In defense of the windows media bashers: it did used to be pretty terrible. Remember, there was a time when Windows Media and Real Player had about the same video fidelity. Find a low-bitrate real stream and you'll see just how bad Windows Media was. It's impressive how quickly and well Microsoft has ramped up the codec. You're right about WM9, these days it's top notch.
Personally, I'm happy to see Mp4s. It's standard enough that most people won't need a new codec and it keeps you from being tied to a particular vendor. Qt's encoding of Mp4's may be terrible, but it's playback is actually pretty good.
I do think large WM9 files as a distribution medium is a bad idea, as anything older than 3 years starts sputtering. At DVD quality my mother's beloved P3 450 is not happy with anything other than MP4 or DivX.
Interesting that they didn't include Windows Media. I know they claim that it didn't improve any in the interim, but it also didn't exactly lose any marketshare you know?
BTW, to find the proper page, go to link->search, and search for "comparison. It's the first link on the page. Deeplinking Doom9 doesn't work.
The teams are competing by entering the qualifying runs. However, the Darpa and the teams would learn a lot more if they were allowed into the "big race." A one mile obstacle cources is a man-made tightly controlled and densly packed stretch of problems. A 150 mile stretch of land between Death Valley and Las Vegas is a much more natural laboratory, ripe with other foreseen and unforeseen problems. For example, vermin. Allowing the cars to run will provide much valuable data, even if it is to confirm for the first time that the testing track is a valid representation.
Furthermore, if Darpa wants to maximize the return from this venture, they want schools to invest more money into it. If a school invested 100k of precious resources into the robotics venture only to be sidelined before the big day, it would make it far less likely to commit the same or more resources the next year. A driving billboard is not going to draw in 100k dollars, especially if it didn't make it to the big race the previous year.
The goal of this competition is autonomous vehicle research. The rules setup around this competition are in support of that goal. DARPA would be a fool not to change the rules when they are not in support of that goal, and in this case disqualifying everybody does nothing towards the greater goal.
Don't get so stuck on the rules that you forget why they were created in the first place.
My guess is that sony are leaving the pre-launch estimations high, so as to ship at 250-300 to acclaim rather than derision. At the next available holiday break, it will drop by 50, and stay there for a good chunk of its life.
I think they can hit that mark. While people have estimated that it can roughly play PS2 games, remember that it is doing so on a display device with a much lower resolution. And unlike Nintendo or Microsoft, Sony owns most of what goes into their systems from the design to the fab plant. Of the major players, they're in the best position to take a working system, shave off some space, and put it all on one die.
I hope they're not seriously planning on shipping a $400 portable. At that price they might as well make it play lazer disks. I give Sony more credit than that.
The GBA is currently overvalued a bit, as it hasn't seen a price drop in its lifetime, so I would put a dual screen model at a bit less than double. I'd look to the low end range of your estimate, as Nintendo is probably aiming for about the same market as the GBA. After all, what portion of the gaming population needs something portable, but isn't already serviced by a laptop or PDA?
Nintendo needs to stop deluding itself. Saying "it's not a competitor to the GBA" a million times doesn't make it any less of a competitor to the GBA. You're talking about a standalone system with good specs and built-in screens. What are you supposed to do with the thing... leave it on a table? Strap it to your face? We all know it's competing with the GBA and the PSP, and on that note alone its release is questionable.
Sadly, it looks like this too won't be an adequate GameTessaract controller, as it lacks analog joysticks... which is really too bad, a touchscreen on a game controller would be quite convenient for inventory management. 802.11b would be a good networking standard for getting consoles to communicate, or for that matter just using the controllers wirelessly.
But the most important spec still hasn't leaked... The price. If this handheld is to compete with the PSP, it has to hit the target price sweet spot. If the PSP ships at it's current target of $250, it will be quite vulnerable to a $100 Nintendo portable. If the Nitro ships at anything approaching the PSP's cost, it will be eaten alive in the market, touchscreen or no.
Overall, this has Virtual Boy written all over it, though not necessarily. While I wish Nintendo the best of luck, I'm also looking forward to picking up one of these things for 15 bucks in 2006.
