first thousand or so cars had to be extensively re-worked when they arrived in the USA to fix manufacturing and design errors. Later cars were bolted together much, much better. And I do mean bolter. I swear that you could almost completely tear down a DeLorean with just a 10mm socket wrench. Also, there were about 2200 design changes (big and small) from the first car to the last one off the line. I know several late '81s that had over 100,000 miles put on them without needing excessive maintenance.
Most of the DeLoreans were 1981 models, with a few '82 and '83 models. The DeLorean plant shut down and restarted near the end. Early '81s had black interiors, and the rest had Grey (a big improvement IMHO). For the '82s and '83s you could get the Black interior as an option. It was a comfy car to ride in. I had passengers fall asleep on me several times.
None of the cars was ever painted at the factory. All painted cars were done aftermarket. The thick type 304 Stainless Steel panels had an epoxy coating and were designed to last at least 25 years. At the time of the DeLorean's design, most cars still regul
Your helpful attitude is totally opposite of the attitude I ran into 10 years ago when I asked for help online.
If that's a common reaction, then the Linux comminty has come a long, long way along with the OS and software. I'm looking forward to trying it out and feeling secure again.
Slashdot Mirror
As someone with some game development experience, let me throw in some observations. (*based on the specs mentioned here).
The 3.2 Ghz Power PC CPUs in the Xbox 360 and PS3 were in-order execution units. As I remember, code on the 360 typically executed about 0.2 IPC -(Instructions per cycle), sometimes worse. The very best hand optimized assembler doing tasks like video decoding could execute about 0.9 IPC once properly cached and unrolled.
AMD and Intel have decades of R&D now into out-of-order x86 execution (the x86/x64 opcodes being translated to internal micro ops), which is a major factor in their performance. Even the Power PC G5 chip devoted a good chunk of its silicon to Out-or-order execution. The 360 and PS3 CPUs - designed almost 10 years ago - traded Out of Order execution for die size and clock speed.
The specs say that the 1.6 Ghz CPUs can issue up to 2 instructions per cycle. If real world performance works out to an IPC of 1.2 to 1.6, which seems very doable, then you will see a 3x to 4x increase in the real-world rate of instructions being performed . ( 0.2 IPC @ 3.2Ghz == 0.4 IPC @ 1.6Ghz ). This doesn't take into account any efficiency gains due to the instruction set, cache, etc.
And at the same time, I would imagine it's a whole lot easier to deal with other things on the chipsets at 1,.6Ghz than at 3.2 Ghz (mature tech and all that)
It did get released in Europe by Phillips as the Vidopac G7400 / G7401 (where the markets for the videopac games was stronger)
A handful of Odyssey 3 prototypes still exist and are in the hands of collectors.
When I first watched Space:1999 season 1 in the mid-70s, one of the things they did made a big impression on me: Some of the episodes would end with something like this:
John: What the hell was that and how did we survive?
Victor: I don't know. We don't know. There's a lot of stuff in the universe that we have no idea about, and it could just as easily have killed us all. We survived due to sheer luck and not because we're anything special.
That's paraphrased of course, but compared to the tone and formula/attitude of all the other action and sci-fi on TV in that era, and it was downright subversive.
I must be getting very old. Back in the 8-bit heyday (1979-1983), Softside Magazine (for TRS-80, Apple ][ and Atari 800 users) used to have 2 submission contests that they ran in almost every issue: One line programs ( "one-liners" I think they called them) and 1K programs (program size without running = 1023 bytes or less).
The TRS-80 was probably the best machine for one-liners as a single line could be 245 or so characters long (the Atari was limited to 120 characters, but you could abbreviate some keywords, I don't recall the Apple ][ Basic line limit).
The one-liner I remember the most was a graphical version of the old "Lunar Lander" game for the TRS-80. Yes, graphical. A loop (X =0 to X= 127) created the lunar landscape, followed by a loop which updated the state machine of your ship (a single "dot" drawn with the SET and RESET commands) that factored in which keys you were holding down (PEEK of the keyboard matrix I think), and tested to see if you hit the ground with your velocity under some threshold. *THAT* single-line effort was certainly more interesting that the one presented here.
