"Flipper always operates on 4 pixels at a time using its 4 pixel pipelines; each of those pipelines is capable of applying one texture per pipeline"
Nope, it can actually apply 8 textures using 16 combiner stages.
"The Flipper graphics core is a fairly simple fixed function GPU"
It can do z-texturing, dependant-texturing, 8-way multitexturing etc. There's no way you can describe it as simple or fixed function. I'd suggest that whoever wrote this article boot up Pikmin, walk out into the water on level four and take a look at what Flipper can do in a single pass over a flat polygon.
Re:The other way round
on
MAME On Xbox
·
· Score: 2
Take a look at the guts of a Saturn some time, dude.
Visit the mighty Yak here:
http://myweb.magicnet.net/~yak/
Sample quote:
Trawling my drive C yielded a total of 143 instances of file or folder names containing the string "sheep", and my HD is approximately 16 gigs, of which 11.8 gigs are currently in use. So my Total Sheep Index is 143, and my Sheepiness Quotient is 143/11.8 = approximately 12.12 sheepies per gigabyte.
Heh, if you'd ever tried to lift an actual XBox you wouldn't be asking that question. Remember the original 'mobile' phones, the brick-sized ones you had to carry a suitcase-sized battery around with? That's the ballpark a portable XBox would be in.
Let's see: The GBA has a 16MHz ARM CPU, the PSX has a 33MHz MIPS. The GBA has 288Kb system RAM, the PSX has 2Mb. The PSX has a vector/matrix coprocessor, the GBA has none. The PSX can draw Gourad-shaded, textured polygons, the GBA can draw rotated/scales unshaded sprites. The PSX ships with an 8-button controller with 2 analogue sticks and a dpadas standard. The GBA has a dpad and 4 buttons. And so on.
The GBA is a fantastic little system but it's nowhere near the playstation in terms of capabilities.
1) Have as little stuff visible as possible - overstuffing your apartment is vulgar. If you have to stack stuff, stack it in a closet or something.
Wow, and I thought that stacking similarly sized boxes along the axis of their least dimension might actually reduce their visible surface area. Thanks for the tip!
That's like saying that the butt-ugly cars of the 70s with all the sharp angles and points look better than the smooth rounded cars of today
No it isn't. I'm saying that the xbox is a totally repugnant design anyway, and all the curve does is make it harder to pack it away under the TV along with the video and other consoles.
Ugh. I would want to see how you decorate your apartment.
Heh, I just got a mental image of you typing that message in an apartment decorated entirely in curvy black plastic with translucent green trim. How I decorate my house is to hide horribly-designed crap from view as much as possible.
...they do make it flat-topped like the (obviously fabricated) illustration. Making the top of the xbox curved so you can't stack stuff on it is just rude.
OpenGL is written for a UNIX environment, DX is for a Windows environment
No. OpenGL is an API, with bindings on UNIX platforms, on the Mac, Win32, Linux, PSX2, XBox and so on. Pretty much all 3D hardware of note has an OpenGL driver.
OpenGL does NOT change very much, which has both good and bad sides, for example, this threads discusses pixel shading, which is a feature OpenGL does not natively supports.
OpenGL does change a lot. Hardware vendors are free to add functionality via extensions, something they cannot do with D3D without going through microsoft.
Also, it does support what DX8 calls pixelshading. It exposes it through a quite different interface to DX8 (see here and here), this much more closely represents what the hardware is actually doing.
Yeah, the new wiz-bang game will probably be able to limp-along on whatever you've got, but likely will only be optimized for a few special cards.
That's the PC trade-off - it can grow as a platform, but that gives developers a moving and fractured target. If you don't like it then get a console, which has exactly the opposite characteristics.
I hope that someone pulls it back in line and we get back on a standards track where card manufacturers contribute to the standards efforts
Standards are for stable technologies. As soon as video card makers agree on a feature (eg multitexturing or texture-compression), it gets standardised.
I've used both controllers (I'm a developer) and please don't call me a liar. The original poster's right. The GC controller is very nice - comfortable, well-designed, all-round cool. The XBox one is a gigantic, horrible thing and it looks stupid too. Looks like someone sneezed on it.
You might want to think twice in the future about making authoritative remarks on subjects you don't know too much about.
The console+DVD thing is actually a *really really bad* idea. Remember, consoles are normally sold at a hefty loss - Sega/Nintendo/Sony *pay* you to put their consoles in your home, in the hope that you'll go buy games for it. Sony has managed to sell a load of PS2's, at a horrific loss (~$100 per unit), to a bunch of people who will use it as a DVD player most of the time, and maybe buy 1 or 2 games per year. Those are sales Nintendo could do without.
The real "problem" is that disassembly of the worm indicates that it might have a monthly cycle, instead of being a one shot wonder; y'know, when the other x00,000 IIS servers join in again.
IIRC, the worm is memory-resident-only and therefore can't survive a reboot. It's not picking up where it left off, it's starting over infecting the internet almost from scratch, so it should be the same thing as last time. Except that this time everyone's forewarned.
