Because a lot of their arcade games are written with a lot of 68000 assembly in order to milk the most out of a very
old processor. In order to get their 2D fighers onto other systems, all that coding needs to be re-done - which is a
pain. It's much easier just to emulate that old hardware (which they're still writing games for) and have the whole
arcade game running on the home systems at a fraction of the effort.
That's possible, and remember, we're both guessing - but a similar story on IGN.com mentions new versions of Resident Evil specifically: certainly *not* a CPS game, and probably not a game with a great deal of assembly coding involved. --
... and remember, opposition parties *do* have roles to play, and they *can* influence what the government does. A party with a large minority of votes will have some influence on the country's direction. A party with a small minority will be pissing in the wind. Just because the party you vote for doesn't get power, doesn't mean your vote was wasted. --
They have source code, why would they use performance-hogging emulation?
It's more likely that they are writing their own compatibility layer for each plaform, such that the same game source can be compiled for each platform with few or no changes. Think of it as porting Linux and glibc from x86 to PowerPC, so that Apache can be compiled for both with no changes.
I suspect the E word slipped in somewhere along the line when someone who doesn't know what emulation is wrote a press release, or something. --
I don't know about US votes, but here in the UK there is the concept of a spoilt ballot: a voting slip which has not been correctly filled out.
Spoilt ballots get counted, and they are included in the announcement after the count.
I always vote, and I always find a canditate to vote for (usually the Labour candidate, although I was once strongly tempted to vote for Plaid Cymru's Cynog Davis, since he is an excellent constituency MP).
However, I have spoken to several UK citizens (*cough* - subjects) who never vote because they feel the whole thing is a sham / all politicians are as bad as each other / etc.
My feeling is that if you really have moral objections to all candidates, you *should* get up and spoil your ballot. Sure, your protest vote will get lumped in with the illiterates and idiots who just couldn't figure out how to draw an X in a box, but a high number of spoilt ballots *will* send out a message. It's better than being lumped in statistically with those too bone-idle to get off their arse and walk to the polling station.
This is silly. People seem to think they can define OS to mean whatever they like. Every has perpetrated a backwards argument, by defining Operating System to mean something UNIX is not, then going on to say "UNIX is not an OS".
It's like me saying "A modern car must have a CD player built in", then going on to say "therefore a model T Ford is not a car."
We have to learn that the term "OS" is nebulous and wooly nowadays, since *nobody* agrees on what OS means. (I've been arguing for a while in the Dreamcast coding world, for a Dreamcast UNIX port to facilitate quick emulator ports to the platform. The number of lamer responses I get saying "Jesus, if you want an OS, get a PC" you would not believe.). Use "Kernel" when you mean it, use "kernel and utilities" when you mean that, and save on confusion all around. --
In 1993, before the collapse of Communism in the USSR, but in they heyday of Glasnost and Perestroika, I went on a school exchange trip to Minsk. One of our daytrips was to Minsk University, where we were shown a lab, and it was explained to us in halting English, that they were researching the "transmission of electricity without wires".
The room was dominated by two enormous steel balls, and every second a spark passed between them with a deafening "click". We recieved no further explanation.
All true.
What's the point of this story? Um... I like stories. --
All these images already exist, as photos of the real events (in the case of the historic pictures). I'm concerned that people will start to think that these things didn't really happen if they see these images in the form of video game pictures without having seen the real thing.:(
So these pictures have created an emotional response in you, and led you to think about the nature of history, documentary photography, journalism, and art itself. I think therefore the artist has done a pretty good job. --
I wouldn't say he did anything revolutionary in the photo editing department. I've seen better novice work. It looks like he just used Paint Shop Pro's "clone brush" a lot.
That's not the point. Good art (to me. Art is by it's nature subjective) is about ideas.
Take something like the Tracey Emin (? or at least one of her peers) piece which consists of a solid wooden table, upon which every day the museum staff place two fried eggs (breasts) and a congealed donner kebab in pitta, bought the night before (vagina). Clearly, the artist has not brought her technique into this piece. Anyone can recreate the piece in their kitchen (assuming they have access to a donner kebab shop!) - but this piece makes points about gender issues, or rather it causes the viewer to think up their own points, which is why it's art and not an essay.
Similarly, but removing the subject from these presumably genuine (but does it matter? another thing to mull over) internet porn pictures, our attention is drawn to the backgrounds. Some are squalid, all are poorly lit; yet we block out these backgrounds when there's a naked woman in the foreground.