I was working 'down the street' if you will at the time, as a programmer on one of their direct competitors (Age of Empires), and it's easy to forget the circumstances we all were working under at the time.
People weren't using Templates in games for a couple of reasons - Familiarity being one, but the state of the code was new, and especially the asm outputted by compilers was often very inefficient which it was not outright BUGGY if you pushed it. Templates were still very new then.
Also, you tend to forget how slow and limited PCs were then -- Your phone today probably runs circles around not just the machines that games were run on, but the PCs used to develop them.
The System Specifications "On the Box " for Starcraft were - A Pentium 90 (or equivalent - that could be a 486-133) , 16MB of RAM and Windows 95 or NT 4.0, and a SVGA video card with 512kb or 1MB of VRAM. Think about that for a minute. These were 2d video cards, not 3D. Age had almost identical specs. A full rebuild of AoE on our Dev machines (Pentium Pro) took 15-20 minutes to make.
It was very normal to worry about saving 2 bytes, or just a few cycles of CPU time back then. So you did everything bespoke by hand, and didn't genericsize much.
And to be honest. We didn't know then what we know now. The programming practices most of my peers just do automatically today -- we hadn't developed/learned them yet. We did what we could with what we had in knowledge and tools, and shipped complete AAA games for costs in man-hours and dollars that seem ludicrously small today.
Don't get me wrong, Besides being a lot of work, It was a lot of fun too. One thing I remember was our companies putting each other on the Beta Test list for our upcoming games.
I should clarify that I am talking about guys with wives who are stay at home moms and have kids in the single digit age range.
If the wife has not ever held a similar job (in terms of work demands, etc), and especially if she has never worked at all, she usually will have a huge misconception of what it's like for her Husband, which fuels the lack of respect. When you are waiting for something to compile, or thinking through a tricky problem, she will see you as just sitting there motionless, so to her of course you are "doing nothing" and are free, because her frame of reference usually involves physical labor or interaction.
As for small kids, you're can be screwed even with a locked door on your office. When I did the work-from-home remote contracting gig, My 4-year old son would pound on the door screaming his lungs out for me for 30 minutes straight (my now ex- wife was no help because of the above - she would actively send the kids to bother me so she could get a break).
Mod this up.
I was about to say if you have a wife and young kids - DON'T WORK FROM HOME. Your work won't be taken seriously, and you will be CONSTANTLY interrupted and your marriage will likely suffer.
Seriously, this has happened to myself and EVERY other guy I know who has young kids and tried working from home (admittedly, 5 guys total) . Their wives didn't respect the need for isolation, and saw them as available to watch the kids and do anything else they wanted to. They would interrupt any time they felt like it, and ignore repeated requests not to. To them, it was like "Hey I work from home too! He's just sitting here on the computer not doing much. If that was me, then I would be able to stop and do something else. He can take the kids while I take a nap and then go to a movie with my girlfriends!".
Mod parents up. I've been making games professionally for over 15 years, and I was going to mention both of those sites.
My general advice, when asked, "How do I learn to make games" is to 1) Look around online as there are communities and resources all over, and 2) Just start making something, anything. Do it rather than talk about it. Start with something small - an early Atari 2600-class game project - and expand as you become comfortable and more knowledgeable and experienced.
... because just before drive production went offline I finally outfitted my new home server with 9TB of storage for just $420. Pretty much my entire life, it's been that once I go and buy some computer hardware, two weeks (or however long the return period is) later, the price is guaranteed to be cut significantly (or a much better version is released).
Someone needs to check the alignment of the universe.
Something I noticed for the last three weeks was the absence of hard drives specials or sales in the weekly adverts from retailers like Fry's electronics.
When newegg sent out their "November Madness" and "Black Friday" emails to subscribes, there was *not a single* hard drive to be found in the sales.
