Man! it would have been interesting if Microsoft had bought Virtual Game Station from Connectix along with VirtualPC. I bought VGS when it first came out, It kicks ass!
Actually this is already getting done. CxBx is a semi-working Xbox compatability layer for Windows. A few commercial games are playable and one of the developers has a ATI card.
Definately for the middle of the road server/workstation, X86 CPU prices are driven down by the amazing volume of them that are sold. Go to the lower or high end and it's different
slower?
Maybe, depends on how much you spend and what you are doing, Apple's G5s are just bastards of much MUCH faster
computers
The PPC design is simpler and generally going to be cheaper to implement.
You may have somthing here, although I think it was the lack of good development tools for the PS2.
It seems that the only thing the Xbox2 is going to have in common with the Xbox1 is a WinNT based kernel, which should make it reasonably easy to develop games on. Who knows? If Microsoft comes out with some super cool feature it could swallow the market before Sony can get the PS3 out. Even without a HD they could include a PVR with HD-DVD-RWs. The Xbox2 will probably ship with an HD-DVD drive which can hold 20gigs on a single layer and 32 gigs on 2 layers (64 gigs per disc!).
$50 is kind of pricey if you aren't sure how much your going to play, I think a lot of casual gamers put their consoles down for months on end(I do) and then pick back up later in the year. People like me will probably never really get into a subscription model like LIVE's (although it may be the best possible solution for console gaming). I really hate subscription models, I'll stick to network gaming on computers.
Mindshare, It makes the cost of a new console more justifiable to a lot of people. This appeals to both people who have an Xbox1(however misguided it is) and to people who don't(who see it as a larger library of games)
I think it could have been an innovative console, but microsoft fumbled. To be fair they did an excellent job creating Live (although it's a bit expensive for a casual gamer). I was expecting a lot more when the Xbox was released.
The only real technical advatage it has over the PS2 is that it has more memory (64MB instead of 40MB), however the motherboards are setup for 128MB. If they had released their console with the full 128, we would have seen impresive games! When they killed off UltimateTV I figured they would release the same functionality in the Xbox. That would have been innovative. The HD is kindof neato, but wasn't ever utilized for much, they never released a browser, or any general purpose apps to make the Xbox WebTVish.
reminds me of Microsoft's Get the Facts crap. I actually ordered their free Windows/Linux evaluation kit. Funniest thing I've ever seen, and it cost them $3.82 just to ship the crap to me, not to mention the cost of materials. I'm now using the folder they gave me for my Comp-Sci classes.
I imagine they backed themselves into a hole by going with an Nvidia chipset. They don't own licences to emulate all of Nvidia's shader stuff on ATI hardware, so they do a "study" showing how it doesn't matter. Sony on the other had has licenced (or cross-licenced) pretty much everything in the PS2.
the Pentium-M is already pretty damn effcient, and can underclock itself when it's not needed for that bad-ass 3D app. Memory can be a big waste of power(generally the more chips(physical) the more power they consume.
LCD screens (and their CCFT backlights) are a HUGE draw on the battery, and old ones aren't really any better.
Elgato seems to have a firewire tuner that supports DVB-S, It's got a funky card reader and only works with Macintoshs, but it does exist (and their software kicks ass)
Firewire tuners are also the most expensive. Elgato makes some really great ones for MacOS. A good way to import video is through a firewire video camera, the video quality is excellent, and you'll probably be buying one anyway.
For recording shows I like using a ReplayTV(a TIVO would do), then you can connect to it over the network and play your shows on your computer.
Well, including a $100 add on HD would be possible.
The Xbox2 is going to have at least 128MB of RAM(maybe as much as 512), if they used all of the extra RAM as a super-cache to the emulated HD then you fix the problem. Of course you have the problem of syncing the cache with the flash on power down, but I imagine most virtual memory is handled through Microsoft's APIs, so these could just be changed so they are never written to Flash.
All this said; I don't think they have a prayer of backwards compatablity because of the Nvidia chipset. I'll buy one when they run Linux.
There was once a chip that could run both both X86 and PPC code. I remember seeing an ad for a machine that had one in a magazine once.
Sony actually built the PS1 into the chip that handles the controller ports, not the main CPU(emotion engine). It's more likely that the Xbox2 would have a System on a chip, but Microsoft would still need to emulate all the NVIDIA crud. This would be quite a feat, legally and technically.
