A bit offtopic here, but what pushed me to get rid of my Creative SBLive! card was the problems with the VIA chipsets. Replaced it with a nice Turtle Beach Santa Cruz card.
Of course, granted, I probably wouldn't listen to DRM files anyway (if I knew that they were such), but I used to have a 2.1 digital speaker set (now I have a 4.1 analog). So, if I was using that digital speaker set, and the Digital Out is being disabled, how am I supposed to listen to what is being played? (Yes, the speaker set I had also allowed for 2.1 analog as well, but that's beside the point).
Or were digital PC speakers just a fad that never lasted?
The Register article mentioned only problems with Windows NT - I used Windows 2000 with no problems at all. I have a Pioneer DVR-A04 that I bought about a month ago, retail box.
Downloaded the upgrade, ran it. It detected my drive (hooked up as secondary slave, with a Pioneer DVD-ROM as primary slave), and flashed it. The drive rebooted itself, no problems. Took all of 30 seconds.
The Register article mentioned only problems with Windows NT - I used Windows 2000 with no problems at all. I still don't have DVD recording working under Linux, but that's from a lack of time, not a lack of trying. Nero is so easy to use.:)
What I'm curious of is that the firmware version number changed from 1.20 to 1.32, but they don't seem to have any changelogs on the Pioneer website. I'm curious only because I have a Compaq laptop that's rather flaky with DVD-R media (Presario 2715US), and I wanted to know if it was the firmware flash that helped, or the type of media I used (probably the media) that actually allowed it to read the DVD-R I made.
I don't work for Microsoft, and I don't know their current licensing agreements of their SDK, but here's my understanding based on my prior experience (in working for Sega, in their Developer Technical Support group).
There are apparently two things that Microsoft is griping about - the sale of Mod Chips, and the distribution of the MAME X-Box binaries.
Issue 1 (Mod Chips): Microsoft may not have a leg to stand on legally. Until reverse-engineering is completely made illegal in the United States (and other countries where Microsoft could sue people), the Mod Chips are semi-legal. I say "semi-legal" because although they generally allow for the use of pirated games, you can also claim that they let you run other things (like non Microsoft formatted CD-R's/DVD's, etc.), like MAME for the X-Box.
Issue 2 (X-Box MAME): It is my understanding that the binaries that were distributed were built using the Microsoft X-Box SDK. This is a no-no. At Sega, we would rent (believe it or not, basically, rent) the development hardware (which was a special Dreamcast unit that had a debugging CPU, a hard drive and a GD-ROM drive that would boot from non-retail GD's) for somewhere in the neighborhood of $5,000, and we would include with that a copy of our SDK.
The hardware and SDK were heavily licensed, to the point that we could take them away from a developer on pretty much our whim (although I had never heard of such a thing happening - usually the developers returned them on their own volition, like when they were finished development for the system). Also, the game concepts had to go through committee decisions, and the companies getting the hardware and software were generally heavily scrutinized. I can say from personal experience that I was ordered to not provide a certain company with support, even though they had our hardware and SDK, because they weren't working on an authorized title.
So, basically, you weren't allowed to give out the SDK's to anybody, and since you don't have permission to use the SDK, it is illegal to distribute the resulting binaries (kind of like the Quake I for Dreamcast that was floating around - it required WinCE to build, but only licensed Sega developers had legal rights to use the WinCE SDK). On this issue, I completely agree with Microsoft.
Build it without the X-Box SDK, and you're in the clear. Otherwise, get a good lawyer, because you're committing copyright infringement.
...for John Byrd actually, up until February 2001, when Sega of Japan dropped the axe on the Sega of America Third-Party Developer Technical Support (DTS). I have contacted him about this article, and maybe he can say a few words (however, he does not work for Sega anymore, so I don't know what effect his words will have).
Truth be told, when we were at Sega, we were following the amateur programmers, and we knew that there was no way that we could stop them (not that the youthful hackers in us really wanted to). I don't know if this will help you any, but Sega of America actually ran a mailing list at one time for amateur VMU (Visual Memory Unit) programmers - this may be useful in establishing some credibility that Sega was encouraging development. Of course, then again, there was usually a difference between what SOA and SOJ wanted.:(
Although I do not know where the links are for making the cables, it is possible to do so (and I believe that somebody else pasted the link). The only catch is finding the Dreamcast serial port side. Rather than ordering from Hong Kong, you might want to see if you can find the Japanese ISDN cable, which is the real version of the cable you are looking for (I have one at home). I don't remember the part number, but I can look it up tonight. That and a null-modem adaptor, and you're in business.
