I used to subscribe to the SFBC. They did have a lot of good books. Especially in the form of omnibuses. (e.g. I got the entire Lucky Starr series in one book, whereas it was nearly impossible to find even one of the books in the series anywhere else!) I also found one of my favorite books ever through them: Jeffrey Carver's Eternity's End.
That being said, I eventually ended my subscription due to several frustrating issues. The first is that there was no way to completely stop the Book of the Month mailing. If I didn't want the book, I had to send a postcard or log online the month before. If I forgot, I would receive a book I didn't want, which I'd have to send back. My next issue was that they almost always messed up the billing. They send books with a bill in the box, then would try to apply late fees when I payed the bill as soon as I got it. This got really annoying and I wish they had just allowed me to pay up front.
The final nail in the coffin for me was that they started focusing too much on Fantasy. I joined the SFBC because they had a kick-ass selection of classic and modern Sci-Fi. But once the Lord of the Rings came out, they were better described as the "Fantasy Book Club". I could have put up with the other problems they had, but that took away the entire value proposition for me. So I canceled. Which was a hassle unto itself.:-/
So if you're a hardcore Sci-Fi fan who likes classic Sci-Fi and is looking for hard-to-find stuff, the SFBC does have something to offer if you're willing to forgive their multitude of sins. But if you just want something fun to read, I recommend passing. It just isn't worth the hassle.
It's only completely wrong if we assume the story is a non-story. The markets you're talking about are traditional super-computer markets. The summary at least (too tired to read the full story today) is suggesting that IBM is targeting "Enterprise" customers. Which, by the classic definition of who those customers are, means that a lot of folks are going to be asking, "Where's the 0xDEADBE... Err.... Java?!?!"
The biggest challenge facing Microsoft is that they really have no concept of originality. The Microsoft Way(TM) is to steamroll the competition and replace it with mediocrity. While competition exists, they can at least do the same thing the competition is doing (and sometimes do it better because of their larger development budget!). Once that competition disappears, Microsoft just sits on its laurels, releasing random features as new versions. If Microsoft ever manages to "win" the market, it will be a sad day for gaming.
Similarly, Sony has a huge problem with arrogance. They regularly mistreat and abuse their customers, then are surprised when they don't take kindly to it. (You mean a PSP wasn't all you wanted for Christmas? Huh.) However, Sony does usually get their act together given enough time. And I think that's what we're seeing with the PS3 now. They've reigned in all the talking idiots^H^H^H^H^H^H heads, and have focused on delivering a good experience to their fan-base. That makes them extremely dangerous in the market.
Nintendo, on the other hand, has always been good about jinking just before the competition catches up. They kind of missed the boat with the GameCube, but they are otherwise always one step ahead of the market. That sort of risk-taking ensures they'll stay in business no matter what happens in the market.
Long story short? None of the console makers are going anywhere. A three-way race can only be good for the market, though with one caveat: I am SO TIRED of multi-console ports. The vast majority of Wii releases takes this to a new plateau with PS2 conversions + waggle. I mean, how much more terrible can you get?
Here's a hint for the industry: If your game is so generic that it can be ported to any system, it's so generic that it's not any fun. If you want to make the big bucks, make games that play to a console's strengths.
Wrong question. The correct question is: Will it run Java?
No? Then What The !@#$ have you been selling me WebFear^W^W^W^WSphere for?
BTW, for all you Eclipse lovers? NEVER install Rational Application Developer (RAD). IBM managed to take a half-decent product, add tons of suck to it, and make sure it was the SLOWEST application in the history of mankind. You need at least 4GB to run it at a decent speed. Which is pretty sad when you consider that Windows only goes up to 3.5...;-)
It was the first console in the current generation of consoles to sell 10 million in the U.S., compared to 8.8 Wii's and 4.1 PS3's.
Wait, let me get this straight. The XBox 360 had a full year head start on the other two consoles, and yet you're crowing about a mere 1.2 million difference between the Wii and 360? I have nothing against the 360, but you need to get some serious perspective.
