Yes, and no. The makefiles and linux/ tree are probably for the Linux dedicated server, and not an actual game client, as it runs on D3D and not OpenGL.
I recommend.. building into the device a storage unit somewhat reminiscent of a glove box, and putting into it a cellphone, and a good pair of shoes.:)
20, 15 years ago, when disk space and RAM were at a premium, this argument held water.
However, in the MODERN world, we have >100 gig disks for $200 usd, a gigabyte of RAM can be had for $150.. It doesn't really MATTER anymore.
Of course, it would be far too hard to have all the libraries call on global configs, with backwards-compatible config files. Far too much effort to do something bright, or reasonable..
Try VDMSound, http://www.ntvdm.cjb.net/ . It doesn't work with everything, most games that use the dos4gw extender die when using it.. but it DOES work for a lot of games. It's GPL, too, so get hacking on it!:)
That's actually because the video player is writing to the overlay buffer on the video card, not because of any DRM technology. It happens with any video player.
As has been said many, many times before, 70% of nothing is still nothing.
The odds of a team being assembled that a) has no ego, b) has plenty of talent, and c) can agree to do something within reason is pretty slim. We all know of the number of projects that get started on SourceForge with the noblest ideals.. and never get beyond the planning stage. Chances are the team will want to make something truly huge, the next great RTS or FPS game. However, convince them to do something like a little sidescroller, or one of those gem-based puzzle games that are so popular, and they could probably make enough money to fund another game, of a similar variety. A few of those, and you end up with enough money to fund one of the big games that the devs are likely dreaming of doing.
The problem is, artists and other content creators aren't going to go for this. We like to be paid. We don't normally like doing pro-bono work, and when we do, we tend to do game modifications, or other projects where we have some measure of creative control. You can get paid good money to churn out artwork in a style you hate. Yes, we WANT to be creating art, but art on our own terms, not someone else's. In a game environment, it has to be someone else's, or the art style looks very amateurish.
Did I also mention that damn near no artist is going to GPL, or similarly license their artwork? It would be, to put it lightly, incredibly stupid. You'd be laughed off the forum for such a suggestion at most of the major art communities on the 'net. "I want people to help with my free game project, you won't be paid, and you lose the rights to your artwork if you help out! Killer deal!"
Makes you wonder why they weren't testing ATI's FireGL series cards - the 8800, and the newer line based on the R300 chips. Doing all those GeForce-based cards doesn't really give any valuable insight into what card might possibly be best - just which geforce.
Hah, if this is the case, some lawyer that reads Slashdot should take it upon themselves to send a Cease & Desist letter to these government web stores on behalf of NCR. Get the process in motion somewhat quicker, since only a very stupid, or a very, very assured company would try to take on a government.
Here's an interesting thought I've been having for the last 20 minutes:
Why doesn't Sun pull something like Apple did? Make a high-end workstation, running Solaris with some much, much better UI over top of it - something akin to Aqua.. Could call it Solarix, heh, or Solaris X or something. Possibly dump X11 in favour of a proprietary display engine, similar to Apple/QNX/NeXT/etc, but keep X11 compatibility availble in the system. Start getting stuff like Photoshop and the big 3d apps, Maya, Lightwave, Softimage|XSI, ported over. It'd probably take a serious expenditure of capital to bribe the companies into supporting the OS/architecture.. but it could be done. The SPARC processor would likely stay, of course, but they'd have to get better 3rd-party video hardware support going to really get this to play nicely. DDR memory would be necessary, too, maybe even AGP graphics. Almost a complete reworking of existing SPARC motherboards, I'd think.
Then you get high-end SPARC servers, and midrange, class workstations equivalent to Apple's best, and, if they design the OS properly, usable by new users as easily as OS X is now. Pipe dream, maybe. Could be worthwhile for Sun to look in to this sort of thing.