Throwing out days worth of work on doubling the size of the output data by simply lowering the screen resolution... That story truly is a classic.
I would argue that games are made with uncompressed data and compressed to fit. A well managed team will have some idea of the size of the target system, and should progress with a tight resource budget on track. You don't want to throw out hundreds of thousands of dollars of work just because you can't fit it all at the end. Sometimes a company does get stuck in a Secret of Mana situation (CD game, cartridge medium), but I would be surprised if it was ever that bad on a non-port.
I hate to give a touchy-feely answer to a serious question, but it also involves a bit of human engineering. The Record was created at the turn of the century to reproduce classical recordings. From the point that music was recorded it was recorded with the intent of being played back on vinyl. Horns, violins, etc were used to tune the recording system and the recording system was used to tune the records that came out. Elvis still sounds better on vinyl.
Now, I while I can't say that modern music sounds terrible on a record (I have a disk here by Kosheen that would attest to that), most of the poppy, clippy... sharp modern recordings sound better on CD. They were recorded with CD's in mind, tuned for CD's, and released on CD. I can't guarentee that Janet sounds better on CD, but most of the modern, non-jazz or instrumental recordings I have heard recently sound much better on disk. Wayne Shorter seems better on Vinyl, but he makes for a more classical sound.
There another touchy-feely answer for you. Recordings sound best on the medium that they were styled, mixed, and recorded for, because they have been optimized for the strengths and weaknesses of that medium.
I was working at a bike shop in college when my boss / mechanic came to me complaining that basically everything that I had written was illegible. It was totally useless, as neither of us could read my writing.
I slowed down significantly for a time being, focusing on writing letters as if they were going to be OCRd.
I'd avoid the Bic, just because I've had terrible luck with that line of pens. The glassy plastic Pentecs give a good line and a solid plastic grip. A traditional rollerball on "fine" works well too.
Writing is not something that has to be taught in a class... you really can learn by simply paying more attention while you write, and consciously taking the time to write well. If you are always rushed, this may not seem like a valuable thing, but what is the value of something written if nobody can understand it?
Overclocking these systems is like racing mules. I mean, sure, my mule may carry 50 lbs of potatoes 1 mph faster than your mule, but somebody please buy a jeep.
Ok, I'm just bitter that I never got my Neo Geo port of Strider. It would have been so beautiful.
If the point of the system is to maximize carrying efficiency, why stick an extra bluetooth headset in your pocket?
It may very well support HUNDREDS of java based games, but you could play those as well on your PDA. The attraction of a console is Tony Hawk, not another Tetris clone. And without the cartridge slot being accessible, it really is just another powerful Nokia phone.
The screen ratio is poorly chosen for anything other than top-down shooters. You may love it, but you are by far in the minority. Compared to the landscape mode of many PDA's, the screen is downright terrible.
If you think the N-Gage hasn't failed in the market, I've got a Jaguar I'd like to sell you. Yes, it is our opinion that the N-Gage has failed to become a real player in the Video Game market. It is also our opinion that the sky is blue and hot coals are painful to touch. Just because it is an opinion that everyone holds doesn't make it wrong.
100 million blank CD's were sold in Canada last year, only 1/2 of which went to music piracy. Where did the other 1/2 go?
Digital video game piracy is rampant due to the wide availability of blank CD-Rs. Yet game designers never see a dollar from this obviously illegal trade. Look at how the existing levy in Canada has supported musicians and technicians, allowing the music scene to grow untethered from the chains of traditional economics. It's a veritable renaissance of human expression, all supported by the taxes collected on their behalf by the CPCC.
Yet us game designers don't see a penny of the money CD-R companies have made their living from. By my estimates, if the CPCC has collected 28 million dollars for music piracy, they should have collected 100 million for digital videogame piracy. That's enough for 5 high-profile Square-quality launches per year, or 200 art-house releases... enough to support a console of their own. Canada's publically supported movie industry has given us The Cube... Isn't it time for The VideoGame Cube?