The fact that the Wii has a third more consoles than the 360 isn't surprising. What IS surprising is that the 360 is starting to lose its lead against the PS3. With a 4.2 million console difference, the race is awfully darn close. (For comparison, the original XBox sold 24 million consoles compared to Sony's 120+ million.)
As I said, I have nothing against the 360. I can honestly say that it has a lot of great features and is possibly the most balanced machine of the current generation. (Hardcore? We got that. Casual? We got that too. Downloadable movies and TV? Check. Leader in online support? Check.) That being said, it is under brutal attack from the competition. Microsoft is going to need to step up their game if they don't want to fall behind. Because I can tell you this: Both Nintendo and Sony are working double-time on the same goal.
I suspect Canvas is not necessarily a software renderer.
Correct. There's nothing that prevents it from being hardware accelerated. In fact, there was some work done for Firefox 3 (which has sadly been abandoned) to create an OpenGL ES rendering context. I considered making mention of the hardware acceleration possibility, but it really would have distracted from my point. Since all current Canvas implementations are software, it's pretty safe to say Canvas == Software and Flash == Software.:-)
With the increasing number of Flex developers and Flash developers switching over to AS3 and the Flash 9 AVM2 engine
Who still haven't produced a critical mass of software yet. In fact, there are very few Flex sites in existence. Adobe's exit from the J2EE market hasn't helped their case one bit.
Check out all those flash sites that use papervision3d, a 3D software renderer for Flash. That's all Flash 9 AS3.
Papervision 3D was created for Flash 8 and ported to Flash 9. If you see a Papervision app, there's a good chance it's Flash 8.
[Flex is] growing as an alternative to AJAX because AJAX eats a crapload of bandwidth since the Javascript code and XML aren't compressed.
AJAX uses as much or as little bandwidth as you design it to. (That's one of the reasons why JSON is becoming a popular alternative to XML.) Flex will happily chew just as much bandwidth if you design it to do so. In fact, if you use the object remoting features, you're likely to use a lot MORE bandwidth due to the nature of distributed objects.
Oh, and my company compresses the hell out of our Javascript and XML. Seems this little thing called GZip compression is supported by every major browser on the market. Who'da'thunk, eh?
Moreover, your front-end code is visible in AJAX.
You don't really know a whole lot about AS3, do you? Like, for example, it's stupidly easy to decompile the code. Worrying about someone having access to your source is so 1990's. You had better get over it, because your source is open for the world to see. That goes for Java, Javascript, Actionscript, C#, and just about any other modern language you can think of.
you sir, are talking out of your ass.
Classic case of pot and kettle. Please get your facts straight before being so rude in the future. It really is upsetting and therefore tempting to use rather abusive language in return.
I think you missed the point. If your Flash code is not compiled for Flash 9, Tamarin is not used. The old Flash 8 engine gets loaded instead. Since the vast majority of Flash content is still Flash 8, no one is using Flash 9.:-)
Please check that link again as it appears you ahve misread it.
Actually, you should check my post below as I explained in detail why Flash lost that handily. The short version is that Flash 9 is not comparable right now because the VM is not in use by many projects. By the time it's in heavy use, FireFox will be using the exact same engine.
Did you even look at the JS code that is your "framework" to this stuff?
Sure. And the piece you picked (like most of the code) is motion computations. The piece you picked does a handful of mulitplies and library (fast!) calls for log, random, and square root. That *could* be heavily optimized with lookup tables, but there wouldn't be much point. That's not even a blip on the processor's time. All the real work is done in the Canvas API calls where the blitting happens.
There is no image manipulation in Javascript or Actionscript. The computations you see could be faster if Javascript had true primitive support, but at the end of the day it just doesn't matter. I know that because that was optimization 101 back when we developers had to write our own 3D engines. A routine that runs once per frame is far less of a concern than a routine that runs once a line or even once a pixel! Moore's law has continued to reinforce that truth.:-)
I mentioned this above, but I'll reiterate it here. In that benchmark, LOWER IS BETTER. The brand-new Flash 9 VM engine did excellent (as I expected it would), but the Flash 7 and 8 engines were generally creamed by the Javascript engines. Which I don't think is what you're trying to prove at all.
