There's a thread on this over on the PS2-Linux community forum, although it looks like it ain't working yet. If anyone can help out, please do! I've been using Dillo on my PS2Linux, and it works fine, but isn't really an industrial-strength browser.
Yep. A few years ago someone (I think it may even have been Dr. Dobbs or something similar) put out a CP/M CDROM that had both the OS and pretty much everything ever written for it on one CD. At least I think it had the OS...a quick Google search turns up something from Walnut Creek Software no longer available (http://www.euronet.nl/users/fvempel/walnut.html). Oh well. A Xenix CD would be cool, but yeah, I doubt one exists.
I guess I have old Win3.1 on a CD too, but dunno if I really consider that an OS. I've thought about adding old CDs of Netware 3.X or the like, but I guess technically newer versions of Netware are still available from Novell, so it doesn't really meet my definition of a dead OS. Probably ought to:-)
I've got a collection of 'dead PC operating system' CDs that'll make nice wall art some day. I guess I'm defining "dead" as an operating system that you can't buy anymore or is otherwise unsupported today.
So far, I have original install CDs from:
SCO Openserver 5 NextStep Novell UnixWare OS/2 BeOS (but just a demo CD, sigh) An old DOS CD
Anyone have any suggestions on CDs to add? I'm still looking for a rare CD of a rumored version of AIX that was for the PC, not RS/6000. Never seen it, though. And I missed out on the chance to get that CP/M CD a while back.
Re:Other innovative early games
on
Netrek
·
· Score: 1
Xtank was an excellent early game that the older X11 crowd might recall.
nVidia is notoriously bad at this; their DirectX drivers are quite stable, but OpenGL blue screens left and right (especially with a lot of detail in the scene graph). I always wondered why they even bothered to include OpenGL support in their drivers, although I suppose with such a major standard they have pretty much no choice.
This puzzles me. Aren't there a large number of engineers originally from SGI at nVidia (e.g. Mark Kilgard and the like) who used to be the original OpenGL "gurus"? You would think they'd know OpenGL cold?
You're both right. The current GDI model with the standard "Windows Driver Model" type drivers just passes standard GDI drawing commands, and the driver is responsible for dealing with them.
That said, there are many printer devices that aren't "WDM", including the weird large-format printers, plotters, and copy-shop stuff. For these, GDI has "backdoors" and other trickery that allows some drivers and apps to send data directly to the device, bypassing GDI's interpretation. An example might be dumping a huge raster image at 600DPI 24-bit color to a 36" paper-size plotter. For this sort of thing, GDI will run out of memory trying to interpret the whole thing, and you have to send things down in "bands", as zulux points out.
The bulk of printers that everyone uses these days are pretty much WDM compatible, so GDI generally works. For those devices that ain't, it's pretty nasty business.
Maya is in the process of being ported to OSX, but AFAIK, isn't quite complete yet. Lightwave has been ported to the Mac, but users aren't terribly happy with the stability of the port. The other applications you mention aren't really in the same league, or even for the same purposes (e.g. Bryce is really for rendering landscapes and backgrounds. It's not a heavy-duty animation tool). Blender is indeed available, but its interface takes a little getting used to (but remember, it's about the results, not the interface:-).
One application you should've mentioned and didn't is Electric Image, which has been used by ILM and others, and started its life out on Macs.
Truth is, there are some gaps to fill in Mac 3D animation tool selection. However, with OSX being a bit more SMP friendly, the gaps may get filled.
Although it's called VisualLISP, does pretty un-LISP like stuff, and other weirdness, like an actual LISP IDE. But nonetheless, it's a major software package that uses LISP.
The Engineer has TNT to can blow up walls, can disable other peoples TNT, and has pliers which I think might cut through the barbed wire.
The pliers, apparently, repair broken bunker guns. It sometimes takes a few tries. Probably other applications in the non-beta.
Neither I, nor anyone else, played Lieutenant
The lieutenant is pretty much like a soldier, except he gets (recharagable) smoke grenades for air strikes, and also can throw out ammo packs, similar to medics throwing out health packs. Doesn't get quite the selection of main weapons that a soldier gets, however.
"The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes on-line September 4th. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug."
I've collected about 10 games so far for my PS2 and to be honest, with the exception of GT3, none of them have been that much fun to play....I loved Space Channel 5 for its silliness, and Crazy Taxi for it's pick-up-and-play fun
FYI, Crazy Taxi is available for the PS2, and it's pretty much indistinguishable from the Dreamcast version.
As for mature fun titles on the N64, I enjoyed Perfect Dark.
Re:Siggraph seemed much smaller/calmer
on
SIGGRAPH 2001
·
· Score: 1
Yep. Floor space was definitely not as full as even two years ago (which was also in LA, thus I'm using it as a mental comparison). I noticed Microsoft didn't bother to have a booth, which was curious.
There was, however, some pretty good stuff in the academic circles, demonstrated by some pretty good papers and panels.
A follow-up to your comment on the electronic theater...did anyone notice how on the big film-production "how-to" reels that the credits were often massive? Pages of animators and video effects folks in tiny little print at the end of, say, some of the work on "Pearl Harbor"?