NTSC television (North America) is 29.97FPS - most movies are shot and displayed at 24FPS. So the DVD hardware has to do (iirc) 3:2 pulldown to get the framerate looking mostly right - and even then you get weird artifacts. PAL is 25FPS, so the 24FPS movies can be displayed almost natively on PAL sets.
Not quite, more along the lines that it's harder to count a game as good on one system if it's been ported off to another system - it diminishes the value of the console you're trying to push. Instead of being able to say 'This game is exclusive to the XBox!', you're limited to 'This game is on the XBox!.. and the GameCube, PS2, and PC. So if you have one of those, no need to buy an XBox....'.
Splinter Cell - Being ported to PS2, Gamecube, and PC Unreal Championship - First console game to need a patch. Also, available on PC as UT2k3. Morrowind - Available on PC, and, remarkably, BETTER on PC (Due entirely to the mod-ability of the PC version). Halo - Being ported to PC.
I'll add Jet Set Radio Future as a must-own XBox title, though - JSR on the Dreamcast rocked.
Most of the good stuff on XBox is being ported off. Which is somewhat unfortunate..
GameCube:
In addition to your list, there is:
Pikmin Eternal Darkness Animal Crossing the new Resident Evil games Legend of Zelda Ikaruga (Being ported from Dreamcast) Some other assorted DC ports.
The GBA->GC link system is also getting some seriously interesting stuff now, with expanded gameplay if you own both machines - Animal Crossing, and Metroid Prime both have extended stuff if you have both. The new Rayman (I think it's Rayman) games will also have additional gameplay possibilities with both consoles.
Not quite, but close. The Matrix 2 (Matrix Reloaded) is being released in May 2003 The Matrix 3 (Matrix Revolutions) is being released in November 2003.
The GIMP is a joke, nowhere near the quality of Photoshop. It's a good start, though - maybe someday. Are there any others? What about a WYSIWYG editor? Bluefish is a good tool, but it's straight HTML only, no WYSIWYG. A quick search of Freshmeat shows no Flash-creation tools available that are beyond conceptual stage, so that's a no-go.. Illustrator, there's a few vector apps (Geist comes to mind, as does killustrator), but none of them approach what Illustrator can do. Premiere? I'm not aware of any video editing software for Linux, but I haven't really looked into that sector.
What about 3d software? The only 3d app that's GPL'd that comes even CLOSE to being worthwhile is Blender - and it's the epitome of a programmer interface: Functionally useless. Fortunately, Alias|Wavefront ships Maya for Linux, and Avid ships Softimage|XSI, so at least there's something to be used.
Except that, that apparently doesn't work - From what I've been reading, every configuration of MSSQL always opens 1434 UDP, regardless of the configuration - turning off TCP/IP for the server wouldn't have prevented this.
Of course, with this idea, you start running into other problems, namely reworking the bus to accomadate high speed tranfers from memory to the graphics processor. Current AGP spec is woefully underpowered, compared to the throughput the cards themselves manage. Actual numbers are in the range of 1GB/sec or so on AGP4x, and ~8.2GB/sec off local ram on the Radeon 8500LE card, ~19.2GB/sec on the Radeon 9700 Pro. Slightly less on the new GeForce FX card - Clearly not in the same ballpark. Conventional DDR memory cannot compete with the timings that video card DDR pushes - Buying ram sticks for the video subsystem will be rather expensive, unless you're willing to settle for vastly decreased performance. Consider - The average PC2100 DDR stick runs at 133MHz, doubled to 266. A PC2700 stick, so far as I know, runs at 166MHz. PC3200 is just beginning to flirt with graphics card speeds, at 200MHz, or 400MHz DDR. nVIDIA is mounting 500MHz chips on their GeForce FX card, and ATI packs ~350MHz chips on their 9700 part (Actual clock speeds, not doubled DDR speeds). A drastic reworking of the motherboard layout, and a considerable increase in complexity, would be required to properly support this.
Then you get issues with the socketing standard - how long with ATI, nVIDIA, and everyone keep playing ball with each other? How long before nVIDIA leans on a motherboard manufacturer, using their nForce chipset, and creates a non-standard socket? Power requirements, as well - Will the motherboard be able to power the chip, or will we have to plug in a lead from the powersupply akin to these new powerhouse cards?