A fully modern, high-performance, Just In Time compiler that gives the JVM a run for its money. It's an amazing piece of Javascript technology that Adobe has donated to the Mozilla project for inclusion in the next major revision of FireFox. Wonderful, wonderful engine that absolutely no one is using yet.
See, if you compiled to Flash 7 or 8, you're still triggering the Flash 8 engine. The Flash 9 engine is a complete rewrite that only works with Flash 9 content. So the next chapter of performance wars has yet to be written.
JS interpreters are not optimized to do image manipulation, DOM updates, etc.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. Optimized for image manipulation? You do absolutely ZERO image manipulation in Javascript. Same with Actionscript. All that is pushed down into the Canvas and Flash rendering engines, respectively. Same thing with DOM manipulations. Sure, you say "insert this item" or "delete this object", but it's the C/C++ engine under the covers that does the heavy lifting.
People haven't done their own image manipulation since Amigas stomped the earth.
Right now it's always faster(CPU %) to do an animation in Flash then it is to do the same animation in JS.
You make that statement, yet you posted a benchmark that showed Javascript to be faster than Flash. I'm rather confused. You do realize that the benchmark you posted below was in millisecond and not operations per second, right? i.e. Lower is better.
You have zero evidence for your statements. Listen to someone who actually knows something about these platforms. There's no reason why Javascript can't perform the same function as Flash using the Canvas APIs. And you know what? That's not a bad thing.:-)
A user interface? I think you have a very odd definition of "Fast". All you've proven is that Flash is designed to do pretty animations. Well, that's kind of the point. Not to run "Fast". "Fast" was never a part of the design. Just look up the "Actions" portion of the Flash 8 spec sometime and you'll be utterly horrified.
That being said, Flash does do animations well. That's what it was designed for. As a result, it has even been used to create games. It never did games all that well, but Moore's law eventually made it possible to come up with some fairly decent stuff.
Of course, if you're referring to "my Flash animations move faster than my DHTML animation", that's just plain user-error. The Flash animations work better because Flash Studio works out all the timings of the motions for you. If you Actionscripted your motions, they'd come out about the same as they would in Javascript. (And being nearly the same language, it's possible to try the same motion code in both.)
This issue is what the Javascript PVL is intended to solve. i.e. A standard framework for providing animation/motion with minimal input from the developer.
Flash doesn't exist anymore to do animation or dynamic graphics, it exists to run fast.
Wait, are we talking about the same Flash? Because I've done a lot of Flash and Actionscripting, and "Fast" is not even in the vocabulary. Software rendered graphics pipeline? Check. Slow VM interpreter that makes Java 1.0 look fast? Check. Lack of direct rendering APIs? Check. Focus on animation at the expense of dynamic scene creation? Check.
Granted, Flash 9 is a major improvement, but it is arriving rather late in the game.
This is a Javascript port of the Processing Visualization Language and a first step towards Javascript being a rival to Flash for online graphics content.
Second step, actually. Apple and the WHATWG took the first step by introducing the Canvas API to the HTML 5 spec. That gave web developers the ability to do Flash-like content. This language is the second step, in that it gives programmers a standard framework from which to create impressive animations.
Kudos to Mr. Resig on a job well done! I can't wait to play around with this project more.:-)
Laserdisc was a Phillips and MCA format. Sony was not involved in its development.
Also, Sony may have failed with Betamax, but they succeeded wildly with 3.5 inch floppies and their Walkman line of cassette players.
bribed the competition and succeeded with Blue-ray.
Both sides of the HD-DVD/Bluray war spent exorbitant amounts of money on promoting their format. The truth is that Bluray was the superior format and was always going to win. HD-DVD had a minor price advantage at the beginning, but that was about it. It never had a chance. Especially when the largest technology companies in the media industry were all backing Bluray. (Many had even contributed to its development!)