Just like to say thanks to you and all student
volunteers for your hard work this year. I
volunteered for the '92 SIGGRAPH, and it was
both fun and worthwhile.
Yep, you're right. I was working for Autodesk at the time the decision was made to only support Win32, and drop support for the Solaris port of AutoCAD, for example. Some of those #ifdef SOLARIS lines may still exist in the code...
The decision seemed odd to me (an engineer), but in retrospect, I believe it was largely based on sales. The numbers of copies of AutoCAD sold for Solaris was dwarfed by the number of copies sold for Win32, to the point that it didn't make sense to have high-paid engineers supporting a port that didn't sell enough.
I believe that when these big companies marketing departments decide that the Linux market is viable enough to create the kinds of numbers that the Win32 market currently does, they'll start porting again. I don't believe that the Linux market is quite there yet.
Maya is fine for 3D work. When it comes to doing animated films, as pointed out in the article, there's a large mix of 3D, 2D and compositing work to be done. Maya only fills the 3D spectrum.
Also, I'd add that as far as "most widely used commercial animation package on the market" goes, this isn't accurate for games. 3D Studio MAX blows Maya away as far as how many people are using it for game content development.
Re:Doorways In The Sand
on
Lord of Light
·
· Score: 1
For the record, the reason why each chapter in "Doorways in the Sand" ends in a cliff-hanger is partially because, in Dickens-like-fashion, Zelazny was writing the book in serial form for a magazine. Each month printed a new chapter, so he had to start each chapter with a little background, add some fast-paced action, and end on a cliff-hanger to get the reader's attention. Even with this "restriction", it's a very good book.
In a Slashdot conversation I had with John Carmack, he indicated that NVidia would be making an OpenGL layer available to developers for their X-Box video chipset. This doesn't guarantee portability, but it has the potential to make life a little easier for places like Id.
Did anyone besides myself ever buy the Sega Genesis "CDX" console way back when? It was basically a Genesis + SegaCD packed into a small package that resembled, according to one reviewer, a "portable CD player on steroids". It was actually an almost servable portable CD player too.
Just waxing nostalgic here, but I thought they were pretty cool when they came out many years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
I use the binaries from an RPM someone posted on the Linux for Playstation2 home. Here's a link to the RPM.
There's a thread on this over on the PS2-Linux community forum, although it looks like it ain't working yet. If anyone can help out, please do! I've been using Dillo on my PS2Linux, and it works fine, but isn't really an industrial-strength browser.
Yep. A few years ago someone (I think it may even have been Dr. Dobbs or something similar) put out a CP/M CDROM that had both the OS and pretty much everything ever written for it on one CD. At least I think it had the OS...a quick Google search turns up something from Walnut Creek Software no longer available (http://www.euronet.nl/users/fvempel/walnut.html). Oh well. A Xenix CD would be cool, but yeah, I doubt one exists.
:-)
I guess I have old Win3.1 on a CD too, but dunno if I really consider that an OS. I've thought about adding old CDs of Netware 3.X or the like, but I guess technically newer versions of Netware are still available from Novell, so it doesn't really meet my definition of a dead OS. Probably ought to
I've got a collection of 'dead PC operating
system' CDs that'll make nice wall art some
day. I guess I'm defining "dead" as an
operating system that you can't buy anymore
or is otherwise unsupported today.
So far, I have original install CDs from:
SCO Openserver 5
NextStep
Novell UnixWare
OS/2
BeOS (but just a demo CD, sigh)
An old DOS CD
Anyone have any suggestions on CDs to add?
I'm still looking for a rare CD of a
rumored version of AIX that was for the PC,
not RS/6000. Never seen it, though. And
I missed out on the chance to get that
CP/M CD a while back.
Xtank was an excellent early game that the older X11 crowd might recall.
nVidia is notoriously bad at this; their DirectX drivers are quite stable, but OpenGL blue screens left and right (especially with a lot of detail in the scene graph). I always wondered why they even bothered to include OpenGL support in their drivers, although I suppose with such a major standard they have pretty much no choice.
This puzzles me. Aren't there a large number of engineers originally from SGI at nVidia (e.g. Mark Kilgard and the like) who used to be the original OpenGL "gurus"? You would think they'd know OpenGL cold?
Yep -- a fine graphic novel by Frank Miller, one of the better story-tellers of the comic-book genre, and a pretty good artist to boot.
You're both right. The current GDI model with the standard "Windows Driver Model" type drivers just passes standard GDI drawing commands, and the driver is responsible for dealing with them.
That said, there are many printer devices that aren't "WDM", including the weird large-format printers, plotters, and copy-shop stuff. For these, GDI has "backdoors" and other trickery that allows some drivers and apps to send data directly to the device, bypassing GDI's interpretation. An example might be dumping a huge raster image at 600DPI 24-bit color to a 36" paper-size plotter. For this sort of thing, GDI will run out of memory trying to interpret the whole thing, and you have to send things down in "bands", as zulux points out.
The bulk of printers that everyone uses these days are pretty much WDM compatible, so GDI generally works. For those devices that ain't, it's pretty nasty business.
