The SGI boxes were not "just another PC". They had a lot of custom engineered components including the entire memory and graphics subsystem. Take a look at the information in this article from 1999 for diagrams showing SGI's architecture. While they did run Windows NT, the hardware was custom, not off the shelf x86.
Try some PocketPC or Palm (especially on a Tapwave Zodiac) emulators. Admittedly playing GB, NES, Sega Gamer Gear/Master System, Turbographix, Commodore 64, Apple 2 games isn't useful as in productive - it sure is fun. Gameboy Advance also has an excellent NES emulator.
This is only true of the Pentium M line of processors. Certainly not the current Prescott generation of Pentium 4s. Intel seems to have realized what a winner they have with the Pentium M. Performance is already very good with low power consumption. With dual core and updated motherboard chipsets supporting higher bus speeds, the next generation of processors should be pretty solid.
If you actually read the interview and not the stupid summary you would see that they did not rule out charging for games. They did mention bundling them as bonuses or special features for new games. This does not translate to me as "instant free all super cool Nintendo old games for you". Sure NES Donkey Kong and others came inside Animal Crossing, but they were included in the cost of the game. Not what I would call exactly free.
"will keep the kids happy with old games while keeping daddy happy because all he has to do is buy one or two sport games"
Uh. It's probably more likely that daddy will be playing the old nostalgic games while the kids play the latest Super Smash Brothers. I know the whole reason I got an Xbox was for emulation. Finally having a bunch of emulators which work consistently with a decent controller.
What makes you think Nintendo WON'T charge for their games? Nintendo has repackaged and resold Super Mario Brothers so many times. Just recently they had their latest line of classics for the GBA and each title cost $20. A bit high for Excitebike if you ask me.
Based on how long it took them to release the not quite ready for prime time Halo 2, I would imagine you are correct. Unless MS is really dumb and throws a whole lot of money at it resulting in some maybe pretty but playability is shitty Halo 3. Of course if they launched a Halo 3 bundle at the time of the PS3 launch, that also would be a good tactic.
It'll be a long fight for sure. Sony has a huge momemtum in the industry right now. I think the best thing Microsoft could do would be to have a serious bundle at launch (say Halo 3 included with the system) or undercut the market on the software side. I doubt that will happen, I guess it's one thing to lose money on the hardware, but no one seems to compete on software pricing.
"Microsoft lost over $500 million dollars selling Xboxes. There aren't many companies in the world that could afford to do business like that. It's really quite amazing. They are, of course, taking a longer view of things, hoping to build a marketshare that will eventually lead to profit down the line. I think that's a very questionable strategy, it reminds me a lot of the dot com era."
Taking a loss to squeeze a competitor and focusing on long term revenue versus short term loss is a viable business tactic for businesses with deep pockets. Where I live, we have two newspapers. One is owned by media giant Gannett (owners of USA Today and a bazillion other papers, tv stations etc.), the other is owned by a smaller Canadian operation with some local investors. So what does Gannett do? They allow the paper to drop advertising rates so drastically that the competing paper loses business. Gannett can afford to bleed a 20% operating loss on their operations for years. The smaller guy can't. Due to the lost revenues, the smaller paper gets forced into a position of pay cuts and layoffs. Gannett then sucks up the best talent from the smaller paper by offering better wages and benefits. Consequently quality suffers at the small newspaper and they lose readers. So they bleed in the short term, but they cripple the other company and establish themselves as market leader. Once in the market lead position they up their advertising rates and turn a profit again. Do you think the advertisers will run scurrying back to the second place newspaper? No, because the brand damage has already been done. They stay with the market leader. The model isn't exactly the same, but Microsoft is doing some of the same stuff. Look at how much press they have been getting since they started snapping up well known developers for Xbox 360? They are throwing their cash around to create a talent pool and a market base. Will they succeed to overthrow Sony? Who knows, but the battle is longer term and probably will still be going after the next generation of consoles.
I'd argue Super Smash Brothers has had the longest impact. The game still sells well years after it's initial release. And with good reason. It's a great multiplayer game that parents can feel fine letting their young kids play but it's appeal is not limited to the under 12 set.
You won't need high def to enjoy the innovative back catalogue of 8 and 16 bit Nintendo games from your youth that Nintendo wants you to pay money for again. You like Excitebike? Twenty bucks! Again! Cha-ching!
"I don't even own one yet and even I can clearly see that if they get the USA firmware fixed then this will in all likelyhood be the best current emulation machine."
IF, they get the firmware cracked and WHEN they get the emulators finished and up to speed. THEN it will be the ultimate emulation portable. It sure ISN'T right now but it has the potential to BECOME the ultimate.
