IIRC, the only way anybody hacked the GC was through the network port and a copy of Phantasy Star Online...I believe the server was sending actual code to execute, not just data, and a bit of intercepting allowed for some memory mangling that allowed for custom stuff, but the only custom stuff I've heard about was Linux, and it had to be loaded via the network port as well. I don't believe there's a custom disc out there at all.
Yes...as one who bought a 500gb "big disk" I had two major failures, one in warranty, and the other out. When I called them up, Lacie wouldn't even talk to me, even for $$$. It's not even raid 0... they have some propietary logic that fills one disk first and then the next, but are striped in some way that prevents the disk from being put into the machine and used (or else I could have gotten my data off).
I will never ever buy another lacie product again.
I agree with you...the game that has surprised me the most in complexity and depth is... wait for it... Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life. Cute graphics, a title worthy of any Hallmark card, but *not* an easy game to play and play well. There are a lot of websites that give tips and tricks, and they're worthy of a massive game like Everquest in the number of possibilities.
Meanwhile, I've got a *very* complex game that I can play with my 4yo daughter who loves brushing the cows while I'm pouring over multiple PDFs and websites trying to figure out how to get Nami to like me.
Realistic graphics, cell-shaded graphics, hell, I'd play a game made entirely of stick figures if it was *fun*. Come to think of it, Alien Hominid doesn't win any "realism" points, but the game is a lot of fun and has a cool look too.
To your point, I'll bet that clusters will get there. Maybe they are there, but I personally have not seen it, so I can't say.
The only difference I really know is that the IBM box was just that... a single machine (though comprised of many many cabinets). Everything was seen as a single entitiy, instead of dealing with a grid's complexity. That, theoretically, makes the admin job easier...you can just see what's happening to the box itself instead of culling details from each node and determining the load via an Excel spreadsheet.
But I will acknowledge that my cluster experience is extremely out of date, so maybe it's all different and better now.
I believe the phrase is: "set in your ways". I agree with you...the little-old-lady was very much one of those; every request I made was flatly turned down simply because "it's worked this way for 30 years and I'll be damned if I'm going to change it now." So I had to come up with some... creative... tricks in VB to do what I thought was a trivial operation for the mainframe.
OTOH, no one is going to change a 30 year old system to suit the needs of a 22 yro vb/web programmer (I had the strange honor of showing the little old lady what the net was..she had simply never heard of it). And I also figured that a lot of it was history...these were folks who had been doing this, in some cases, since the 50s. They had fixed their ideas of computers as machines that forbid you to fold, spindle or mutilate, and when you left work you went home and never thought about computers until the next day, not necessarily because you weren't interested or loved what you did, but because you simply didn't have one, and couldn't get one.
I had a job at a bank several years ago that stored everything on an IBM ES/9000. This was purported to be one of the largest machines of this type shipped from IBM to a customer. The thing was water cooled, had a staff of 10 people to maintain it, and required a hand scan just to get in the room. It ran everything you'd think and scoff at...mostly cobol jobs and a lot of JCL. I was a newbie client-server guy whose world was sybase VB3. As TFA states, there were a number of older folks, some who had been working there since before I was born, counting down the days till retirement.
I was writing the front end to the banking system, first as a VB3 app and then as a web app (in 1996!). As such, you'd run "jobs", basically like how you'd call a stored procedure, and get back the value. So I'd run the job, and before I had taken my finger off the enter key, the result was sitting on the screen.
I asked a "little-old-lady" who was days from retirement how it cached the person's value, and how it took into consideration interest, atms, etc. She told me it didn't. It started from the top of the vsam file, and added and substracted for that person till it got to the end. Then it gave you the answer.
It did this every single time.
I have never ever ever seen anything that could match that machine for raw IO processing. Add to it the fact that it was used by several thousand people all over the world, *and* it ran VM so there were two identical MVS operating systems, then CICS, then the apps....
To be honest, I never got the hang of how to even move around in CICS, but I will give mainframes a lot of credit...when you need to shovel a *lot* of data around, there's probably nothing better.