Thus why I was being snarky. No, they're not really compatible. Close, but no cigar. Still, you could probably take a copy of BOCHS or DOSBox and modify it for Z80 compatibility without too much difficulty. The architecture would still be all wrong for an Amstrad, though...:-)
They're tackling the problem from another point of view
To a certain degree. I think they may actually be targeting real customers, though. There are plenty of aviation enthusiasts who are bit by the problem of finding transportation once they're on the ground. Renting a car isn't a big deal, but the cost does add up. This design would probably be targeted at such enthusiasts who would not only have a car once they were on the ground, but would also be able to avoid hanger fees!
On a side-note, Oshkosh is where it's happening if you like to build your own planes. Apparently, one of the most affordable methods of obtaining an aircraft these days is to build one from a kit. And there are few places in the nation where there's as much support for this practice as in Oshkosh, WI.
...that was posted. Dear God. Someone mark the date. Slashdot just died today.
Re:Is it a parody? Comedy?
on
Iron Sky Trailer
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The movie is supposed to be a tongue in cheek comedy. It's semi-serious in its premise, but is able to use humor to gloss over the various suspension of disbelief problems that arise with the (rather outlandish) plot. Should make for an interesting film once it's released.:-)
Re:This reminds me of an old game...
on
Iron Sky Trailer
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
This reminded me of an old Cinemaware game called "Rocket Ranger", where the Nazis obtained alien technology that they could use to conquer the world. Rocket Ranger had to stop their plans, and go to the moon to dismantle their base.
I have that game for the Commodore 64! Most annoying design, ever. You have to sit through ALL the cut scenes before you play the game. Then it's really a collection of mini-games that start with the oddest rhythm game in history. (Basically, tap the joystick to the beat of the character's run so that you have a running start when taking off with your jet pack.) On top of everything, you have to swap disks CONSTANTLY, which makes the game even slower than it already was.
That being said, the game grows on you after a while. There's a lot more strategy to the game than it would appear on the surface, and the cheap deaths become less of a problem once you get the hang of it. Even the secret decoder wheel (an anti-piracy device required to play the game) actually becomes kind of cool after a while. It gives you more of that WWII, "slide-rule" feel to your adventure. However, fuel is a constant problem. It seems like no matter how much you steal from the Nazis, you never have enough to keep your jet pack running AND add fuel to your moon rocket. (For the game's finale.) Plus your secret agents are disposed of by the enemy as soon as you get anywhere in the game. The end result is that the game is HARD to finish.
None the less, it is still a rewarding game. If you're interested in playing it again, Cinemaware has actually released the game for FREE on their website. All you have to do is sign up for their site and they'll allow you to download a disk image to use in your favorite emulator. They even throw in a copy of the Secret Decoder Wheel(TM) so you won't have to search the 'net looking for the information!
For those of you who haven't tried it before, I highly recommend downloading it and giving it a try. With modern emulators, pesky issues like disk swaps are nowhere near as annoying as they once were. Or if you're a hardcore classic gamer, you can even write the images back to floppies and play the game on original hardware as God intended.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a review from someone who's NOT anonymous.
:-/
I used to subscribe to the SFBC. They did have a lot of good books. Especially in the form of omnibuses. (e.g. I got the entire Lucky Starr series in one book, whereas it was nearly impossible to find even one of the books in the series anywhere else!) I also found one of my favorite books ever through them: Jeffrey Carver's Eternity's End.
That being said, I eventually ended my subscription due to several frustrating issues. The first is that there was no way to completely stop the Book of the Month mailing. If I didn't want the book, I had to send a postcard or log online the month before. If I forgot, I would receive a book I didn't want, which I'd have to send back. My next issue was that they almost always messed up the billing. They send books with a bill in the box, then would try to apply late fees when I payed the bill as soon as I got it. This got really annoying and I wish they had just allowed me to pay up front.
The final nail in the coffin for me was that they started focusing too much on Fantasy. I joined the SFBC because they had a kick-ass selection of classic and modern Sci-Fi. But once the Lord of the Rings came out, they were better described as the "Fantasy Book Club". I could have put up with the other problems they had, but that took away the entire value proposition for me. So I canceled. Which was a hassle unto itself.
So if you're a hardcore Sci-Fi fan who likes classic Sci-Fi and is looking for hard-to-find stuff, the SFBC does have something to offer if you're willing to forgive their multitude of sins. But if you just want something fun to read, I recommend passing. It just isn't worth the hassle.