For emulation, PocketPC and things like Tapwave have much better developed software and don't require owning the Japanese 1.0 version. The controls vary model to model, some horrible, some decent. The Asus PocketPC I own has decent controls for gaming. The Tapwave is better. If the PSP does get mature emulators and a way to run unsigned code on a U.S. model, I'll be the first in line to get one.
The GBA is more complicated than the SNES - but the reason you were able to run SNES games on those old Pentium 100s was because the early emulator ZSNES was written in assembly language. This also made the emulator pretty much impossible to port to other architectures. SNES9x is a more "normal" emulator, but runs much slower (although at 100% on any even reasonably modern CPU).
The video chipset doesn't have much to with emulating 8 and 16 bit 2D console games. Mostly the emulators are CPU drive. I don't know why your model has so many problems with emulators, my Asus A716 runs Atari 2600, Gameboy Color, NES, Game Gear, Sega Master System, Commodore 64, and TurboGraphix games perfectly. SNES is playable, MAME supports older games (early to mid 80s stuff fine). The Genesis emulator I have doesn't work too good, and my PocketPC is not fast enough for Gameboy Advance. Definately the screen and button layout on the PSP are better. I chose the Asus model because the button layout wasn't bad for gaming, especially with 8 bit systems that usually only had 2 active in game buttons. The "dpad" is also much more normal than the oddly shaped mutant things that are used on some devices. If/when there is a way to load homebrew on software on the newer American PSP models - I will certainly consider getting one. I've been in search of the perfect emulation handheld for ages. Let's all just keep in mind that this PSP hack isn't something every PSP user can use and also that PSP homebrew is in it's infancy. It'll only get better from here. Until it does, my PocketPC will suit me just fine.
Re:The "arbitrary barriers" are what annoy me...
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A Gamer's Manifesto
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· Score: 1
"And despite having enough weaponry on you to level Myanmar, you have to find a key."
That's priceless. The next time someone asks me what I'm doing as a slam dozens of rockets into the damn door I don't have the damn red, blue, yellow or mauve key for, I'll have a proper answer.
"I'm leveling Myanmar, dammit."
Re:#9: Immersion and the invisible hand of God
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A Gamer's Manifesto
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· Score: 1
I on the other hand prefer to have the ability to jump to my doom if I so choose. Especially for example when some mobs are chasing me down and killing me. I laugh and jump off a cliff, knowing at least that they won't have the satisfaction of my death. (feeling the need to deny AI mobs of the satisfaction of the hunt, now I admit there may be something wrong with me)
Re:#9: Immersion and the invisible hand of God
on
A Gamer's Manifesto
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· Score: 1
While the game plays best on ATI cards - the Nvidia card should handle it fine. I would check and see if there is a patch or updated drivers. I know the 64bit patch for Far Cry has some graphical glitching. My 6800 GT plays it decently, but I can't crank up the resolution as high as on Doom 3 or Half Life 2. But if the graphics LOOK bad (i.e. texture detail, model detail) there is something whacked going on.
I'm not arguing that NAT is the greatest thing in the universe and therefore there is no reason of IPV6. Sure I'd love to have real IPs for each machine on my home LAN. Provided of course that I had an easy to use and cheap IPv6 hardware firewall (hacking together a Linux box doesn't count). I'm just saying that in general for gaming in 2005 being behing NAT is not that big a deal.
(Unless you're a network guru and know what "port forwarding" is.) Most game faqs have help pages on how to do this. If you are configuring a Counter Strike server or something, odds are you will be able to figure it out.
I agree it's a bit of a pain in the ass to forward ports "on a whim", but once you are used to doing it and have the ports noted, it's not a big deal. Most games have one computer "host" where the others connect to it. Generally I've pointed the necessary ports through the router to the host computer. Local clients connect to the host via the LAN IP, remote clients cannect via the WAN IP. What type of games use a peer-peer technique that are dealing with more than two players? For any two player games the port forwarding works fine too. I'm not trying to flame, I just haven't seen this be an issue with games in a long time. I primarily play FPS, MMO and RTS games multiplayer.
I have 3 gamers at the house. It is extremely rare for me to see any problem with typical client/server games. Battlefield 1942, Unreal, World of Warcraft, City of Heroes etc. If I'm hosting a game, I forward ports through the router to the computer that is hosting. Local clients connect via the LAN IP, remote clients connect via the WAN IP. I've done this for years. Does a mixture of 16 LAN and WAN players on the office network fulfill your concept of LAN party? I would say this is MOST modern games, and not a *few*.
You're setting us up right? You are parroting the Matrix fan boys who dragged out the "you don't like it because you're too stupid to understand it" talk when reviews of Reloaded started to roll in, right? I mean you don't seriously think anything presented in the series was profound do you? I mean maybe if prior to seeing the films the deepest literature you had ever read was Archie comics.
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The SGI boxes were not "just another PC". They had a lot of custom engineered components including the entire memory and graphics subsystem.