Absolutely rediculous what is going on. I wonder when my homeland of Canada will begin to follow suit.:(
Disclaimer: I speak only for myself, and not Sega of America, Sega of Japan, John Byrd, or any other current or former Sega employee.
I used to work at Sega (and since the information is widely available on the net now, I don't think that there's any harm in posting it here, despite the little contract I signed with them when I got laid off).
It's not so much the board as it is the BootROM in the Dreamcast.
A little history here (as recounted to me by a few Sega of Japan people)... Sega of Japan (SOJ) originally intended the Dreamcast to run off of GD-ROMs only, but the problem is that GD-ROM discs cost $13 (at least, that's what the blank ones we sold to game developers cost, I have no idea what the mass production expense is). The problem is that Sega then decided that they wanted to distribute free demo discs, and the cost of GD's for this purposes was astronomical. So, they came up with this MIL-CD format that would also boot on a Dreamcast, a regular CD (in media) but had a special signature that the BootROM checked for.
SOJ thought that their little secret was safe (through security by obscurity), until somebody discovered it. I don't have any concrete facts on who did, the rumor that I heard is that the Bleem team (who are very intelligent people, BTW) had a MIL-CD imported from Japan and cracked it that way . Of course, at this time, the GameShark was starting to exploit the MIL-CD format. Then the cracking groups started exploiting it (presumably by looking at GameShark).
At this point, Sega of Japan didn't really care, but Sega of America (SOA) was mightily pissed - our third-party developers were not impressed. There was some internal experimentation on copy-protection/anti-cracking schemes (which I will NOT discuss), and we also lobbied SOJ to put out a new BootROM (v2.0?) that did not allow for booting from CD's. Once they had used their depleted stock of previous (1.1 I believe) BootROM's, then they started using the new chips.
The problem is that there were many hardware revisions of the Dreamcast, so you can't necessarily guarantee by a date (or version number) whether your DC will boot CD's or not.
Of course, there is some legality regarding using the MIL-CD format - Sega intentionally put in some Sega trademarks in the BootROM and the MIL-CD format, so that the only way to have them boot is to contain that Sega text. Thus, in theory, you are subjecting yourself to trademark infringement cases (they did this as a result of Sega v. Accolade, way back when).
Although I don't know the particulars of these cases involving prayer and the ACLU (I'm Canadian), I will make a personal comment here.
Just as you have the right to pray in school, I have the right to not have to listen to it/participate in it due to my beliefs.
In the schools in Ontario (which is where I'm from), it was the public school that I went to (which is supposed to be religion agnostic) that forced us to say the Lord's Prayer every morning. You didn't like it, you had to leave the classroom until the prayer was finished. In other words, you say the prayer, or you're ostracised.
Luckily by the time I was in grade three, the schools were no longer permitted to do this. However, by grade six, they were back at it.
Personally, I was baptised a Roman Cathlolic, but by faith, I'm an Atheist. I believe that public school is not a place for prayer - if you want to pray, pray at home.
Note that in the case of a private school, it is completely different. In that case, it's put up and shut up.
Who would buy an ATI board? Well, I would. Not to fan the flames, but...
I've owned a few video boards over the years, and have been constantly looking for a board that does both good 2D and 3D, and up until now, I haven't really found it. My Matrox Millenium (from about four years ago) did excellent 2D, no 3D. My Voodoo Rush had decent 3D for it's time, but the 2D sucked (blurry image, and this was without a passthrough cable). That got replaced (after switching back to the Matrox) with an nVidia TNT Ultra. The 3D was pretty good, but the 2D was a bit blurry (I dumped the TNT when I spoke with nVidia and confirmed that they were not producing Open Source Linux drivers - I don't like liars too much). So, the TNT got replaced by a Matrox G400Max Dualhead - excellent 2D, the 3D was lacking somewhat.
Just this weekend I purchased an ATI Radeon All-In-Wonder for $250. An excellent deal, since the 2D is nice and crisp, and the 3D rocks (for my purposes anyway). And, in 32-bit mode, it almost equals the GeForce 2 in performance.
Plus, this board has excellent multimedia. I love the TV tuner, it's so much better than the Hauppauge I used it to replace, plus I can hook up all sorts of video input devices and record from them. Excellent on the fly MPEG compression. And of course, we can't forget the hardware DVD playback, which is outstanding.