The G5@2Ghz may be able to emulate the CPU in software. It looks like Microsoft is at least looking at the route(they bought Connectix but I doubt this is possible). The graphics emulation would still be a bitch.
From what I understand, Sony is almost ready to start fabbing a chip which combines most of the PS2's chips(sound,graphice,etc) and will start using it in PS2s and then in the PS3 to allow backwards compatablilty
They could jus t use a flash drive to emulate a HD, they wouldn't even have to bundle it with the Xbox2. They didn't bother bundling DVD capabilities with the original Xbox, I could see them charging $100 for a 256MB drive to "enable" Xbox compatablility.
It seems that HD-DVDs use the same wavelngth blue laser that Blu-Ray DVDs use accoring to the Blu-Ray FAQ. Also, sony has succesfully made a single head for reading regular DVDs and Blu-Ray discs, the head uses a 3-wavelength diode.
Complexity of implementation may be why Blu-Ray beats out HD-DVD. According to the Blu-Ray FAQ they only support Mpeg2, basically they are just increasing the size of DVDs. The extra 22gigs per disc might help to.
This is just going to get worse with time. Disc cartidges solve this problem reasonably well, It seems that current Blu-Ray DVDs are in carts from this review. If you look at the Blu-Ray FAQ they are still up in the air on requiring carts.
HD-DVD will not support cartridges, this is mainly because you can make the drives and discs cheaper.
I would imagine that requiring a cart would make laptop drives easier to produce (no tray), although making them optional would make them DAMN complex.
Well, The 2 biggest console makers (Sony and Microsoft) are also pushing these new DVD formats. So the consoles that are coming out will heat up this DVD standards stuff, to bad the consoles are still almost 2 years away.
I bet he average Joe will start buying HD-DVD/Blu-Ray movies about a year after the next round of consoles comes out.
If you look over at MacRumors.com They talk about a Wall Street Journal article where Steve Jobs(Pixar/Apple CEO) complains about HD-DVD not having "adequate copy protection methods." So Is he complainging about having to use M$ DRM, or what? I can't get to the DVD forums site to see what the spec actually says about DRM.
What's interesting to me here is that 2 of the biggest console makers are backing different DVD standards. I'm guessing the XBox2 will play HD-DVDs and the PS3 will play Blu-Ray, akes the next-gen consoles a bit more interesting.
Re:Message from the Extreme Conclusions Club
on
RIP G4 PowerMac
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
wow, that's a bit of a Troll, but...
HP, for example, can deliver hardware that's tested, warranteed, supported, and, most important, homogenous. When a school system buys 2000 new PCs to run Windows 2000 (which predates OS X), they know that every PC will be the same, every PC will be working out of the box (or will be replaced quickly), and that every PC will be supported in two years.
I'd love for someone to point to ANY company still selling new computers with waranties still offering support for Windows 98. Even in the much larger world of PCs you have to EOL stuff. Companies who stay current, stay current. Companies that wait for something to break, massively upgrade. Every OEM supplier offers warranties(HP is not usually rated very highly). How are HPs any more homogenous than any other computer? Macs are a LOT more homogenous when it comes to drivers/system software.
They also know that any applications they buy will still work in five years.
Not all apps are happy to go between 2000 and XP, and a lot of apps broke between 98/ME and NT/2K.Windows XP SP2 is going to break a shitload of apps(many developers are getting ready for this). Hell, any update can break almost anything, a stupid video card update broke our terminal emulator(Reflections) on our Win2k boxes. P.S. Biege and AIO G3s were discontinued over 5 years ago*.
Most teachers won't even notice the change. XP is that compatible. OS X is not. OS X requires new training, new applications (unless you want to use Classic, which isn't exactly a great solution), new servers, and new machines.
Soooo, Windows hasn't ever changed and will never change their GUI? OSX was a huge change, but that was years ago. If you are still bitching about that, then I'll bitch about Windows 3.1 to 95! Wah! Wah! As far as new servers and machines, WTF? Any Mac produced in the last 5 years* is officialy supported by Apple with OSX and OSX will hook up to pretty much any server.
It would be impossible for a 100% OS 8/9 district to become a 100% OS X district. The all-in-one (and beige) G3s simply do not work correctly on OS X. The PII 233s work fine under Windows XP.
This is silly, OSX will install in a biege G3* as much as XP will work on a PII 233, both machines are on the fringe of being usable even with upgrades. People have to retire machines if they want to stay current.