This is really great stuff. The Sims pictures are excellent too, although many of them seem to relate to events in American history which didn't factor into my education. That said, Beca's Daughters (renowned cross-dressing Welsh tax protesting farmers of history) might not fit into the concept too well... --
..But, why would anyone want this? It seems like just another 'rumble pack' like they had for the N64. Whoo. I fell, my mouse shook. Amazing.
Vibrating console controllers did indeed seem like a silly idea when they first came out - but when programmed well, they can be amazingly effective. Two examples come to mind. The bumps and crashes in Gran Turismo - the vibration really does add to the experience. Silent Hill - as your character becomes weak, his heart beats harder. The closer he is to death, the louder his heart beats, and the more the controller shakes, in time to the heartbeat.
This device could be the PC equivalent, although merely linking vibration to the audio output is probably not all that effective.
Hmmm... I used to live in a house with a very shaky floor. I wonder how effective it'd be to somehow link the vibration instructions from a Playstation to a subwoofer of some kind?
Also, I don't understand your conjecture that Mozilla will be easier to modify for future standards. Unless you have firsthand experience with the IE code, your comment is baseless.
I will never have firsthand experience of the IE source code because it is closed-source: that's *the* *reason* that Mozilla will be easier to modify for future standards. The comment is not baseless. --
Unless you're only transferring stuff to and from services at your ISP, all this is moot: it still comes down to the capacity on the ISP's pipes to their peers. These are the expensive links they have to keep upgrading every time RealAudio decide that streaming (insert high bandwidth streamable media) is a good idea... and that drives costs up for *every user*. Will the Quake players still be happy with unmetered access when they suddenly realise they're subsidising Video On Demand users? --
I use the 'net a lot and I don't want to have to count minutes (or megs) like I have to on my cellphone or long distance line.
I don't want to pay my ISP for the latest Slackware ISO that I d/l'ed, nor do I want to pay for playing Q3 all night...
Well, metered access wouldn't do you any favours. However, look at it from my point of view. I (actually a hypothetical me...) transfer a couple of kilobytes of plain ASCII email every day. I don't want to pay the same monthly fee to my ISP as you do. I don't want to pay over the odds for my tiny needs, just because the ISP is installing fatter pipes and faster switches for Q3 LPBs.
Actually, the ISP service I'm (the real me this time) crying out for is this: a persistent unmetered low-bandwidth (14.4 is fine) connection so that a small news feed and email can get through all day long, which I would hope to be pretty cheap, with the option to manually switch to a metred high-bandwidth connection for gaming and streaming media.
I don't think anyone (here in the UK) can provide me with that. --
The article states that case sensitivity has yet to be implemented. I'm not sure I understand...
I would have thought that case insensitivity would be the sort of thing you have to put effort into developing -- and that case sensitivity is something that "just happens"?... and AIX's JFS is already case sensitive, so what's changed?
Yummy. A SCART version for us Europeans would be peachy. Please, someone make one. My console cables are getting terribly worn from all that plugging and unplugging. --
Whatever my sympathies though, Linux is not a user friendly OS.
Putting my CS pedant hat on, no OS is "user friendly", because that's not a kernel's job. The UI shell running on top of that OS is another matter altogether. Red Hat or Slackware may not be all that user friendly for the neophyte user, but a TiVo is Linux, and that's mass-market user-friendliness (with the limited functionality that implies).
When the Dreamcast came out, and there were massive hardware shortages and general release niggles (faulty GDs, etc.) the media had a bit of a field day. I hope they give Sony the same treatment: a console launch is fraught with difficulty, but Sony seem to have been making promises they can't keep.
Meanwhile, in the UK, anecdotal evidence suggests that preorders are slow, which is a good thing because we're only going to get half the initally promised allotment. --
I've heard of being able to play online against people in an arcade, but there was actually a better idea that I have no idea if it ever made it, but they were talking about Memory card ports on Arcade cabinets..
Yes. There are characters in the Japanese Dreamcast release of SNK's King of Fighters 99 which cannot be unlocked without earning them by playing on the coin-op version with your Dreamcast memory card inserted. --
Cool, a journaling file system... Remove that off of Microsoft's 'Linux Myths'...
Woah there! Do note that although it's great progress for Linux, XFS for Linux is *still* in Beta. I gather IBM's JFS is coming along too, so the race is on. --
"Twitch" games like Quake might require low latency and moderate bandwidth, but there are plenty of games you can design within the constraints dictated by a modem.
Turn-based games like Chess, Backgammon and Whist are easiest of all. Something like Tetris (I yearn for Super Puzzle Fighter online multiplayer) would be doable. A MMRPG is certainly doable, as long as the action sequences were designed not to require too much large data.