Also, like other people have said, let's not forget that the GeForce cards are still quite expensive.
A friend of mine was telling me three years ago that ATI made great cards, and I scoffed at him. Looks like I owe him an apology.
So, in conclusion, who would buy an ATI? How about somebody who wants a full-featured card that gives outstanding image quality. If you want pure frames per second, then buy your GeForce with it's blurry, dim images, since they screw around with the palettes and overclock the chips to get those numbers that hardcore gamers seem to like so much.
Windows CE 3.0 will not work on a Dreamcast without extensive porting for the hardware (i.e. the PowerVR chip (video), Yamaha AICA (sound)), which is why when Sega developers asked if Windows CE 3.0 would be made available for DC, MS said no. I worked at Sega (until I got laid off because of their new strategy, software publishing, which killed off the Dreamcast), and I couldn't even get the source code for Windows CE for Dreamcast 2.0 from Microsoft whenever developers had a complaint.
And now for my personal ranting...
Unfortunately, it seemed that Windows CE for Dreamcast was an afterthought - the documentation was horrible, to the point that some functions not available on the Dreamcast were listed, or some functions had completely incorrect information. And, oh, the bugs - the worst thing was finding the cause of the bug, only to have to tell the developers, "Sorry, you'll have to wait for the next bug-fix release". At least with the Sega libraries, I could recompile them myself when needed.
After my experience with Windows CE, I certainly hope to not have to program in it again (or use any of MS' API's) - I found it rather messy and inelegant. For now I don't have to worry about it, since my current job has me doing embedded work using vxWorks.
Wish this "Shared Source" abomination was around back when I needed it, I could have helped some third party Sega developers better.
Actually, one question that I have... Does normal Windows CE come with DirectX, or does it use normal GDI stuff? For the Dreamcast, it came with DirectX 6.0, and a vast majority of the GDI stuff was removed by default (unless you used the integrated version of IE, then it included GDI components, to the best of my knowledge).
Actually, Windows doesn't show the output of ANY Windows drivers that are being loaded - they're just loaded (or fail) without any sort of an indication. The text that you're seeing on the screen is that from a DOS driver (you really shouldn't be loading ASPICD.SYS or MSCDEX.EXE with Windows 95 and higher, that can actually cause more problems then it solves - mind you, if your CD-ROM isn't supported through Windows native drivers, then by all means, go for it).
Myself, I like the idea that Windows NT has, where any problems are logged in the Event Viewer (dmesg in Linux), and a message appears when you login (or maybe at bootup) when something went wrong, and it tells you to check the Event Log.
-- Joe
Although I haven't tried the site myself, I would suspect that IE doesn't fall for it because if you look at it's browser ID string, it actually represents itself as Mozilla 4.0 (IE Compatible) or something like that.
-- Joe
Actually, the regulations exist more to keep people from blowing up phones and destroying phone lines.:)
As I'm sure you know, phones require electric current running through them to work. This current is provided through the phone jack, and is actually what makes the phone ring (I think a high current turns the ringer on and a low current keeps it off).
Anyway, when I worked at Bell Canada in high school, the techs in the central office had a way of turning on a stronger than normal electric current to the phone line. They used this to test whether a line was good or not (exactly how, I'm not certain - is there somebody who works in the telco industry who knows how?). The signal wasn't enough to damage the line if used in moderation, but imagine what would happen if somebody were to modify a modem to, say, triple the output of current? Granted, I doubt this could happen with DSP code, but hey, you never know...
Granted, it's been years since I worked at Bell, so I don't remember all of the details, but I do recall that the guy left the current running for about five minutes before I reminded him to shut it off.:)
This is an very good point. When a modem is certified, both the actual hardware and the software that drives it (whether it be uploaded software in this case, or software on a ROM chip) must be certified. If something changes in the firmware, you generally need a new certification.
At the last company that I worked for, we had a modem driver written by another company (it was a software modem) for our game console, and we were trying to write a new driver for it (since we wanted bugfixes, etc.), so we had to check out the legal documentation. It seems that the FCC here in the US had certified the existing combination and didn't allow for changes, but the Canadian government didn't quite care as much (I don't know why).
I believe (though I am not 100% sure) that much of the reasons for these requirements are the regulations for line load and interference. If you take too much of the line load, then you'll render all phones in the house inoperable, and if you allow too much interference, well, that pretty much speaks for itself.
