BMP scans from bottom to top because that was how the OS/2 video coordinate system worked. (0,0) was the lower left corner.
Kind of weird because when you think about it, most representations of the screen start from the upper left and worked down towards the lower right. (VGA, etc.)
I haven't encountered a crash outside of KoToR, but I'm not saying its impossible. Given the huge size of games today, it's impossible for the developers to test every possible state the game can get into. The best that they can do is test all common and likely states and pray that on probability that no player will ever trigger a game state that the game is not prepared to handle.
That said, console gaming is a lot more comfortable than pc gaming. The only crashes that i have experienced in console games was a crash in GTA3 and a bunch of kotor bugs:P
It's possible. * NIC fires interrupt * Generic interrupt service routine in the kernel catches interrupt, wakes up device driver process and queues an interrupt. * interrupt servicing is done.
****** * Driver process wakes up, sees that it has a queued interrupt on NIC. It reads some network data by calling some kernel api to copy the data. * The data is handled and needs to be shoved to network stack.
Blah blah. Looks like a microkernel. It's going to suck performancewise, but it'll be very easy to get soft realtime performance. Of course, a big question is whether this performance loss is significant in the big picture.
Initializing hardware from a userland process is not impossible. XFree86 can easily cope with video cards running from a process by writing to/dev/kmem,/dev/port, etc. to do all necessary manipulations to switch screenmodes, set resolutions, set refresh rates, blit bitmaps.
I think both drivers models have positive points. It comes down to weighing which negative points users are willing to live with. What would be nice would be to give users the option of kernel/userspace drivers. Personally, I'd probably end up using userspace drivers because I don't really need the highest maximum throughput to chat on irc, write some code, do some email, and browse the web, but I'd definitely appreciate the added insulation between the kernel and potentially bad drivers.
It's sad but here is the way a lot of companies see it:
It's a bug in the jvm because the # of people with ATI video cards are greater than the # of people who actually use the JVM. (Heck, people using the ATI video cards have significant market share.) Sun should have taken this into account when testing the JVM and tested it on multiple computers with different hardware / drivers. They should have been able to catch this bug in testing and devised a workaround.
If it had been an inverted situation with more people using JVM vs ATI video cards, then it's ATI's fault for not testing a common piece of software for compatibility, even though their DirectX driver properly handles all of the other applications out that use the same api call.
It's sick and twisted, but always happens (even between groups of a company.) Products with greater market/mindshare are always more important that products with minimal/smaller share.
Actually i think these days it's 10 million to live decently on the interest. 1 million can be blown off these days pretty quickly.
Assuming you can get a 1% return (aka bank savings account) on 10 million, you can get $100,000 a year in interest which is a pretty decent income with little to no effort.
MS isn't going to go PowerPC. Back in the day, the PowerPC port of NT was done by IBM for MS. More likely, IBM is going to be making the ATI designed video chip for Xbox. ATI probably worked out a deal where they sell MS the license to use the graphics chip design and leave the manufacturing problem to MS to work out. MS is probably just getting a deal with IBM so they can use IBM's fabs to churn out that chip for Xbox 2 and maybe other bits too.
I would argue cpoints would be a better name. Heck if points were agreed to a be a special type cpt(with pt meaning point).
Now, we know that this variable counts the number of points. It doesn't matter if the variable is a short, long, int, long long, or any other god foresaken type. We know that it's only purpose in life is to keep track of a the count of points.
This is no different from standard unix convention really. Like pid for program id, tid for thread id, uid, gid, etc. Whereas in unix, these descriptors are often appended at the end of the identifier like user_gid, user_pid, etc, hungarian really just shuffles it to the front: gidUser, pidUser, etc.
But whatever, I really have no preference for style. I usually just adapt the style that is currently being used, which is probably the best thing to do because restyling source is such a PITA.
Hardware might be required, but getting a bunch of smart people to juryrig a means to extracting information from microfilm is easy. Reading microfilm is like one of those things that are blatantly obvious. It's transparent and has dark markings on it--hold it up to a light source. If you squint a bit, you can still make out some of the words.
Given _proper storage_, microfilm is supposed to last a few hundred years. Magnetic platters and optical media can't touch that without a good plan in place to replace media in place. But all things considered equal, i think it would be easier for some future society to figure out a way to magnify the writing on the microfilm vs. piecing together IDE / SCSI protocols, then figuring out filesystem, then figuring out that there are 8bits to a byte, etc.
Digital solutions hardly last for centuries. If they want to keep public records available for centuries, they'll put it on microfilm and put the index to the microfilm in a book printed with acid-free paper.
I think the real reason is: a. Cost (lower IT + software cost) b. Cost (bargaining chip with MS)
Establish non-standard network for desktops at work (aka Token ring) and force laptop users to use another network (aka Wireless LAN). Separate the two network groups with a firewall in between.