Normally I'd try for a witty or insightful comment here, but I just don't have much more to say as I don't know if it more due to profit taking on the retailer's part, or if they are more concerned about running short/out of supply in the near future.
very coincidentally, I was having a conversation about Atari 2600 emulation last night, and it was suggested that "perfect" emulation of the early consoles might be impossible due to the change from CRTs to LCD TVs (and monitors).
The culprit in this case is the latency added by digital displays (and PC style video hardware) and packet-based input devices (USB, etc).
On pre NES hardware like the Atari 2600, the games would (at times) be synchronized to the video output signal of the CRT (see for a discussion), and they also had specialized video hardware which often did collision detection between various video elements (sprites, missiles, backgrounds, etc) meaning that results were detected as the frame was outputted, and available to the game code instantly .
This *can* be emulated perfectly by the emulator/ PC CPU
But these games ran their main loops at 60 hz (or 50 for PAL), and many of them required near perfect reflexes and timing.
Once the emulator has completed and rendered a frame of the old console game, how long until the player actually sees the result?
The answer is: It varies.
Will there be a 1/60th second delay before the video card swaps the rendered frame to the front buffer?
And how long will it take for the front buffer to be sent over HDMI/DVI to the LCD Tv set or PC Monitor? another 1/60th of a second?
And how long before the TV or monitor actually displays the frame? Another 1 or 2 60ths of a second? more? (The TV/Monitor takes time to buffer, filter/process and scale the image). You usually don't notice this on TV sets because the audio is buffered and delayed so it stays in sync with the video.
And now that the next frame is finally visible to the player, he/she can sees that they need to react to save their on-screen character, so they press the controller appropriately.
And how long does it take the USB adapter/controller to send to a packet to the PC, and for the PC to process it and make it available to the emulator? Compare that to the original hardware where pushing a button or joystick caused an individual circuit to open/close and whose status was polled immediately and directly by the console CPU. Maybe it's fast enough, maybe it adds another frame of latency.
In the end, with emulators we likely have a longer feedback loop from the emulator to the display to the player to the controller and back to the emulator compared to the original console and CRT displays, and many old games just won't play the same as a result.
We can emulate the game perfectly from the standpoint of the hardware simulation and audio/visual display, but still not get the play experience emulated perfectly because of changes in the feedback loop to the player.
I was under the impression that there were no public APIs for getting at the audio data from the call in progress,specifically to keep people from making apps that could record calls due to legality issues (wiretapping, etc, depending on your location and jurisdiction).
The "recorder" programs that are out there recording directly from the mic, and are usually not able to pick up the output from the speaker (and if they do, it's usually very faint). iPhones / iOS lack the capability for the same reasons.
I think a lot of people would find it very useful, for a number of various reasons, to have the ability to have their calls automatically recorded, with metadata of who, when, etc, stored in .WAV or other easily playable format, and automatically synced with their PC.
If you have the same T-mobile HTC that my girlfriend has... the answer is "hell yes".
...where Judges are applying an understanding of the technical issues, common sense, and considering the situation of ordinary citizens?
The guys over at jalopnik aren't so sure, unless he's traded in his Mercedes SL55 AMG for a 10+ year old Honda Civic...
http://jalopnik.com/#!5763321/cmon-does-the-national-enquirer-really-think-steve-jobs-owns-a-honda
My response will be simple.
Here's another website I can live without. There are very, very few site I frequent that I honestly need (my webmail, and... and... I'll think of something).
Seriously, I would expect these to be traffic killers.
Neat concept for a BBS game.
I'll bet no one here remembers "CompuTrek" hosted on Computalk TCS in the Dallas/Ft.Worth Area circa 1986-1988. Up to 8 players squaring off in a real-time version of the old 'Star Trek' games (on a 64x64 sector grid if I recall correctly). The BBS itself was run on a cluster of 8 Atari 800's, sharing a Corvus 20 MB hard disk via a multiplexer, (and with a homemade synchronization device attached to joystick port 2 of each machine no less). The guys with 2400 baud modems had a definite advantage.
Whenever I hear "Galactic Empire" I always think of the TRS-80 game from br0derbund (conquer the 19 other planets in 1000 years) without FTL.
