I think this is how the Dreamcast CD boot system works-- to get the thing to boot a CDR, you have to copy a magic 32K header called IP.BIN into the top of an ISO image, part of which it runs, but before running it, it checks it byte-for-byte against a copy held in the Dreamcast's ROM. This code naturally displays a screen saying `Licensed and endorsed by Sega Enterprises' which of course ain't so for homebrew developers. Having said this, Sega don't seem to have batted an eyelid that copies of this code are floating around on the various DC development sites... somebody else mentioned on this thread that Sega tried to claim (c) on three bytes which were needed to authenticate a Genesis cart after Acclaim reverse-engineered them. Maybe they're not so bothered about it these days?
Console factionism (a bit offtopic, but hey...)
on
XBox Tidbits
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· Score: 3
I always wonder why a group of grown-ups on higher-than-average salaries want to bitch about which console will be best, fastest, make them look hard with their mates etc. but really all these bits of hardware do the same thing! Dreamcasts, Playstations and N64s are all `silly money' now, even when you're paying in UK pounds like I am. I mean, you hardly need to lay out any cash at all for the system, and the games are all largely the same price. If there are more than a few games you're willing to splash out on for a particular console, why not just buy them all and bitch about which is the better game?
Most of the discussion even a few months into a new console's life (this goes for the PS2 in spades) is centered around such-and-such a feature of a console not facilitating good games, or distribution problems, or publisher problems. The hardware is all pretty much without question really exciting and interesting across the board (multiple processors, exciting graphics chips etc., a real trip if you're only used to programming PCs) if you're genuinely interested in that, but that's pretty much by the by. They're all capable of giving exactly the same amount of fun, and fabulous, jaw-dropping games are increasingly not necessarily technical feats any more. So at the end of the day, it really, really doesn't matter what hardware is in these boxes-- all we're arguing about is the hype, surrounding them: unreleased consoles are great for this.
A supercomputer on a chip, much much more than a games console, fast internet access blah blah blah. Has everyone forgotten how much of Sony's PR bilge was regurgitated in the runup to the PS2 launch? The let-down launch titles, the buggy DVD software, the self-corrupting memory cards? Are the world's media already taking backhanders to hype up the PS3? Let's forget all about it until the launch and judge it the contents of the box in 2004, hmmm?
Er, since I'm addressing the humor-impaired, I should probably point out that http://www.kleinbottle.com is a joke as well.
No it's not, A friend ordered one from them and he's drunk beer out of it! It comes with a couple of sides of A4 about what to do if you're exporting it into any universe which has more or less than three dimensions (consult a registered quantum mechanic etc.).
Only one site has the truth: Where Are The Toons Now? Apparently Optimus Prime became a garbage truck; sad, but I think he's happier that way. Also features a documentary on He-Man's conversion from Master Of The Universe to disco diva; Grayskull never looked so pink...
People seem to be mentioning the obvious targets: Knuth, BSD etc. but I notice nobody has mentioned Dan Bernstein's projects, notably qmail. This guy basically didn't trust the standard C library routines for security and wrote his own string handling, file processing etc. based on a few system calls. He also splits up his programs into separate binaries as much as possible and is very, very minimalist in other ways too. The code seems quite impenetrable at first, I'm not sure beautiful is the right word, but it's certainly an education.
Also worth a read is Sam Latinga's C++ port of the classic Mac game Maelstrom. The actual code of the game is surprisingly small and very well-written.
Oh, and while I think about it, the InfoZip sources are a real surprise too-- I mean this code is one of the most portable pieces of code you'll ever see; they're a very good example of the sort of lengths you'll need to go to in order to achieve this kind of portability, and it's still elegant in my opinion.
I always wondered why noone has exploited the possibility of selling ad-space in the game... I think it would be about as effective as real world advertising.