*Apple officialy stopped supporting beige computers running OSX, but you can still install it, and it works well if you upgrade the video card and RAM. These machines were discontinued back in 1998.
Re:Message from the Extreme Conclusions Club
on
RIP G4 PowerMac
·
· Score: 1
You can still run Win98 on basically any new machine, but drivers are a bit of a pain. Win98 will not support some of the hardware, but the basic machine will still run. Problems come when you start depending on a piece of proprietary hardware, bleck, just don't do that.
If you need to use a piece of software that will not run under Classic, you can always use Basilisk II if the program is 68K compatable. I haven't checked it out yet, but Sheep Shaver has been ported to Darwin, so you should be able to now have a complete virtual PowerPC macintosh running old versions of MacOS. There is also MOL, which currently only runs under Linux/PPC, but may someday get ported over to OSX, that would allow you to boot multiple coppies of OSX on the same machine.
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Man! it would have been interesting if Microsoft had bought Virtual Game Station from Connectix along with VirtualPC. I bought VGS when it first came out, It kicks ass!
So it should be doable.
more expensive? slower?
The PPC design is simpler and generally going to be cheaper to implement.
It seems that the only thing the Xbox2 is going to have in common with the Xbox1 is a WinNT based kernel, which should make it reasonably easy to develop games on. Who knows? If Microsoft comes out with some super cool feature it could swallow the market before Sony can get the PS3 out. Even without a HD they could include a PVR with HD-DVD-RWs. The Xbox2 will probably ship with an HD-DVD drive which can hold 20gigs on a single layer and 32 gigs on 2 layers (64 gigs per disc!).
$50 is kind of pricey if you aren't sure how much your going to play, I think a lot of casual gamers put their consoles down for months on end(I do) and then pick back up later in the year. People like me will probably never really get into a subscription model like LIVE's (although it may be the best possible solution for console gaming). I really hate subscription models, I'll stick to network gaming on computers.
Mindshare, It makes the cost of a new console more justifiable to a lot of people. This appeals to both people who have an Xbox1(however misguided it is) and to people who don't(who see it as a larger library of games)
actually it just has one small microsoft logo on the bottom. In huge letters it says "Essential Facts about Windows and Linux"
I think it could have been an innovative console, but microsoft fumbled. To be fair they did an excellent job creating Live (although it's a bit expensive for a casual gamer). I was expecting a lot more when the Xbox was released.
The only real technical advatage it has over the PS2 is that it has more memory (64MB instead of 40MB), however the motherboards are setup for 128MB. If they had released their console with the full 128, we would have seen impresive games! When they killed off UltimateTV I figured they would release the same functionality in the Xbox. That would have been innovative. The HD is kindof neato, but wasn't ever utilized for much, they never released a browser, or any general purpose apps to make the Xbox WebTVish.
I imagine they backed themselves into a hole by going with an Nvidia chipset. They don't own licences to emulate all of Nvidia's shader stuff on ATI hardware, so they do a "study" showing how it doesn't matter. Sony on the other had has licenced (or cross-licenced) pretty much everything in the PS2.
LCD screens (and their CCFT backlights) are a HUGE draw on the battery, and old ones aren't really any better.
I've never had it crash in Mozilla, but then again I use a Mac. Funny that WMP9 works better on MacOS than Windows
Elgato seems to have a firewire tuner that supports DVB-S, It's got a funky card reader and only works with Macintoshs, but it does exist (and their software kicks ass)
For recording shows I like using a ReplayTV(a TIVO would do), then you can connect to it over the network and play your shows on your computer.
The Xbox2 is going to have at least 128MB of RAM(maybe as much as 512), if they used all of the extra RAM as a super-cache to the emulated HD then you fix the problem. Of course you have the problem of syncing the cache with the flash on power down, but I imagine most virtual memory is handled through Microsoft's APIs, so these could just be changed so they are never written to Flash.
All this said; I don't think they have a prayer of backwards compatablity because of the Nvidia chipset. I'll buy one when they run Linux.
Sony actually built the PS1 into the chip that handles the controller ports, not the main CPU(emotion engine). It's more likely that the Xbox2 would have a System on a chip, but Microsoft would still need to emulate all the NVIDIA crud. This would be quite a feat, legally and technically.
The G5@2Ghz may be able to emulate the CPU in software. It looks like Microsoft is at least looking at the route(they bought Connectix but I doubt this is possible). The graphics emulation would still be a bitch.