The fact is people...mainframes are computers answer to gravity...you never see them, barely acknowledge their presence, but you'll miss them when they're gone, because they're the only machines that can handle the staggering loads that would make a cluster of *anything* weep.
I know what you're saying 'cause I have one. It was available for something like a day and bought a copy. It's a pretty nice complete kit, but yeah, I had a hell of a time finding a sync-on-green monitor (and I had 3 sonys!) and once everything was up and running, it was something of a dog, performance-wise.
But all that aside, what bugged me the most was that Sony didn't really bother to include any kind of SDK for the Emotion Engine. There were some header files in there, sure, but very much "figure it out for yourself". I got through it enough to get input from the controller, and with Mesa you could whip up some OpenGL stuff, but what I was looking for was a real dev box that was just limited to those with the Linux kit. So yeah, in the end, it did seem to smack a bit of PR more than of a real attempt to get hobbyists to develop stuff a la the Yarouze.
It's telling that the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago has this awesome videogame exhibit, and while they show actual Yarouze games people created (which you can play!), I think they only show the actual PS2 kit, behind glass, unusable.
Just like on the G5, I have some apps that have a cocoa/obj-c front end to a pure 64 bit c++-based set of libraries written using xlC for performance reasons. I'll be happy to do the same thing on an Intel-based mac when it becomes generally available (and assuming that it'll also support 64-bit addressing).
Frankly, I don't see the need for Intel to worry about obj-c much...I would think the gains are not really worth it...if you're doing something graphically intense, then you're presumably going to target the gpu, and if it's mathmatically intense, you'd probably want straight C or C++ with templates.
Hell, if I thought it'd be even faster (and I knew how to program in it), I'd write my libraries in Fortran.
Well, this falls totally into personal preference, so I am speaking only for myself, but I thought that the notbook interface was too "cutesy" for the audience they were going for. It tries to bring a level of familarity to users who are, for the most part, already pretty computer savvy. The addition of the spiral was superfluous, especially since it was, and again IMHO, a pixelated mess, so it made the screen "uglier".
To be fair, I give them credit for trying, and the only reason why microsoft didn't have this problem is because they totally eschewed graphics like that, going for the lowest-common-denometer interface. I felt the same way with Borland's OWL toolkit because the green check next to OK looked horrible on my screen, and also because so many apps that I dealt with written with it would have a dialog saying "You're files are not recoverable! (sic)" with that damn green checkbox as if to say "Yep! Okay! No problem!" Microsoft's attempt at a stoplight for sql server service status was also, in my mind, well, nuts.
I think representations of real-life devices are fine when the situation calls for it (flight simulators, that sort of thing), but if you're going to try to really represent all the features of a desktop (like a blotter, pencil holder, etc.) then the tempation is to go all the way, and then you wind up with microsoft's bob.
Well, yes, you're right, but as far as the mac goes the interface in '95 was pretty much the same as it was in '84...it was still awesome to use, but the paradigms behind it were still the same.
I had OS/2 2.0 and 2.1 and while it was much more powerful (as OS/2 was in general), I think IBM kinda skimped on the interface, making for a less-then-cohesive whole. For example, you had tabs, but then you also had that notebook-tab metaphor...that blew my mind the first time I saw it and not in a good way. Another example was their idea of a trash can... a shredder. Well...yes, we all know what they were trying to convey (delete these files), but shredding has violent overtones as well as hinting that the files are not really gone, they're just in pieces (and maybe they can be recovered?). This is the kind of stuff that pychologists pour over when hired as gui experts, which I'm guessing IBM didn't do.
I don't know about anyone else, but my take on win95 was one thing...the interface. Plumbing aside, it was *new* and *different* and made it seem like the first real step to LCARS and all the space age stuff that we always imagined would be common place by the year 2001.