You need to find the video card that results in the most number of winners. Scrounge up cash, run a lan party, and get down info on the video cards that people are using.
The card that correlates to the most wins is obviously the superior video card.
But then again, gifs and pngs are still better for line art. chunking the image into 8x8 blocks doesn't make sense for charts and low color images. In these scenarios, it's better to just use gif/png.
Oh wait, this sounds like Oracle and their per processor licensing scheme.
Or RedHat Enterprise AS Premium vs. ES Standard vs. Enterprise ES Basic vs Professional vs. Plain
Or SuSE Linux 10clt Openexchange Server vs. Enterprise Server vs. Professional
It is a marketing gimmick, but the best way to make money. And everyone does it, even Linux companies. You force people to pay for what they are willing to pay for said features.
The average user isn't running on a box with 8GB of ram (probably can't even afford said box). Why bother shipping him a feature that he can't use. Instead lower the price (to make it more attractive to the user) and charge lots of $$$ for users who need that feature (in fact, charge enough to subsidize the lower price of disabled builds) because they already spent a ton of bucks on hardware and the extra cost is probably like spitting into the ocean for them.
Then do something about it. Buy software that is guaranteed to not crash.
I don't see a big sticker on Windows XP which says "Guaranteed to never crash." Unless you are willing to walk the walk and pony up the cash for MS to increase their QA by whatever magnitude necessary to validate all of XP, then XP will ship at whatever condition the market will bear.
Wondering whether a link to the actual agreement is available? I'd like to take a peek at it myself. I'm no apologist, but it seems more likely that MS was asking for any technology contributed to DirectX to become unencumbered to make it legally safe for other manufacturers (other than NVidia and ATI) to manufacture DX9 type hardware (more competitors always means more fun).
And here I was thinking James Cameron sent Arnold Schwarzenegger back in time to tell Dr. Gatling to invent the gun, thus seeding humanity with the technology to allow for the movies Predator and Terminator 2 to be created.
But NVidia just took what they did for the xbox (10/2001) and released it as GeForce4 (2/2002). They didn't totally lose out on the deal because whatever R&D that went into the Xbox also went into their next card, which was still way ahead of ATI's offerings at the time. (Radeon8xxx redux)
What shafted NVidia was the team that designed the GeforceFX. They gambled that the 0.13 micron process was going to buy them a major win in core speed. They also figured that a 128bit memory bus was going to be wide enough. They also went ahead with single-pass multitexturing on all of the chip's pipelines without considering that the memory wouldn't be fast enough.
If anything, their involvement on the XBox paid off by means of the GeForce4, which was and still is a decent video card.
Should have bought the hp12c. Rock solid. Thick plastic. Nice feedback on the buttons. In fact, HP should have just kept selling their hp1x calculators.
Yeah, but Microsoft just bought stake in Immersion technologies after paying them off and licensing force feedback technology used in the Xbox controller. Immersion currently has a suit against Sony.
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/news/news_6072673.htm l
I think what's going to happen is that both Immersion/Microsoft and InterTrust/Sony are going to end up crosslicensing their respective technologies and dropping both suits.
But it better be durable. Considering that the PSP is going to be spinning a small plastic disk at high speed, I pray that Sony takes the high road and builds the PSP with quality construction. Nothing stupid like plastic rails for the laser pickup (original Playstation + recent portable minidisc players) that warp under heat and stress...
If there is one thing that I love about the Gameboy (other than the retro games) is that it's designed to take abuse. The clamshell of the GBA SP is effective means of protecting screen and lack of moving parts means it can take shock and physical abuse rather well.
I would have been more interested if Sony offered hints about the prices point regarding the system. How much for the base system? How much for games?
Re:always wondered how to suck the roms off....
on
KnoppiXMAME 1.0 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
All of the pins on the cartridge have a purpose. Some are for addressing and some are for data. There's probably a grounding pin and a power pin. Anyhow, go to a website like www.gamesx.com or google.com:P and look for the pinouts online.
You'd need the know how to write a program to use a parallel port to drive the important pins (basically start addressing from the base address of the cartridge and save the data that comes back over the data bus. Keep going until it fails.) and you can build yourself a dumper. At least that's how the smarter people used to do it in the day before companies would just sell you the stuff.
Of course, you're going into problems with carts that do funky tricks like memory mapping and such, but the info above is about all that i understand on the subject.
As for Sega CD's, if they are just standard ISO9660 cds, you can dump them using any decent cd writing software.
Slashdot Mirror
BMP scans from bottom to top because that was how the OS/2 video coordinate system worked. (0,0) was the lower left corner.
