The more likely situation is if Google stopped funding Mozilla, that Firefox would fall behind pretty drastically. Then most folks would be stuck with a choice between IE and Chrome. Some proportion of that group would choose IE, and probably stick with the default Bing search. This costs Google money.
I don't understand. You have to follow a person on Twitter in order to see their twitter posts, right? So if this audience of millions isn't interested in DARPA, why would they follow DARPA on twitter?
If you teach your kids to take care of their stuff, you avoid many, many future battles. Teaching kids a little responsibility and the value of a dollar is your job as a parent. If you choose not to fight that battle, you are failing your children.
Actually, I *do* believe Valve will provide patches if they were ever to shutdown
If Valve were to go out of business, they'd be sold to another entity, or just plain be liquidated. Gabe wouldn't have the rights to release patches anymore.
Unless the patches exist today, and are held in escrow by an independent third party, that promise is worth nothing.
Of course emulators will exist. Emulators already exist for most games more than 10 years old. There's no reason to believe they won't exist in 80 years. Even if we get to the point where we're unable to compile Dosbox or MAME, we will have emulators for platforms that can.
The amount of money that it would probably end up costing to publish a completely separate, offline version would probably be greater than the money they'd get from customers
They don't have to put it in a separate box, or even on a separate disc. I certainly don't buy the argument that it would cost more to do this than what they'd get in return. The bad press they're getting from this decision will cost them more than the developer time it would take to rip the networking out of the game.
And it isn't that Blizzard doesn't want you money - they just don't care about your money if they think their current plan is better than one that would appease you.
But it's not. They could increase their profits at negligible cost to themselves by publishing an offline only version. Corporate greed cannot be an explanation for this situation. Only stupidity or malice are adequate explanations.
John Doe in the middle of rural Nebraska is not Blizzard's target market. John McTravelocity is also not Blizzard's target market
Why not? There's not much to do in rural Nebraska but play video games. Same thing when you're stuck traveling. Our money is as good as anyone elses, so why doesn't Blizzard want it?
This is especially strange, because it wouldn't harm any of Blizzard's online customers if they released an offline version. If they sold an offline version that cannot interact in any way with the online version they would please a lot of people, sell a lot more games, and the whole thing would go away.
Blizzard simply believes they are protecting the customer.
You're not actually naive enough to believe that, are you? Blizzard simply believes they are protecting their bottom line, and fuck their customers if they have a problem with it.
Batman: Arkham Asylum was, for me, the perfect game. There was no grinding, no real difficulty spikes, and never did I feel that any boss or puzzle was impossible.
Doesn't sound like much of a challenge then. What's the point in playing it?
There are plenty of legal ways to get your hands on an Xbox hard disk image. All sorts of emulators require BIOS files that cannot be freely distributed. I'm not aware of any emulator author being sued on that basis.
Recycling means it's shipped off to Africa or China, where it's stripped for parts and sold back to us at a giant markup. What's not salvageable is disposed of in whatever way they can get away with in 3rd world countries.
Can you name a single game for the XBox that doesn't run on some other platform (be it PC or 360 or PS2 or GameCube)? I'm sure there are a few, but all of the popular ones are probably covered, so there's really a lack of need for a good XBox emulator
Gunvalkyrie, Spikeout: Battlestreet, Metal Wolf Chaos, Outrun 2 (really really good update!), Otogi 1 & 2, ToeJam & Earl III, Steel Battalion, Tao Feng.
You act like particle physics has no practical applications. It may be hard to see what the practical applications of finding the Higg's boson would be, but it's like Faraday said when asked what use electricity had. His response? "Madam, of what use is a new born child?"
All those latency issues apply to computer games just as much as they do emulated consoles. As long as there is a demand for low latency displays driven by modern gaming, there should be available low latency displays for emulation as well.
Personally I'm more worried about latency inside the emulator. Did you know MAME adds a frame of latency to every game? Someone hacked this out for use with various shmups. There is a minor graphical glitch it causes, but the games play much better. Google "lagless MAME" and try out some shmups!
Even if you treat it like a PC to be virtualized rather than a console to be emulated, you've got the unenviable task of writing the simulation of an entire operating system (which, while not based on Windows, does use a similar API, plus DirectX)
That seems like the wrong approach. How about emulating the hardware, and running the Xbox OS from a hard disk image (or real xbox hard drive)?
since there's very little hardware abstraction going on, you *do* need to emulate (or at least translate for) all the other components like the GPU.
But that sort of thing has been done for any number of other consoles (PS2, Wii, DS), so that's not a huge barrier.
You have a point there. Pixel perfect display is not fidelity, but that's one case where I think it's actually an improvement. In fact, I go as far as to upgrade my actual console's video-out to get the best display I can. RGB out on a CRT is really a thing of beauty.
Slashdot Mirror
The more likely situation is if Google stopped funding Mozilla, that Firefox would fall behind pretty drastically. Then most folks would be stuck with a choice between IE and Chrome. Some proportion of that group would choose IE, and probably stick with the default Bing search. This costs Google money.
OK, then design a slim card edge connector anyone can get to.
I don't understand. You have to follow a person on Twitter in order to see their twitter posts, right? So if this audience of millions isn't interested in DARPA, why would they follow DARPA on twitter?
