All gameboys are BC(backwards Compatible), As were the succesive Atari's. The Turbo graphics / Duo were. Genesis had an adaptor for BC. Same with the SNES. As for popular. There have been only a few popular consoles. And PS2 has out sold the combined numbers of all consoles since the NES. So it's a very compelling example. Anecdotally: It's been a feature "all" of my friends have been wantign for a long time. And for the first 4 months of the PS2 exsitence it made the machien worth it. For the first 4 months all the games that were made for it sucked. So it was used as a "enhanced" ps1 player. The reduction in load time alone was worth it. But as good games came more people bought into it. But you always need your early adoptors to "popularize" the console.
Yes, but Microsoft purchased Connectix and acquired Virtual PC, which has an emulation engine that should be fast enough to emulate the x86 processor in the XB1 at the XB2's processor speed.
Presumably the appeal of PowerPC is that, while emulating x86 on PowerPC is somewhat feasible (if a bit slow) because of the much greater number of PPC general-purpose registers, it is impossible to emulate the PowerPC on the x86 without severe performance impacts.
This is a very nice copy protection method for Microsoft -- all those Windows users out there can't just download an XB2 emulator and start playing.
You can emulate the CPU, but they cant emulate Nvidias propriatary GPU. They don't have legals rights to and Nvidia is now backing the competition so it's gonna cost a lot to licence it. Also Emulation is never perfect. even havign the same chip on the PS2 doesn't garentee compatibility. a handful of games don't play. Now how many good working PS1 emulators do you see around? I used a few and there is always glitches, special patches for certain games ect... For a comsumer product thats nto goign to fly (ie. twiddling 16 settings each game to make it work). Forget emulation. Xbox just won't be Backwards compatable.
Graphics betweent he two aren't that much of a factor. PS2 is blurry but passable and people who know what to do with it can make it look good. Xbox is crisp and sharp and much more powerful but it's running into the area of diminishing returns. It's likly at least x2 as powerful as the PS2 but things don't look x2 better.
Having a good game is pretty independant of having a game with good graphics. A lot of times they coiencide but a lot of times it doesn't. FFT is a great game. Fun. Despite the translation and the dated graphics. Halo is beuatiful in many places but it's a bore single player. Multiplayer it's just as good as golden eye. Not better. Side by side you notice a lot of difference, but playing one then later playign the other, theres less difference.
Compare then Soul Caliber. Looks just about the same on all platforms. How about Comparing Ninja Gaiden to MGS2. The difference is there. The difference isn't huge. It's evolution not revolution. It's not 8bit sprites vs 16 bit sprites vs 32 polygons vs x4 AA x4 ASF. It's the difference between x4 AA x4 ASF vs x6 AA and x4 ASF.
If my car is in a wreck or goes into a canal. If I cant open the doors I want to be able to break the windows and get out.
If Im dead...my beautiful windshield doesnt mean a damn thing.
If this is a regular occurance perhaps you shouldn't drive. if it is not. Then worry more about the probable chance of chipping your winshield vs the improbable chance that you roll your dumb ass self into a canal.
The best bet for MS or Nintendo is to go for the dev's and get them psyched to do something radical like offer CD/DVD medium that offers 2x the storage space of typical DVD's or something. I mean a CD compared to a cartridge was technologically miles ahead in storage capacity for a fraction of the cost of a cartridge so it was a no brainer.
It's late into the current generation and games are still vastly underusing the DVd format. After a point, increased capacity of power has a diminishing return. For now, we're at the point where x2 the capacity is meaningless. Until HDTV comes or other such innovations, a 16 gig dvd isn't needed. Most games come in at a small 650 megs to 2 gigs. Event he most FMV heavy genre (RPG's) have sized that don't exceed 4 gigs.
It'd be more advantagous to have a more secure format like the mini GC disks (which also have lower seek times) or a better APi. More capacity wont' make that much difference anymore.