Sure, remember the Playstation version of Wipeout 2097? All the tracks were littered with Red Bull banners. Also there was a cute Genesis platformer a few years back called Cool Spot, sponsored by 7-UP. Your character was the red spot from the middle of the 7-UP logo with arms, legs and shades, and the bonus levels were set inside bottles of 7-UP where you had to ride up to the top on bubbles. Also, there was Zool, another cutesy platformer where you had to pick up Chupa Chups lollies for bonuses. I think in all cases, the advertiser's money resulted in a much better game (or maybe I never played any sponsored games that sucked); it's a shame it doesn't happen more often, to be honest, since I can't see that games developers wouldn't mind funding from somebody whose interest isn't solely in meeting the next milestone or publishing deadline. But as somebody else pointed out, I can't see many advertisers wanting to have their ads in games where their shiny logo could be splattered with gore:-)
That this story was on the front page on over two weeks ago. I think the memory of the average Slashdot reader must be decreasing; or was it just that none of its readership was sad enough to be reading Slashdot on Boxing day? Nah, don't pull my leg, you're all at least as sad as me:-)
They're called "early adopters" and they're the sort of people who already have an HDTV set, and are frothing at the mouth to be able to record "Everybody Loves Raymond" in super high fidelity.
Sure, but not all technology is destined to trickle down in price to the point where `everyone' will want it; Laserdisc certainly didn't. I don't know what sort of factors would affect this mass consumer take-off.
Somebody's obviously alerted them to the fact that every copy of XFree86 4.0 is using TrueType fonts, but what can Apple gain out of this? They can hardly hope to get license fees out of it; FreeType will just remove the hinting bytecode interpreter and everyone will have slightly naffer looking fonts. Presumably, though, their worry is that competitors will use FreeType to make the products a pretty as Apple's . But it seems like a bit of a PR gaffe to have a go at people working from a freely-published specification to achieve this end. Patent warfare, especially software patent warfare, is just about trying to build up `amicable' cross-licensing agreements where the law will allow, but free software authors can't play this game. It doesn't really matter that they worked from a specification that Apple provided, and that this might be legal-- lawsuits & threats of lawsuits are a pretty good way of getting free software authors to yank code, whatever the reason.
) Is it true that the WINE project could one day run Windows programs faster than Windows does itself?
It already does! Or at least last time I ran the N64 emulator UltraHLE, WINE ran it a few fps higher than Windows did (according to its internal fps counter).
Hey presto! You too can have a 50 workstation lab for $10,000!
Except that the street price of $150 is subsidised by the fact that Sega expect to get money off you buying their licensed games. I'm not sure how much the Dreamcast would cost (much more than double, if you compare it to similar-spec PC hardware) if they weren't trying to account for games purchases.
If it runs Linux (as it does, we're told), then it should work fine as a IP-masquerading gateway
Might be tough given that you can fit it with either the modem or the ethernet adaptor into its expansion port! And I might be wrong but the `serial' port (not really a serial port, you need a bit of bridge circuitry to connect it to a PC) only goes at 3-4K / second, hardly lightning fast.
The same link has a story about a company selling ray guns that would let police painlessly immobilize criminals in their tracks; much more interesting than an armoured laptop, I think you'll agree:-)
That's a co-incidence; I'm from Oxford, and when I was small my parents used to live in the house next-door to Tolkien too (albeit a few years after his death). The house still has a little plaque on it.
Re:Now give DC a keyboard, mouse, X & a browser!
on
Dreamcast Runs Linux
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· Score: 2
Is there any easy way to connect any sort of standard keyboard and mouse to a dreamcast (like firewire or usb, maybe?). I know the ps2 has these ports, so it should be very possible to turn a ps2 into a really versatile computer with *STANDARD* components, right?
Well obviously Sega make quite a bit of money in you buying their gear, but the people at LikSang, a Hong-Kong based firm, make all sorts of hacky bits of hardware including a combined PS/2 keyboard and Playstation joypad adaptor, a memory card which plugs into your parallel port to store saves on your hard drive and a serial cable for you to download your own code onto the machine (which is how most guerilla development seems to be going on). All seems quite cheap, and they're very UK/US friendly, despite the $25 minimum order charge and `postage on application' policy:-) Try Jules' site for some more information and links to amateur Dreamcast development development. I'm just getting into it myself, though I think my DC is one of the very first which won't boot CDRs (grr mumble mutter etc.)
