1) Poor tools 2) Arcane DMA alighnent issues 3) Misguided selection of VU integer instructions (no imul, you have to jump through hoops to do xor, only 16bit, yet flags are in the upper 16bits) 4) Hard to singlestep the VUs 5) Very limited blending modes in the GS 6) Very limited iterator precision in the GS 7) No hardware clipping 8) Wierd GS rules where rendering horizontal triangles is much slower than large vertical ones 9) Non perspective correct iterated vertex colour 10) Limited vram 11) 1.0 * 1.0 == 0.999999999 in the VUs
I.e. it's cheap and flawed (but hey that's a challenge and some people seem to like it)
Then you go
"It's really a whole new way to program."
You are not a programmer are you? Didn't think so.
"Now it seems that Sony convinced some developers to lean it there's nothing stopping them from making more threads (there are 16 in Emotion if I am not mistaken)."
What are you talking about? I can't possibly imagine why you would want 16 threads in PS2 game. Genrally CPU multi threadding is quite costly. Most games are written to run at a solid 60fps*, so you can often get away with out multithreadding stuff like the AI, the Renderer or some trickle loader.
BTW The only console that really had seriously multi-thredded games was the N64.
* Due to field rendering you have 2x the fillrate (and more vram) at 60fps than at 30fps. Dropping to 30fps is bad!
You can only have a floating castle if you have three or more of:
* A white cat * Barrels of explosives in your secret lair * A huge satellite tracking map * Incompetent side kicks with guns * Nightly dream of ruling the world and are called 'The Brain'
Publishers (and the retailers) are the bane of the games industry.
No one is willing to pick up innovative products. I've hard too many horror stories of imbecilic external producers meddling with projects (I.e. I have random whim X and I want you to retarget your entire game to accommodate it. No wait I now want you to do Y instead etc...)
If the encryption is not strong enough to deter the majority of fraudsters, then I'd steer clear.
I'd hope they use some kind of pin code in addition to the "chip card". I also hope you can cancel a "chip card" if it gets stolen...
If someone fraudulently uses your digital signature that better not be binding!
Interesting idea, I wonder how it could work in practice.
They are going to have to deal with flow control, dropped packets, etc... I wonder what happens if the receiver crashes?
I have a feeling that they may be sending quite a bit of redundant data (perhaps similar to the way CDs are encoded at the hardware level), and they are betting that the signal to noise ratio is good enough for error correction software to deal with it. With a bit of luck they should be able to use more of the bandwidth available.
I wonder what would happen if lots of people start using something like this. Would the extra bandwidth actually slow things down, even though an individual download was faster?
I wish I had more energy left after doing my day lob, since this sounds like a fun side project...
Of course if they are really tall, they are going to need special cars / houses / stadiums / etc otherwise they will be banging their heads all the time;-)
It would be deeply scary if 11 year olds could outperform us all (looks round the office and sees programmers / computer geeks and is no longer scared;-P
Besides, I was under the impression that tinkering with gene X has knock on effects on dozens of different often unrelated systems. So trying to make a superhuman may cause some undesirable side effects (e.g. dead foetus, low IQ, poor disease resistance, etc...)
>because you sure don't sound like a developer
Pray tell what does a developer sound like?
Have you ever actually met any?
>However, it allows you more freedom, and thus more creative possibilities for those who can master it.
You couldn't be more wrong if you tried:
Blending modes:
PS2 - same as PS1 (i.e. fuck all)
XBOX - more than pc version of DX8 + pixel shaders
Texturing:
PS2 - horrid cheap DDA (you can't tile textures many times before the texture breaks up). Non perspective vertex colour and vertex fog interpolation. No texture compression. No single pass multi-texturing. Little VRAM.
Not much in the way of clamping wrapping options.
XBOX - nice high precision DDAs, full perspective correct interpolation (including _two_ vertex colours). Texture compression. Four textures at once. Lots of RAM. Lots of wrapping / clamping options. Pixel shaders. Dependant texture reads (very handy for function lookups).
T&L stuff:
PS2 - VU1 microcode, not as good as the hype makes it to be. Besides you have to write your own clipper (evil).
XBOX - Vertex shaders (shame they don't have loops, but are great apart from that). Hardware clipper.
DMA stuff:
PS2 - Quite impressive dma subsystem. Getting alignment right is challenging. Has some nice tricks.
XBOX - DX8 style streams for vertex shaders. These seem to work well for me. The UMA
tends to remove the need for most common console
related DMAs (moving textures & sounds about).
Graphical quality:
PS2 - designed for 640x240 interlaced, no flicker filter. Hard to get FSAA. Can't really do dot3 bump mapping. No pixel shaders.
XBOX - It's a PC graphics chip, it's high quality.
(I.e. it's not a cheap and nasty console hack)
Sound quality:
PS2 - Basically 2x ps1. Some brave souls have used VU0 to good effect.