Kind of weird because when you think about it, most representations of the screen start from the upper left and worked down towards the lower right. (VGA, etc.)
I haven't encountered a crash outside of KoToR, but I'm not saying its impossible. Given the huge size of games today, it's impossible for the developers to test every possible state the game can get into. The best that they can do is test all common and likely states and pray that on probability that no player will ever trigger a game state that the game is not prepared to handle.
:P
That said, console gaming is a lot more comfortable than pc gaming. The only crashes that i have experienced in console games was a crash in GTA3 and a bunch of kotor bugs
It's possible.
/dev/kmem, /dev/port, etc. to do all necessary manipulations to switch screenmodes, set resolutions, set refresh rates, blit bitmaps.
* NIC fires interrupt
* Generic interrupt service routine in the kernel catches interrupt, wakes up device driver process and queues an interrupt.
* interrupt servicing is done.
******
* Driver process wakes up, sees that it has a queued interrupt on NIC. It reads some network data by calling some kernel api to copy the data.
* The data is handled and needs to be shoved to network stack.
Blah blah. Looks like a microkernel. It's going to suck performancewise, but it'll be very easy to get soft realtime performance. Of course, a big question is whether this performance loss is significant in the big picture.
Initializing hardware from a userland process is not impossible. XFree86 can easily cope with video cards running from a process by writing to
I think both drivers models have positive points. It comes down to weighing which negative points users are willing to live with. What would be nice would be to give users the option of kernel/userspace drivers. Personally, I'd probably end up using userspace drivers because I don't really need the highest maximum throughput to chat on irc, write some code, do some email, and browse the web, but I'd definitely appreciate the added insulation between the kernel and potentially bad drivers.
It's sad but here is the way a lot of companies see it:
It's a bug in the jvm because the # of people with ATI video cards are greater than the # of people who actually use the JVM. (Heck, people using the ATI video cards have significant market share.) Sun should have taken this into account when testing the JVM and tested it on multiple computers with different hardware / drivers. They should have been able to catch this bug in testing and devised a workaround.
If it had been an inverted situation with more people using JVM vs ATI video cards, then it's ATI's fault for not testing a common piece of software for compatibility, even though their DirectX driver properly handles all of the other applications out that use the same api call.
It's sick and twisted, but always happens (even between groups of a company.) Products with greater market/mindshare are always more important that products with minimal/smaller share.
Actually i think these days it's 10 million to live decently on the interest. 1 million can be blown off these days pretty quickly.
Assuming you can get a 1% return (aka bank savings account) on 10 million, you can get $100,000 a year in interest which is a pretty decent income with little to no effort.
It is entirely possible that the original poster was making multiproc workstations for 3d artists.
MS isn't going to go PowerPC. Back in the day, the PowerPC port of NT was done by IBM for MS. More likely, IBM is going to be making the ATI designed video chip for Xbox. ATI probably worked out a deal where they sell MS the license to use the graphics chip design and leave the manufacturing problem to MS to work out. MS is probably just getting a deal with IBM so they can use IBM's fabs to churn out that chip for Xbox 2 and maybe other bits too.
I would argue cpoints would be a better name. Heck if points were agreed to a be a special type cpt(with pt meaning point).
Now, we know that this variable counts the number of points. It doesn't matter if the variable is a short, long, int, long long, or any other god foresaken type. We know that it's only purpose in life is to keep track of a the count of points.
This is no different from standard unix convention really. Like pid for program id, tid for thread id, uid, gid, etc. Whereas in unix, these descriptors are often appended at the end of the identifier like user_gid, user_pid, etc, hungarian really just shuffles it to the front: gidUser, pidUser, etc.
But whatever, I really have no preference for style. I usually just adapt the style that is currently being used, which is probably the best thing to do because restyling source is such a PITA.
You have spyware running on your machine.
t ex t_spyware.html
http://simplythebest.net/info/spyware/ezula_top
Hardware might be required, but getting a bunch of smart people to juryrig a means to extracting information from microfilm is easy. Reading microfilm is like one of those things that are blatantly obvious. It's transparent and has dark markings on it--hold it up to a light source. If you squint a bit, you can still make out some of the words.
Given _proper storage_, microfilm is supposed to last a few hundred years. Magnetic platters and optical media can't touch that without a good plan in place to replace media in place. But all things considered equal, i think it would be easier for some future society to figure out a way to magnify the writing on the microfilm vs. piecing together IDE / SCSI protocols, then figuring out filesystem, then figuring out that there are 8bits to a byte, etc.
Digital solutions hardly last for centuries. If they want to keep public records available for centuries, they'll put it on microfilm and put the index to the microfilm in a book printed with acid-free paper.