Q3A comes out for Dreamcast very soon indeed: I believe it will be limited to 4 players online. Let's see what they can achieve. --
"Phantasy Star Online for the Dreamcast and FF11 for the PSX2 are both planned MMRPGs coming relatively soon.
I haven't followed developments on FF11, but I'm fairly sure PSO supports games with up to four cooperating players. PSO will be massive, it will be multiplayer, it'll be magnificent I'm sure -- but I don't think it'll be massively multiplayer. --
Userfriendly'ness is vital for a massmarket product. Beter than keyboards is to use microphones to exchange short voice messages.
The Dreamcast microphone peripheral, which US and Japan readers will have seen bundled with Seaman, will be launched in Europe with the online game "Dream Dorobo", in which two players on two Dreamcasts connected over the net, cooperate with each other using voice-over-IP.
That's great stuff, and it can't be long (although it might have to wait until Broadband is deployed) before console gamers can play (say) Team Fortress with voice communications. (although personally I'd prefer to see something more fun than a FPS). --
Yes, there are ways and means of burning a CDR which will boot code on most Dreamcasts (there are rumours of some new models coming out which are not amenable to this method). I suspect this method was reverse-engineered from the commercial Datel product "action replay CDX", which itself is not endorsed by Sega.
Bleem!'s Dreamcast port is also, by all accounts, not sanctioned by Sega. We live in interesting times...
Ah so many choices: X, SDL, SVGAlib, GGI, ClanLib, ngine... --
...until the rest of the consoles drop the morally bankrupt licensing arrangements that developers have to conform to, we are not going to be able to release a Free Software MMORPG client that consumers will be able to use on their Playstation/Xbox/Gamecube.
How about Dreamcast? You can develop for Dreamcast without using any leaked or proprietary information at all -- just reverse-engineered stuff. Start here.
Note that there is currently a lot of homebrew Dreamcast development going on under Windows CE. As far as I can tell, this stuff is compiled using pirated devkits, and needs pirated WinCE runtime files in order to run -- as Free Software advocates, I'd expect you to reject these methods, even though it means some extra work reimplementing hardware-specific code.
I understand that NetBSD/SH3 is progressing well on Dreamcast. Perhaps that and a SVGAlib port would be enough to persuade me to get coding? --
Slashdot Mirror
Because a lot of their arcade games are written with a lot of 68000 assembly in order to milk the most out of a very
old processor. In order to get their 2D fighers onto other systems, all that coding needs to be re-done - which is a
pain. It's much easier just to emulate that old hardware (which they're still writing games for) and have the whole
arcade game running on the home systems at a fraction of the effort.
That's possible, and remember, we're both guessing - but a similar story on IGN.com mentions new versions of Resident Evil specifically: certainly *not* a CPS game, and probably not a game with a great deal of assembly coding involved.
--
... and remember, opposition parties *do* have roles to play, and they *can* influence what the government does. A party with a large minority of votes will have some influence on the country's direction. A party with a small minority will be pissing in the wind. Just because the party you vote for doesn't get power, doesn't mean your vote was wasted.
--
They have source code, why would they use performance-hogging emulation?
It's more likely that they are writing their own compatibility layer for each plaform, such that the same game source can be compiled for each platform with few or no changes. Think of it as porting Linux and glibc from x86 to PowerPC, so that Apache can be compiled for both with no changes.
I suspect the E word slipped in somewhere along the line when someone who doesn't know what emulation is wrote a press release, or something.
--
I don't know about US votes, but here in the UK there is the concept of a spoilt ballot: a voting slip which has not been correctly filled out.
Spoilt ballots get counted, and they are included in the announcement after the count.
I always vote, and I always find a canditate to vote for (usually the Labour candidate, although I was once strongly tempted to vote for Plaid Cymru's Cynog Davis, since he is an excellent constituency MP).
However, I have spoken to several UK citizens (*cough* - subjects) who never vote because they feel the whole thing is a sham / all politicians are as bad as each other / etc.
My feeling is that if you really have moral objections to all candidates, you *should* get up and spoil your ballot. Sure, your protest vote will get lumped in with the illiterates and idiots who just couldn't figure out how to draw an X in a box, but a high number of spoilt ballots *will* send out a message. It's better than being lumped in statistically with those too bone-idle to get off their arse and walk to the polling station.
--
This is silly. People seem to think they can define OS to mean whatever they like. Every has perpetrated a backwards argument, by defining Operating System to mean something UNIX is not, then going on to say "UNIX is not an OS".
It's like me saying "A modern car must have a CD player built in", then going on to say "therefore a model T Ford is not a car."