EA= crap. They'd have mroe success if they could buy out Square Enix (the two big RPG makers in JApan). Because sports games are cash cows but they don't have as much brand loyalty as RPG's and action/adventure franchises like MGS. EA has a few quality lines but the rest is Sports Cash cows. Plus the cost of aquisition is pretty high. EA is the largest (by quantity made) game developer/publisher. They'd have to justify a pretty high initial ticket and a yncertain return.
Compare the graphics from both. (I own both, have compared, and the XBOX wins hands down).
Compare a first rate developer game (like MGS2) to Halo (another first rate developer game). The difference isn't that big. Compare anygame made on both (like the EA sports line) and again the difference isn't that big. PS2 is technological inferior, but it's passable. And we're beyond the point were improvement in graphics have huge returns.
The saturn always reminded me of the jaguar. The lack of games and it's sudden death were some of the most compelling similiarities. Street fighter the movie game also reminded me of how similiar the Saturn was the jaguar. No quality control because the hardware company was desprate.
In the short run, yes, people are going to go for the system that is backward-compatible. But in the long run, when push comes to shove, gamers are not going to buy a PS3 or Xbox2 just to play FFX or Halo 1.
Like with the PS2 in the short run (when good games are sparse and the platform is new) it makes the one key weakness of new consoles go away, the lack of games in the initial release. So if Sony PS3 is backwards compatible, it means it doesn't start at a disatvantage. That it instant;y has a library of games. That it carriers over all the good will from the last product.
FFX is not available ont he PC. nor is FFX-2. Those are the only PS2 FFX. FFX tends to come out 1-2 years after the ps2 release. Xbox games tend to come out 3-4 months after the Xbox release. Temporal locality is important. People will hold off for months but not years. FF9 isn't out for PC yet either.
Released a year ahead of the rest, the Dreamcast was hands down the best console out there. But when the rest of the generation came out, a year or whatever later, they eclipsed it. If Sega had sat on it for a year and made improvements, and released it, say, two weeks before PS2, then it might have been a huge hit. I love mine; it's a powerful, compact system that had some good games.
It would have failed anyway. Dreamcast didn't die from lack of technical merit, but for lack of customers who would support the dipshits who ran the company into the ground. Sega only had one successful console, the genesis. After that they pisssed away any good will from their customers by releasing the 32x, the saturn, the lack of support for the sega cd. They could have released it 2 weeks before the PS2 with incredibly better specs and priced it at 200$ and it still would have died. Everyone felt burned by Sega. No one was willing to risk having anouther saturn, and predicatably sega folded shop and screwed early adopters again.
No? You will be able to avoid clicking a yes button on an Active X install dialog box which is obscured by a popup window or comes in a serious of several other sensible Yes/No questions, while you are looking for some information in a hurry? How about unpatched IE exploits that don't ask for anything.
insightful my ass. I work on 4 different windows boxes and none of them have any spyware. Just don't be an idiot and install a whole bunch of crap or start looking for "warez" or "pr0n" on the net and you likly will never ever get any spyware except cookies. Now if you do go looking for warez and pr0n. Just run spybot + adaware and you'll get most fo the shit off.
They could jus t use a flash drive to emulate a HD, they wouldn't even have to bundle it with the Xbox2. They didn't bother bundling DVD capabilities with the original Xbox, I could see them charging $100 for a 256MB drive to "enable" Xbox compatablility.
A flash drive no. It has a limited R/W lifespan so as a cache drive it'd die very quickly. problbly 100-200 hours and it'd die (or about a month worht of play for most gamers).
I know the hard drive was a big problem from price standpoint. Clearly their DVD-ROM wasn't because it sucked, although it probably still cost more than Sony's since Sony was able to make that themselves. But, how can Sony's HD cost any less than Xbox's? The storage capacity of the Xbox's hard drive is about as small as they get, and it's a damned slow drive...