If I remember correctly, the objections to the licensing were primarily about the uselessness of constant upgrades and the subsequent required hardware upgrades to support the new software, not to mention the difficulty of ripping out tested, working systems and replacing them with something that may or may not function correctly.
I don't remember there even being the possibility that simply nothing would be shipped. Microsoft was, for many years, the king of incremental releases. There were a multitude of releases of Word, for example, that existed merely to break file format compatibility. With dual line releases of NT and 9*, a new version of Windows was always around the corner. The idea that MS failed to ship anything in the time frame is kind of surprising and, honestly, an improvement over previous release policies for those who buy boxed editions.
Not to call the parent a troll, but there were far more reasons to avoid the new licensing model than the fear that they would release nothing.
In defense of the above above poster, games on cartridges are cheaper and faster to develop. Near instantaneous access to data is assured, and because of this less time needs to be spent carefully crafting and streaming data, debugging the data stream, etc, etc. Personally, I would love a system that used an optical / cartridge hybrid, as this would allow for the startup screen, character models, and textures to be stored and accessed instantaneously, and less frequently used data (a particular boss' sound effects, for example) to be streamed as usual. Plus, developers wouldn't be required to use the cartridge portion, so that if the game doesn't justify the risk you can have one without the other.
Could you imagine how many players would flock to a system where you could turn it on and be immediately in the game?
The PC version wasn't intended to have any multiplayer at all... If I'm not mistaken, ID hired an outside company to create multiplayer for the game after it had already been in development for several years. If Vicarious Vision decided to add co-op multiplayer to the XBox, it is probably because they realized that they were cutting enough that the two games wouldn't be compatible with eachother... I'd be surprised if the XBox kept the per-polygon collision detection... So why not throw in a new multiplayer mode?
Personally I don't see how the loneliness, desolation, and terror of being lost alone on a hell planet will translate with a second person running around with you, but personally I want that option. There are too few games where you can cooperate with your friends... Pitting 2 people head-to-head is always easier than creating a game around 2 people cooperating.
This was modded Funny, but is actually pretty accurate. Chemical substances, from alcohol to MDMA, give antisocial geeks a viewport on another way of thinking. Growth in college as a human being seems to be as much about chemical alterations to perception as social ones. Take an off-the-shelf geek, lock them in a cabin in the woods, add 20 chatty, excited co-eds, and lots of chemicals, and out will walk a far better socially adjusted geek... able to empathise with the best of them.
Sadly, unless he is a professor of Sociology, this isn't a viable solution to the original poster's problem. But it is the normal solution, and one that has worked wonders time and time again.
We'd need an awful lot of those people... and being so terribly useful we'd have to pay them ludicrously high salaries. But that's OK, we could sell 10% of every page to advertisers in the form of a smallish strip. It would be the perfect market too: advertisers love people who don't know things. Since everyone would want to use our service, and because without messy paper our costs would be basically nothing, we could stand to make billions of dollars with our infinite profit margins. We could be the next Britannica, or the next Webster!
Why stop there? Why not take those people looking up information on Tuvalu, and sell them trips to that country? Why not let someone looking up Ford, track the cost of Ford's stock and, for a small fee, connect them with people selling used Fords? Any info you want, at no cost to us to deliver. Forget Billions, we would make Trillions! Have a hand in every transaction in the US! My god, we could own the world!
Who wants to line up to invest some capital in this amazing new venture.
I see all kinds of information about printing presses and scribes in my encyclopedia, but for some reason I can't find anything on this "internet" thingie.
Does anyone know of a way we could keep information up-to-date, remotely, without... say... mailing a new book every year? I bet such an invention would revolutionize the encyclopedia business.
Slashdot Mirror
It's so borked it even stopped seving up the 503 error page. Now that's quality you can count on!
Actually, the personal website of the author has a cleaned up, and significantly larger, version available here.
Just like the title of the article says, Nintendo Patents Handheld Emulation, Downs Crack.