We have to learn that the term "OS" is nebulous and wooly nowadays, since *nobody* agrees on what OS means. (I've been arguing for a while in the Dreamcast coding world, for a Dreamcast UNIX port to facilitate quick emulator ports to the platform. The number of lamer responses I get saying "Jesus, if you want an OS, get a PC" you would not believe.). Use "Kernel" when you mean it, use "kernel and utilities" when you mean that, and save on confusion all around.
--
In 1993, before the collapse of Communism in the USSR, but in they heyday of Glasnost and Perestroika, I went on a school exchange trip to Minsk. One of our daytrips was to Minsk University, where we were shown a lab, and it was explained to us in halting English, that they were researching the "transmission of electricity without wires".
The room was dominated by two enormous steel balls, and every second a spark passed between them with a deafening "click". We recieved no further explanation.
All true.
What's the point of this story? Um... I like stories.
--
Cheers for the correction. One of Emin's peers, though, yes?
--
All these images already exist, as photos of the real events (in the case of the historic pictures). I'm concerned that people will start to think that these things didn't really happen if they see these images in the form of video game pictures without having seen the real thing. :(
So these pictures have created an emotional response in you, and led you to think about the nature of history, documentary photography, journalism, and art itself. I think therefore the artist has done a pretty good job.
--
I wouldn't say he did anything revolutionary in the photo editing department. I've seen better novice work. It looks like he just used Paint Shop Pro's "clone brush" a lot.
That's not the point. Good art (to me. Art is by it's nature subjective) is about ideas.
Take something like the Tracey Emin (? or at least one of her peers) piece which consists of a solid wooden table, upon which every day the museum staff place two fried eggs (breasts) and a congealed donner kebab in pitta, bought the night before (vagina). Clearly, the artist has not brought her technique into this piece. Anyone can recreate the piece in their kitchen (assuming they have access to a donner kebab shop!) - but this piece makes points about gender issues, or rather it causes the viewer to think up their own points, which is why it's art and not an essay.
Similarly, but removing the subject from these presumably genuine (but does it matter? another thing to mull over) internet porn pictures, our attention is drawn to the backgrounds. Some are squalid, all are poorly lit; yet we block out these backgrounds when there's a naked woman in the foreground.
This is really great stuff. The Sims pictures are excellent too, although many of them seem to relate to events in American history which didn't factor into my education. That said, Beca's Daughters (renowned cross-dressing Welsh tax protesting farmers of history) might not fit into the concept too well...
--
..But, why would anyone want this? It seems like just another 'rumble pack' like they had for the N64. Whoo. I fell, my mouse shook. Amazing.
Vibrating console controllers did indeed seem like a silly idea when they first came out - but when programmed well, they can be amazingly effective. Two examples come to mind. The bumps and crashes in Gran Turismo - the vibration really does add to the experience. Silent Hill - as your character becomes weak, his heart beats harder. The closer he is to death, the louder his heart beats, and the more the controller shakes, in time to the heartbeat.
This device could be the PC equivalent, although merely linking vibration to the audio output is probably not all that effective.
Hmmm... I used to live in a house with a very shaky floor. I wonder how effective it'd be to somehow link the vibration instructions from a Playstation to a subwoofer of some kind?
--
Also, I don't understand your conjecture that Mozilla will be easier to modify for future standards. Unless you have firsthand experience with the IE code, your comment is baseless.
I will never have firsthand experience of the IE source code because it is closed-source: that's *the* *reason* that Mozilla will be easier to modify for future standards. The comment is not baseless.
--
Unless you're only transferring stuff to and from services at your ISP, all this is moot: it still comes down to the capacity on the ISP's pipes to their peers. These are the expensive links they have to keep upgrading every time RealAudio decide that streaming (insert high bandwidth streamable media) is a good idea... and that drives costs up for *every user*. Will the Quake players still be happy with unmetered access when they suddenly realise they're subsidising Video On Demand users?
--
I use the 'net a lot and I don't want to have to count minutes (or megs) like I have to on my cellphone or long distance line.
I don't want to pay my ISP for the latest Slackware ISO that I d/l'ed, nor do I want to pay for playing Q3 all night...
Well, metered access wouldn't do you any favours. However, look at it from my point of view. I (actually a hypothetical me...) transfer a couple of kilobytes of plain ASCII email every day. I don't want to pay the same monthly fee to my ISP as you do. I don't want to pay over the odds for my tiny needs, just because the ISP is installing fatter pipes and faster switches for Q3 LPBs.
Actually, the ISP service I'm (the real me this time) crying out for is this: a persistent unmetered low-bandwidth (14.4 is fine) connection so that a small news feed and email can get through all day long, which I would hope to be pretty cheap, with the option to manually switch to a metred high-bandwidth connection for gaming and streaming media.