It's only completely wrong if we assume the story is a non-story. The markets you're talking about are traditional super-computer markets. The summary at least (too tired to read the full story today) is suggesting that IBM is targeting "Enterprise" customers. Which, by the classic definition of who those customers are, means that a lot of folks are going to be asking, "Where's the 0xDEADBE... Err.... Java?!?!"
I can agree with that. :-)
:-P
The biggest challenge facing Microsoft is that they really have no concept of originality. The Microsoft Way(TM) is to steamroll the competition and replace it with mediocrity. While competition exists, they can at least do the same thing the competition is doing (and sometimes do it better because of their larger development budget!). Once that competition disappears, Microsoft just sits on its laurels, releasing random features as new versions. If Microsoft ever manages to "win" the market, it will be a sad day for gaming.
Similarly, Sony has a huge problem with arrogance. They regularly mistreat and abuse their customers, then are surprised when they don't take kindly to it. (You mean a PSP wasn't all you wanted for Christmas? Huh.) However, Sony does usually get their act together given enough time. And I think that's what we're seeing with the PS3 now. They've reigned in all the talking idiots^H^H^H^H^H^H heads, and have focused on delivering a good experience to their fan-base. That makes them extremely dangerous in the market.
Nintendo, on the other hand, has always been good about jinking just before the competition catches up. They kind of missed the boat with the GameCube, but they are otherwise always one step ahead of the market. That sort of risk-taking ensures they'll stay in business no matter what happens in the market.
Long story short? None of the console makers are going anywhere. A three-way race can only be good for the market, though with one caveat: I am SO TIRED of multi-console ports. The vast majority of Wii releases takes this to a new plateau with PS2 conversions + waggle. I mean, how much more terrible can you get?
Here's a hint for the industry: If your game is so generic that it can be ported to any system, it's so generic that it's not any fun. If you want to make the big bucks, make games that play to a console's strengths.
And that's all I gots ta' say about that.
Err.. s/^W/^H/g
:-P
Sorry, too distracted by my new Mac.
Wrong question. The correct question is: Will it run Java?
No? Then What The !@#$ have you been selling me WebFear^W^W^W^WSphere for?
BTW, for all you Eclipse lovers? NEVER install Rational Application Developer (RAD). IBM managed to take a half-decent product, add tons of suck to it, and make sure it was the SLOWEST application in the history of mankind. You need at least 4GB to run it at a decent speed. Which is pretty sad when you consider that Windows only goes up to 3.5...
Wait, let me get this straight. The XBox 360 had a full year head start on the other two consoles, and yet you're crowing about a mere 1.2 million difference between the Wii and 360? I have nothing against the 360, but you need to get some serious perspective.
Let's take a look at some current numbers, shall we?
Wii: 25.79M
360: 18.89M
PS3: 12.60M
The fact that the Wii has a third more consoles than the 360 isn't surprising. What IS surprising is that the 360 is starting to lose its lead against the PS3. With a 4.2 million console difference, the race is awfully darn close. (For comparison, the original XBox sold 24 million consoles compared to Sony's 120+ million.)
As I said, I have nothing against the 360. I can honestly say that it has a lot of great features and is possibly the most balanced machine of the current generation. (Hardcore? We got that. Casual? We got that too. Downloadable movies and TV? Check. Leader in online support? Check.) That being said, it is under brutal attack from the competition. Microsoft is going to need to step up their game if they don't want to fall behind. Because I can tell you this: Both Nintendo and Sony are working double-time on the same goal.
Oh, and my company compresses the hell out of our Javascript and XML. Seems this little thing called GZip compression is supported by every major browser on the market. Who'da'thunk, eh?You don't really know a whole lot about AS3, do you? Like, for example, it's stupidly easy to decompile the code. Worrying about someone having access to your source is so 1990's. You had better get over it, because your source is open for the world to see. That goes for Java, Javascript, Actionscript, C#, and just about any other modern language you can think of.Classic case of pot and kettle. Please get your facts straight before being so rude in the future. It really is upsetting and therefore tempting to use rather abusive language in return.