Microsoft knew it all along: It isn't a bug that Windows requires rebooting every few days, it's a security feature.
Phil: So what did *you* do last night Tim?
Tim: Well Phil, I went to a Kenny G concert, then I went home and watched 'Walker, Texas Ranger'.
(Everyone murmurs appreciatively)
Tim:How are you Phil? Were where you last night?
Phil: Oh, I went to see 'Planet of the Apes'.
(2 second of silence)
(People burst into laughs)
Tim: You went to see what!
Tim sounds like a really condescending, smug git to me. Why would Phil hang out with such a closetted fool?
Can you please supply more dialog? I want to know more of Tim and Phil's relationship.
Imagine you're about to go in for major surgery and someone tells you the doctor's going to be using something called a light-saber. The mental image I get is of a guy standing about five feet away from me wielding a large white-hot laser sword, poking the tip around inside my chest. Is that really the image they want to project?
If these things take off, maybe they should make a new rule that you're not a true surgeon until you've constructed your own lightsaber.
I believe there's software that accomplishes the same thing although through different means. Every time your PC goes online, the software makes itself known to a central server. If the server gets contacted by a PC on the 'red alert' list, it contacts it and gets more info on it (although, as someone pointed out, all that's really needed is an IP address and a time), ba-da-bing.
Although, the first thing I would do if someone handed me a computer is format and reload all the drives
Lucky for the poster he got such a stupid thief. I guess a system based on something like CPUID or NIC MAC address would work better; it'd have to be part of the OS though, and pretty well-secured too.
If you see games as a tool to teach people to persevere, overcome and work hard then yes, cheat codes are a negative thing.
However, if you see games as something to have fun experiencing then cheats are generally a good thing. They're a tool to skip frustrating, badly-balanced areas of a game and get to the fun stuff; a player who's really enjoying a game generally won't resort to cheating.
Now, all kids have to do is look up the cheat codes for God mode, and get after it with a BFG Are you really bemoaning the fact that today's lazy kids don't work as hard at playing games?
Slashdot Mirror
"Flipper always operates on 4 pixels at a time using its 4 pixel pipelines; each of those pipelines is capable of applying one texture per pipeline"
Nope, it can actually apply 8 textures using 16 combiner stages.
"The Flipper graphics core is a fairly simple fixed function GPU"
It can do z-texturing, dependant-texturing, 8-way multitexturing etc. There's no way you can describe it as simple or fixed function. I'd suggest that whoever wrote this article boot up Pikmin, walk out into the water on level four and take a look at what Flipper can do in a single pass over a flat polygon.
Take a look at the guts of a Saturn some time, dude.
Visit the mighty Yak here:
http://myweb.magicnet.net/~yak/
Sample quote:
Trawling my drive C yielded a total of 143 instances of file or folder names containing the string "sheep", and my HD is approximately 16 gigs, of which 11.8 gigs are currently in use. So my Total Sheep Index is 143, and my Sheepiness Quotient is 143/11.8 = approximately 12.12 sheepies per gigabyte.
Wonder what an XBox portable would be like.
Heh, if you'd ever tried to lift an actual XBox you wouldn't be asking that question. Remember the original 'mobile' phones, the brick-sized ones you had to carry a suitcase-sized battery around with? That's the ballpark a portable XBox would be in.
Let's see: The GBA has a 16MHz ARM CPU, the PSX has a 33MHz MIPS. The GBA has 288Kb system RAM, the PSX has 2Mb. The PSX has a vector/matrix coprocessor, the GBA has none. The PSX can draw Gourad-shaded, textured polygons, the GBA can draw rotated/scales unshaded sprites. The PSX ships with an 8-button controller with 2 analogue sticks and a dpadas standard. The GBA has a dpad and 4 buttons. And so on.
The GBA is a fantastic little system but it's nowhere near the playstation in terms of capabilities.
1) Have as little stuff visible as possible - overstuffing your apartment is vulgar. If you have to stack stuff, stack it in a closet or something.
Wow, and I thought that stacking similarly sized boxes along the axis of their least dimension might actually reduce their visible surface area. Thanks for the tip!
3) KISS.
'Keep It Simple Stupid', my ass.
That's like saying that the butt-ugly cars of the 70s with all the sharp angles and points look better than the smooth rounded cars of today
No it isn't. I'm saying that the xbox is a totally repugnant design anyway, and all the curve does is make it harder to pack it away under the TV along with the video and other consoles.
Ugh. I would want to see how you decorate your apartment.
Heh, I just got a mental image of you typing that message in an apartment decorated entirely in curvy black plastic with translucent green trim. How I decorate my house is to hide horribly-designed crap from view as much as possible.
...they do make it flat-topped like the (obviously fabricated) illustration. Making the top of the xbox curved so you can't stack stuff on it is just rude.
Original here: http://www.acm.org/classics/sep95/
Description here: http://www.tuxedo.org/jargon/jargon.html#back door
BTW, why is slashcode telling me I've violated the postercomment compression filter when I attempt links?
Will it give back that huge class A domain that MIT still has?