I remember that I had a box at the university that ran a version of Linux, and its interface was basically the same as win3.1 as everything else was at the time...Motif. Win95 seemed like such a radical change (at first), plus the growing realization about the internet, computers in general, and it felt like a good time to be in the tech industry. Thus I've always used this day, 10 years ago, as the beginning of the tech bubble, ending with the conviction of microsoft in 2000.
The sad thing is, when I saw NextStep, I was *really* looking at the future, and didn't realize it. I'm shocked at how much ooh'ing and ahh'ing I did over NextStep, which I actually didn't do with Win95, and didn't think that the world should be moving this way. Eh, maybe it was the black and white screen. Oh well.
I completely agree with you...as soon as I fired it up I though that it was much cleaner than Fire, and when I saw all the options (they have a separate website at AdiumExtras) I was hooked. I love the customization...I now have a Hobbes dock icon and the sounds from a Japanese train station. Awesome!
If we base our desires on sci-fi, we might as well base them on the Jetsons..I mean, they had flying cars that became briefcases, a huge computerized workforce, robots, trips to other planets, etc.
Sci-fi creates a world that suits the creator, and if done well, draws the user in. But the creator would never finish the thing if s/he had to also talk about how the plumbing works. The fact is there are so many details left out that even Blade Runner, in all its anti-glory, is idealized (how exactly did Decker *pay* for his noodles?)
Take Star Trek: only the Ferengi talked about money, but apart from hoarding it, it didn't seem like it got used a lot. I seem to recall some talk of "credits", whatever those are, but the real *believable* sci fi has Riker wondering how he's going to pay for that special trip he and Troi have been thinking about, especially based on a military salary.
"The devil's in the details"...well, they got that one right. The problem is that we dream of a details-free world where men and women live in harmony on Mars doing... "things". Meanwhile, the reality, when it arrives, is that Susan and Joe MarsPioneer are screaming at each other about her infidelity and his drinking and threatening divorce while Buddy is downloading pr0n and Sis is hanging out with a bad crowd by airlock #2.
Space exploration doesn't sound so appealing anymore.
I third! That was the best game ever...I thought it was much better than something like tetris because you had the whole physics thing going with the mouse.
Is the game even available anywhere? I have it on a macgames disk image that I can only run under an emulator (Mac SE/30 with 6.0.5!). I'd love to be able to play it directly on my OS X machine (mouse would work a lot better I'm sure)
I admit that I never played Serious Sam, and yeah, something like Duke Nukem, but I'd say *more* funny....DN was, I think, a pretty generic clone of Doom except that it had better locations and obviously a better main character with memorable lines. But the gameplay was pretty much the same as Doom, same weapons lineup (for the most part), and the same generic monsters/bad guys.
As soon as I read "Little Red Wagon" I imagined the marine from Doom running through the station pulling his little wagon. When the lights are all off, all you hear is the little 'squeak squeak' from the wheels, then, when the imps attack, turning and pulling out the gun he wants to use from the bottom of the wagon and all the other weapons fall out and one of the zombies stealing his wagon.
Then imagine that *every* marine is issued a LRW (always refered to as "LRW") and when they become zombies, they are able to trick out the wagon with monster tires with spikes, crazy paint jobs...but they still have pull it.
Now *that's* a Doom I'd play.
As a postscript...why doesn't anyone take the Doom or even the Q3 engine and make a *funny* game? I almost think it's a cop-out to do a game with demons, zombies, industrial-looking places with crates (crates!)...it'd be a *lot* harder to come up with a game that has all the "kick-ass" elements (graphics, audio, etc.) and be able to show something that makes you laugh, and still be an awesome game to play.
WW was the first Zelda I played with my daughter, who was not even born when Majorie's Mask was released. It wasn't as long or "indepth" as I remember OfT was, but was perfect for the understanding of my now 3 year old. For all the complaints of the cell shaded look, she loved it. One benefit was that the nastiest of bosses (mostly the first one) still looked comic-y enough that she could go to bed without nightmares about a giant whatever-that-thing-was hurting her.
I think the story was beyond her (especially not having played OfT), but she stayed interested until the end of the game, which I thought pretty good for an age where attention span is not the highest.
