I worked on lottery machines and casino stuff for a while and we had some reports of machines racking up credits if beer was poured down the coin chute. Needless to say we needed to make a trip to the supply depot and try this one out.
Sure 'nuff, as the coin mech was drying out it would start putting out crazy pulses which the software was not rejecting:-)
After we fixed the software we had the duty of disposing the test equipment (hic) and beating the s/w folks over the head with the empties.
Hogwash. Piracy was only a problem when a game sold enough to get on the pirates radar screen. I doubt anything in the past few years besides "Golden Tee" has sold anything above a few thousand units. Better profit margins on DVDs, CD's, computer software, and console cartidges.
A bigger problem was keeping the distributors honest so they wouldn't sell into each other's territories:-)
When Midway bought Atari Games there was a huge culture clash - Midway was viewed by Atari as a cheap bottom feeder, and Atari was viewed by Midway as an inefficient waster of money (both true to some extent). My opinion is that there were some major disagreements among the Midway corporate level people and the Midway game designers about whether the purchase was a good idea, and that some of those people didn't try very hard to support Atari projects. Just the usual character assasination and not invented here stuff.
I worked at Midway and with Atari people, and I liked most of the people I met there. I think this move just reflects more of the agonizingly slow death spiral that Midway is in right now.
There have been a lot of layoffs and frustration over the years, and I wouldn't be surpirsed that there were cops or private security types - WMS (Midway's ex-parent company) has hired these types before during a production strike. Midway can be pretty paranoid about corporate secrets, but that goes along with the territory.
As for corporate culture at Midway, it's pretty ugly (my opinion). See http://fatbabies.com for a sampling of what some (very opinionated) people think about Midway and other fine outfits in the games industry.
They ceased arcade production at the same time as the rest of Midway - around summer 2000. AFAIK they were producing ports and independent titles for home systems.
About the last arcade piece they produced that did anything was "San Francisco Rush 2049".
lets see - IIRC NTSC video is about 4 MHz worth of bandwidth, and you want to sample at least 2x so that's 8 mega samples/sec. Assuming 4/2/2 sampling (8 bits/pixel) that's 8mbyte/sec.
MIPS has BEEN in embedded applications for a long time. I was using an IDT 3051 (R3000) core in an X-window terminal 10 years ago. They have been in laser printers, CISCO networking boxes, video games, X terminals and other high-end embedded gear for a while...
I think they should make a fuel cell that runs
on ethanol and accepts those little bottles of
jack daniels you get on planes - they cost
$3 to $5 too...
As an ex-Midway employee I suggest you examine their standard employee agreements - basically everything you ever thought of, they claim as theirs. You would have to get the fine legal staff their to write up specials for everyone who still wanted to do open-source stuff. Besides, it's a really sucky place to work;-)
a couple of things - 1) don't use modems - they introduce their own latency, disconnect, take a long time to dial, etc. The only advantage is they are cheap. 2) if you can, use some sort of
"dead reckoning" algorithm where for a short time
in the absence of any updated state objects will
continue along in a sensible way and you can slowly "bring them back" to where they should be when you do receive the data. This is a lot harder than running the games in a lock-step config, but much more lag resistant
It was also done on a much larger scale with
San Francisco Rush/Rush The Rock. I worked for Midway at the time. They had arcades in So. Cal, No. Cal and Chicago all hooked up and running, with tournaments and a ladder system. I really enjoyed playing it, but our machines were on "free play":-)
I believe the plug was pulled because of a combination of political squabbles and not enough revenue coming in vs. costs for all the leased lines, servers, development, etc. A big part of the networked play thing was trying to find a way for Midway to get some of the "take" beyond the initial sale price of the game.