Seeing how the birth of my son caused me 4 YEARS of extreme sleep deprivation, then I guess I am ... wait.. what was I saying?
I seem to remember most all of these things were in (or experimented with) the RTS games I worked on a decade ago - Age of Empires/Kings/Mythology (Decentralized Intelligence, Strategic Tiers, Sub-Commanders, etc). Not all of those were exposed to the end-user via the AI script / expert system / etc, and things improved with each iteration.
I also remember that while some Ai things may have seemed like great ideas, and were neat to implement, they didn't always make for a better game experience.
And I personally say you should make an economic AI that is bound by exactly the same rules as human players, and doesn't cheat at all. And as I remember, the definition of 'doesn't cheat at all' was an occasional ongoing discussion and subtle things that could be considered as cheating, like 'Can I Path from here to there?' or the reactions times of the computer vs a human sometimes had massive implementation ramifications.
A good test in my book was 'can the AI handle a wide range of truly random maps / game worlds.
Humans will always be finding the limits of Computer player AIs, and saying you'll just put in counter code whenever someone tells you of your AI's limits... Hmmm... I think that's weak.
All this has been done before, and all this will be done again.
All the above is solely my opinion and recollections, and in no way speaks for anyone but myself.
It was 10 years ago when I bought a Rio PMP-300, the first readily available flash-based MP3 player. It came with 32MB of internal memory, and would accept a single SmartMedia card, 32MB max in size (which I quickly went out and bought).
Back then, the size of your MP3 files mattered a whole lot more. At 128K CBR, I could fit 6 to 9 songs on each bank, depending on how long they were. The artifacts were noticeable to even my poor hearing. So I then stepped up to 160kb CBR and then LAME -remix (VBR, average ~ 190K ) encoding setting. I will make a note here that not all MP3 encoders are created equal - there is no fixed encoding standard, just for decoding.
With the VBR files, I could only fit 3-6 songs per bank of the Rio, so yea, it mattered then. If I wanted a specific CD to take to the gym with me, I had to think about what I put on the Rio. Often I couldn't fit the whole CD on the device or I had to swap play order to better use the slack space in each memory partition.
Can you even buy a MP3 player with less than 1GB of internal flash memory today? Skip past something like the iPod shuffle or equivalent at 1 and 2 GB, and you are quickly looking at 4GB, 8GB, 16GB or more.
I just encoded my copy of Linkin park's Minutes to Midnight CD that I bought with LAME 3.97 high quality VBR and it came out to 77.6 MB for the whole thing with the average bit rates in the 230kb/s to 270kbs. It wouldn't fit on the RIO at this quality. On the cheapest iPod Shuffle, I could fit 13 similarly sized CDs at this quality encoding. On the cheapest iPod Nano, around 100 similarly sized and encoded CDs.
My point??
128Kbs is sooo 1990s.. We've moved on. Storage, be it flash or Hard drives, has gotten order(s) of magnitude cheaper and bigger. So why aren't we moving our mindset about default MP3 quality UP to reflect the change? Make very High quality VBR the default and raise the average quality bar.
I will say, and this is my opinion only, that if anyone can pull of a successful RTS on the console, it will be the Halo Wars team. The core of their team was responsible for Age of Empires 1 & 2, and they have both superior technology and game design people.
(I recently owned a 1995 BMW M5 Station Wagon, for example)
Tell me, are they really exempt from the Laws of Physics, I mean, impossible to crash? Can you also go faster than c? Can you go from 150mph to 0 in 6 feet on ice? Or am I missing something?
No exemption from the laws of physics, but a real blast to drive. I used to take mine out to the track when the local chapter of the car club would have a DE (Driver Education) event. Nothing like seeing a station wagon hold its own in a pack of M3s.
I am assuming you just don't know that the BMW E34 M5 Touring was actually made. A total of 891 of them were built from '92 to '95 model years, but it was never sold in North America due to price and certifying the S38B38 engine (3.8L 340hp/295 ft-lb). I bought one in Germany and spent nearly a year to get it federalized and imported.
Thanks for doing some homework for me. Seriously.