So while WW may not have lived up to the expectations of a lot of people (including Miyamoto it seems), there's one 3 year old who absolutely adored it and hopefully will have the same pleasant memories of it as I have of some of the games I played when I was her age (Adventure on the 2600...viva la difference!)
I'm surprised no one is talking about this, as it seems it was all the rage back-in-the-day (and I believe still going today): charge by the cycle for the app.
Case in point: I worked with IBM's MQSeries product as a link between a mainframe and a webserver. The MQSeries license for NT was something like a flat $6000. On the mainframe, however, it was some ungodly amount for the tapes, then they charged a per-cycle fee *and* a monthly maintenance contract.
As part of load testing, I wrote a program that would spit the complete works of shakespeare back and forth, over and over, to the mainframe and back using multiple threads. Two weeks of testing cost the company an extra $12,000 because of the cycles expended.
I noticed too that starting with SQL Server 7.0 that the explain plan feature can also show the number of cycles spent on a particular step. I would think Microsoft, with that info, could, if they wanted, go to a similar model with SQL Server if they so chose (and wanted to effectively kill the product).
And now that I think about it, my Unix account back in the early 90s had a cost associated with it too...I was allotted something like $1000 worth of what I assume was cpu time, and sure enough, enough attempts to get Nethack to compile and I was back in the office begging for more "money".
I was checking out your site... very cool! I'm curious how much you had to customize and what you did in fact customize. We're looking for software that has a lot of the features you have on your site, and was thinking of Drupal, and if it wasn't too much, maybe that will instill the confidence I have to go forward with it (and no, our site has absolutely nothing to do with maps:) ).
Of course, while it would seem as if justice is served should IBM do as you suggest, but I'm wondering if anything would be learned from the SCO/Unixware codebases; from what I understand they're the most 'behind-the-times' version of Unix.
What does SCO/Unixware have that sets them apart from the other Unixes? I'm not trolling, I'm really curious to know what makes SCO/Unixware different from Linux/Solaris/FreeBSD/etc apart from licensing issues.
I think you're absolutely correct. I worked at a number of places that uses AS/400's (or whatever they're calling them these days) and the RS/6000s (or whatever they're calling them...) and it seemed like a big win for IBM to have a high end processor that could unify their product lines in terms of having to support only one processor type. My understanding is that the z/Series mainframes also use the Power chips, just a whole lot more with a whole lot more infrastructure.
It would seem that my G5 no longer 'chirps' when moving around the dock, screensaver, etc. I had been using the 'Dis-allow nap' trick, but so far all seems to be well.
I know it's a dupe, but this time I get to respond instead of just giving mod points...
I played D3 at a friends house for about an hour. Big screen, dark room, was fun. But the fact is, I'm not the gamer I was back in the early nineties; zombies just don't do it for me anymore. Doom was amazing because it was a technical tour de force; I still remember walking into some of those rooms and going 'that is so *cool*!' Frankly, the whole zombie/monster story was pretty old even then, but Doom was such a good game, I was happy to play the entire thing. Hell, I did the same for D2.
Quake was pretty good, but seemed like pretty much the same thing with a slightly mideval twist to it. By the time Q2 came around, it seemed like I was playing the "same-old-thing", even though, id never disappointed in the graphics level.
But in the intervening years I'd gotten married, had kids, played a lot of other games, and given the time I now have to play, I'm looking for something different and original. Id seems to think that they can coast on demonic bitmaps and licensing forever.
I have shown this app to two of my upstairs neighbors who are muscians and they said they'd check it out, so here's hoping that helps you.
On another note (so to speak): did you write the app in cocoa with objective-c? I ask because I'm trying to get into writing mac apps (don't worry...I won't compete against you in any way unless you're into pipe/valve simulators) and need to do some graphics-intensive work for it, and wanted merely to know what you used to be inspired.