Well, seeing as this site has many other consoles that they cover, you really think that they'll put a Sega slant on things? The way I see it, everybody is entitled to their opinion, and that's just what it is - their opinion, based on technical information and a side-by-side comparison.
My opinion though is that they hit the nail on the head. We have a Japanese PS2 at work (have had it for months), and the games for it aren't that great. Ridge Racer 5 looked terrible (all of the building looked the same because of the low texture memory), and everything else that we have for it (I don't remember the titles, but we have about five of them) look so-so. The only game that we play on it (on a regular basis) is a Japanese baseball game by Konami. I don't know what the game title is (I can't read Japanese), but it's a "big head" baseball type game (the characters are cartoons with overly inflated head and feet), with Japanese teams. We have Square's baseball title as well, and while it looks pretty good, it's not that great in playability (and believe me, I almost say the same about World Series 2K1).
Also, before you say that the DC is for lazy programmers, have you tried to program for it? I write programs for it on a daily basis (it's my job after all), and let me tell you, if you're a lazy programmer, you'll get poor results.
First of all folks, are we even sure that Segaweb.com is even owned by Sega? I did a whois on the domain name, and it appears to be owned by a separate party that has nothing to do with Sega.
I work for Sega, and we pretty much stick within the sega.com domain for our publically viewable stuff (our internal websites are on another domain).
In fact, from their site, "SegaWeb is an independent site and is not associated in any official capacity with Sega Enterprises."
The site is a spinoff of gamerweb.com, and they also have sonyweb.com, nintendoweb.com and xboxweb.com as well.
An interesting tidbit here... The Dreamcast was supposed to be only WinCE powered, that would mean that every game was supposed to be written for DirectX. Luckily Sega (my employer) made the decision to come up with it's own (superior) OS.
Let's just say that WinCE has it's limitations, and personally, I think that it blows chunks, but there are still some titles that manage to get good performance out of it. For the rest, I get phone calls and e-mails from the developers asking how they can improve performance and work around memory leaks and bugs. *sigh*
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A bit offtopic here, but what pushed me to get rid of my Creative SBLive! card was the problems with the VIA chipsets. Replaced it with a nice Turtle Beach Santa Cruz card.
Of course, granted, I probably wouldn't listen to DRM files anyway (if I knew that they were such), but I used to have a 2.1 digital speaker set (now I have a 4.1 analog). So, if I was using that digital speaker set, and the Digital Out is being disabled, how am I supposed to listen to what is being played? (Yes, the speaker set I had also allowed for 2.1 analog as well, but that's beside the point).
Or were digital PC speakers just a fad that never lasted?
-- Joe
The Register article mentioned only problems with Windows NT - I used Windows 2000 with no problems at all. I have a Pioneer DVR-A04 that I bought about a month ago, retail box.
:)
Downloaded the upgrade, ran it. It detected my drive (hooked up as secondary slave, with a Pioneer DVD-ROM as primary slave), and flashed it. The drive rebooted itself, no problems. Took all of 30 seconds.
The Register article mentioned only problems with Windows NT - I used Windows 2000 with no problems at all. I still don't have DVD recording working under Linux, but that's from a lack of time, not a lack of trying. Nero is so easy to use.
What I'm curious of is that the firmware version number changed from 1.20 to 1.32, but they don't seem to have any changelogs on the Pioneer website. I'm curious only because I have a Compaq laptop that's rather flaky with DVD-R media (Presario 2715US), and I wanted to know if it was the firmware flash that helped, or the type of media I used (probably the media) that actually allowed it to read the DVD-R I made.
-- Joe
I don't work for Microsoft, and I don't know their current licensing agreements of their SDK, but here's my understanding based on my prior experience (in working for Sega, in their Developer Technical Support group).
There are apparently two things that Microsoft is griping about - the sale of Mod Chips, and the distribution of the MAME X-Box binaries.
Issue 1 (Mod Chips): Microsoft may not have a leg to stand on legally. Until reverse-engineering is completely made illegal in the United States (and other countries where Microsoft could sue people), the Mod Chips are semi-legal. I say "semi-legal" because although they generally allow for the use of pirated games, you can also claim that they let you run other things (like non Microsoft formatted CD-R's/DVD's, etc.), like MAME for the X-Box.