The quote of "only 4" cars is something I took from Car & Driver Magazine, and I am unsure how they may have qualified it.
Your list is very instructive though; all of those cars would be considered "exotics" (the Jag a little less so) and I do believe that some of them (the 512BBi and Jalpa for starters) were not available for sale in the US due primarily to emissions.
A little more research may be needed to be definitive, but I think the point I made is still valid; Power outputs that we take for granted in common cars today were very, very rare in *any* car back in 1982.
I guess not many posters here actually owned one. I had one for about 3 years in the late '80s, and am something of a car geek (I recently owned a 1995 BMW M5 Station Wagon, for example). Anyway, after reading the posting here, I feel the need to provide more accurate information about the car. The following are in no particular order.
Mobyy_6kl was basically right about the engine: The US saw a detuned version of the PVR 2.8L V6, though in US trim it's peak output was rated at 130hp (not 120) and ~165 lb-ft.
One important thing to realize is the state of automotive engineering at the time the DeLorean was sold. If you compare it to the cars being manufactured and sold today, things look very different.
While today's economy cars have engines as powerful as the DeLorean's; In 1982, there were only 4 car models being sold that were rated as having over 200 peak horsepower. Only 4. Today, virtually every family sedan has more power than that. DeLorean One now sells a tuned and upgraded version of the very same engine that puts out around 195 hp.
The build quality of "exotic" cars has drastically changed since the time of the DeLorean. For it's time, the quality, and fit-and-finish (of the later build cars especially) of the DeLorean were very good. If you ever go look at an exotic car from that era, say a Ferrari 308, look carefully at the interior and panels, check the gaps and how straight the lines and seams are. Examine the switchgear. The Ferrari of the time was not much better than a kit car, and can't compare the build quality of today's "exotics". We can thank very rapid technology and quality advancement, not to mention the Acura NSX for giving the rest of the industry a lesson on build quality and reliability.
The DeLorean was envisioned as more of a Luxury/Grand Touring coupe than a pure performance car. It also has its roots in a 1970's safety car design.
A lot of parts were sourced from other manufacturers, making service interesting and sometimes much less expensive than it otherwise would be. The 'backbone' the car sits on is from Lotus (Lotus Esprit) as well as the windshield. The brakes/pads were from the same company that was supplying Jaguar at the time. The A/C system was a GM/Delco unit, same as on some Cadillacs. And so on...
Though underpowered, the handling was good for the time, especially considering its 65/35 rear weight distribution (it was a true rear-engine car, not mid-engine). Lotus, whose engineering group is still doing chassis tuning for other car companies today, is responsible for the DeLoreans handling. Note the rear tires were larger than the fronts. Try tossing around a Fiero to see the difference the engineering makes. The brakes were pretty good for their time (pre ABS/Monster rotor size).
Build Quality and reliability increased with production (VIN) number. The first thousand or so cars had to be extensively re-worked when they arrived in the USA to fix manufacturing and design errors. Later cars were bolted together much, much better. And I do mean bolter. I swear that you could almost completely tear down a DeLorean with just a 10mm socket wrench. Also, there were about 2200 design changes (big and small) from the first car to the last one off the line. I know several late '81s that had over 100,000 miles put on them without needing excessive maintenance.
Most of the DeLoreans were 1981 models, with a few '82 and '83 models. The DeLorean plant shut down and restarted near the end. Early '81s had black interiors, and the rest had Grey (a big improvement IMHO). For the '82s and '83s you could get the Black interior as an option. It was a comfy car to ride in. I had passengers fall asleep on me several times.
None of the cars was ever painted at the factory. All painted cars were done aftermarket. The thick type 304 Stainless Steel panels had an epoxy coating and were designed to last at least 25 years. At the time of the DeLorean's design, most cars still regul
Thank you, both of you who replied...
Your helpful attitude is totally opposite of the attitude I ran into 10 years ago when I asked for help online.
If that's a common reaction, then the Linux comminty has come a long, long way along with the OS and software. I'm looking forward to trying it out and feeling secure again.