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IIRC, the only way anybody hacked the GC was through the network port and a copy of Phantasy Star Online...I believe the server was sending actual code to execute, not just data, and a bit of intercepting allowed for some memory mangling that allowed for custom stuff, but the only custom stuff I've heard about was Linux, and it had to be loaded via the network port as well. I don't believe there's a custom disc out there at all.
Yes...as one who bought a 500gb "big disk" I had two major failures, one in warranty, and the other out. When I called them up, Lacie wouldn't even talk to me, even for $$$. It's not even raid 0 ... they have some propietary logic that fills one disk first and then the next, but are striped in some way that prevents the disk from being put into the machine and used (or else I could have gotten my data off).
I will never ever buy another lacie product again.
I agree with you...the game that has surprised me the most in complexity and depth is ... wait for it... Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life. Cute graphics, a title worthy of any Hallmark card, but *not* an easy game to play and play well. There are a lot of websites that give tips and tricks, and they're worthy of a massive game like Everquest in the number of possibilities.
Meanwhile, I've got a *very* complex game that I can play with my 4yo daughter who loves brushing the cows while I'm pouring over multiple PDFs and websites trying to figure out how to get Nami to like me.
Realistic graphics, cell-shaded graphics, hell, I'd play a game made entirely of stick figures if it was *fun*. Come to think of it, Alien Hominid doesn't win any "realism" points, but the game is a lot of fun and has a cool look too.
To your point, I'll bet that clusters will get there. Maybe they are there, but I personally have not seen it, so I can't say.
... a single machine (though comprised of many many cabinets). Everything was seen as a single entitiy, instead of dealing with a grid's complexity. That, theoretically, makes the admin job easier...you can just see what's happening to the box itself instead of culling details from each node and determining the load via an Excel spreadsheet.
The only difference I really know is that the IBM box was just that
But I will acknowledge that my cluster experience is extremely out of date, so maybe it's all different and better now.
I believe the phrase is: "set in your ways". I agree with you...the little-old-lady was very much one of those; every request I made was flatly turned down simply because "it's worked this way for 30 years and I'll be damned if I'm going to change it now." So I had to come up with some ... creative ... tricks in VB to do what I thought was a trivial operation for the mainframe.
OTOH, no one is going to change a 30 year old system to suit the needs of a 22 yro vb/web programmer (I had the strange honor of showing the little old lady what the net was..she had simply never heard of it). And I also figured that a lot of it was history...these were folks who had been doing this, in some cases, since the 50s. They had fixed their ideas of computers as machines that forbid you to fold, spindle or mutilate, and when you left work you went home and never thought about computers until the next day, not necessarily because you weren't interested or loved what you did, but because you simply didn't have one, and couldn't get one.
I had a job at a bank several years ago that stored everything on an IBM ES/9000. This was purported to be one of the largest machines of this type shipped from IBM to a customer. The thing was water cooled, had a staff of 10 people to maintain it, and required a hand scan just to get in the room. It ran everything you'd think and scoff at...mostly cobol jobs and a lot of JCL. I was a newbie client-server guy whose world was sybase VB3. As TFA states, there were a number of older folks, some who had been working there since before I was born, counting down the days till retirement.
I was writing the front end to the banking system, first as a VB3 app and then as a web app (in 1996!). As such, you'd run "jobs", basically like how you'd call a stored procedure, and get back the value. So I'd run the job, and before I had taken my finger off the enter key, the result was sitting on the screen.
I asked a "little-old-lady" who was days from retirement how it cached the person's value, and how it took into consideration interest, atms, etc. She told me it didn't. It started from the top of the vsam file, and added and substracted for that person till it got to the end. Then it gave you the answer.
It did this every single time.
I have never ever ever seen anything that could match that machine for raw IO processing. Add to it the fact that it was used by several thousand people all over the world, *and* it ran VM so there were two identical MVS operating systems, then CICS, then the apps....
To be honest, I never got the hang of how to even move around in CICS, but I will give mainframes a lot of credit...when you need to shovel a *lot* of data around, there's probably nothing better.