From what I understand, Sony is almost ready to start fabbing a chip which combines most of the PS2's chips(sound,graphice,etc) and will start using it in PS2s and then in the PS3 to allow backwards compatablilty
They could jus t use a flash drive to emulate a HD, they wouldn't even have to bundle it with the Xbox2. They didn't bother bundling DVD capabilities with the original Xbox, I could see them charging $100 for a 256MB drive to "enable" Xbox compatablility.
Blu-Ray burners are available now, and the discs are bigger than HD-DVD's
Fat chance of that happening, the CPU overhead is crazy for those codecs, and you can get similar results by cranking up bit-rates.
It seems that HD-DVDs use the same wavelngth blue laser that Blu-Ray DVDs use accoring to the Blu-Ray FAQ. Also, sony has succesfully made a single head for reading regular DVDs and Blu-Ray discs, the head uses a 3-wavelength diode.
Complexity of implementation may be why Blu-Ray beats out HD-DVD. According to the Blu-Ray FAQ they only support Mpeg2, basically they are just increasing the size of DVDs. The extra 22gigs per disc might help to.
HD-DVD will not support cartridges, this is mainly because you can make the drives and discs cheaper.
I would imagine that requiring a cart would make laptop drives easier to produce (no tray), although making them optional would make them DAMN complex.
I bet he average Joe will start buying HD-DVD/Blu-Ray movies about a year after the next round of consoles comes out.
If you look over at MacRumors.com They talk about a Wall Street Journal article where Steve Jobs(Pixar/Apple CEO) complains about HD-DVD not having "adequate copy protection methods." So Is he complainging about having to use M$ DRM, or what? I can't get to the DVD forums site to see what the spec actually says about DRM.
What's interesting to me here is that 2 of the biggest console makers are backing different DVD standards. I'm guessing the XBox2 will play HD-DVDs and the PS3 will play Blu-Ray, akes the next-gen consoles a bit more interesting.
HP, for example, can deliver hardware that's tested, warranteed, supported, and, most important, homogenous. When a school system buys 2000 new PCs to run Windows 2000 (which predates OS X), they know that every PC will be the same, every PC will be working out of the box (or will be replaced quickly), and that every PC will be supported in two years.
I'd love for someone to point to ANY company still selling new computers with waranties still offering support for Windows 98. Even in the much larger world of PCs you have to EOL stuff. Companies who stay current, stay current. Companies that wait for something to break, massively upgrade. Every OEM supplier offers warranties(HP is not usually rated very highly). How are HPs any more homogenous than any other computer? Macs are a LOT more homogenous when it comes to drivers/system software.
They also know that any applications they buy will still work in five years.
Not all apps are happy to go between 2000 and XP, and a lot of apps broke between 98/ME and NT/2K.Windows XP SP2 is going to break a shitload of apps(many developers are getting ready for this). Hell, any update can break almost anything, a stupid video card update broke our terminal emulator(Reflections) on our Win2k boxes. P.S. Biege and AIO G3s were discontinued over 5 years ago*.
Most teachers won't even notice the change. XP is that compatible. OS X is not. OS X requires new training, new applications (unless you want to use Classic, which isn't exactly a great solution), new servers, and new machines.
Soooo, Windows hasn't ever changed and will never change their GUI? OSX was a huge change, but that was years ago. If you are still bitching about that, then I'll bitch about Windows 3.1 to 95! Wah! Wah! As far as new servers and machines, WTF? Any Mac produced in the last 5 years* is officialy supported by Apple with OSX and OSX will hook up to pretty much any server.
It would be impossible for a 100% OS 8/9 district to become a 100% OS X district. The all-in-one (and beige) G3s simply do not work correctly on OS X. The PII 233s work fine under Windows XP.
This is silly, OSX will install in a biege G3* as much as XP will work on a PII 233, both machines are on the fringe of being usable even with upgrades. People have to retire machines if they want to stay current.
*Apple officialy stopped supporting beige computers running OSX, but you can still install it, and it works well if you upgrade the video card and RAM. These machines were discontinued back in 1998.
If you need to use a piece of software that will not run under Classic, you can always use Basilisk II if the program is 68K compatable. I haven't checked it out yet, but Sheep Shaver has been ported to Darwin, so you should be able to now have a complete virtual PowerPC macintosh running old versions of MacOS. There is also MOL, which currently only runs under Linux/PPC, but may someday get ported over to OSX, that would allow you to boot multiple coppies of OSX on the same machine.
Moof!