In defense of the windows media bashers: it did used to be pretty terrible. Remember, there was a time when Windows Media and Real Player had about the same video fidelity. Find a low-bitrate real stream and you'll see just how bad Windows Media was. It's impressive how quickly and well Microsoft has ramped up the codec. You're right about WM9, these days it's top notch.
Personally, I'm happy to see Mp4s. It's standard enough that most people won't need a new codec and it keeps you from being tied to a particular vendor. Qt's encoding of Mp4's may be terrible, but it's playback is actually pretty good.
I do think large WM9 files as a distribution medium is a bad idea, as anything older than 3 years starts sputtering. At DVD quality my mother's beloved P3 450 is not happy with anything other than MP4 or DivX.
Interesting that they didn't include Windows Media. I know they claim that it didn't improve any in the interim, but it also didn't exactly lose any marketshare you know?
BTW, to find the proper page, go to link->search, and search for "comparison. It's the first link on the page. Deeplinking Doom9 doesn't work.
Ok, when did the moderators find the stash and is there any left?
They had to do something with the guys from the Comanche program.
The teams are competing by entering the qualifying runs. However, the Darpa and the teams would learn a lot more if they were allowed into the "big race." A one mile obstacle cources is a man-made tightly controlled and densly packed stretch of problems. A 150 mile stretch of land between Death Valley and Las Vegas is a much more natural laboratory, ripe with other foreseen and unforeseen problems. For example, vermin. Allowing the cars to run will provide much valuable data, even if it is to confirm for the first time that the testing track is a valid representation.
Furthermore, if Darpa wants to maximize the return from this venture, they want schools to invest more money into it. If a school invested 100k of precious resources into the robotics venture only to be sidelined before the big day, it would make it far less likely to commit the same or more resources the next year. A driving billboard is not going to draw in 100k dollars, especially if it didn't make it to the big race the previous year.
The goal of this competition is autonomous vehicle research. The rules setup around this competition are in support of that goal. DARPA would be a fool not to change the rules when they are not in support of that goal, and in this case disqualifying everybody does nothing towards the greater goal.
Don't get so stuck on the rules that you forget why they were created in the first place.
Well, it's been patented, so it's stopped for about 20 years.
My guess is that sony are leaving the pre-launch estimations high, so as to ship at 250-300 to acclaim rather than derision. At the next available holiday break, it will drop by 50, and stay there for a good chunk of its life.
I think they can hit that mark. While people have estimated that it can roughly play PS2 games, remember that it is doing so on a display device with a much lower resolution. And unlike Nintendo or Microsoft, Sony owns most of what goes into their systems from the design to the fab plant. Of the major players, they're in the best position to take a working system, shave off some space, and put it all on one die.
I hope they're not seriously planning on shipping a $400 portable. At that price they might as well make it play lazer disks. I give Sony more credit than that.
The GBA is currently overvalued a bit, as it hasn't seen a price drop in its lifetime, so I would put a dual screen model at a bit less than double. I'd look to the low end range of your estimate, as Nintendo is probably aiming for about the same market as the GBA. After all, what portion of the gaming population needs something portable, but isn't already serviced by a laptop or PDA?
Nintendo needs to stop deluding itself. Saying "it's not a competitor to the GBA" a million times doesn't make it any less of a competitor to the GBA. You're talking about a standalone system with good specs and built-in screens. What are you supposed to do with the thing... leave it on a table? Strap it to your face? We all know it's competing with the GBA and the PSP, and on that note alone its release is questionable.
Sadly, it looks like this too won't be an adequate GameTessaract controller, as it lacks analog joysticks... which is really too bad, a touchscreen on a game controller would be quite convenient for inventory management. 802.11b would be a good networking standard for getting consoles to communicate, or for that matter just using the controllers wirelessly.
But the most important spec still hasn't leaked... The price. If this handheld is to compete with the PSP, it has to hit the target price sweet spot. If the PSP ships at it's current target of $250, it will be quite vulnerable to a $100 Nintendo portable. If the Nitro ships at anything approaching the PSP's cost, it will be eaten alive in the market, touchscreen or no.
Overall, this has Virtual Boy written all over it, though not necessarily. While I wish Nintendo the best of luck, I'm also looking forward to picking up one of these things for 15 bucks in 2006.