Very simple. PS2 doesn't have an HD. Not having somethign means you spent 0 putting it in. As for capacity. Capacity != cost. Cost and capacity on Hd's move in different ways. cost/mb decreases rapidly but Absolute cost stays about the same because R/W heads are expensive no matter how dense the platters are.
It would presumably play all of the Xbox 2 titles since they would be written against DirectX (or equivalent). Early purchasers could upgrade when a "XBox 2+" title appeared that they wanted to be able to play.
This is precisly why Pc games aren't mainstream while Ps2 games are. People hate to upgrade. People hate to be obsolete. And it makes the developers have to aim at a moving target.
The only reason I can say that XBox is not currently the market leader is the fact that the PS2 launched a bit early.
There are many many more reasons. and they have to do with demographics, Developers, Target audiences, marketting, BAckwards compatibility, and product perception.
MS makes console at 175 dollars. Sells it to retailers for 75 dollers who sell it to you for 150$. MS lost 100 + shipping and handling.
MS make console at 175 dollars. Sells it to retailers for 75 dollers and doesn't it sell it to you. Retailer sends it back. MS loses 175 + shipping and handling x 2.
PS2 has a year+ lead on the Xbox and that's a good thing. Xbox2 has a lead on the PS3 and suddently it's a BAD thing.
PS2 did have a year lead advantage. They had a preserved lead from the previous console via backwards compatibility. Somewhat different. If ps3 has Backwards compatibility then Xbox 2 must be that much better just to compete.
Hint: when you sell something for less than it costs to manufacture, you lose money. Every time someone buys an Xbox, Microsoft lose a few bucks.
Hint: They lost money when they made it, they'd lose mroe if you didn't buy it. If enough people buy it and they have to produce another round of product or increase production by expanding a factory, then you caused them to lose money. But buying 1 xbox means you mitigated their previous loss making the damn thing, not took 100 bucks form microsoft.
What is to stop Microsoft from releasing this at the end of the year and then relasing the NEXT version a few months after the PS3? They would get all the folks who picked up a Xbox 2 looking to get the 3. This would greatly expand their user base. They have a lot of $$$ to throw at this.
The wrath of Xbox owners. Sega tries this with the 32X and people weren't ahppy. When you put out a piece of hardware in the game industry the developers then target that system if they think it will be more profitable. So puting Xbox 2 out then shaftign everyone a year later with the xbox 3 will likyl make everyone never buy your consoles again (see dreamcast).
I'm having trouble finding articles suggesting what will happen one way or another. I can't see how they would freeze out current Xbox owners, and expect to sell new expensive consoles. People would go nuts. But, as you say, Intel vs. PPC. Any links on this issue?
Try the news from gamespot. They went with IBm for the CPU anf ATI for the GPU. That'd be soem incredible smack down of emulation to get that to work and theirs always the "This API and code are mine or derivitive works there of" from Nvidia stopping it. Also the lack of a Harddrive cannot be emulated unless you have a gig + of ram and nothing better to do with it then cache. Even if they had a ramdrive that was big enough to replace the Xbox HD, that'd be a very expensive pice of equipment (say it was slow cheap ddr ram, still 100bucks for 256 so a gig would be 400, takign the discoutn for bulk and the whoelsale price it woudl add 150 bucks to the cost of a xbox).
Without disclosing any NDA stuff, I can say that developers will likely continue to have much less a learning curve with Xbox 2 than PS3, and this advantage must be factored in.
I'm not sure if sony would make the same mistake twice. But since their the 800 pound gurilla they might. PS3 is still officially 2 years away. A lot of time to get out a api. .