Yes, dammit! Given that my old Acorn A3000 (based on an 8MHz ARM2, 2MB memory) had anti-aliased fonts switched on by default, and the desktop still flew along nicely (the rendering might have been slow, but the bitmap cache ensured that the desktop was always responsive for a fairly modest outlay of memory). Here's a nice shot of the font rendering. No, I don't use it any more, so I can't possibly be a rabid advocate, but I know from experience that anti-aliasing isn't hard to do efficiently.
So Microsoft offers an additional option for people who want to use their software in terms different from the existing ones, and everybody just comes out and denounces them for giving their customers a choice. Yup, what a bunch of bigots on this site.
Ah, but you're assuming people choose to buy Office; it's something most PC buyers need and assume will come with a new computer system when they pay for it. The system bundlers are going to love this, because they can bring down the immediate cost of a new system, making it more attractive to potential buyers, but this initial saving is offset by the MS subscription fee. This is Microsoft shifting the traditional Wintel tax from the high initial purchase cost of a system to a more `spread out' model of payment.
So prices come down for computer buyers, system builders get to sell more systems, and MS assure themselves a revenue stream without having to stuff more bloaty features into their software to sell it. I'm not really sure what I think about it really:-)
Since the European Convention on Human Rights legislation came in to force the other week (in Britain at least), our legislators seem to have been running scared of falling foul of it, and people are saying a lot of existing British laws will be annulled or substantially altered by interpretation in the light of the Euro-dictat. As far as I can tell, the wording is so vague that (lawyers reckon) it's easily interpretable for the benefit of David in any David v. Goliath case. The satirical magazine Private Eye said it best in a cartoon last week (damn can't find it on-line), picturing a game of Monopoly, with a man reading from a Chance card: `Go to jail. Go indirectly to jail via the European Court of Human Rights. Get out of jail free. Collect £2,000,000.' It's pretty rare that you get this sort of sweeping legislation coming into force, and here's a nice example of it protecting on-line rights already (hurrah!).
Obviously MS have an excuse to sue if one person looks, but where's the harm in everybody looking? After all, the Windows programmers have had access to every piece of code ever relased under the GNU Public License since 1984! What I'm saying is based on the hypothetical that Windows source is / will be generally available, but then that's what all the don't-look-don't-touch hysteria is based on too.
On the offchance this is the case, why should one free software programmer fear litigation for implementing something that MS also implemented? What's to stop the programmer of some major open source software taking the opportunity to scrutinise Windows for appropriated ideas from GPL code? Obviously no free software programmer would be idiot enough to cut and paste Windows code, so if we're arguing on the stealing of `ideas' from code, and code from both sides is available for scrutiny, surely lawsuits could fly both ways?
I can see why the Samba / Wine people might be more wary than most but MS would have a very hard time grinding all international free software devleopment to a halt just because windows_src.zip turned up on a few FTP sites.
At the end of the day, most mature text editors have the same core functionality, but some make it easier to use than others. I chose NEdit because emacs is too complicated for my liking (and for anyone else who thinks you should be able to pick up an editor in half an hour), and if I wanted to change its behaviour on any small point I had to delve into the voluminous documentation. I'd previously used Zap, and Nedit is certainly the closest to this editor that I'd found. Its interface shows off all its features without the user needing any documentation, and there's a large `cookbook' type library of macros and syntax hilighting available which you can just plug in.
I'm not doubting the capability of emacs or vi, but I came to Linux from RISC OS, an OS where user interface design was very important, and so I don't believe you should have to spend any time at all learning how to use an editor. So when X isn't an option I use joe or pico-- I think you'd be surprised how many other `serious' programmers just can't be arsed to mess around with customising their editors when there's real code to hack.
Seeing as nobody seems to have mentioned it, there's a similar initiative being started by consume.net, aiming to do much the same thing around London in the UK. The first masts are going up at the moment, and apparently you can get quite a good range from the `Sarah Lee antenna', i.e. made out of a cake tin and coathangers:-) Maybe somebody who's actually used one can fill me in here, but the mention of it on the mailing list made me laugh.