Interesting upsides to the situation would include the potential to use a G4 Mac style dual-, or perhaps quad-processor modules, for increased processing power - but that has the potential to easily saturate the bus, also bringing us back to the original concept of having everything mounted on an independent board module.
In reality this is subject to some abuse in 3rd world countries, and even countries like Canada will hold a gun to a companies head over issues like this. In Canada they might tell you - "Yes, I know this sells for $5/pill in the USA, but we'll only let you sell it here for $0.50. And if you don't sell it, well then we'll just have to have somebody else make it and we'll mail you the 50 cents. Oh yeah, and too bad for you that company that develops the expertise to make the drug will be looking to find other places to sell it as well...".
So, basically you're saying that a company should be able to extort huge amounts of money from sick and dying people, and that countries which choose to stand up against this sort of asinine behaviour are the villians? I mean, how DARE they try to save more lives! How DARE they try to make necessary drugs affordable to the common people!
That they can get away with such outright extortion NOW is the sick part, and I for one am glad Canada takes a stand against such outright greed.
Okay, how about 'ignorant, lazy masses', since that's more apt? There wouldn't be thousands of websites out there detailing the truly boneheaded calls TechSupport has received if you people could be bothered reading the documentation. We had to - it's not like we get the information through a psychic upload.
I'd go for this, for perfect CD quality, either using a lossless compressor, or the raw.wav files. Then I could burn all the tracks to disc and have a perfect reproduction, which would be good.
However, once you touch it with mp3, it's nowhere near perfect cd quality anymore... same with ogg or any of the other hot encoders. CD-quality is, iirc, over 1000kbps, easily.
Slashdot Mirror
Enh, screw the used market, it's always overpriced.. I'm drooling over the 1.25GHz PowerMac's on the Apple Store for $1300. It's actually reasonable..
Ah, actually, it does. Note the kernel modules that have to be inserted before 3d accel will work.
Yes, and no. The makefiles and linux/ tree are probably for the Linux dedicated server, and not an actual game client, as it runs on D3D and not OpenGL.
I recommend .. building into the device a storage unit somewhat reminiscent of a glove box, and putting into it a cellphone, and a good pair of shoes. :)
That if we parked a yacht offshore and started up Kazaa.. it'd be giving a whole new meaning to coastal piracy.
20, 15 years ago, when disk space and RAM were at a premium, this argument held water.
However, in the MODERN world, we have >100 gig disks for $200 usd, a gigabyte of RAM can be had for $150.. It doesn't really MATTER anymore.
Of course, it would be far too hard to have all the libraries call on global configs, with backwards-compatible config files. Far too much effort to do something bright, or reasonable..
Except for those pesky sound and input devices which OpenGL doesn't handle.. and that pesky display surface which has to be created using DirectX..
Try VDMSound, http://www.ntvdm.cjb.net/ . It doesn't work with everything, most games that use the dos4gw extender die when using it.. but it DOES work for a lot of games. It's GPL, too, so get hacking on it! :)
That's actually because the video player is writing to the overlay buffer on the video card, not because of any DRM technology. It happens with any video player.
As has been said many, many times before, 70% of nothing is still nothing.
The odds of a team being assembled that a) has no ego, b) has plenty of talent, and c) can agree to do something within reason is pretty slim. We all know of the number of projects that get started on SourceForge with the noblest ideals.. and never get beyond the planning stage. Chances are the team will want to make something truly huge, the next great RTS or FPS game. However, convince them to do something like a little sidescroller, or one of those gem-based puzzle games that are so popular, and they could probably make enough money to fund another game, of a similar variety. A few of those, and you end up with enough money to fund one of the big games that the devs are likely dreaming of doing.