Yes it does. (And that's only one of many implementations.)
I think you missed the point. If your Flash code is not compiled for Flash 9, Tamarin is not used. The old Flash 8 engine gets loaded instead. Since the vast majority of Flash content is still Flash 8, no one is using Flash 9. :-)
Actually, you should check my post below as I explained in detail why Flash lost that handily. The short version is that Flash 9 is not comparable right now because the VM is not in use by many projects. By the time it's in heavy use, FireFox will be using the exact same engine.
Sure. And the piece you picked (like most of the code) is motion computations. The piece you picked does a handful of mulitplies and library (fast!) calls for log, random, and square root. That *could* be heavily optimized with lookup tables, but there wouldn't be much point. That's not even a blip on the processor's time. All the real work is done in the Canvas API calls where the blitting happens.
There is no image manipulation in Javascript or Actionscript. The computations you see could be faster if Javascript had true primitive support, but at the end of the day it just doesn't matter. I know that because that was optimization 101 back when we developers had to write our own 3D engines. A routine that runs once per frame is far less of a concern than a routine that runs once a line or even once a pixel! Moore's law has continued to reinforce that truth.
I mentioned this above, but I'll reiterate it here. In that benchmark, LOWER IS BETTER. The brand-new Flash 9 VM engine did excellent (as I expected it would), but the Flash 7 and 8 engines were generally creamed by the Javascript engines. Which I don't think is what you're trying to prove at all.
The secret to the performance of Flash 9 is this little beauty: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/
A fully modern, high-performance, Just In Time compiler that gives the JVM a run for its money. It's an amazing piece of Javascript technology that Adobe has donated to the Mozilla project for inclusion in the next major revision of FireFox. Wonderful, wonderful engine that absolutely no one is using yet.
See, if you compiled to Flash 7 or 8, you're still triggering the Flash 8 engine. The Flash 9 engine is a complete rewrite that only works with Flash 9 content. So the next chapter of performance wars has yet to be written.
Q.E.D.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. Optimized for image manipulation? You do absolutely ZERO image manipulation in Javascript. Same with Actionscript. All that is pushed down into the Canvas and Flash rendering engines, respectively. Same thing with DOM manipulations. Sure, you say "insert this item" or "delete this object", but it's the C/C++ engine under the covers that does the heavy lifting.
People haven't done their own image manipulation since Amigas stomped the earth.
You make that statement, yet you posted a benchmark that showed Javascript to be faster than Flash. I'm rather confused. You do realize that the benchmark you posted below was in millisecond and not operations per second, right? i.e. Lower is better.
You have zero evidence for your statements. Listen to someone who actually knows something about these platforms. There's no reason why Javascript can't perform the same function as Flash using the Canvas APIs. And you know what? That's not a bad thing.
Oh? I have, and I don't disagree. Of course, I've USED Flash quite a bit too, so I know how God-aweful slow that platform was up until version 9.
Why not? Flash == Software renderer. Canvas == Software renderer. Actionscript == ECMAScript engine. Javascript == ECMAScript engine. I'm not seeing the issue.
Hell, once FireFox is on the Tamarin engine, the two platforms will be practically the same!
A user interface? I think you have a very odd definition of "Fast". All you've proven is that Flash is designed to do pretty animations. Well, that's kind of the point. Not to run "Fast". "Fast" was never a part of the design. Just look up the "Actions" portion of the Flash 8 spec sometime and you'll be utterly horrified.
That being said, Flash does do animations well. That's what it was designed for. As a result, it has even been used to create games. It never did games all that well, but Moore's law eventually made it possible to come up with some fairly decent stuff.
Of course, if you're referring to "my Flash animations move faster than my DHTML animation", that's just plain user-error. The Flash animations work better because Flash Studio works out all the timings of the motions for you. If you Actionscripted your motions, they'd come out about the same as they would in Javascript. (And being nearly the same language, it's possible to try the same motion code in both.)
This issue is what the Javascript PVL is intended to solve. i.e. A standard framework for providing animation/motion with minimal input from the developer.