The fact is people...mainframes are computers answer to gravity...you never see them, barely acknowledge their presence, but you'll miss them when they're gone, because they're the only machines that can handle the staggering loads that would make a cluster of *anything* weep.
I know what you're saying 'cause I have one. It was available for something like a day and bought a copy. It's a pretty nice complete kit, but yeah, I had a hell of a time finding a sync-on-green monitor (and I had 3 sonys!) and once everything was up and running, it was something of a dog, performance-wise.
But all that aside, what bugged me the most was that Sony didn't really bother to include any kind of SDK for the Emotion Engine. There were some header files in there, sure, but very much "figure it out for yourself". I got through it enough to get input from the controller, and with Mesa you could whip up some OpenGL stuff, but what I was looking for was a real dev box that was just limited to those with the Linux kit. So yeah, in the end, it did seem to smack a bit of PR more than of a real attempt to get hobbyists to develop stuff a la the Yarouze.
It's telling that the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago has this awesome videogame exhibit, and while they show actual Yarouze games people created (which you can play!), I think they only show the actual PS2 kit, behind glass, unusable.
Just like on the G5, I have some apps that have a cocoa/obj-c front end to a pure 64 bit c++-based set of libraries written using xlC for performance reasons. I'll be happy to do the same thing on an Intel-based mac when it becomes generally available (and assuming that it'll also support 64-bit addressing).
Frankly, I don't see the need for Intel to worry about obj-c much...I would think the gains are not really worth it...if you're doing something graphically intense, then you're presumably going to target the gpu, and if it's mathmatically intense, you'd probably want straight C or C++ with templates.
Hell, if I thought it'd be even faster (and I knew how to program in it), I'd write my libraries in Fortran.
Well, this falls totally into personal preference, so I am speaking only for myself, but I thought that the notbook interface was too "cutesy" for the audience they were going for. It tries to bring a level of familarity to users who are, for the most part, already pretty computer savvy. The addition of the spiral was superfluous, especially since it was, and again IMHO, a pixelated mess, so it made the screen "uglier".
To be fair, I give them credit for trying, and the only reason why microsoft didn't have this problem is because they totally eschewed graphics like that, going for the lowest-common-denometer interface. I felt the same way with Borland's OWL toolkit because the green check next to OK looked horrible on my screen, and also because so many apps that I dealt with written with it would have a dialog saying "You're files are not recoverable! (sic)" with that damn green checkbox as if to say "Yep! Okay! No problem!" Microsoft's attempt at a stoplight for sql server service status was also, in my mind, well, nuts.
I think representations of real-life devices are fine when the situation calls for it (flight simulators, that sort of thing), but if you're going to try to really represent all the features of a desktop (like a blotter, pencil holder, etc.) then the tempation is to go all the way, and then you wind up with microsoft's bob.
Well, yes, you're right, but as far as the mac goes the interface in '95 was pretty much the same as it was in '84...it was still awesome to use, but the paradigms behind it were still the same.
... a shredder. Well...yes, we all know what they were trying to convey (delete these files), but shredding has violent overtones as well as hinting that the files are not really gone, they're just in pieces (and maybe they can be recovered?). This is the kind of stuff that pychologists pour over when hired as gui experts, which I'm guessing IBM didn't do.
I had OS/2 2.0 and 2.1 and while it was much more powerful (as OS/2 was in general), I think IBM kinda skimped on the interface, making for a less-then-cohesive whole. For example, you had tabs, but then you also had that notebook-tab metaphor...that blew my mind the first time I saw it and not in a good way. Another example was their idea of a trash can
I don't know about anyone else, but my take on win95 was one thing...the interface. Plumbing aside, it was *new* and *different* and made it seem like the first real step to LCARS and all the space age stuff that we always imagined would be common place by the year 2001.
I remember that I had a box at the university that ran a version of Linux, and its interface was basically the same as win3.1 as everything else was at the time...Motif. Win95 seemed like such a radical change (at first), plus the growing realization about the internet, computers in general, and it felt like a good time to be in the tech industry. Thus I've always used this day, 10 years ago, as the beginning of the tech bubble, ending with the conviction of microsoft in 2000.