Slashdot Mirror
I think this is how the Dreamcast CD boot system works-- to get the thing to boot a CDR, you have to copy a magic 32K header called IP.BIN into the top of an ISO image, part of which it runs, but before running it, it checks it byte-for-byte against a copy held in the Dreamcast's ROM. This code naturally displays a screen saying `Licensed and endorsed by Sega Enterprises' which of course ain't so for homebrew developers. Having said this, Sega don't seem to have batted an eyelid that copies of this code are floating around on the various DC development sites... somebody else mentioned on this thread that Sega tried to claim (c) on three bytes which were needed to authenticate a Genesis cart after Acclaim reverse-engineered them. Maybe they're not so bothered about it these days?
I always wonder why a group of grown-ups on higher-than-average salaries want to bitch about which console will be best, fastest, make them look hard with their mates etc. but really all these bits of hardware do the same thing! Dreamcasts, Playstations and N64s are all `silly money' now, even when you're paying in UK pounds like I am. I mean, you hardly need to lay out any cash at all for the system, and the games are all largely the same price. If there are more than a few games you're willing to splash out on for a particular console, why not just buy them all and bitch about which is the better game?
Most of the discussion even a few months into a new console's life (this goes for the PS2 in spades) is centered around such-and-such a feature of a console not facilitating good games, or distribution problems, or publisher problems. The hardware is all pretty much without question really exciting and interesting across the board (multiple processors, exciting graphics chips etc., a real trip if you're only used to programming PCs) if you're genuinely interested in that, but that's pretty much by the by. They're all capable of giving exactly the same amount of fun, and fabulous, jaw-dropping games are increasingly not necessarily technical feats any more. So at the end of the day, it really, really doesn't matter what hardware is in these boxes-- all we're arguing about is the hype, surrounding them: unreleased consoles are great for this.
A supercomputer on a chip, much much more than a games console, fast internet access blah blah blah. Has everyone forgotten how much of Sony's PR bilge was regurgitated in the runup to the PS2 launch? The let-down launch titles, the buggy DVD software, the self-corrupting memory cards? Are the world's media already taking backhanders to hype up the PS3? Let's forget all about it until the launch and judge it the contents of the box in 2004, hmmm?
This means that we're one step closer to making the most evil timewasting and addictive piece of software ever written portable-- do these people really think that what they're doing is moral?
Er, since I'm addressing the humor-impaired, I should probably point out that http://www.kleinbottle.com is a joke as well.
No it's not, A friend ordered one from them and he's drunk beer out of it! It comes with a couple of sides of A4 about what to do if you're exporting it into any universe which has more or less than three dimensions (consult a registered quantum mechanic etc.).
Only one site has the truth: Where Are The Toons Now? Apparently Optimus Prime became a garbage truck; sad, but I think he's happier that way. Also features a documentary on He-Man's conversion from Master Of The Universe to disco diva; Grayskull never looked so pink...
People seem to be mentioning the obvious targets: Knuth, BSD etc. but I notice nobody has mentioned Dan Bernstein's projects, notably qmail. This guy basically didn't trust the standard C library routines for security and wrote his own string handling, file processing etc. based on a few system calls. He also splits up his programs into separate binaries as much as possible and is very, very minimalist in other ways too. The code seems quite impenetrable at first, I'm not sure beautiful is the right word, but it's certainly an education.
Also worth a read is Sam Latinga's C++ port of the classic Mac game Maelstrom. The actual code of the game is surprisingly small and very well-written.
Oh, and while I think about it, the InfoZip sources are a real surprise too-- I mean this code is one of the most portable pieces of code you'll ever see; they're a very good example of the sort of lengths you'll need to go to in order to achieve this kind of portability, and it's still elegant in my opinion.
I always wondered why noone has exploited the possibility of selling ad-space in the game... I think it would be about as effective as real world advertising.