Issue 2 (X-Box MAME): It is my understanding that the binaries that were distributed were built using the Microsoft X-Box SDK. This is a no-no. At Sega, we would rent (believe it or not, basically, rent) the development hardware (which was a special Dreamcast unit that had a debugging CPU, a hard drive and a GD-ROM drive that would boot from non-retail GD's) for somewhere in the neighborhood of $5,000, and we would include with that a copy of our SDK.
The hardware and SDK were heavily licensed, to the point that we could take them away from a developer on pretty much our whim (although I had never heard of such a thing happening - usually the developers returned them on their own volition, like when they were finished development for the system). Also, the game concepts had to go through committee decisions, and the companies getting the hardware and software were generally heavily scrutinized. I can say from personal experience that I was ordered to not provide a certain company with support, even though they had our hardware and SDK, because they weren't working on an authorized title.
So, basically, you weren't allowed to give out the SDK's to anybody, and since you don't have permission to use the SDK, it is illegal to distribute the resulting binaries (kind of like the Quake I for Dreamcast that was floating around - it required WinCE to build, but only licensed Sega developers had legal rights to use the WinCE SDK). On this issue, I completely agree with Microsoft.
Build it without the X-Box SDK, and you're in the clear. Otherwise, get a good lawyer, because you're committing copyright infringement.
-- Joe
...for John Byrd actually, up until February 2001, when Sega of Japan dropped the axe on the Sega of America Third-Party Developer Technical Support (DTS). I have contacted him about this article, and maybe he can say a few words (however, he does not work for Sega anymore, so I don't know what effect his words will have).
:(
:(
Truth be told, when we were at Sega, we were following the amateur programmers, and we knew that there was no way that we could stop them (not that the youthful hackers in us really wanted to). I don't know if this will help you any, but Sega of America actually ran a mailing list at one time for amateur VMU (Visual Memory Unit) programmers - this may be useful in establishing some credibility that Sega was encouraging development. Of course, then again, there was usually a difference between what SOA and SOJ wanted.
Although I do not know where the links are for making the cables, it is possible to do so (and I believe that somebody else pasted the link). The only catch is finding the Dreamcast serial port side. Rather than ordering from Hong Kong, you might want to see if you can find the Japanese ISDN cable, which is the real version of the cable you are looking for (I have one at home). I don't remember the part number, but I can look it up tonight. That and a null-modem adaptor, and you're in business.
Absolutely rediculous what is going on. I wonder when my homeland of Canada will begin to follow suit.
Disclaimer: I speak only for myself, and not Sega of America, Sega of Japan, John Byrd, or any other current or former Sega employee.
-- Joe
I used to work at Sega (and since the information is widely available on the net now, I don't think that there's any harm in posting it here, despite the little contract I signed with them when I got laid off).
It's not so much the board as it is the BootROM in the Dreamcast.
A little history here (as recounted to me by a few Sega of Japan people)... Sega of Japan (SOJ) originally intended the Dreamcast to run off of GD-ROMs only, but the problem is that GD-ROM discs cost $13 (at least, that's what the blank ones we sold to game developers cost, I have no idea what the mass production expense is). The problem is that Sega then decided that they wanted to distribute free demo discs, and the cost of GD's for this purposes was astronomical. So, they came up with this MIL-CD format that would also boot on a Dreamcast, a regular CD (in media) but had a special signature that the BootROM checked for.
SOJ thought that their little secret was safe (through security by obscurity), until somebody discovered it. I don't have any concrete facts on who did, the rumor that I heard is that the Bleem team (who are very intelligent people, BTW) had a MIL-CD imported from Japan and cracked it that way . Of course, at this time, the GameShark was starting to exploit the MIL-CD format. Then the cracking groups started exploiting it (presumably by looking at GameShark).
At this point, Sega of Japan didn't really care, but Sega of America (SOA) was mightily pissed - our third-party developers were not impressed. There was some internal experimentation on copy-protection/anti-cracking schemes (which I will NOT discuss), and we also lobbied SOJ to put out a new BootROM (v2.0?) that did not allow for booting from CD's. Once they had used their depleted stock of previous (1.1 I believe) BootROM's, then they started using the new chips.
The problem is that there were many hardware revisions of the Dreamcast, so you can't necessarily guarantee by a date (or version number) whether your DC will boot CD's or not.
