I went into the local Apple store to get an iPod for a present. There was a the iPod center, with oodles of iPods. There were the helpful employees. Helpfully helping (flirting) with two young girls. There I stood trying to get their attention. I knew what I wanted and just wanted to buy it. The two girls were just chatting it up talking about iPods and music and whatever. So I got in the regular line and waited 20 minutes to buy my present. Sometimes I wish I had tits.
And one more thing - Apple needs to do away with the grueling lighting in the store. Despite it being an open air part of the mall AND it being cold out, I was dripping sweat waiting in that line under those oppresive lights.
Compared to full blown Win XP or even Win 2000, the Xbox OS has very low overhead. While based on the same kernal and direct X apis, it has had tons of functionality stripped out of it. Not to mention it is optimized for one particular hardware platform, not generic x86. So ok "no overhead" would be wrong, but "way the hell less overhead than win XP" would be correct. Try running XP or 2000 on a 700MHz computer with 64MB of RAM. Then again on a nano board system you would have a lot more memory, which should mediate the OS overhead anyway. Not like the emulators need too much RAM to run.
Yeah I just said the hell with it and dropped 2 more gigs in my system for a total of 3. Overkill? Well I play World of Warcraft a lot AND I like to multitask, so I typically have web browsers and a newsreader loaded at the same time. This would work on a 1GB system but alt-tabbing to the desktop took a couple minutes to swap everything around. Now it takes a second. I've found Battlefield 2 to be a crazy RAM hog as well, and it performs much better with over a gig of RAM.
Well the C3s performance is kind of all over the map. If you look at these benchmarks you can see that a Celeron 667 is faster is most cases. I guess the biggest advantage the Xbox has in terms of performance is no operating system overhead. But yeah there really isn't any other option in the super small, cool and quiet space.
I don't know about that. For a PC gaming mouse and keyboard person - the revolution controller is the first console controller I've seen that might be decently suitable for FPS and RTS style games. I'll reserve judgement until I have one in my hand, but personally I think the concept is more interesting than some way out there crap like a VR head set.
True - but yeah I think the processors used in nano-itx solutions are not quite good enough for emulation. Well, they would certainly handle 8bit stuff fine - I don't know how well they would do 16 bit systems. Of course in a few years time I think nano size systems will reach a level of maturity especially since the mini has shown that there is a market for smaller computers inspite of the limitations you get from slower processors. I think it would be a neat project to transplant an Xbox into something more palatable - maybe a AV component looking case. Whoever designed the Xbox case sure knew how to make something look ugly.
"You could even write a nice menu system to run on boot to choose between emulators and games, making the machine seem more like a remade console."
What you are describing is exactly what has been done with emulation on the Xbox. Modded Xboxes use a menu interface such as Evolution X which makes it easy to select emulators, homebrew games or media center apps while sitting on the couch. The emulator interfaces are easy to use menus. Most of the emulators are ports of ones you have used on Windows, just with a new interface that is more suited to a TV screen. No need to select roms from a mouse driven GUI. The other nice thing about Xbox emulation is that all the emulators will use the full controller features. So for example, dual joystick play in Robotron or Battlezone works without any controller configuration. And although big for a console, the Xbox is small for a PC. And cheap as well. The only REAL disadvantage is if you are interested in emulating mid to late '90s arcade games or consoles. There just isn't enough CPU power. Although some of the N64 games that do work are quite playable. And of course for systems that had keyboards or keypads, there isn't one available (i.e. Intellivision, Colecovision, 8 bit computers). The selection of emulators is pretty much just as impressive as on the PC - Atari (from 2600 to ST), Coleco, Intellivision, Odyssey, Spectrum, NES, SNES, N64, GBA, Sega Master System, Genesis, NeoGeo, Arcade, Commodore 64, Apple 2, Amiga, Turbographix even a Playstation emulator. This page: Xport hasn't been updated in a long time but shows a good amount of whats out there.
almost but not quite
on
Kong Lives!
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Memorizing certain patterns could also help a lot when playing Pac-Man. For more information check out How to Win at Pac-Man. Ah, those were the days...
Not that it's changed much - most "boss" encounters in games these days rely on finding the "pattern" of attack and repeating it until the big guy falls over.
I don't play SWG, but I did try out the trial. I thought it was kind of goofy and buggy in places but not particularly horrible. A friend of mine who I played World of Warcraft with was an ex-SWG player, so I mentioned to him that Sony had totally changed the game around. He tried the trial and then shortly after - reactivated his SWG account and quit playing WoW. He had played SWG back at launch time, leaving just before Jump to Lightspeed came out. His opinion on NGE seems to be primarily that they streamlined a lot of stuff in the game. He is also enjoying playing the space flight portion which is now free and not a seperate pay expansion. It makes me wonder, how many people are like the author of the article and my friend? How many account reactivations have they seen?