The sad thing is, when I saw NextStep, I was *really* looking at the future, and didn't realize it. I'm shocked at how much ooh'ing and ahh'ing I did over NextStep, which I actually didn't do with Win95, and didn't think that the world should be moving this way. Eh, maybe it was the black and white screen. Oh well.
I completely agree with you...as soon as I fired it up I though that it was much cleaner than Fire, and when I saw all the options (they have a separate website at AdiumExtras) I was hooked. I love the customization...I now have a Hobbes dock icon and the sounds from a Japanese train station. Awesome!
If we base our desires on sci-fi, we might as well base them on the Jetsons..I mean, they had flying cars that became briefcases, a huge computerized workforce, robots, trips to other planets, etc.
... "things". Meanwhile, the reality, when it arrives, is that Susan and Joe MarsPioneer are screaming at each other about her infidelity and his drinking and threatening divorce while Buddy is downloading pr0n and Sis is hanging out with a bad crowd by airlock #2.
Sci-fi creates a world that suits the creator, and if done well, draws the user in. But the creator would never finish the thing if s/he had to also talk about how the plumbing works. The fact is there are so many details left out that even Blade Runner, in all its anti-glory, is idealized (how exactly did Decker *pay* for his noodles?)
Take Star Trek: only the Ferengi talked about money, but apart from hoarding it, it didn't seem like it got used a lot. I seem to recall some talk of "credits", whatever those are, but the real *believable* sci fi has Riker wondering how he's going to pay for that special trip he and Troi have been thinking about, especially based on a military salary.
"The devil's in the details"...well, they got that one right. The problem is that we dream of a details-free world where men and women live in harmony on Mars doing
Space exploration doesn't sound so appealing anymore.
I third! That was the best game ever...I thought it was much better than something like tetris because you had the whole physics thing going with the mouse.
Is the game even available anywhere? I have it on a macgames disk image that I can only run under an emulator (Mac SE/30 with 6.0.5!). I'd love to be able to play it directly on my OS X machine (mouse would work a lot better I'm sure)
I admit that I never played Serious Sam, and yeah, something like Duke Nukem, but I'd say *more* funny....DN was, I think, a pretty generic clone of Doom except that it had better locations and obviously a better main character with memorable lines. But the gameplay was pretty much the same as Doom, same weapons lineup (for the most part), and the same generic monsters/bad guys.
As soon as I read "Little Red Wagon" I imagined the marine from Doom running through the station pulling his little wagon. When the lights are all off, all you hear is the little 'squeak squeak' from the wheels, then, when the imps attack, turning and pulling out the gun he wants to use from the bottom of the wagon and all the other weapons fall out and one of the zombies stealing his wagon.
Then imagine that *every* marine is issued a LRW (always refered to as "LRW") and when they become zombies, they are able to trick out the wagon with monster tires with spikes, crazy paint jobs...but they still have pull it.
Now *that's* a Doom I'd play.
As a postscript...why doesn't anyone take the Doom or even the Q3 engine and make a *funny* game? I almost think it's a cop-out to do a game with demons, zombies, industrial-looking places with crates (crates!)...it'd be a *lot* harder to come up with a game that has all the "kick-ass" elements (graphics, audio, etc.) and be able to show something that makes you laugh, and still be an awesome game to play.
Bag of Holding
(Hey, it's as good an explanation as being able to just run over a med kit and be healed)
WW was the first Zelda I played with my daughter, who was not even born when Majorie's Mask was released. It wasn't as long or "indepth" as I remember OfT was, but was perfect for the understanding of my now 3 year old. For all the complaints of the cell shaded look, she loved it. One benefit was that the nastiest of bosses (mostly the first one) still looked comic-y enough that she could go to bed without nightmares about a giant whatever-that-thing-was hurting her.