XBOX - Massively powerful DSP, gives tons of channels, 3d spatial effects, Dolby 5.1 BTW it's possible to pipe the results of one filter into another to get some really interesting effects (I think this is the way synths work).
The xbox is more powerful and massively more flexible, so don't tell me PS2 gives more creative possibilities.
>Look at Xbox or PS2 and i can find some games >which look like shit, worse than Dreamcast, >these games show that the system is hard to >program for.
Err, no. That's nintendo having very high production standards (they can do this since they are very very selective about who developes for their machines and which titles actually make it).
BTW have you ever written a non trivial programme?
Why not buy both? The Gamecube is a nice little machine and it's got Myamoto san developing for it... The XBOX is easy to develop for and considering it's power you are going to see some great stuff.
On the subject of how easy the various consoles are to work with:
The XBox is the developers best friend and believe it or not Microsoft's tech support is actually very good. The same most certainly can not be said of Sony or particularly Nintendo.
Sony are unbelievably arrogant, and Nintendo
won't tell you anything unless you are 1st or 1.5 party...
The PS2 is not an easy machine to develop for, and believe it or not this does have a knock on effect on the games.
Apparently the Gamecube is OK to work with (I only have first hand experience with PS2 & XBOX), and it does have a PPC which I've always had a soft spot for.
On most consoles, the mass storage device, can usually only write to main ram. Often due to the hardware being cheap, this either steals bus cycles or worse requires frequent CPU intervention.
Now in order to do anything with the data, it needs to be shunted to VRAM / Sound ram / etc..
This burns up extra bus bandwidth, especially since you typically have to do multiple DMAs to multiple destinations, making trickle loading challenging.
The XBOX on the other hand has UMA, so once you have loaded in resources you can use them in situ.
Don't forget the XBOX has a rather impressive memory controller (4 banks of quite fast ram / full cross bar / clever internal buffering prioritisation) that has plenty of bandwidth.
The HD going at maximum transfer rate is really quite a low bandwidth device in comparison with
the CPU or the GPU. In comparison with the CPU it's quite latency tolerant too (though not as tolerant as the GPU). FYI you can load 40mb off the xbox hd in 2 - 3 seconds in a very fillrate (i.e. memory bandwidth) limited situation with seemingly no adverse affects on the CPU or GPU performance.
The xbox has plenty of bandwidth. UMA is in fact a huge advantage:
1) When you stream in data from DVD / HD the cpu has almost no work to do to in order to use that data. On other consoles a memcpy() or an additional DMA will be needed.
2) The cpu can play with anything and everything. This is great for special effects.
3) Unlike the Gamecube all xbox memory runs the same speed (not all Gamecube ram is the 1t fast stuff).
4) Segmented ram is a pain the in arse for many reasons, it's often very difficult to get at some ram (e.g. vu0 ram on ps2) this makes debugging seriously interesting...
5) FYI: there is in practice enough bandwidth to keep a DVD, a HD and the audio DMAs going at the same time as the CPU doing heavy work and the GPU rendering close to max fillrate.
BTW this is not to say that the Gamecube is crap in anyway. I've had a Japanese cube for a while now & I love Nintendo games (esp Myamoto stuff)! But for speed XBox is king.
1) XBox will only boot from layer 2 of a DVD
2) The bios is held encrypted in the nv2a
3) IIRC the dvd drive isn't a normal one.
4) There is meant to be all sorts of encryption built into the hardware.
5) I think there are monitering routines to detect code tampering at run time.
6) The network stack is encrypted.
7) There is a custom disk format i.e. not fat32.
etc...
It will probably be cracked eventually, but I doubt we will be seeing linux on it any time soon...
Don't you think the UK Government would if they could? NI is huge financial liability, and the cost in lives is incalculable. The UK govt are dammed if they do let NI go (the "loyalists" bomb London) and dammed if they don't (the republicans bomb London). Personally I wouldn't mind seeing Scotland leave the union, as long as they take northern Ireland with them (the unionists are of Scottish descent after all). BTW there is more to history than a Mel Gibson movie. Irish (or Celtic) warlords have been fighting each other for thousands of years, the current conflict is just the latest manifestation.
Judging from the screenshots, the walls are using additive transparency, and therefore they would not need to be sorted. I imagine that the modifications to the driver would be fairly simple and would not massively impact performance.
Slashdot Mirror
Err, the reasons the PS2 is hard to work with is:
1) Poor tools
2) Arcane DMA alighnent issues
3) Misguided selection of VU integer instructions
(no imul, you have to jump through hoops to do xor, only 16bit, yet flags are in the upper 16bits)
4) Hard to singlestep the VUs
5) Very limited blending modes in the GS
6) Very limited iterator precision in the GS
7) No hardware clipping
8) Wierd GS rules where rendering horizontal triangles is much slower than large vertical ones
9) Non perspective correct iterated vertex colour
10) Limited vram
11) 1.0 * 1.0 == 0.999999999 in the VUs
I.e. it's cheap and flawed (but hey that's a challenge and some people seem to like it)
Then you go
"It's really a whole new way to program."