Throwing out days worth of work on doubling the size of the output data by simply lowering the screen resolution... That story truly is a classic.
I would argue that games are made with uncompressed data and compressed to fit. A well managed team will have some idea of the size of the target system, and should progress with a tight resource budget on track. You don't want to throw out hundreds of thousands of dollars of work just because you can't fit it all at the end. Sometimes a company does get stuck in a Secret of Mana situation (CD game, cartridge medium), but I would be surprised if it was ever that bad on a non-port.
I hate to give a touchy-feely answer to a serious question, but it also involves a bit of human engineering. The Record was created at the turn of the century to reproduce classical recordings. From the point that music was recorded it was recorded with the intent of being played back on vinyl. Horns, violins, etc were used to tune the recording system and the recording system was used to tune the records that came out. Elvis still sounds better on vinyl.
Now, I while I can't say that modern music sounds terrible on a record (I have a disk here by Kosheen that would attest to that), most of the poppy, clippy... sharp modern recordings sound better on CD. They were recorded with CD's in mind, tuned for CD's, and released on CD. I can't guarentee that Janet sounds better on CD, but most of the modern, non-jazz or instrumental recordings I have heard recently sound much better on disk. Wayne Shorter seems better on Vinyl, but he makes for a more classical sound.
There another touchy-feely answer for you. Recordings sound best on the medium that they were styled, mixed, and recorded for, because they have been optimized for the strengths and weaknesses of that medium.
I was working at a bike shop in college when my boss / mechanic came to me complaining that basically everything that I had written was illegible. It was totally useless, as neither of us could read my writing.
I slowed down significantly for a time being, focusing on writing letters as if they were going to be OCRd.
I'd avoid the Bic, just because I've had terrible luck with that line of pens. The glassy plastic Pentecs give a good line and a solid plastic grip. A traditional rollerball on "fine" works well too.
Writing is not something that has to be taught in a class... you really can learn by simply paying more attention while you write, and consciously taking the time to write well. If you are always rushed, this may not seem like a valuable thing, but what is the value of something written if nobody can understand it?
Overclocking these systems is like racing mules. I mean, sure, my mule may carry 50 lbs of potatoes 1 mph faster than your mule, but somebody please buy a jeep.
Ok, I'm just bitter that I never got my Neo Geo port of Strider. It would have been so beautiful.
Which swears off all forms of attack, unless it involves giant robots or tentacles.
If the point of the system is to maximize carrying efficiency, why stick an extra bluetooth headset in your pocket?
It may very well support HUNDREDS of java based games, but you could play those as well on your PDA. The attraction of a console is Tony Hawk, not another Tetris clone. And without the cartridge slot being accessible, it really is just another powerful Nokia phone.
The screen ratio is poorly chosen for anything other than top-down shooters. You may love it, but you are by far in the minority. Compared to the landscape mode of many PDA's, the screen is downright terrible.
If you think the N-Gage hasn't failed in the market, I've got a Jaguar I'd like to sell you. Yes, it is our opinion that the N-Gage has failed to become a real player in the Video Game market. It is also our opinion that the sky is blue and hot coals are painful to touch. Just because it is an opinion that everyone holds doesn't make it wrong.
100 million blank CD's were sold in Canada last year, only 1/2 of which went to music piracy. Where did the other 1/2 go?
Digital video game piracy is rampant due to the wide availability of blank CD-Rs. Yet game designers never see a dollar from this obviously illegal trade. Look at how the existing levy in Canada has supported musicians and technicians, allowing the music scene to grow untethered from the chains of traditional economics. It's a veritable renaissance of human expression, all supported by the taxes collected on their behalf by the CPCC.
Yet us game designers don't see a penny of the money CD-R companies have made their living from. By my estimates, if the CPCC has collected 28 million dollars for music piracy, they should have collected 100 million for digital videogame piracy. That's enough for 5 high-profile Square-quality launches per year, or 200 art-house releases... enough to support a console of their own. Canada's publically supported movie industry has given us The Cube... Isn't it time for The VideoGame Cube?