Maya is in the process of being ported to OSX, but AFAIK, isn't quite complete yet. Lightwave has been ported to the Mac, but users aren't terribly happy with the stability of the port. The other applications you mention aren't really in the same league, or even for the same purposes (e.g. Bryce is really for rendering landscapes and backgrounds. It's not a heavy-duty animation tool). Blender is indeed available, but its interface takes a little getting used to (but remember, it's about the results, not the interface :-).
One application you should've mentioned and didn't is Electric Image, which has been used by ILM and others, and started its life out on Macs.
Truth is, there are some gaps to fill in Mac 3D animation tool selection. However, with OSX being a bit more SMP friendly, the gaps may get filled.
Also from time to time Pixar have given tapes of their shorts (well at least Geri's Game, a months before it was attached to A Bugs Life) at SIGGRAPH
Just to add to this, Pixar also gave out the Geri's Game VHS tape to their shareholders.
because if DOA3 were on PS2 it would be overshadowed by Tekken 4, Virtua Fighter 4 and Soul Calibur 2?
So true. Preach it brother -- Soul Calibur 2 is going to kick some serious ass.
Although it's called VisualLISP, does pretty un-LISP like stuff, and other weirdness, like an actual LISP IDE. But nonetheless, it's a major software package that uses LISP.
The Engineer has TNT to can blow up walls, can disable other peoples TNT, and has pliers which I think might cut through the barbed wire.
The pliers, apparently, repair broken bunker guns. It sometimes takes a few tries. Probably other applications in the non-beta.
Neither I, nor anyone else, played Lieutenant
The lieutenant is pretty much like a soldier, except he gets (recharagable) smoke grenades for air strikes, and also can throw out ammo packs, similar to medics throwing out health packs. Doesn't get quite the selection of main weapons that a soldier gets, however.
"The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes on-line September 4th. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug."
I've collected about 10 games so far for my PS2 and to be honest, with the exception of GT3, none of them have been that much fun to play....I loved Space Channel 5 for its silliness, and Crazy Taxi for it's pick-up-and-play fun
FYI, Crazy Taxi is available for the PS2, and it's pretty much indistinguishable from the Dreamcast version.
As for mature fun titles on the N64, I enjoyed Perfect Dark.
Yep. Floor space was definitely not as full as even two years ago (which was also in LA, thus I'm using it as a mental comparison). I noticed Microsoft didn't bother to have a booth, which was curious.
There was, however, some pretty good stuff in the academic circles, demonstrated by some pretty good papers and panels.
A follow-up to your comment on the electronic theater...did anyone notice how on the big film-production "how-to" reels that the credits were often massive? Pages of animators and video effects folks in tiny little print at the end of, say, some of the work on "Pearl Harbor"?
Just like to say thanks to you and all student
volunteers for your hard work this year. I
volunteered for the '92 SIGGRAPH, and it was
both fun and worthwhile.
could you suggest ANY game simaler in play that is better?
Nethack, Crossfire (if you can still find it)
Yep, you're right. I was working for Autodesk at the time the decision was made to only support Win32, and drop support for the Solaris port of AutoCAD, for example. Some of those #ifdef SOLARIS lines may still exist in the code...
The decision seemed odd to me (an engineer), but in retrospect, I believe it was largely based on sales. The numbers of copies of AutoCAD sold for Solaris was dwarfed by the number of copies sold for Win32, to the point that it didn't make sense to have high-paid engineers supporting a port that didn't sell enough.
I believe that when these big companies marketing departments decide that the Linux market is viable enough to create the kinds of numbers that the Win32 market currently does, they'll start porting again. I don't believe that the Linux market is quite there yet.
Soon You'll have Your Linux renderer which can be directly addressed from a MAX server on Windows
This is already possible with the MAX-to-Mental-Ray connection, as well as the work Animal Logic did connecting Pixar's Renderman to MAX.
Maya is fine for 3D work. When it comes to doing animated films, as pointed out in the article, there's a large mix of 3D, 2D and compositing work to be done. Maya only fills the 3D spectrum.
Also, I'd add that as far as "most widely used commercial animation package on the market" goes, this isn't accurate for games. 3D Studio MAX blows Maya away as far as how many people are using it for game content development.
For the record, the reason why each chapter in "Doorways in the Sand" ends in a cliff-hanger is partially because, in Dickens-like-fashion, Zelazny was writing the book in serial form for a magazine. Each month printed a new chapter, so he had to start each chapter with a little background, add some fast-paced action, and end on a cliff-hanger to get the reader's attention. Even with this "restriction", it's a very good book.
Try this instead.
Does anyone know if OpenGL will be supported
In a Slashdot conversation I had with John Carmack, he indicated that NVidia would be making an OpenGL layer available to developers for their X-Box video chipset. This doesn't guarantee portability, but it has the potential to make life a little easier for places like Id.
Did anyone besides myself ever buy the Sega Genesis "CDX" console way back when? It was basically a Genesis + SegaCD packed into a small package that resembled, according to one reviewer, a "portable CD player on steroids". It was actually an almost servable portable CD player too.
Just waxing nostalgic here, but I thought they were pretty cool when they came out many years ago.