Oh no, I got the joke and found it amusing. There just seems to be a contigent of slash dotters that finds modding posts with the words "mod down" in them to be funny. (waits to be modded down)
Leaving an MMO is practically the same thing. It "hurts" a bit at first, your uber character, your favorite places, your guildies - giving all those things up. If your like me, you've left to play something else and once you get sucked in you remember the sense of discovery and wonder that is missng from an MMO once you've "seen it all". I'm a nostalgic dork myself however. I make heavy use of the screenshot button as I play through a game. I also tend to make some videos using FRAPs that I can view long after the game is gone or changed or I'm no longer playing it.
Do you have any links or information about NWN servers? I played it single player and have played multiplayer with friends - but I don't know anything about the persistant worlds that people have set up.
"It is a bitch to try to drink alcoholic beverages while playing Unreal Tournament 2004."
I map the move forward to one of the thumb buttons on my 5 button mouse. So I can use WASD when I'm not sipping the beer, but can use the thumb button as run when I'm enjoying the frosty beverage. True you can't straff that way, but it'll keep you moving while you take your swigs.
I also suspect not as IE for Mac hasn't been udpated in AGES. This is simply the announcement of their end of support for a platform no longer in development. They do this with all their software such as when Windows 95 fell into the no longer updated and supported category. IE 5 for Mac has been old and outdated for browser for years.
"I've had friends who got into publishing and journalism after school... and they weren't the sharpest knives in the drawer. Assuming more of the same in the industry, I'm not prone to taking much seriously when journalists stray from objectivity and decide to weigh in with opinion."
Or restated:
"I had some dumb friends who became journalists so all journalists must be dumb."
If you use logic like that I would take a close look at your own intelligence level before damning an entire industry.
"Comparatively, Sony Online Entertainment (SOE, the developers of Star Wars Galaxies, SWG) have a few MMORPG's under their acquizition belt. Ultima Online, Ever Quest being the biggest."
Ultima Online is owned by Electronic Arts - not Sony.
They are both science fiction and both have the usual trappings such as space ships and blasters. Other than that they really don't resemble each other. Star Trek is takes place in the future with humans from Earth. Star Trek is about human exploration of the galaxy. Star Trek also commonly deals with with the human aspect as well - subjects such as sexism and racism have been addressed - human nature examined etc. Star Trek frequently addresses morality and ethics. Star Wars is set "a long time ago in a galaxy far far away". Star Wars doesn't try to relate to real people or human history at all. Star Wars is a rollicking adventure with clearly defined bad guys and good guys - even Anakin turns good to bad like a flip of a switch. It's more of a fantasy story in sci-fi trappings complete with knights with laser swords and princesses to rescue.
Most prominently that idiot who bought Commodore and tried to turn the Amiga into a game console during the "everybody make a console" early '90s. Watching the Amiga "Deathbed vigil" video is one of the most depressing experiences for an old Amiga fan. Aside from bad business decisions the one thing that really killed the Amiga was the same component that made it so greats: the custom chipset. The Amiga was so tied to it's hardware that it couldn't upgrade easily. Software was hard coded directly to the custom chipsets and even the one released upgrade (AGA) managed to break a number of game programs. And because the custom chips were directly tied to the motherboard, you couldn't upgrade an older Amiga to get AGA graphics. I myself had so much invested in my Amiga 2000 (big hard drive, '030 processor, deinterlacer, expanded memory), there was no way I was going to throw it all out for an inferior (CPU wise) 1200 and no way I could afford a 4000. Meanwhile on the PC side, VGA came out and rapidly became extremely cheap. The prices on PC hardware dropped dramatically. I was reluctant to leave the Amiga world - but the choice was between spending money I didn't have on a dying platform, or using a PC that a friend gave me for free after they upgraded. I truly miss the Amiga. It was a computer that was so far ahead of it's time that it took a decade for other computers to catch up and ultimately surpass its capabilities.
The article was entirely oriented to sales in the USA. The Commodore 64 dominated the 8 bit era. The Sinclair made no impact in the US. I agree it doesn't tell the whole story and misses a lot of important computer systems from other countries (MSX anyone?).
Franklin Computer Corporation produced several different models of Apple II clones throughout the '80s - even after being sued by Apple. The Franklin Ace computers were fairly popular and I new a number of people who owned them.
Slashdot Mirror
I went into the local Apple store to get an iPod for a present. There was a the iPod center, with oodles of iPods. There were the helpful employees. Helpfully helping (flirting) with two young girls. There I stood trying to get their attention. I knew what I wanted and just wanted to buy it. The two girls were just chatting it up talking about iPods and music and whatever.