Slashdot Mirror
All gameboys are BC(backwards Compatible), As were the succesive Atari's. The Turbo graphics / Duo were. Genesis had an adaptor for BC. Same with the SNES. As for popular. There have been only a few popular consoles. And PS2 has out sold the combined numbers of all consoles since the NES. So it's a very compelling example. Anecdotally: It's been a feature "all" of my friends have been wantign for a long time. And for the first 4 months of the PS2 exsitence it made the machien worth it. For the first 4 months all the games that were made for it sucked. So it was used as a "enhanced" ps1 player. The reduction in load time alone was worth it. But as good games came more people bought into it. But you always need your early adoptors to "popularize" the console.
Yes, but Microsoft purchased Connectix and acquired Virtual PC, which has an emulation engine that should be fast enough to emulate the x86 processor in the XB1 at the XB2's processor speed.
Presumably the appeal of PowerPC is that, while emulating x86 on PowerPC is somewhat feasible (if a bit slow) because of the much greater number of PPC general-purpose registers, it is impossible to emulate the PowerPC on the x86 without severe performance impacts.
This is a very nice copy protection method for Microsoft -- all those Windows users out there can't just download an XB2 emulator and start playing.
You can emulate the CPU, but they cant emulate Nvidias propriatary GPU. They don't have legals rights to and Nvidia is now backing the competition so it's gonna cost a lot to licence it. Also Emulation is never perfect. even havign the same chip on the PS2 doesn't garentee compatibility. a handful of games don't play. Now how many good working PS1 emulators do you see around? I used a few and there is always glitches, special patches for certain games ect... For a comsumer product thats nto goign to fly (ie. twiddling 16 settings each game to make it work). Forget emulation. Xbox just won't be Backwards compatable.
Graphics betweent he two aren't that much of a factor. PS2 is blurry but passable and people who know what to do with it can make it look good. Xbox is crisp and sharp and much more powerful but it's running into the area of diminishing returns. It's likly at least x2 as powerful as the PS2 but things don't look x2 better.
Having a good game is pretty independant of having a game with good graphics. A lot of times they coiencide but a lot of times it doesn't. FFT is a great game. Fun. Despite the translation and the dated graphics. Halo is beuatiful in many places but it's a bore single player. Multiplayer it's just as good as golden eye. Not better. Side by side you notice a lot of difference, but playing one then later playign the other, theres less difference.
Compare then Soul Caliber. Looks just about the same on all platforms. How about Comparing Ninja Gaiden to MGS2. The difference is there. The difference isn't huge. It's evolution not revolution. It's not 8bit sprites vs 16 bit sprites vs 32 polygons vs x4 AA x4 ASF. It's the difference between x4 AA x4 ASF vs x6 AA and x4 ASF.
If my car is in a wreck or goes into a canal. If I cant open the doors I want to be able to break the windows and get out.
If Im dead...my beautiful windshield doesnt mean a damn thing.
If this is a regular occurance perhaps you shouldn't drive. if it is not. Then worry more about the probable chance of chipping your winshield vs the improbable chance that you roll your dumb ass self into a canal.
The vast majority of accidents occur when driver A makes a mistake and driver B doesn't react fast enough to avoid driver A's vehicle.
The best bet for MS or Nintendo is to go for the dev's and get them psyched to do something radical like offer CD/DVD medium that offers 2x the storage space of typical DVD's or something. I mean a CD compared to a cartridge was technologically miles ahead in storage capacity for a fraction of the cost of a cartridge so it was a no brainer.
It's late into the current generation and games are still vastly underusing the DVd format. After a point, increased capacity of power has a diminishing return. For now, we're at the point where x2 the capacity is meaningless. Until HDTV comes or other such innovations, a 16 gig dvd isn't needed. Most games come in at a small 650 megs to 2 gigs. Event he most FMV heavy genre (RPG's) have sized that don't exceed 4 gigs.
It'd be more advantagous to have a more secure format like the mini GC disks (which also have lower seek times) or a better APi. More capacity wont' make that much difference anymore.