Take a look at the information in this article from 1999 for diagrams showing SGI's architecture.
While they did run Windows NT, the hardware was custom, not off the shelf x86.
Try some PocketPC or Palm (especially on a Tapwave Zodiac) emulators. Admittedly playing GB, NES, Sega Gamer Gear/Master System, Turbographix, Commodore 64, Apple 2 games isn't useful as in productive - it sure is fun.
Gameboy Advance also has an excellent NES emulator.
This is only true of the Pentium M line of processors. Certainly not the current Prescott generation of Pentium 4s.
Intel seems to have realized what a winner they have with the Pentium M. Performance is already very good with low power consumption. With dual core and updated motherboard chipsets supporting higher bus speeds, the next generation of processors should be pretty solid.
Yeah hopefully it will run better than Virtual PC on Windows which still kind of sucks despite not having to emulate the x86 processor.
If you actually read the interview and not the stupid summary you would see that they did not rule out charging for games. They did mention bundling them as bonuses or special features for new games. This does not translate to me as "instant free all super cool Nintendo old games for you". Sure NES Donkey Kong and others came inside Animal Crossing, but they were included in the cost of the game. Not what I would call exactly free.
Mine idles at 0-4% on Windows XP. Of course the slower your cpu the more the overhead will be.
You say you want a revolution?
"will keep the kids happy with old games while keeping daddy happy because all he has to do is buy one or two sport games"
Uh. It's probably more likely that daddy will be playing the old nostalgic games while the kids play the latest Super Smash Brothers.
I know the whole reason I got an Xbox was for emulation. Finally having a bunch of emulators which work consistently with a decent controller.
What makes you think Nintendo WON'T charge for their games? Nintendo has repackaged and resold Super Mario Brothers so many times. Just recently they had their latest line of classics for the GBA and each title cost $20. A bit high for Excitebike if you ask me.
Based on how long it took them to release the not quite ready for prime time Halo 2, I would imagine you are correct. Unless MS is really dumb and throws a whole lot of money at it resulting in some maybe pretty but playability is shitty Halo 3.
Of course if they launched a Halo 3 bundle at the time of the PS3 launch, that also would be a good tactic.
It'll be a long fight for sure. Sony has a huge momemtum in the industry right now. I think the best thing Microsoft could do would be to have a serious bundle at launch (say Halo 3 included with the system) or undercut the market on the software side. I doubt that will happen, I guess it's one thing to lose money on the hardware, but no one seems to compete on software pricing.
"Microsoft lost over $500 million dollars selling Xboxes. There aren't many companies in the world that could afford to do business like that. It's really quite amazing. They are, of course, taking a longer view of things, hoping to build a marketshare that will eventually lead to profit down the line. I think that's a very questionable strategy, it reminds me a lot of the dot com era."
Taking a loss to squeeze a competitor and focusing on long term revenue versus short term loss is a viable business tactic for businesses with deep pockets.
Where I live, we have two newspapers. One is owned by media giant Gannett (owners of USA Today and a bazillion other papers, tv stations etc.), the other is owned by a smaller Canadian operation with some local investors. So what does Gannett do? They allow the paper to drop advertising rates so drastically that the competing paper loses business. Gannett can afford to bleed a 20% operating loss on their operations for years. The smaller guy can't. Due to the lost revenues, the smaller paper gets forced into a position of pay cuts and layoffs. Gannett then sucks up the best talent from the smaller paper by offering better wages and benefits. Consequently quality suffers at the small newspaper and they lose readers.
So they bleed in the short term, but they cripple the other company and establish themselves as market leader. Once in the market lead position they up their advertising rates and turn a profit again. Do you think the advertisers will run scurrying back to the second place newspaper? No, because the brand damage has already been done. They stay with the market leader.
The model isn't exactly the same, but Microsoft is doing some of the same stuff. Look at how much press they have been getting since they started snapping up well known developers for Xbox 360? They are throwing their cash around to create a talent pool and a market base. Will they succeed to overthrow Sony? Who knows, but the battle is longer term and probably will still be going after the next generation of consoles.
I'd argue Super Smash Brothers has had the longest impact. The game still sells well years after it's initial release. And with good reason. It's a great multiplayer game that parents can feel fine letting their young kids play but it's appeal is not limited to the under 12 set.
You won't need high def to enjoy the innovative back catalogue of 8 and 16 bit Nintendo games from your youth that Nintendo wants you to pay money for again.
You like Excitebike? Twenty bucks! Again! Cha-ching!
I keed! (sort of)
"I don't even own one yet and even I can clearly see that if they get the USA firmware fixed then this will in all likelyhood be the best current emulation machine."
IF, they get the firmware cracked and WHEN they get the emulators finished and up to speed. THEN it will be the ultimate emulation portable. It sure ISN'T right now but it has the potential to BECOME the ultimate.