I think the real reason is:
a. Cost (lower IT + software cost)
b. Cost (bargaining chip with MS)
Establish non-standard network for desktops at work (aka Token ring) and force laptop users to use another network (aka Wireless LAN). Separate the two network groups with a firewall in between.
You need to find the video card that results in the most number of winners. Scrounge up cash, run a lan party, and get down info on the video cards that people are using.
The card that correlates to the most wins is obviously the superior video card.
Get a torx screw driver, open the case, pull hard drive out move hard drive to new xbox.
But then again, gifs and pngs are still better for line art. chunking the image into 8x8 blocks doesn't make sense for charts and low color images. In these scenarios, it's better to just use gif/png.
Oh wait, this sounds like Oracle and their per processor licensing scheme.
Or RedHat Enterprise AS Premium vs. ES Standard vs. Enterprise ES Basic vs Professional vs. Plain
Or SuSE Linux 10clt Openexchange Server vs. Enterprise Server vs. Professional
It is a marketing gimmick, but the best way to make money. And everyone does it, even Linux companies. You force people to pay for what they are willing to pay for said features.
The average user isn't running on a box with 8GB of ram (probably can't even afford said box). Why bother shipping him a feature that he can't use. Instead lower the price (to make it more attractive to the user) and charge lots of $$$ for users who need that feature (in fact, charge enough to subsidize the lower price of disabled builds) because they already spent a ton of bucks on hardware and the extra cost is probably like spitting into the ocean for them.
Then do something about it. Buy software that is guaranteed to not crash.
I don't see a big sticker on Windows XP which says "Guaranteed to never crash." Unless you are willing to walk the walk and pony up the cash for MS to increase their QA by whatever magnitude necessary to validate all of XP, then XP will ship at whatever condition the market will bear.
Wondering whether a link to the actual agreement is available? I'd like to take a peek at it myself. I'm no apologist, but it seems more likely that MS was asking for any technology contributed to DirectX to become unencumbered to make it legally safe for other manufacturers (other than NVidia and ATI) to manufacture DX9 type hardware (more competitors always means more fun).
And here I was thinking James Cameron sent Arnold Schwarzenegger back in time to tell Dr. Gatling to invent the gun, thus seeding humanity with the technology to allow for the movies Predator and Terminator 2 to be created.
But NVidia just took what they did for the xbox (10/2001) and released it as GeForce4 (2/2002). They didn't totally lose out on the deal because whatever R&D that went into the Xbox also went into their next card, which was still way ahead of ATI's offerings at the time. (Radeon8xxx redux)
What shafted NVidia was the team that designed the GeforceFX. They gambled that the 0.13 micron process was going to buy them a major win in core speed. They also figured that a 128bit memory bus was going to be wide enough. They also went ahead with single-pass multitexturing on all of the chip's pipelines without considering that the memory wouldn't be fast enough.
If anything, their involvement on the XBox paid off by means of the GeForce4, which was and still is a decent video card.
Should have bought the hp12c. Rock solid. Thick plastic. Nice feedback on the buttons. In fact, HP should have just kept selling their hp1x calculators.
CF -> 50 pins
SD -> 9 pins
Engineers probably figured SD would be easier and cheaper to integrate into design. Enough said.
Yeah, but Microsoft just bought stake in Immersion technologies after paying them off and licensing force feedback technology used in the Xbox controller. Immersion currently has a suit against Sony.
m l
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/news/news_6072673.ht
I think what's going to happen is that both Immersion/Microsoft and InterTrust/Sony are going to end up crosslicensing their respective technologies and dropping both suits.
But it better be durable. Considering that the PSP is going to be spinning a small plastic disk at high speed, I pray that Sony takes the high road and builds the PSP with quality construction. Nothing stupid like plastic rails for the laser pickup (original Playstation + recent portable minidisc players) that warp under heat and stress...
If there is one thing that I love about the Gameboy (other than the retro games) is that it's designed to take abuse. The clamshell of the GBA SP is effective means of protecting screen and lack of moving parts means it can take shock and physical abuse rather well.
I would have been more interested if Sony offered hints about the prices point regarding the system. How much for the base system? How much for games?
All of the pins on the cartridge have a purpose. Some are for addressing and some are for data. There's probably a grounding pin and a power pin. Anyhow, go to a website like www.gamesx.com or google.com :P and look for the pinouts online.
You'd need the know how to write a program to use a parallel port to drive the important pins (basically start addressing from the base address of the cartridge and save the data that comes back over the data bus. Keep going until it fails.) and you can build yourself a dumper. At least that's how the smarter people used to do it in the day before companies would just sell you the stuff.
Of course, you're going into problems with carts that do funky tricks like memory mapping and such, but the info above is about all that i understand on the subject.
As for Sega CD's, if they are just standard ISO9660 cds, you can dump them using any decent cd writing software.