How 'bout
in nor particular order:
- segmented architecture
- 486SX
- the 286 (and IBM's gateA20 hack to go with it)
- iAPX 432
- hyping the i960 as a graphics processor
- hyping the i860 as an IO processor
- hyping flash in '92 and screwing everyone by not delivering
- itanium scheduling
- i740 graphics chip
Mostly I hate them because I would guess that
80% of the people I have met who work for Intel
are total assholes. I figure I have probably
encountered about 100 Intel people - salespeople
field apps types, marketing, designers, and
management. Corporate arrogance seems to be the norm there.
Re:Some applications need the fastest cpu
on
Pentium 4 Delayed
·
· Score: 1
IIRC, xilinx will support multi-processing in the
place and route program if you have the right version and give it the right switches.
I have had simulations that ran for days on the hardware that was available at the time. 1.5 minutes just doesn't seem that long. Only problem is it isn't long enough to go take a bathroom break:-)
I am sure that AMD is working with them - Gateway is a huge OEM customer and those people have a tremendous amount of leverage with suppliers. Nothing in the story hints that Gateway is mad at AMD. I think it just makes Gateway look bad.
Re:The problem with Rambus compared to SDRAM...
on
Will Rambus Go Bust?
·
· Score: 2
I think this analysis is a bit flawed - if you give rambus the same 64 pins that you allow the DDR solution you find rambus parts winning in bandwidth by a large margin, plus you can have independent accesses going on the four different banks which might be nice if you have the CPU, AGP, and PCI all contending for memory at once.
I think rambus has done some very cool stuff. When they first introduced their technology (1991!) it was really gee-whiz compared to fast-page mode DRAM.
Their problems are latency, die size penalty, royalty costs, the care that needs to go into designing a PC board for them and one noone else has mentioned - test costs.
The testers used to test rambus parts are hideously expensive, slow, and can't test as many devices at once which leads to major throughput and cost problems on a factory floor compared to DDR SDRAM which uses an incremental improvement to the testers already in use.
If you read the whole press release in addition to the ARM core there are also two (2) Oak DSP cores in the device, which should give it plenty of DSP horsepower...
Slashdot Mirror
I worked on lottery machines and casino stuff
:-)
for a while and we had some reports of machines
racking up credits if beer was poured down the
coin chute. Needless to say we needed to make
a trip to the supply depot and try this one out.
Sure 'nuff, as the coin mech was drying out
it would start putting out crazy pulses which
the software was not rejecting
After we fixed the software we had the duty of
disposing the test equipment (hic) and beating
the s/w folks over the head with the empties.
Hogwash. Piracy was only a problem when a game sold enough to get on the pirates radar screen. I doubt anything in the past few years besides "Golden Tee" has sold anything above a few thousand units. Better profit margins on DVDs, CD's, computer software, and console cartidges.
:-)
A bigger problem was keeping the distributors honest so they wouldn't sell into each other's territories
When Midway bought Atari Games there was a huge culture clash - Midway was viewed by Atari as a cheap bottom feeder, and Atari was viewed by Midway as an inefficient waster of money (both true to some extent). My opinion is that there were some major disagreements among the Midway corporate level people and the Midway game designers about whether the purchase was a good idea, and that some of those people didn't try very hard to support Atari projects. Just the usual character assasination and not invented here stuff.
I worked at Midway and with Atari people, and I liked most of the people I met there. I think this move just reflects more of the agonizingly slow death spiral that Midway is in right now.
There have been a lot of layoffs and frustration over the years, and I wouldn't be surpirsed that there were cops or private security types - WMS (Midway's ex-parent company) has hired these types before during a production strike. Midway can be pretty paranoid about corporate secrets, but that goes along with the territory.
As for corporate culture at Midway, it's pretty ugly (my opinion). See http://fatbabies.com for a sampling of what some (very opinionated) people think about Midway and other fine outfits in the games industry.
You can pretty much pigeonhole the games out
today into 4 (maybe 5) categories:
drivers
shooters
fighting
sports
novelties (things like dance dance revolution)
They ceased arcade production at the same time
as the rest of Midway - around summer 2000.
AFAIK they were producing ports and independent
titles for home systems.