As a game designer, I feel underpaid by this lawsuit.
(note, the above is an example of oh-so-trendy serious sarcasm. By having read this comment you agree to not make any laws based upon it.)
If I remember correctly, the objections to the licensing were primarily about the uselessness of constant upgrades and the subsequent required hardware upgrades to support the new software, not to mention the difficulty of ripping out tested, working systems and replacing them with something that may or may not function correctly.
I don't remember there even being the possibility that simply nothing would be shipped. Microsoft was, for many years, the king of incremental releases. There were a multitude of releases of Word, for example, that existed merely to break file format compatibility. With dual line releases of NT and 9*, a new version of Windows was always around the corner. The idea that MS failed to ship anything in the time frame is kind of surprising and, honestly, an improvement over previous release policies for those who buy boxed editions.
Not to call the parent a troll, but there were far more reasons to avoid the new licensing model than the fear that they would release nothing.
In defense of the above above poster, games on cartridges are cheaper and faster to develop. Near instantaneous access to data is assured, and because of this less time needs to be spent carefully crafting and streaming data, debugging the data stream, etc, etc. Personally, I would love a system that used an optical / cartridge hybrid, as this would allow for the startup screen, character models, and textures to be stored and accessed instantaneously, and less frequently used data (a particular boss' sound effects, for example) to be streamed as usual. Plus, developers wouldn't be required to use the cartridge portion, so that if the game doesn't justify the risk you can have one without the other.
Could you imagine how many players would flock to a system where you could turn it on and be immediately in the game?
This coming directly after the Fox special "When Software Attacks 2!"
Come to think of it, the stories are probably linked more fundamentally than we would be comfortable admitting.
The PC version wasn't intended to have any multiplayer at all... If I'm not mistaken, ID hired an outside company to create multiplayer for the game after it had already been in development for several years. If Vicarious Vision decided to add co-op multiplayer to the XBox, it is probably because they realized that they were cutting enough that the two games wouldn't be compatible with eachother... I'd be surprised if the XBox kept the per-polygon collision detection... So why not throw in a new multiplayer mode?
Personally I don't see how the loneliness, desolation, and terror of being lost alone on a hell planet will translate with a second person running around with you, but personally I want that option. There are too few games where you can cooperate with your friends... Pitting 2 people head-to-head is always easier than creating a game around 2 people cooperating.
This was modded Funny, but is actually pretty accurate. Chemical substances, from alcohol to MDMA, give antisocial geeks a viewport on another way of thinking. Growth in college as a human being seems to be as much about chemical alterations to perception as social ones. Take an off-the-shelf geek, lock them in a cabin in the woods, add 20 chatty, excited co-eds, and lots of chemicals, and out will walk a far better socially adjusted geek... able to empathise with the best of them.
Sadly, unless he is a professor of Sociology, this isn't a viable solution to the original poster's problem. But it is the normal solution, and one that has worked wonders time and time again.
We'd need an awful lot of those people... and being so terribly useful we'd have to pay them ludicrously high salaries. But that's OK, we could sell 10% of every page to advertisers in the form of a smallish strip. It would be the perfect market too: advertisers love people who don't know things. Since everyone would want to use our service, and because without messy paper our costs would be basically nothing, we could stand to make billions of dollars with our infinite profit margins. We could be the next Britannica, or the next Webster!
Why stop there? Why not take those people looking up information on Tuvalu, and sell them trips to that country? Why not let someone looking up Ford, track the cost of Ford's stock and, for a small fee, connect them with people selling used Fords? Any info you want, at no cost to us to deliver. Forget Billions, we would make Trillions! Have a hand in every transaction in the US! My god, we could own the world!
Who wants to line up to invest some capital in this amazing new venture.
I see all kinds of information about printing presses and scribes in my encyclopedia, but for some reason I can't find anything on this "internet" thingie.
Does anyone know of a way we could keep information up-to-date, remotely, without... say... mailing a new book every year? I bet such an invention would revolutionize the encyclopedia business.