EA= crap. They'd have mroe success if they could buy out Square Enix (the two big RPG makers in JApan). Because sports games are cash cows but they don't have as much brand loyalty as RPG's and action/adventure franchises like MGS. EA has a few quality lines but the rest is Sports Cash cows. Plus the cost of aquisition is pretty high. EA is the largest (by quantity made) game developer/publisher. They'd have to justify a pretty high initial ticket and a yncertain return.
Compare the graphics from both. (I own both, have compared, and the XBOX wins hands down).
Compare a first rate developer game (like MGS2) to Halo (another first rate developer game). The difference isn't that big. Compare anygame made on both (like the EA sports line) and again the difference isn't that big. PS2 is technological inferior, but it's passable. And we're beyond the point were improvement in graphics have huge returns.
NES->SNES huge difference
SNES->PS also huge difference
PS->PS2 pretty big difference
PS2->Xbox pretty subtle differences
Xbox->PS3/Xbox2 We'll hardly notice unless we're Hardware geeks.
The saturn always reminded me of the jaguar. The lack of games and it's sudden death were some of the most compelling similiarities. Street fighter the movie game also reminded me of how similiar the Saturn was the jaguar. No quality control because the hardware company was desprate.
In the short run, yes, people are going to go for the system that is backward-compatible. But in the long run, when push comes to shove, gamers are not going to buy a PS3 or Xbox2 just to play FFX or Halo 1.
Like with the PS2 in the short run (when good games are sparse and the platform is new) it makes the one key weakness of new consoles go away, the lack of games in the initial release. So if Sony PS3 is backwards compatible, it means it doesn't start at a disatvantage. That it instant;y has a library of games. That it carriers over all the good will from the last product.
FFX is not available ont he PC. nor is FFX-2. Those are the only PS2 FFX. FFX tends to come out 1-2 years after the ps2 release. Xbox games tend to come out 3-4 months after the Xbox release. Temporal locality is important. People will hold off for months but not years. FF9 isn't out for PC yet either.
Dreamcast.
Released a year ahead of the rest, the Dreamcast was hands down the best console out there. But when the rest of the generation came out, a year or whatever later, they eclipsed it. If Sega had sat on it for a year and made improvements, and released it, say, two weeks before PS2, then it might have been a huge hit. I love mine; it's a powerful, compact system that had some good games.
It would have failed anyway. Dreamcast didn't die from lack of technical merit, but for lack of customers who would support the dipshits who ran the company into the ground. Sega only had one successful console, the genesis. After that they pisssed away any good will from their customers by releasing the 32x, the saturn, the lack of support for the sega cd. They could have released it 2 weeks before the PS2 with incredibly better specs and priced it at 200$ and it still would have died. Everyone felt burned by Sega. No one was willing to risk having anouther saturn, and predicatably sega folded shop and screwed early adopters again.
Hey AC. The point was it doesn't happen to me. Except the cookies, which you get too now STFU.
No? You will be able to avoid clicking a yes button on an Active X install dialog box which is obscured by a popup window or comes in a serious of several other sensible Yes/No questions, while you are looking for some information in a hurry? How about unpatched IE exploits that don't ask for anything.
insightful my ass. I work on 4 different windows boxes and none of them have any spyware. Just don't be an idiot and install a whole bunch of crap or start looking for "warez" or "pr0n" on the net and you likly will never ever get any spyware except cookies. Now if you do go looking for warez and pr0n. Just run spybot + adaware and you'll get most fo the shit off.
They could jus t use a flash drive to emulate a HD, they wouldn't even have to bundle it with the Xbox2. They didn't bother bundling DVD capabilities with the original Xbox, I could see them charging $100 for a 256MB drive to "enable" Xbox compatablility.
A flash drive no. It has a limited R/W lifespan so as a cache drive it'd die very quickly. problbly 100-200 hours and it'd die (or about a month worht of play for most gamers).
I know the hard drive was a big problem from price standpoint. Clearly their DVD-ROM wasn't because it sucked, although it probably still cost more than Sony's since Sony was able to make that themselves. But, how can Sony's HD cost any less than Xbox's? The storage capacity of the Xbox's hard drive is about as small as they get, and it's a damned slow drive...