Of course, there is some legality regarding using the MIL-CD format - Sega intentionally put in some Sega trademarks in the BootROM and the MIL-CD format, so that the only way to have them boot is to contain that Sega text. Thus, in theory, you are subjecting yourself to trademark infringement cases (they did this as a result of Sega v. Accolade, way back when).
-- Joe
Although I don't know the particulars of these cases involving prayer and the ACLU (I'm Canadian), I will make a personal comment here.
Just as you have the right to pray in school, I have the right to not have to listen to it/participate in it due to my beliefs.
In the schools in Ontario (which is where I'm from), it was the public school that I went to (which is supposed to be religion agnostic) that forced us to say the Lord's Prayer every morning. You didn't like it, you had to leave the classroom until the prayer was finished. In other words, you say the prayer, or you're ostracised.
Luckily by the time I was in grade three, the schools were no longer permitted to do this. However, by grade six, they were back at it.
Personally, I was baptised a Roman Cathlolic, but by faith, I'm an Atheist. I believe that public school is not a place for prayer - if you want to pray, pray at home.
Note that in the case of a private school, it is completely different. In that case, it's put up and shut up.
-- Joe
Who would buy an ATI board? Well, I would. Not to fan the flames, but...
I've owned a few video boards over the years, and have been constantly looking for a board that does both good 2D and 3D, and up until now, I haven't really found it. My Matrox Millenium (from about four years ago) did excellent 2D, no 3D. My Voodoo Rush had decent 3D for it's time, but the 2D sucked (blurry image, and this was without a passthrough cable). That got replaced (after switching back to the Matrox) with an nVidia TNT Ultra. The 3D was pretty good, but the 2D was a bit blurry (I dumped the TNT when I spoke with nVidia and confirmed that they were not producing Open Source Linux drivers - I don't like liars too much). So, the TNT got replaced by a Matrox G400Max Dualhead - excellent 2D, the 3D was lacking somewhat.
Just this weekend I purchased an ATI Radeon All-In-Wonder for $250. An excellent deal, since the 2D is nice and crisp, and the 3D rocks (for my purposes anyway). And, in 32-bit mode, it almost equals the GeForce 2 in performance.
Plus, this board has excellent multimedia. I love the TV tuner, it's so much better than the Hauppauge I used it to replace, plus I can hook up all sorts of video input devices and record from them. Excellent on the fly MPEG compression. And of course, we can't forget the hardware DVD playback, which is outstanding.
Also, like other people have said, let's not forget that the GeForce cards are still quite expensive.
A friend of mine was telling me three years ago that ATI made great cards, and I scoffed at him. Looks like I owe him an apology.
So, in conclusion, who would buy an ATI? How about somebody who wants a full-featured card that gives outstanding image quality. If you want pure frames per second, then buy your GeForce with it's blurry, dim images, since they screw around with the palettes and overclock the chips to get those numbers that hardcore gamers seem to like so much.
-- Joe
Windows CE 3.0 will not work on a Dreamcast without extensive porting for the hardware (i.e. the PowerVR chip (video), Yamaha AICA (sound)), which is why when Sega developers asked if Windows CE 3.0 would be made available for DC, MS said no. I worked at Sega (until I got laid off because of their new strategy, software publishing, which killed off the Dreamcast), and I couldn't even get the source code for Windows CE for Dreamcast 2.0 from Microsoft whenever developers had a complaint.
And now for my personal ranting...
Unfortunately, it seemed that Windows CE for Dreamcast was an afterthought - the documentation was horrible, to the point that some functions not available on the Dreamcast were listed, or some functions had completely incorrect information. And, oh, the bugs - the worst thing was finding the cause of the bug, only to have to tell the developers, "Sorry, you'll have to wait for the next bug-fix release". At least with the Sega libraries, I could recompile them myself when needed.
After my experience with Windows CE, I certainly hope to not have to program in it again (or use any of MS' API's) - I found it rather messy and inelegant. For now I don't have to worry about it, since my current job has me doing embedded work using vxWorks.
Wish this "Shared Source" abomination was around back when I needed it, I could have helped some third party Sega developers better.
Actually, one question that I have... Does normal Windows CE come with DirectX, or does it use normal GDI stuff? For the Dreamcast, it came with DirectX 6.0, and a vast majority of the GDI stuff was removed by default (unless you used the integrated version of IE, then it included GDI components, to the best of my knowledge).