The problem is, artists and other content creators aren't going to go for this. We like to be paid. We don't normally like doing pro-bono work, and when we do, we tend to do game modifications, or other projects where we have some measure of creative control. You can get paid good money to churn out artwork in a style you hate. Yes, we WANT to be creating art, but art on our own terms, not someone else's. In a game environment, it has to be someone else's, or the art style looks very amateurish.
Did I also mention that damn near no artist is going to GPL, or similarly license their artwork? It would be, to put it lightly, incredibly stupid. You'd be laughed off the forum for such a suggestion at most of the major art communities on the 'net. "I want people to help with my free game project, you won't be paid, and you lose the rights to your artwork if you help out! Killer deal!"
Makes you wonder why they weren't testing ATI's FireGL series cards - the 8800, and the newer line based on the R300 chips. Doing all those GeForce-based cards doesn't really give any valuable insight into what card might possibly be best - just which geforce.
Hah, if this is the case, some lawyer that reads Slashdot should take it upon themselves to send a Cease & Desist letter to these government web stores on behalf of NCR. Get the process in motion somewhat quicker, since only a very stupid, or a very, very assured company would try to take on a government.
Here's an interesting thought I've been having for the last 20 minutes:
Why doesn't Sun pull something like Apple did? Make a high-end workstation, running Solaris with some much, much better UI over top of it - something akin to Aqua.. Could call it Solarix, heh, or Solaris X or something. Possibly dump X11 in favour of a proprietary display engine, similar to Apple/QNX/NeXT/etc, but keep X11 compatibility availble in the system. Start getting stuff like Photoshop and the big 3d apps, Maya, Lightwave, Softimage|XSI, ported over. It'd probably take a serious expenditure of capital to bribe the companies into supporting the OS/architecture.. but it could be done. The SPARC processor would likely stay, of course, but they'd have to get better 3rd-party video hardware support going to really get this to play nicely. DDR memory would be necessary, too, maybe even AGP graphics. Almost a complete reworking of existing SPARC motherboards, I'd think.
Then you get high-end SPARC servers, and midrange, class workstations equivalent to Apple's best, and, if they design the OS properly, usable by new users as easily as OS X is now.
Pipe dream, maybe. Could be worthwhile for Sun to look in to this sort of thing.
What do you guys think?
NTSC television (North America) is 29.97FPS - most movies are shot and displayed at 24FPS. So the DVD hardware has to do (iirc) 3:2 pulldown to get the framerate looking mostly right - and even then you get weird artifacts. PAL is 25FPS, so the 24FPS movies can be displayed almost natively on PAL sets.
Motherboard: $100CAN
Athlon XP 1800+: $150
512MB DDR RAM: $195.
Less than 3 months later, seeing the prices halved: Priceless.
Not quite, more along the lines that it's harder to count a game as good on one system if it's been ported off to another system - it diminishes the value of the console you're trying to push. Instead of being able to say 'This game is exclusive to the XBox!', you're limited to 'This game is on the XBox!.. and the GameCube, PS2, and PC. So if you have one of those, no need to buy an XBox....'.
See my point?
XBox:
Splinter Cell - Being ported to PS2, Gamecube, and PC
Unreal Championship - First console game to need a patch. Also, available on PC as UT2k3.
Morrowind - Available on PC, and, remarkably, BETTER on PC (Due entirely to the mod-ability of the PC version).
Halo - Being ported to PC.
I'll add Jet Set Radio Future as a must-own XBox title, though - JSR on the Dreamcast rocked.
Most of the good stuff on XBox is being ported off. Which is somewhat unfortunate..
GameCube:
In addition to your list, there is:
Pikmin
Eternal Darkness
Animal Crossing
the new Resident Evil games
Legend of Zelda
Ikaruga (Being ported from Dreamcast)
Some other assorted DC ports.
The GBA->GC link system is also getting some seriously interesting stuff now, with expanded gameplay if you own both machines - Animal Crossing, and Metroid Prime both have extended stuff if you have both. The new Rayman (I think it's Rayman) games will also have additional gameplay possibilities with both consoles.