A class A is 1/20,282,409,603,651,670,423,947,251,286,016th of the total IP6 namespace. Why not let them keep it?
GNG = GNG's Not GNU
See it recurse! See it bifurcate!
Informative? What's up with you moderators today?
OpenGL is an open standard, but the source code isn't open--there isn't even any source code!
http://oss.sgi.com/projects/ogl-sample/
That was insightful? Crikey.
OpenGL is written for a UNIX environment, DX is for a Windows environment
No. OpenGL is an API, with bindings on UNIX platforms, on the Mac, Win32, Linux, PSX2, XBox and so on. Pretty much all 3D hardware of note has an OpenGL driver.
OpenGL does NOT change very much, which has both good and bad sides, for example, this threads discusses pixel shading, which is a feature OpenGL does not natively supports.
OpenGL does change a lot. Hardware vendors are free to add functionality via extensions, something they cannot do with D3D without going through microsoft.
Also, it does support what DX8 calls pixelshading. It exposes it through a quite different interface to DX8 (see here and here), this much more closely represents what the hardware is actually doing.
Yeah, the new wiz-bang game will probably be able to limp-along on whatever you've got, but likely will only be optimized for a few special cards.
That's the PC trade-off - it can grow as a platform, but that gives developers a moving and fractured target. If you don't like it then get a console, which has exactly the opposite characteristics.
I hope that someone pulls it back in line and we get back on a standards track where card manufacturers contribute to the standards efforts
Standards are for stable technologies. As soon as video card makers agree on a feature (eg multitexturing or texture-compression), it gets standardised.
Sorry, but I'll bite:
Ok, I will too.
I've used both controllers (I'm a developer) and please don't call me a liar. The original poster's right. The GC controller is very nice - comfortable, well-designed, all-round cool. The XBox one is a gigantic, horrible thing and it looks stupid too. Looks like someone sneezed on it.
You might want to think twice in the future about making authoritative remarks on subjects you don't know too much about.
...I wonder if it will cost Nintendo some sales.
The console+DVD thing is actually a *really really bad* idea. Remember, consoles are normally sold at a hefty loss - Sega/Nintendo/Sony *pay* you to put their consoles in your home, in the hope that you'll go buy games for it. Sony has managed to sell a load of PS2's, at a horrific loss (~$100 per unit), to a bunch of people who will use it as a DVD player most of the time, and maybe buy 1 or 2 games per year. Those are sales Nintendo could do without.
There's a 3rd-party gamecube on the way that also plays DVDs. I'm sure someone will figure out how to get it to boot off DVDs soon enough.
The real "problem" is that disassembly of the worm indicates that it might have a monthly cycle, instead of being a one shot wonder; y'know, when the other x00,000 IIS servers join in again.
IIRC, the worm is memory-resident-only and therefore can't survive a reboot. It's not picking up where it left off, it's starting over infecting the internet almost from scratch, so it should be the same thing as last time. Except that this time everyone's forewarned.
Microsoft knew it all along: It isn't a bug that Windows requires rebooting every few days, it's a security feature.
Can you please supply more dialog?
No? I guess I'll have to extrapolate.
Phil: So what did *you* do last night Tim?
Tim: Well Phil, I went to a Kenny G concert, then I went home and watched 'Walker, Texas Ranger'.
(Everyone murmurs appreciatively)
Tim:How are you Phil? Were where you last night?
Phil: Oh, I went to see 'Planet of the Apes'.
(2 second of silence)
(People burst into laughs)
Tim: You went to see what!
Tim sounds like a really condescending, smug git to me. Why would Phil hang out with such a closetted fool?
Can you please supply more dialog? I want to know more of Tim and Phil's relationship.
Oh dear, I can feel a troll feeding frenzy coming on...
Imagine you're about to go in for major surgery and someone tells you the doctor's going to be using something called a light-saber. The mental image I get is of a guy standing about five feet away from me wielding a large white-hot laser sword, poking the tip around inside my chest. Is that really the image they want to project?
If these things take off, maybe they should make a new rule that you're not a true surgeon until you've constructed your own lightsaber.
I believe there's software that accomplishes the same thing although through different means. Every time your PC goes online, the software makes itself known to a central server. If the server gets contacted by a PC on the 'red alert' list, it contacts it and gets more info on it (although, as someone pointed out, all that's really needed is an IP address and a time), ba-da-bing.
Although, the first thing I would do if someone handed me a computer is format and reload all the drives
Lucky for the poster he got such a stupid thief. I guess a system based on something like CPUID or NIC MAC address would work better; it'd have to be part of the OS though, and pretty well-secured too.
...they just maim a lot of people's feet.
If you see games as a tool to teach people to persevere, overcome and work hard then yes, cheat codes are a negative thing.
However, if you see games as something to have fun experiencing then cheats are generally a good thing. They're a tool to skip frustrating, badly-balanced areas of a game and get to the fun stuff; a player who's really enjoying a game generally won't resort to cheating.
Now, all kids have to do is look up the cheat codes for God mode, and get after it with a BFG
Are you really bemoaning the fact that today's lazy kids don't work as hard at playing games?