I think the story was beyond her (especially not having played OfT), but she stayed interested until the end of the game, which I thought pretty good for an age where attention span is not the highest.
So while WW may not have lived up to the expectations of a lot of people (including Miyamoto it seems), there's one 3 year old who absolutely adored it and hopefully will have the same pleasant memories of it as I have of some of the games I played when I was her age (Adventure on the 2600...viva la difference!)
I'm surprised no one is talking about this, as it seems it was all the rage back-in-the-day (and I believe still going today): charge by the cycle for the app.
Case in point: I worked with IBM's MQSeries product as a link between a mainframe and a webserver. The MQSeries license for NT was something like a flat $6000. On the mainframe, however, it was some ungodly amount for the tapes, then they charged a per-cycle fee *and* a monthly maintenance contract.
As part of load testing, I wrote a program that would spit the complete works of shakespeare back and forth, over and over, to the mainframe and back using multiple threads. Two weeks of testing cost the company an extra $12,000 because of the cycles expended.
I noticed too that starting with SQL Server 7.0 that the explain plan feature can also show the number of cycles spent on a particular step. I would think Microsoft, with that info, could, if they wanted, go to a similar model with SQL Server if they so chose (and wanted to effectively kill the product).
And now that I think about it, my Unix account back in the early 90s had a cost associated with it too...I was allotted something like $1000 worth of what I assume was cpu time, and sure enough, enough attempts to get Nethack to compile and I was back in the office begging for more "money".
Ah, the good old days. I think.
I was checking out your site ... very cool! I'm curious how much you had to customize and what you did in fact customize. We're looking for software that has a lot of the features you have on your site, and was thinking of Drupal, and if it wasn't too much, maybe that will instill the confidence I have to go forward with it (and no, our site has absolutely nothing to do with maps :) ).
Of course, while it would seem as if justice is served should IBM do as you suggest, but I'm wondering if anything would be learned from the SCO/Unixware codebases; from what I understand they're the most 'behind-the-times' version of Unix.
What does SCO/Unixware have that sets them apart from the other Unixes? I'm not trolling, I'm really curious to know what makes SCO/Unixware different from Linux/Solaris/FreeBSD/etc apart from licensing issues.
I think you're absolutely correct. I worked at a number of places that uses AS/400's (or whatever they're calling them these days) and the RS/6000s (or whatever they're calling them...) and it seemed like a big win for IBM to have a high end processor that could unify their product lines in terms of having to support only one processor type. My understanding is that the z/Series mainframes also use the Power chips, just a whole lot more with a whole lot more infrastructure.
It would seem that my G5 no longer 'chirps' when moving around the dock, screensaver, etc. I had been using the 'Dis-allow nap' trick, but so far all seems to be well.
I know it's a dupe, but this time I get to respond instead of just giving mod points...
I played D3 at a friends house for about an hour. Big screen, dark room, was fun. But the fact is, I'm not the gamer I was back in the early nineties; zombies just don't do it for me anymore. Doom was amazing because it was a technical tour de force; I still remember walking into some of those rooms and going 'that is so *cool*!' Frankly, the whole zombie/monster story was pretty old even then, but Doom was such a good game, I was happy to play the entire thing. Hell, I did the same for D2.
Quake was pretty good, but seemed like pretty much the same thing with a slightly mideval twist to it. By the time Q2 came around, it seemed like I was playing the "same-old-thing", even though, id never disappointed in the graphics level.
But in the intervening years I'd gotten married, had kids, played a lot of other games, and given the time I now have to play, I'm looking for something different and original. Id seems to think that they can coast on demonic bitmaps and licensing forever.
I have shown this app to two of my upstairs neighbors who are muscians and they said they'd check it out, so here's hoping that helps you.
On another note (so to speak): did you write the app in cocoa with objective-c? I ask because I'm trying to get into writing mac apps (don't worry...I won't compete against you in any way unless you're into pipe/valve simulators) and need to do some graphics-intensive work for it, and wanted merely to know what you used to be inspired.
Good luck!