Not quite, but close.
The Matrix 2 (Matrix Reloaded) is being released in May 2003
The Matrix 3 (Matrix Revolutions) is being released in November 2003.
So 2004 should see the full boxed set.
Competitive GPL'd apps? Name them.
The GIMP is a joke, nowhere near the quality of Photoshop. It's a good start, though - maybe someday. Are there any others?
What about a WYSIWYG editor? Bluefish is a good tool, but it's straight HTML only, no WYSIWYG.
A quick search of Freshmeat shows no Flash-creation tools available that are beyond conceptual stage, so that's a no-go..
Illustrator, there's a few vector apps (Geist comes to mind, as does killustrator), but none of them approach what Illustrator can do.
Premiere? I'm not aware of any video editing software for Linux, but I haven't really looked into that sector.
What about 3d software? The only 3d app that's GPL'd that comes even CLOSE to being worthwhile is Blender - and it's the epitome of a programmer interface: Functionally useless. Fortunately, Alias|Wavefront ships Maya for Linux, and Avid ships Softimage|XSI, so at least there's something to be used.
Except that, that apparently doesn't work - From what I've been reading, every configuration of MSSQL always opens 1434 UDP, regardless of the configuration - turning off TCP/IP for the server wouldn't have prevented this.
Of course, with this idea, you start running into other problems, namely reworking the bus to accomadate high speed tranfers from memory to the graphics processor. Current AGP spec is woefully underpowered, compared to the throughput the cards themselves manage. Actual numbers are in the range of 1GB/sec or so on AGP4x, and ~8.2GB/sec off local ram on the Radeon 8500LE card, ~19.2GB/sec on the Radeon 9700 Pro. Slightly less on the new GeForce FX card - Clearly not in the same ballpark. Conventional DDR memory cannot compete with the timings that video card DDR pushes - Buying ram sticks for the video subsystem will be rather expensive, unless you're willing to settle for vastly decreased performance. Consider - The average PC2100 DDR stick runs at 133MHz, doubled to 266. A PC2700 stick, so far as I know, runs at 166MHz. PC3200 is just beginning to flirt with graphics card speeds, at 200MHz, or 400MHz DDR. nVIDIA is mounting 500MHz chips on their GeForce FX card, and ATI packs ~350MHz chips on their 9700 part
(Actual clock speeds, not doubled DDR speeds). A drastic reworking of the motherboard layout, and a considerable increase in complexity, would be required to properly support this.
Then you get issues with the socketing standard - how long with ATI, nVIDIA, and everyone keep playing ball with each other? How long before nVIDIA leans on a motherboard manufacturer, using their nForce chipset, and creates a non-standard socket? Power requirements, as well - Will the motherboard be able to power the chip, or will we have to plug in a lead from the powersupply akin to these new powerhouse cards?
Interesting upsides to the situation would include the potential to use a G4 Mac style dual-, or perhaps quad-processor modules, for increased processing power - but that has the potential to easily saturate the bus, also bringing us back to the original concept of having everything mounted on an independent board module.
So, basically you're saying that a company should be able to extort huge amounts of money from sick and dying people, and that countries which choose to stand up against this sort of asinine behaviour are the villians? I mean, how DARE they try to save more lives! How DARE they try to make necessary drugs affordable to the common people!
That they can get away with such outright extortion NOW is the sick part, and I for one am glad Canada takes a stand against such outright greed.
Okay, how about 'ignorant, lazy masses', since that's more apt? There wouldn't be thousands of websites out there detailing the truly boneheaded calls TechSupport has received if you people could be bothered reading the documentation. We had to - it's not like we get the information through a psychic upload.
I'd go for this, for perfect CD quality, either using a lossless compressor, or the raw .wav files. Then I could burn all the tracks to disc and have a perfect reproduction, which would be good.
However, once you touch it with mp3, it's nowhere near perfect cd quality anymore... same with ogg or any of the other hot encoders. CD-quality is, iirc, over 1000kbps, easily.