Wait, are we talking about the same Flash? Because I've done a lot of Flash and Actionscripting, and "Fast" is not even in the vocabulary. Software rendered graphics pipeline? Check. Slow VM interpreter that makes Java 1.0 look fast? Check. Lack of direct rendering APIs? Check. Focus on animation at the expense of dynamic scene creation? Check.
Granted, Flash 9 is a major improvement, but it is arriving rather late in the game.
Second step, actually. Apple and the WHATWG took the first step by introducing the Canvas API to the HTML 5 spec. That gave web developers the ability to do Flash-like content. This language is the second step, in that it gives programmers a standard framework from which to create impressive animations.
Kudos to Mr. Resig on a job well done! I can't wait to play around with this project more.
Also, Sony may have failed with Betamax, but they succeeded wildly with 3.5 inch floppies and their Walkman line of cassette players.Both sides of the HD-DVD/Bluray war spent exorbitant amounts of money on promoting their format. The truth is that Bluray was the superior format and was always going to win. HD-DVD had a minor price advantage at the beginning, but that was about it. It never had a chance. Especially when the largest technology companies in the media industry were all backing Bluray. (Many had even contributed to its development!)
Thus why I was being snarky. No, they're not really compatible. Close, but no cigar. Still, you could probably take a copy of BOCHS or DOSBox and modify it for Z80 compatibility without too much difficulty. The architecture would still be all wrong for an Amstrad, though... :-)
To a certain degree. I think they may actually be targeting real customers, though. There are plenty of aviation enthusiasts who are bit by the problem of finding transportation once they're on the ground. Renting a car isn't a big deal, but the cost does add up. This design would probably be targeted at such enthusiasts who would not only have a car once they were on the ground, but would also be able to avoid hanger fees!
On a side-note, Oshkosh is where it's happening if you like to build your own planes. Apparently, one of the most affordable methods of obtaining an aircraft these days is to build one from a kit. And there are few places in the nation where there's as much support for this practice as in Oshkosh, WI.
Here's a few links:
http://www.oshkoshaircraftbuilders.com/
http://www.airventure.org/
http://www.oshkoshwai.org/
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m5072/is_n34_v16/ai_16058827
Just to be snarky for a moment, the Z80 *was* a clone of the Intel 8080...
...that was posted. Dear God. Someone mark the date. Slashdot just died today.
The movie is supposed to be a tongue in cheek comedy. It's semi-serious in its premise, but is able to use humor to gloss over the various suspension of disbelief problems that arise with the (rather outlandish) plot. Should make for an interesting film once it's released. :-)
I have that game for the Commodore 64! Most annoying design, ever. You have to sit through ALL the cut scenes before you play the game. Then it's really a collection of mini-games that start with the oddest rhythm game in history. (Basically, tap the joystick to the beat of the character's run so that you have a running start when taking off with your jet pack.) On top of everything, you have to swap disks CONSTANTLY, which makes the game even slower than it already was.
That being said, the game grows on you after a while. There's a lot more strategy to the game than it would appear on the surface, and the cheap deaths become less of a problem once you get the hang of it. Even the secret decoder wheel (an anti-piracy device required to play the game) actually becomes kind of cool after a while. It gives you more of that WWII, "slide-rule" feel to your adventure. However, fuel is a constant problem. It seems like no matter how much you steal from the Nazis, you never have enough to keep your jet pack running AND add fuel to your moon rocket. (For the game's finale.) Plus your secret agents are disposed of by the enemy as soon as you get anywhere in the game. The end result is that the game is HARD to finish.
None the less, it is still a rewarding game. If you're interested in playing it again, Cinemaware has actually released the game for FREE on their website. All you have to do is sign up for their site and they'll allow you to download a disk image to use in your favorite emulator. They even throw in a copy of the Secret Decoder Wheel(TM) so you won't have to search the 'net looking for the information!
For those of you who haven't tried it before, I highly recommend downloading it and giving it a try. With modern emulators, pesky issues like disk swaps are nowhere near as annoying as they once were. Or if you're a hardcore classic gamer, you can even write the images back to floppies and play the game on original hardware as God intended.
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