About the last arcade piece they produced that
did anything was "San Francisco Rush 2049".
lets see - IIRC NTSC video is about 4 MHz worth
of bandwidth, and you want to sample at least 2x
so that's 8 mega samples/sec. Assuming 4/2/2
sampling (8 bits/pixel) that's 8mbyte/sec.
MIPS has BEEN in embedded applications for a long
time. I was using an IDT 3051 (R3000) core in
an X-window terminal 10 years ago. They have
been in laser printers, CISCO networking boxes,
video games, X terminals and other high-end
embedded gear for a while...
I think they should make a fuel cell that runs
on ethanol and accepts those little bottles of
jack daniels you get on planes - they cost
$3 to $5 too...
As an ex-Midway employee I suggest you examine their standard employee agreements - basically everything you ever thought of, they claim as theirs. You would have to get the fine legal staff their to write up specials for everyone who still wanted to do open-source stuff. Besides, it's a really sucky place to work ;-)
a couple of things - 1) don't use modems - they introduce their own latency, disconnect, take a long time to dial, etc. The only advantage is they are cheap. 2) if you can, use some sort of "dead reckoning" algorithm where for a short time in the absence of any updated state objects will continue along in a sensible way and you can slowly "bring them back" to where they should be when you do receive the data. This is a lot harder than running the games in a lock-step config, but much more lag resistant
It was also done on a much larger scale with San Francisco Rush/Rush The Rock. I worked for Midway at the time. They had arcades in So. Cal, No. Cal and Chicago all hooked up and running, with tournaments and a ladder system. I really enjoyed playing it, but our machines were on "free play" :-)
I believe the plug was pulled because of a combination of political squabbles and not enough revenue coming in vs. costs for all the leased lines, servers, development, etc. A big part of the networked play thing was trying to find a way for Midway to get some of the "take" beyond the initial sale price of the game.
How 'bout in nor particular order: - segmented architecture - 486SX - the 286 (and IBM's gateA20 hack to go with it) - iAPX 432 - hyping the i960 as a graphics processor - hyping the i860 as an IO processor - hyping flash in '92 and screwing everyone by not delivering - itanium scheduling - i740 graphics chip
Mostly I hate them because I would guess that 80% of the people I have met who work for Intel are total assholes. I figure I have probably encountered about 100 Intel people - salespeople field apps types, marketing, designers, and management. Corporate arrogance seems to be the norm there.
IIRC, xilinx will support multi-processing in the place and route program if you have the right version and give it the right switches. I have had simulations that ran for days on the hardware that was available at the time. 1.5 minutes just doesn't seem that long. Only problem is it isn't long enough to go take a bathroom break :-)
I am sure that AMD is working with them - Gateway is a huge OEM customer and those people have a tremendous amount of leverage with suppliers. Nothing in the story hints that Gateway is mad at AMD. I think it just makes Gateway look bad.
I think this analysis is a bit flawed - if you give rambus the same 64 pins that you allow the DDR solution you find rambus parts winning in bandwidth by a large margin, plus you can have independent accesses going on the four different banks which might be nice if you have the CPU, AGP, and PCI all contending for memory at once.
I think rambus has done some very cool stuff. When they first introduced their technology (1991!) it was really gee-whiz compared to fast-page mode DRAM.
Their problems are latency, die size penalty, royalty costs, the care that needs to go into designing a PC board for them and one noone else has mentioned - test costs.
The testers used to test rambus parts are hideously expensive, slow, and can't test as many devices at once which leads to major throughput and cost problems on a factory floor compared to DDR SDRAM which uses an incremental improvement to the testers already in use.
actually Wyse stock is public already and has been for quite a few years. The only problem is that it is listed on the Taiwan stock exchange.
If you read the whole press release in addition to the ARM core there are also two (2) Oak DSP cores in the device, which should give it plenty of DSP horsepower...
This just screams for an ABM (anti-beerlistic missile) made of legos. Think of the fun the campus cops could have with that!