:-)
Sure, remember the Playstation version of Wipeout 2097? All the tracks were littered with Red Bull banners. Also there was a cute Genesis platformer a few years back called Cool Spot, sponsored by 7-UP. Your character was the red spot from the middle of the 7-UP logo with arms, legs and shades, and the bonus levels were set inside bottles of 7-UP where you had to ride up to the top on bubbles. Also, there was Zool, another cutesy platformer where you had to pick up Chupa Chups lollies for bonuses. I think in all cases, the advertiser's money resulted in a much better game (or maybe I never played any sponsored games that sucked); it's a shame it doesn't happen more often, to be honest, since I can't see that games developers wouldn't mind funding from somebody whose interest isn't solely in meeting the next milestone or publishing deadline. But as somebody else pointed out, I can't see many advertisers wanting to have their ads in games where their shiny logo could be splattered with gore
That this story was on the front page on over two weeks ago. I think the memory of the average Slashdot reader must be decreasing; or was it just that none of its readership was sad enough to be reading Slashdot on Boxing day? Nah, don't pull my leg, you're all at least as sad as me :-)
They're called "early adopters" and they're the sort of people who already have an HDTV set, and are frothing at the mouth to be able to record "Everybody Loves Raymond" in super high fidelity.
Sure, but not all technology is destined to trickle down in price to the point where `everyone' will want it; Laserdisc certainly didn't. I don't know what sort of factors would affect this mass consumer take-off.
Somebody's obviously alerted them to the fact that every copy of XFree86 4.0 is using TrueType fonts, but what can Apple gain out of this? They can hardly hope to get license fees out of it; FreeType will just remove the hinting bytecode interpreter and everyone will have slightly naffer looking fonts. Presumably, though, their worry is that competitors will use FreeType to make the products a pretty as Apple's . But it seems like a bit of a PR gaffe to have a go at people working from a freely-published specification to achieve this end. Patent warfare, especially software patent warfare, is just about trying to build up `amicable' cross-licensing agreements where the law will allow, but free software authors can't play this game. It doesn't really matter that they worked from a specification that Apple provided, and that this might be legal-- lawsuits & threats of lawsuits are a pretty good way of getting free software authors to yank code, whatever the reason.
) Is it true that the WINE project could one day run Windows programs faster than Windows does itself?
It already does! Or at least last time I ran the N64 emulator UltraHLE, WINE ran it a few fps higher than Windows did (according to its internal fps counter).
Hey presto! You too can have a 50 workstation lab for $10,000!
Except that the street price of $150 is subsidised by the fact that Sega expect to get money off you buying their licensed games. I'm not sure how much the Dreamcast would cost (much more than double, if you compare it to similar-spec PC hardware) if they weren't trying to account for games purchases.
If it runs Linux (as it does, we're told), then it should work fine as a IP-masquerading gateway
Might be tough given that you can fit it with either the modem or the ethernet adaptor into its expansion port! And I might be wrong but the `serial' port (not really a serial port, you need a bit of bridge circuitry to connect it to a PC) only goes at 3-4K / second, hardly lightning fast.
The same link has a story about a company selling ray guns that would let police painlessly immobilize criminals in their tracks; much more interesting than an armoured laptop, I think you'll agree :-)
That's a co-incidence; I'm from Oxford, and when I was small my parents used to live in the house next-door to Tolkien too (albeit a few years after his death). The house still has a little plaque on it.
Is there any easy way to connect any sort of standard keyboard and mouse to a dreamcast (like firewire or usb, maybe?). I know the ps2 has these ports, so it should be very possible to turn a ps2 into a really versatile computer with *STANDARD* components, right?
:-) Try Jules' site for some more information and links to amateur Dreamcast development development. I'm just getting into it myself, though I think my DC is one of the very first which won't boot CDRs (grr mumble mutter etc.)
Well obviously Sega make quite a bit of money in you buying their gear, but the people at LikSang, a Hong-Kong based firm, make all sorts of hacky bits of hardware including a combined PS/2 keyboard and Playstation joypad adaptor, a memory card which plugs into your parallel port to store saves on your hard drive and a serial cable for you to download your own code onto the machine (which is how most guerilla development seems to be going on). All seems quite cheap, and they're very UK/US friendly, despite the $25 minimum order charge and `postage on application' policy
Isn't this question in their FAQ? Goes on for bloody pages too!