You are not a programmer are you? Didn't think so.
"Now it seems that Sony convinced some developers to lean it there's nothing stopping them from making more threads (there are 16 in Emotion if I am not mistaken)."
What are you talking about? I can't possibly imagine why you would want 16 threads in PS2 game.
Genrally CPU multi threadding is quite costly. Most games are written to run at a solid 60fps*, so you can often get away with out multithreadding
stuff like the AI, the Renderer or some trickle loader.
BTW The only console that really had seriously multi-thredded games was the N64.
* Due to field rendering you have 2x the fillrate (and more vram) at 60fps than at 30fps. Dropping to 30fps is bad!
You can only have a floating castle if you have three or more of:
* A white cat
* Barrels of explosives in your secret lair
* A huge satellite tracking map
* Incompetent side kicks with guns
* Nightly dream of ruling the world and are called 'The Brain'
Publishers (and the retailers) are the bane of the
games industry.
No one is willing to pick up innovative products.
I've hard too many horror stories of imbecilic external producers meddling with projects (I.e. I have random whim X and I want you to retarget your entire game to accommodate it. No wait I now want you to do Y instead etc...)
If the encryption is not strong enough to deter the majority of fraudsters, then I'd steer clear.
I'd hope they use some kind of pin code in addition to the "chip card". I also hope you can cancel a "chip card" if it gets stolen...
If someone fraudulently uses your digital signature that better not be binding!
After reading the article I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Consider his career in IT /.ed!
Interesting idea, I wonder how it could work in practice.
They are going to have to deal with flow control, dropped packets, etc... I wonder what happens if the receiver crashes?
I have a feeling that they may be sending quite a bit of redundant data (perhaps similar to the way CDs are encoded at the hardware level), and they are betting that the signal to noise ratio is good enough for error correction software to deal with it. With a bit of luck they should be able to use more of the bandwidth available.
I wonder what would happen if lots of people start using something like this. Would the extra bandwidth actually slow things down, even though an individual download was faster?
I wish I had more energy left after doing my day lob, since this sounds like a fun side project...
Of course if they are really tall, they are going to need special cars / houses / stadiums / etc otherwise they will be banging their heads all the time ;-)
It would be deeply scary if 11 year olds could outperform us all (looks round the office and sees programmers / computer geeks and is no longer scared ;-P
Besides, I was under the impression that tinkering with gene X has knock on effects on dozens of different often unrelated systems. So trying to make a superhuman may cause some undesirable side effects (e.g. dead foetus, low IQ, poor disease resistance, etc...)
>because you sure don't sound like a developer
Pray tell what does a developer sound like?
Have you ever actually met any?
>However, it allows you more freedom, and thus more creative possibilities for those who can master it.
You couldn't be more wrong if you tried:
Blending modes:
PS2 - same as PS1 (i.e. fuck all)
XBOX - more than pc version of DX8 + pixel shaders
Texturing:
PS2 - horrid cheap DDA (you can't tile textures many times before the texture breaks up). Non perspective vertex colour and vertex fog interpolation. No texture compression. No single pass multi-texturing. Little VRAM.
Not much in the way of clamping wrapping options.
XBOX - nice high precision DDAs, full perspective correct interpolation (including _two_ vertex colours). Texture compression. Four textures at once. Lots of RAM. Lots of wrapping / clamping options. Pixel shaders. Dependant texture reads (very handy for function lookups).
T&L stuff:
PS2 - VU1 microcode, not as good as the hype makes it to be. Besides you have to write your own clipper (evil).
XBOX - Vertex shaders (shame they don't have loops, but are great apart from that). Hardware clipper.
DMA stuff:
PS2 - Quite impressive dma subsystem. Getting alignment right is challenging. Has some nice tricks.
XBOX - DX8 style streams for vertex shaders. These seem to work well for me. The UMA
tends to remove the need for most common console
related DMAs (moving textures & sounds about).
Graphical quality:
PS2 - designed for 640x240 interlaced, no flicker filter. Hard to get FSAA. Can't really do dot3 bump mapping. No pixel shaders.
XBOX - It's a PC graphics chip, it's high quality.
(I.e. it's not a cheap and nasty console hack)
Sound quality:
PS2 - Basically 2x ps1. Some brave souls have used VU0 to good effect.
XBOX - Massively powerful DSP, gives tons of channels, 3d spatial effects, Dolby 5.1 BTW it's possible to pipe the results of one filter into another to get some really interesting effects (I think this is the way synths work).