/mb decreases rapidly but Absolute cost stays about the same because R/W heads are expensive no matter how dense the platters are.
Very simple. PS2 doesn't have an HD. Not having somethign means you spent 0 putting it in. As for capacity. Capacity != cost. Cost and capacity on Hd's move in different ways. cost
It would presumably play all of the Xbox 2 titles since they would be written against DirectX (or equivalent). Early purchasers could upgrade when a "XBox 2+" title appeared that they wanted to be able to play.
This is precisly why Pc games aren't mainstream while Ps2 games are. People hate to upgrade. People hate to be obsolete. And it makes the developers have to aim at a moving target.
The only reason I can say that XBox is not currently the market leader is the fact that the PS2 launched a bit early.
There are many many more reasons. and they have to do with demographics, Developers, Target audiences, marketting, BAckwards compatibility, and product perception.
MS makes console at 175 dollars. Sells it to retailers for 75 dollers who sell it to you for 150$. MS lost 100 + shipping and handling.
MS make console at 175 dollars. Sells it to retailers for 75 dollers and doesn't it sell it to you. Retailer sends it back. MS loses 175 + shipping and handling x 2.
PS2 has a year+ lead on the Xbox and that's a good thing. Xbox2 has a lead on the PS3 and suddently it's a BAD thing.
PS2 did have a year lead advantage. They had a preserved lead from the previous console via backwards compatibility. Somewhat different. If ps3 has Backwards compatibility then Xbox 2 must be that much better just to compete.
Hint: when you sell something for less than it costs to manufacture, you lose money. Every time someone buys an Xbox, Microsoft lose a few bucks.
Hint: They lost money when they made it, they'd lose mroe if you didn't buy it. If enough people buy it and they have to produce another round of product or increase production by expanding a factory, then you caused them to lose money. But buying 1 xbox means you mitigated their previous loss making the damn thing, not took 100 bucks form microsoft.
What is to stop Microsoft from releasing this at the end of the year and then relasing the NEXT version a few months after the PS3? They would get all the folks who picked up a Xbox 2 looking to get the 3. This would greatly expand their user base. They have a lot of $$$ to throw at this.
The wrath of Xbox owners. Sega tries this with the 32X and people weren't ahppy. When you put out a piece of hardware in the game industry the developers then target that system if they think it will be more profitable. So puting Xbox 2 out then shaftign everyone a year later with the xbox 3 will likyl make everyone never buy your consoles again (see dreamcast).
I'm having trouble finding articles suggesting what will happen one way or another. I can't see how they would freeze out current Xbox owners, and expect to sell new expensive consoles. People would go nuts. But, as you say, Intel vs. PPC. Any links on this issue?
Try the news from gamespot. They went with IBm for the CPU anf ATI for the GPU. That'd be soem incredible smack down of emulation to get that to work and theirs always the "This API and code are mine or derivitive works there of" from Nvidia stopping it. Also the lack of a Harddrive cannot be emulated unless you have a gig + of ram and nothing better to do with it then cache. Even if they had a ramdrive that was big enough to replace the Xbox HD, that'd be a very expensive pice of equipment (say it was slow cheap ddr ram, still 100bucks for 256 so a gig would be 400, takign the discoutn for bulk and the whoelsale price it woudl add 150 bucks to the cost of a xbox).
KOTOR/Halo are about as exclusive as GTA... only a few months less so. KOTOR took how many months to get to the PC? 3. GTa took almosta year.
Without disclosing any NDA stuff, I can say that developers will likely continue to have much less a learning curve with Xbox 2 than PS3, and this advantage must be factored in.
I'm not sure if sony would make the same mistake twice. But since their the 800 pound gurilla they might. PS3 is still officially 2 years away. A lot of time to get out a api. .