Yes, dammit! Given that my old Acorn A3000 (based on an 8MHz ARM2, 2MB memory) had anti-aliased fonts switched on by default, and the desktop still flew along nicely (the rendering might have been slow, but the bitmap cache ensured that the desktop was always responsive for a fairly modest outlay of memory). Here's a nice shot of the font rendering. No, I don't use it any more, so I can't possibly be a rabid advocate, but I know from experience that anti-aliasing isn't hard to do efficiently.
So Microsoft offers an additional option for people who want to use their software in terms different from the existing ones, and everybody just comes out and denounces them for giving their customers a choice. Yup, what a bunch of bigots on this site.
:-)
Ah, but you're assuming people choose to buy Office; it's something most PC buyers need and assume will come with a new computer system when they pay for it. The system bundlers are going to love this, because they can bring down the immediate cost of a new system, making it more attractive to potential buyers, but this initial saving is offset by the MS subscription fee. This is Microsoft shifting the traditional Wintel tax from the high initial purchase cost of a system to a more `spread out' model of payment.
So prices come down for computer buyers, system builders get to sell more systems, and MS assure themselves a revenue stream without having to stuff more bloaty features into their software to sell it. I'm not really sure what I think about it really
Since the European Convention on Human Rights legislation came in to force the other week (in Britain at least), our legislators seem to have been running scared of falling foul of it, and people are saying a lot of existing British laws will be annulled or substantially altered by interpretation in the light of the Euro-dictat. As far as I can tell, the wording is so vague that (lawyers reckon) it's easily interpretable for the benefit of David in any David v. Goliath case. The satirical magazine Private Eye said it best in a cartoon last week (damn can't find it on-line), picturing a game of Monopoly, with a man reading from a Chance card: `Go to jail. Go indirectly to jail via the European Court of Human Rights. Get out of jail free. Collect £2,000,000.' It's pretty rare that you get this sort of sweeping legislation coming into force, and here's a nice example of it protecting on-line rights already (hurrah!).
Errr©©© but Guinness is, like, disgusting! I went round the brewery in Dublin a couple of years back and exchanged my `free pint' voucher for a couple of glasses of orange squash instead© Be a man a drink real ale instead©
Obviously MS have an excuse to sue if one person looks, but where's the harm in everybody looking? After all, the Windows programmers have had access to every piece of code ever relased under the GNU Public License since 1984! What I'm saying is based on the hypothetical that Windows source is / will be generally available, but then that's what all the don't-look-don't-touch hysteria is based on too.
On the offchance this is the case, why should one free software programmer fear litigation for implementing something that MS also implemented? What's to stop the programmer of some major open source software taking the opportunity to scrutinise Windows for appropriated ideas from GPL code? Obviously no free software programmer would be idiot enough to cut and paste Windows code, so if we're arguing on the stealing of `ideas' from code, and code from both sides is available for scrutiny, surely lawsuits could fly both ways?
I can see why the Samba / Wine people might be more wary than most but MS would have a very hard time grinding all international free software devleopment to a halt just because windows_src.zip turned up on a few FTP sites.
At the end of the day, most mature text editors have the same core functionality, but some make it easier to use than others. I chose NEdit because emacs is too complicated for my liking (and for anyone else who thinks you should be able to pick up an editor in half an hour), and if I wanted to change its behaviour on any small point I had to delve into the voluminous documentation. I'd previously used Zap, and Nedit is certainly the closest to this editor that I'd found. Its interface shows off all its features without the user needing any documentation, and there's a large `cookbook' type library of macros and syntax hilighting available which you can just plug in.
I'm not doubting the capability of emacs or vi, but I came to Linux from RISC OS, an OS where user interface design was very important, and so I don't believe you should have to spend any time at all learning how to use an editor. So when X isn't an option I use joe or pico-- I think you'd be surprised how many other `serious' programmers just can't be arsed to mess around with customising their editors when there's real code to hack.
Seeing as nobody seems to have mentioned it, there's a similar initiative being started by consume.net, aiming to do much the same thing around London in the UK. The first masts are going up at the moment, and apparently you can get quite a good range from the `Sarah Lee antenna', i.e. made out of a cake tin and coathangers :-) Maybe somebody who's actually used one can fill me in here, but the mention of it on the mailing list made me laugh.