The xbox is more powerful and massively more flexible, so don't tell me PS2 gives more creative possibilities.
>Look at Xbox or PS2 and i can find some games >which look like shit, worse than Dreamcast, >these games show that the system is hard to >program for.
Err, no. That's nintendo having very high production standards (they can do this since they are very very selective about who developes for their machines and which titles actually make it).
BTW have you ever written a non trivial programme?
>However Gamecube is easier to program for.
Hmm, does it have DevStudio?
Sure I'd rather work with a PPC than x86 any day, but don't underestimate the effects of a good mature IDE.
To put this into perspective, the XBOX is actually easier to debug / write for than a normal win32 PC. For a console that's revolutionary!
Why not buy both? The Gamecube is a nice little machine and it's got Myamoto san developing for it... The XBOX is easy to develop for and considering it's power you are going to see some great stuff.
On the subject of how easy the various consoles are to work with:
The XBox is the developers best friend and believe it or not Microsoft's tech support is actually very good. The same most certainly can not be said of Sony or particularly Nintendo.
Sony are unbelievably arrogant, and Nintendo
won't tell you anything unless you are 1st or 1.5 party...
The PS2 is not an easy machine to develop for, and believe it or not this does have a knock on effect on the games.
Apparently the Gamecube is OK to work with (I only have first hand experience with PS2 & XBOX), and it does have a PPC which I've always had a soft spot for.
Perhaps I should expand on my statement:
On most consoles, the mass storage device, can usually only write to main ram. Often due to the hardware being cheap, this either steals bus cycles or worse requires frequent CPU intervention.
Now in order to do anything with the data, it needs to be shunted to VRAM / Sound ram / etc..
This burns up extra bus bandwidth, especially since you typically have to do multiple DMAs to multiple destinations, making trickle loading challenging.
The XBOX on the other hand has UMA, so once you have loaded in resources you can use them in situ.
Don't forget the XBOX has a rather impressive memory controller (4 banks of quite fast ram / full cross bar / clever internal buffering prioritisation) that has plenty of bandwidth.
The HD going at maximum transfer rate is really quite a low bandwidth device in comparison with
the CPU or the GPU. In comparison with the CPU it's quite latency tolerant too (though not as tolerant as the GPU). FYI you can load 40mb off the xbox hd in 2 - 3 seconds in a very fillrate (i.e. memory bandwidth) limited situation with seemingly no adverse affects on the CPU or GPU performance.
Actually idiot,
The xbox has plenty of bandwidth. UMA is in fact a huge advantage:
1) When you stream in data from DVD / HD the cpu has almost no work to do to in order to use that data. On other consoles a memcpy() or an additional DMA will be needed.
2) The cpu can play with anything and everything. This is great for special effects.
3) Unlike the Gamecube all xbox memory runs the same speed (not all Gamecube ram is the 1t fast stuff).
4) Segmented ram is a pain the in arse for many reasons, it's often very difficult to get at some ram (e.g. vu0 ram on ps2) this makes debugging seriously interesting...
5) FYI: there is in practice enough bandwidth to keep a DVD, a HD and the audio DMAs going at the same time as the CPU doing heavy work and the GPU rendering close to max fillrate.
BTW this is not to say that the Gamecube is crap in anyway. I've had a Japanese cube for a while now & I love Nintendo games (esp Myamoto stuff)! But for speed XBox is king.
Some info:
1) XBox will only boot from layer 2 of a DVD
2) The bios is held encrypted in the nv2a
3) IIRC the dvd drive isn't a normal one.
4) There is meant to be all sorts of encryption built into the hardware.
5) I think there are monitering routines to detect code tampering at run time.
6) The network stack is encrypted.
7) There is a custom disk format i.e. not fat32.
etc...
It will probably be cracked eventually, but I doubt we will be seeing linux on it any time soon...
This was discussed on ukgamer:
From: Kevin Bachus [mailto:kbachus@xbox.com]
Sent: Wednesday, August 30, 2000 17:25
To: 'removed'
Subject: RE: [ukgamer] FW: Die sony DIE!!!!
Not true.
The spec has been baked since before GDC and will not change.
These rumors make me insane.
It's definately _not_ going to be 128mb :-(
Don't you think the UK Government would if they could? NI is huge financial liability, and the cost in lives is incalculable. The UK govt are dammed if they do let NI go (the "loyalists" bomb London) and dammed if they don't (the republicans bomb London). Personally I wouldn't mind seeing Scotland leave the union, as long as they take northern Ireland with them (the unionists are of Scottish descent after all). BTW there is more to history than a Mel Gibson movie. Irish (or Celtic) warlords have been fighting each other for thousands of years, the current conflict is just the latest manifestation.
Judging from the screenshots, the walls are using additive transparency, and therefore they would not need to be sorted. I imagine that the modifications to the driver would be fairly simple and would not massively impact performance.