-- Joe
Actually, Windows doesn't show the output of ANY Windows drivers that are being loaded - they're just loaded (or fail) without any sort of an indication. The text that you're seeing on the screen is that from a DOS driver (you really shouldn't be loading ASPICD.SYS or MSCDEX.EXE with Windows 95 and higher, that can actually cause more problems then it solves - mind you, if your CD-ROM isn't supported through Windows native drivers, then by all means, go for it). Myself, I like the idea that Windows NT has, where any problems are logged in the Event Viewer (dmesg in Linux), and a message appears when you login (or maybe at bootup) when something went wrong, and it tells you to check the Event Log. -- Joe
Although I haven't tried the site myself, I would suspect that IE doesn't fall for it because if you look at it's browser ID string, it actually represents itself as Mozilla 4.0 (IE Compatible) or something like that. -- Joe
Actually, the regulations exist more to keep people from blowing up phones and destroying phone lines. :)
:)
As I'm sure you know, phones require electric current running through them to work. This current is provided through the phone jack, and is actually what makes the phone ring (I think a high current turns the ringer on and a low current keeps it off).
Anyway, when I worked at Bell Canada in high school, the techs in the central office had a way of turning on a stronger than normal electric current to the phone line. They used this to test whether a line was good or not (exactly how, I'm not certain - is there somebody who works in the telco industry who knows how?). The signal wasn't enough to damage the line if used in moderation, but imagine what would happen if somebody were to modify a modem to, say, triple the output of current? Granted, I doubt this could happen with DSP code, but hey, you never know...
Granted, it's been years since I worked at Bell, so I don't remember all of the details, but I do recall that the guy left the current running for about five minutes before I reminded him to shut it off.
Joe
This is an very good point. When a modem is certified, both the actual hardware and the software that drives it (whether it be uploaded software in this case, or software on a ROM chip) must be certified. If something changes in the firmware, you generally need a new certification.
At the last company that I worked for, we had a modem driver written by another company (it was a software modem) for our game console, and we were trying to write a new driver for it (since we wanted bugfixes, etc.), so we had to check out the legal documentation. It seems that the FCC here in the US had certified the existing combination and didn't allow for changes, but the Canadian government didn't quite care as much (I don't know why).
I believe (though I am not 100% sure) that much of the reasons for these requirements are the regulations for line load and interference. If you take too much of the line load, then you'll render all phones in the house inoperable, and if you allow too much interference, well, that pretty much speaks for itself.
Joe
Well, seeing as this site has many other consoles that they cover, you really think that they'll put a Sega slant on things? The way I see it, everybody is entitled to their opinion, and that's just what it is - their opinion, based on technical information and a side-by-side comparison.
My opinion though is that they hit the nail on the head. We have a Japanese PS2 at work (have had it for months), and the games for it aren't that great. Ridge Racer 5 looked terrible (all of the building looked the same because of the low texture memory), and everything else that we have for it (I don't remember the titles, but we have about five of them) look so-so. The only game that we play on it (on a regular basis) is a Japanese baseball game by Konami. I don't know what the game title is (I can't read Japanese), but it's a "big head" baseball type game (the characters are cartoons with overly inflated head and feet), with Japanese teams. We have Square's baseball title as well, and while it looks pretty good, it's not that great in playability (and believe me, I almost say the same about World Series 2K1).
Also, before you say that the DC is for lazy programmers, have you tried to program for it? I write programs for it on a daily basis (it's my job after all), and let me tell you, if you're a lazy programmer, you'll get poor results.
-- Joe
First of all folks, are we even sure that Segaweb.com is even owned by Sega? I did a whois on the domain name, and it appears to be owned by a separate party that has nothing to do with Sega.
I work for Sega, and we pretty much stick within the sega.com domain for our publically viewable stuff (our internal websites are on another domain).
In fact, from their site, "SegaWeb is an independent site and is not associated in any official capacity with Sega Enterprises."
The site is a spinoff of gamerweb.com, and they also have sonyweb.com, nintendoweb.com and xboxweb.com as well.
-- Joe
An interesting tidbit here... The Dreamcast was supposed to be only WinCE powered, that would mean that every game was supposed to be written for DirectX. Luckily Sega (my employer) made the decision to come up with it's own (superior) OS.
Let's just say that WinCE has it's limitations, and personally, I think that it blows chunks, but there are still some titles that manage to get good performance out of it. For the rest, I get phone calls and e-mails from the developers asking how they can improve performance and work around memory leaks and bugs. *sigh*
-- Joe