So I got in the regular line and waited 20 minutes to buy my present.
Sometimes I wish I had tits.
And one more thing - Apple needs to do away with the grueling lighting in the store. Despite it being an open air part of the mall AND it being cold out, I was dripping sweat waiting in that line under those oppresive lights.
Compared to full blown Win XP or even Win 2000, the Xbox OS has very low overhead. While based on the same kernal and direct X apis, it has had tons of functionality stripped out of it. Not to mention it is optimized for one particular hardware platform, not generic x86. So ok "no overhead" would be wrong, but "way the hell less overhead than win XP" would be correct. Try running XP or 2000 on a 700MHz computer with 64MB of RAM.
Then again on a nano board system you would have a lot more memory, which should mediate the OS overhead anyway. Not like the emulators need too much RAM to run.
Yeah I just said the hell with it and dropped 2 more gigs in my system for a total of 3. Overkill? Well I play World of Warcraft a lot AND I like to multitask, so I typically have web browsers and a newsreader loaded at the same time. This would work on a 1GB system but alt-tabbing to the desktop took a couple minutes to swap everything around. Now it takes a second.
I've found Battlefield 2 to be a crazy RAM hog as well, and it performs much better with over a gig of RAM.
Well the C3s performance is kind of all over the map. If you look at these benchmarks you can see that a Celeron 667 is faster is most cases.
I guess the biggest advantage the Xbox has in terms of performance is no operating system overhead.
But yeah there really isn't any other option in the super small, cool and quiet space.
I don't know about that. For a PC gaming mouse and keyboard person - the revolution controller is the first console controller I've seen that might be decently suitable for FPS and RTS style games.
I'll reserve judgement until I have one in my hand, but personally I think the concept is more interesting than some way out there crap like a VR head set.
True - but yeah I think the processors used in nano-itx solutions are not quite good enough for emulation. Well, they would certainly handle 8bit stuff fine - I don't know how well they would do 16 bit systems.
Of course in a few years time I think nano size systems will reach a level of maturity especially since the mini has shown that there is a market for smaller computers inspite of the limitations you get from slower processors.
I think it would be a neat project to transplant an Xbox into something more palatable - maybe a AV component looking case. Whoever designed the Xbox case sure knew how to make something look ugly.
"You could even write a nice menu system to run on boot to choose between emulators and games, making the machine seem more like a remade console."
What you are describing is exactly what has been done with emulation on the Xbox. Modded Xboxes use a menu interface such as Evolution X which makes it easy to select emulators, homebrew games or media center apps while sitting on the couch.
The emulator interfaces are easy to use menus. Most of the emulators are ports of ones you have used on Windows, just with a new interface that is more suited to a TV screen. No need to select roms from a mouse driven GUI.
The other nice thing about Xbox emulation is that all the emulators will use the full controller features. So for example, dual joystick play in Robotron or Battlezone works without any controller configuration.
And although big for a console, the Xbox is small for a PC. And cheap as well.
The only REAL disadvantage is if you are interested in emulating mid to late '90s arcade games or consoles. There just isn't enough CPU power. Although some of the N64 games that do work are quite playable. And of course for systems that had keyboards or keypads, there isn't one available (i.e. Intellivision, Colecovision, 8 bit computers).
The selection of emulators is pretty much just as impressive as on the PC - Atari (from 2600 to ST), Coleco, Intellivision, Odyssey, Spectrum, NES, SNES, N64, GBA, Sega Master System, Genesis, NeoGeo, Arcade, Commodore 64, Apple 2, Amiga, Turbographix even a Playstation emulator.
This page: Xport hasn't been updated in a long time but shows a good amount of whats out there.
"Naomi Watts waving at you in a bathing suit"
should be
"Naomi Watts waving her bathing suit at you"
Memorizing certain patterns could also help a lot when playing Pac-Man.
For more information check out How to Win at Pac-Man.
Ah, those were the days...
Not that it's changed much - most "boss" encounters in games these days rely on finding the "pattern" of attack and repeating it until the big guy falls over.
I don't play SWG, but I did try out the trial. I thought it was kind of goofy and buggy in places but not particularly horrible.
A friend of mine who I played World of Warcraft with was an ex-SWG player, so I mentioned to him that Sony had totally changed the game around. He tried the trial and then shortly after - reactivated his SWG account and quit playing WoW.
He had played SWG back at launch time, leaving just before Jump to Lightspeed came out. His opinion on NGE seems to be primarily that they streamlined a lot of stuff in the game. He is also enjoying playing the space flight portion which is now free and not a seperate pay expansion.