I don't think anyone (here in the UK) can provide me with that.
--
The article states that case sensitivity has yet to be implemented. I'm not sure I understand...
... and AIX's JFS is already case sensitive, so what's changed?
I would have thought that case insensitivity would be the sort of thing you have to put effort into developing -- and that case sensitivity is something that "just happens"?
Can anyone explain what I'm missing?
--
Yummy. A SCART version for us Europeans would be peachy. Please, someone make one. My console cables are getting terribly worn from all that plugging and unplugging.
--
Whatever my sympathies though, Linux is not a user friendly OS.
Putting my CS pedant hat on, no OS is "user friendly", because that's not a kernel's job. The UI shell running on top of that OS is another matter altogether. Red Hat or Slackware may not be all that user friendly for the neophyte user, but a TiVo is Linux, and that's mass-market user-friendliness (with the limited functionality that implies).
--
When the Dreamcast came out, and there were massive hardware shortages and general release niggles (faulty GDs, etc.) the media had a bit of a field day. I hope they give Sony the same treatment: a console launch is fraught with difficulty, but Sony seem to have been making promises they can't keep.
Meanwhile, in the UK, anecdotal evidence suggests that preorders are slow, which is a good thing because we're only going to get half the initally promised allotment.
--
I've heard of being able to play online against people in an arcade, but there was actually a better idea that I have no idea if it ever made it, but they were talking about Memory card ports on Arcade cabinets..
Yes. There are characters in the Japanese Dreamcast release of SNK's King of Fighters 99 which cannot be unlocked without earning them by playing on the coin-op version with your Dreamcast memory card inserted.
--
Cool, a journaling file system... Remove that off of Microsoft's 'Linux Myths'...
Woah there! Do note that although it's great progress for Linux, XFS for Linux is *still* in Beta. I gather IBM's JFS is coming along too, so the race is on.
--
"Twitch" games like Quake might require low latency and moderate bandwidth, but there are plenty of games you can design within the constraints dictated by a modem.
Turn-based games like Chess, Backgammon and Whist are easiest of all. Something like Tetris (I yearn for Super Puzzle Fighter online multiplayer) would be doable. A MMRPG is certainly doable, as long as the action sequences were designed not to require too much large data.
Q3A comes out for Dreamcast very soon indeed: I believe it will be limited to 4 players online. Let's see what they can achieve.
--
"Phantasy Star Online for the Dreamcast and FF11 for the PSX2 are both planned MMRPGs coming relatively soon.
I haven't followed developments on FF11, but I'm fairly sure PSO supports games with up to four cooperating players. PSO will be massive, it will be multiplayer, it'll be magnificent I'm sure -- but I don't think it'll be massively multiplayer.
--
--
Userfriendly'ness is vital for a massmarket product. Beter than keyboards is to use microphones to exchange short voice messages.
The Dreamcast microphone peripheral, which US and Japan readers will have seen bundled with Seaman, will be launched in Europe with the online game "Dream Dorobo", in which two players on two Dreamcasts connected over the net, cooperate with each other using voice-over-IP.
That's great stuff, and it can't be long (although it might have to wait until Broadband is deployed) before console gamers can play (say) Team Fortress with voice communications. (although personally I'd prefer to see something more fun than a FPS).
--
Yes, there are ways and means of burning a CDR which will boot code on most Dreamcasts (there are rumours of some new models coming out which are not amenable to this method). I suspect this method was reverse-engineered from the commercial Datel product "action replay CDX", which itself is not endorsed by Sega.
Bleem!'s Dreamcast port is also, by all accounts, not sanctioned by Sega. We live in interesting times...
Ah so many choices: X, SDL, SVGAlib, GGI, ClanLib, ngine...
--
...until the rest of the consoles drop the morally bankrupt licensing arrangements that developers have to conform to, we are not going to be able to release a Free Software MMORPG client that consumers will be able to use on their Playstation/Xbox/Gamecube.
How about Dreamcast? You can develop for Dreamcast without using any leaked or proprietary information at all -- just reverse-engineered stuff. Start here.
Note that there is currently a lot of homebrew Dreamcast development going on under Windows CE. As far as I can tell, this stuff is compiled using pirated devkits, and needs pirated WinCE runtime files in order to run -- as Free Software advocates, I'd expect you to reject these methods, even though it means some extra work reimplementing hardware-specific code.
I understand that NetBSD/SH3 is progressing well on Dreamcast. Perhaps that and a SVGAlib port would be enough to persuade me to get coding?
--