If you teach your kids to take care of their stuff, you avoid many, many future battles. Teaching kids a little responsibility and the value of a dollar is your job as a parent. If you choose not to fight that battle, you are failing your children.
Because people would complain if they were wrong.
The cost of running an RSS feed is negligible. What specific advantages does Twitter have versus RSS in this context?
Actually, I *do* believe Valve will provide patches if they were ever to shutdown
If Valve were to go out of business, they'd be sold to another entity, or just plain be liquidated. Gabe wouldn't have the rights to release patches anymore.
Unless the patches exist today, and are held in escrow by an independent third party, that promise is worth nothing.
Of course emulators will exist. Emulators already exist for most games more than 10 years old. There's no reason to believe they won't exist in 80 years. Even if we get to the point where we're unable to compile Dosbox or MAME, we will have emulators for platforms that can.
They cant fire me for living in a blue house with yellow flowers growing outside
If you live in an ironically named "at will employment" state, then yes, they absolutely can fire you because they don't like your landscaping.
The amount of money that it would probably end up costing to publish a completely separate, offline version would probably be greater than the money they'd get from customers
They don't have to put it in a separate box, or even on a separate disc. I certainly don't buy the argument that it would cost more to do this than what they'd get in return. The bad press they're getting from this decision will cost them more than the developer time it would take to rip the networking out of the game.
And it isn't that Blizzard doesn't want you money - they just don't care about your money if they think their current plan is better than one that would appease you.
But it's not. They could increase their profits at negligible cost to themselves by publishing an offline only version. Corporate greed cannot be an explanation for this situation. Only stupidity or malice are adequate explanations.
John Doe in the middle of rural Nebraska is not Blizzard's target market. John McTravelocity is also not Blizzard's target market
Why not? There's not much to do in rural Nebraska but play video games. Same thing when you're stuck traveling. Our money is as good as anyone elses, so why doesn't Blizzard want it?
This is especially strange, because it wouldn't harm any of Blizzard's online customers if they released an offline version. If they sold an offline version that cannot interact in any way with the online version they would please a lot of people, sell a lot more games, and the whole thing would go away.
Blizzard simply believes they are protecting the customer.
You're not actually naive enough to believe that, are you? Blizzard simply believes they are protecting their bottom line, and fuck their customers if they have a problem with it.
That would be rewarding the developers for bad behavior.
They're not really surprised. They fake surprise because the alternative is worse. They just don't fucking care.
Batman: Arkham Asylum was, for me, the perfect game. There was no grinding, no real difficulty spikes, and never did I feel that any boss or puzzle was impossible.
Doesn't sound like much of a challenge then. What's the point in playing it?
Outrun 2006 is on PC and PS2. Outrun 2 is an Xbox exclusive.
There are plenty of legal ways to get your hands on an Xbox hard disk image. All sorts of emulators require BIOS files that cannot be freely distributed. I'm not aware of any emulator author being sued on that basis.
Recycling means it's shipped off to Africa or China, where it's stripped for parts and sold back to us at a giant markup. What's not salvageable is disposed of in whatever way they can get away with in 3rd world countries.
Can you name a single game for the XBox that doesn't run on some other platform (be it PC or 360 or PS2 or GameCube)? I'm sure there are a few, but all of the popular ones are probably covered, so there's really a lack of need for a good XBox emulator
Gunvalkyrie, Spikeout: Battlestreet, Metal Wolf Chaos, Outrun 2 (really really good update!), Otogi 1 & 2, ToeJam & Earl III, Steel Battalion, Tao Feng.
These are all good games too.
You act like particle physics has no practical applications. It may be hard to see what the practical applications of finding the Higg's boson would be, but it's like Faraday said when asked what use electricity had. His response? "Madam, of what use is a new born child?"
All those latency issues apply to computer games just as much as they do emulated consoles. As long as there is a demand for low latency displays driven by modern gaming, there should be available low latency displays for emulation as well.
Personally I'm more worried about latency inside the emulator. Did you know MAME adds a frame of latency to every game? Someone hacked this out for use with various shmups. There is a minor graphical glitch it causes, but the games play much better. Google "lagless MAME" and try out some shmups!
Even if you treat it like a PC to be virtualized rather than a console to be emulated, you've got the unenviable task of writing the simulation of an entire operating system (which, while not based on Windows, does use a similar API, plus DirectX)
That seems like the wrong approach. How about emulating the hardware, and running the Xbox OS from a hard disk image (or real xbox hard drive)?
since there's very little hardware abstraction going on, you *do* need to emulate (or at least translate for) all the other components like the GPU.
But that sort of thing has been done for any number of other consoles (PS2, Wii, DS), so that's not a huge barrier.
"A blurry mess" is not what I saw when I played Super Metroid with eg Super2xSAI
Yeah, instead of blurry SAI is distorted. It works OK on some sample images, but in practice it puts in a lot of weird angles that don't look right.
Scaling from 320x240 to 800x600
I never do anything but integer scaling. That way it looks exactly as it was designed to look.
I don't know what you're talking about. Linux has run on my desktops for 10 years.
You have a point there. Pixel perfect display is not fidelity, but that's one case where I think it's actually an improvement. In fact, I go as far as to upgrade my actual console's video-out to get the best display I can. RGB out on a CRT is really a thing of beauty.