It makes me wonder, how many people are like the author of the article and my friend? How many account reactivations have they seen?
Oh no, I got the joke and found it amusing. There just seems to be a contigent of slash dotters that finds modding posts with the words "mod down" in them to be funny.
(waits to be modded down)
Including the words:
"mod you (down)..."
in any slashdot post - is likely to get you... well modded down.
Check out these fine graphics!
Leaving an MMO is practically the same thing. It "hurts" a bit at first, your uber character, your favorite places, your guildies - giving all those things up. If your like me, you've left to play something else and once you get sucked in you remember the sense of discovery and wonder that is missng from an MMO once you've "seen it all".
I'm a nostalgic dork myself however. I make heavy use of the screenshot button as I play through a game. I also tend to make some videos using FRAPs that I can view long after the game is gone or changed or I'm no longer playing it.
Do you have any links or information about NWN servers? I played it single player and have played multiplayer with friends - but I don't know anything about the persistant worlds that people have set up.
"It is a bitch to try to drink alcoholic beverages while playing Unreal Tournament 2004."
I map the move forward to one of the thumb buttons on my 5 button mouse. So I can use WASD when I'm not sipping the beer, but can use the thumb button as run when I'm enjoying the frosty beverage.
True you can't straff that way, but it'll keep you moving while you take your swigs.
I also suspect not as IE for Mac hasn't been udpated in AGES. This is simply the announcement of their end of support for a platform no longer in development. They do this with all their software such as when Windows 95 fell into the no longer updated and supported category.
IE 5 for Mac has been old and outdated for browser for years.
"I've had friends who got into publishing and journalism after school... and they weren't the sharpest knives in the drawer. Assuming more of the same in the industry, I'm not prone to taking much seriously when journalists stray from objectivity and decide to weigh in with opinion."
Or restated:
"I had some dumb friends who became journalists so all journalists must be dumb."
If you use logic like that I would take a close look at your own intelligence level before damning an entire industry.
"Comparatively, Sony Online Entertainment (SOE, the developers of Star Wars Galaxies, SWG) have a few MMORPG's under their acquizition belt. Ultima Online, Ever Quest being the biggest."
Ultima Online is owned by Electronic Arts - not Sony.
They are both science fiction and both have the usual trappings such as space ships and blasters.
Other than that they really don't resemble each other.
Star Trek is takes place in the future with humans from Earth. Star Trek is about human exploration of the galaxy. Star Trek also commonly deals with with the human aspect as well - subjects such as sexism and racism have been addressed - human nature examined etc. Star Trek frequently addresses morality and ethics.
Star Wars is set "a long time ago in a galaxy far far away". Star Wars doesn't try to relate to real people or human history at all.
Star Wars is a rollicking adventure with clearly defined bad guys and good guys - even Anakin turns good to bad like a flip of a switch. It's more of a fantasy story in sci-fi trappings complete with knights with laser swords and princesses to rescue.
Most prominently that idiot who bought Commodore and tried to turn the Amiga into a game console during the "everybody make a console" early '90s. Watching the Amiga "Deathbed vigil" video is one of the most depressing experiences for an old Amiga fan.
Aside from bad business decisions the one thing that really killed the Amiga was the same component that made it so greats: the custom chipset. The Amiga was so tied to it's hardware that it couldn't upgrade easily. Software was hard coded directly to the custom chipsets and even the one released upgrade (AGA) managed to break a number of game programs. And because the custom chips were directly tied to the motherboard, you couldn't upgrade an older Amiga to get AGA graphics. I myself had so much invested in my Amiga 2000 (big hard drive, '030 processor, deinterlacer, expanded memory), there was no way I was going to throw it all out for an inferior (CPU wise) 1200 and no way I could afford a 4000.
Meanwhile on the PC side, VGA came out and rapidly became extremely cheap. The prices on PC hardware dropped dramatically. I was reluctant to leave the Amiga world - but the choice was between spending money I didn't have on a dying platform, or using a PC that a friend gave me for free after they upgraded.
I truly miss the Amiga. It was a computer that was so far ahead of it's time that it took a decade for other computers to catch up and ultimately surpass its capabilities.
What about Wizardry? Or the "3D" dungeon segments of Akalabeth and Ultima 1?
The article was entirely oriented to sales in the USA. The Commodore 64 dominated the 8 bit era. The Sinclair made no impact in the US.
I agree it doesn't tell the whole story and misses a lot of important computer systems from other countries (MSX anyone?).
Franklin Computer Corporation produced several different models of Apple II clones throughout the '80s - even after being sued by Apple. The Franklin Ace computers were fairly popular and I new a number of people who owned them.
Necrohomophilia?
I have no idea what you call it when an undead has the hots for the living though.