For emulation, PocketPC and things like Tapwave have much better developed software and don't require owning the Japanese 1.0 version.
The controls vary model to model, some horrible, some decent. The Asus PocketPC I own has decent controls for gaming. The Tapwave is better.
If the PSP does get mature emulators and a way to run unsigned code on a U.S. model, I'll be the first in line to get one.
The GBA is more complicated than the SNES - but the reason you were able to run SNES games on those old Pentium 100s was because the early emulator ZSNES was written in assembly language. This also made the emulator pretty much impossible to port to other architectures. SNES9x is a more "normal" emulator, but runs much slower (although at 100% on any even reasonably modern CPU).
The video chipset doesn't have much to with emulating 8 and 16 bit 2D console games. Mostly the emulators are CPU drive. I don't know why your model has so many problems with emulators, my Asus A716 runs Atari 2600, Gameboy Color, NES, Game Gear, Sega Master System, Commodore 64, and TurboGraphix games perfectly. SNES is playable, MAME supports older games (early to mid 80s stuff fine). The Genesis emulator I have doesn't work too good, and my PocketPC is not fast enough for Gameboy Advance.
Definately the screen and button layout on the PSP are better. I chose the Asus model because the button layout wasn't bad for gaming, especially with 8 bit systems that usually only had 2 active in game buttons. The "dpad" is also much more normal than the oddly shaped mutant things that are used on some devices.
If/when there is a way to load homebrew on software on the newer American PSP models - I will certainly consider getting one. I've been in search of the perfect emulation handheld for ages. Let's all just keep in mind that this PSP hack isn't something every PSP user can use and also that PSP homebrew is in it's infancy. It'll only get better from here. Until it does, my PocketPC will suit me just fine.
"And despite having enough weaponry on you to level Myanmar, you have to find a key."
That's priceless. The next time someone asks me what I'm doing as a slam dozens of rockets into the damn door I don't have the damn red, blue, yellow or mauve key for, I'll have a proper answer.
"I'm leveling Myanmar, dammit."
I on the other hand prefer to have the ability to jump to my doom if I so choose. Especially for example when some mobs are chasing me down and killing me. I laugh and jump off a cliff, knowing at least that they won't have the satisfaction of my death.
(feeling the need to deny AI mobs of the satisfaction of the hunt, now I admit there may be something wrong with me)
While the game plays best on ATI cards - the Nvidia card should handle it fine. I would check and see if there is a patch or updated drivers. I know the 64bit patch for Far Cry has some graphical glitching.
My 6800 GT plays it decently, but I can't crank up the resolution as high as on Doom 3 or Half Life 2.
But if the graphics LOOK bad (i.e. texture detail, model detail) there is something whacked going on.
I'm not arguing that NAT is the greatest thing in the universe and therefore there is no reason of IPV6. Sure I'd love to have real IPs for each machine on my home LAN. Provided of course that I had an easy to use and cheap IPv6 hardware firewall (hacking together a Linux box doesn't count).
I'm just saying that in general for gaming in 2005 being behing NAT is not that big a deal.
(Unless you're a network guru and know what "port forwarding" is.)
Most game faqs have help pages on how to do this. If you are configuring a Counter Strike server or something, odds are you will be able to figure it out.
Notice I said:
"more and more like Fark"
I am commenting on this as being an accelerating phenomenon.
Asshat.
Oh now I've done it!
I agree it's a bit of a pain in the ass to forward ports "on a whim", but once you are used to doing it and have the ports noted, it's not a big deal.
Most games have one computer "host" where the others connect to it. Generally I've pointed the necessary ports through the router to the host computer. Local clients connect to the host via the LAN IP, remote clients cannect via the WAN IP.
What type of games use a peer-peer technique that are dealing with more than two players? For any two player games the port forwarding works fine too.
I'm not trying to flame, I just haven't seen this be an issue with games in a long time. I primarily play FPS, MMO and RTS games multiplayer.
I have 3 gamers at the house. It is extremely rare for me to see any problem with typical client/server games. Battlefield 1942, Unreal, World of Warcraft, City of Heroes etc.
If I'm hosting a game, I forward ports through the router to the computer that is hosting. Local clients connect via the LAN IP, remote clients connect via the WAN IP. I've done this for years. Does a mixture of 16 LAN and WAN players on the office network fulfill your concept of LAN party?
I would say this is MOST modern games, and not a *few*.
You're setting us up right? You are parroting the Matrix fan boys who dragged out the "you don't like it because you're too stupid to understand it" talk when reviews of Reloaded started to roll in, right?
I mean you don't seriously think anything presented in the series was profound do you?
I mean maybe if prior to seeing the films the deepest literature you had ever read was Archie comics.