Its lovely little chiclets taught me to touch-type, its sucky Basic pushed me towards assembly, and its lack of games gave me all the inspiration I needed to write my own software.. and.. most important of all.. the Atmos is still one of the nicest lookingmachines, ever!
I had an MSX for a while (Yamaha), but only for the superlative MIDI support.. now *that* was total integration..;)
.. than my current Powerbook. But SGI never made one. They wussed out and decided it was 'too hard' to make decent computers that the rest of humanity outside the big-metal bubble could use.
Pity, it would've been fun to use to chase storms..
oh sorry that second one must have come out in the last few months. You didn't have to get all high and mighty about it,
If I came off that way, I apologize.. its just that, you see, I'm a very inspired GP2X developer driven to do innovative things with the GP2X handheld (such as port MidiShareGP2X, use the GP2X's as a host platform for music-composition apps, etc).
I'll agree with you, for sure, that maintaining an SD-card is tricky for most people, but in fact this is not a requirement of the GP2X, for it supports such ease-of-use as "insert cartridge, turn on, play" out of the box. Developers can ship their games in such a way that, if extracted to a fresh SD card, that SD card functions just like a gameboy cartridge.. its just that the perception of the need within the existing coder/hacker scene is not there so perhaps you're not seeing that the GP2X is, indeed, capable of that functionaly you require.
In fact, dig a bit deeper into the admittedly murky (*ahem*) GP2X scene, and you'll see that there are indeed "GP2X MonsterPacks" that are prepared by a smart few for just this purpose: put contents of MonsterPack on fresh SD card, put SD card in GP2X, boot up, and play. Just like your Gameboy.
For what other games console can you name 400 developers? (grin) You can go to gp32x.com right now and get yourself a list of thriving coders making daily releases.
The GP2X has 2 released commercial games, not 'just 1'. And over 1,000 non-commercial releases. This is why its hot: its a wild frontier for people to get their game code on unhindered by competition and market posession by bigger fish.
EB, and other retail outlets, are owned by commercial developers, and people with a vested interest in seeing that homebrew consoles don't edge in on that space. Don't count on such vendors ever letting in the 'little guys' - this doesn't mean the little guy won't grow, though. 40,000 shipped units is not a trifle, and if you're a homebrew developer looking to cottage-industry your apps into a viable expanding market, this is it. 1,000 customers is still a lotta moolah for the little guy.
Every single day we hear of new coders working on apps for the GP2X, and almost every week we hear of someone in this community making a deal for real $$$ with their games and apps. This isn't going to stop, and is a viable tractor of new innovation..
Would be open to the public, would encourage thousands and thousands of people - no matter who they are - to come to the event and play, indulge in the joy of game-playing, immerse themselves in a weeklong festival of games, games, and nothing but games. New releases could be made during this period, game companies would be able to plan their schedules around the week-long event, big surprises and huge capers could occur, and the general public would be actively involved - not because they were 'allowed' to, but because they're simply a big part of the event.
There would be sufficient organization to let the industry communicate amongst itself - heck, why not set up a back-end "Dealer Network" so that all the regular business deals could be done amidst the chaos of releases, parties, highscore table overflows, etc.
I mean, honestly, the more this E3 business comes out, the more it seems like its being run by people who are actively suppressing the whole point of Games in the first place: TO HAVE FUN. Surely, there has to be a way to align "TO MAKE MONEY" with "TO HAVE FUN" in a big event in such a way that everyone wins, and for me that would mean taking off all the barriers to entry to the temple that the E3 priests have been erecting, and making it a huge worship-fest of games, games, games.
The more a person profits from Games, it seems, the more they lose sight of the original point in the first place. This happens in all industries of course - the tired, old, rich, millionaires jealously guarding their temples from the hoards of the new, eager, un-enlightened masses from which they themselves, once, were also borne..
I'm sitting here with my 17" Powerbook well and truly on my lap, and while it does feel warm (a fact for which I am grateful, as it is cold outside) it is most certainly still usable as a laptop.
My girlfriends Macbook, however, is a serious bed-warmer, so she'll be getting smcFanControl installed at the next convenient moment..
I won't mind your property being tracked, any way you want to, while its in my posession, as long as it gets me on the plane and outta your hokey country.. so an RFIDPass would work, in my opinion.
I understand that there is a deep-seated 'need' for super-secret intelligence to hide itself, but how exactly are air samples taken over North Korea, legally? Technically?
I remember, oh how long ago now it seems (1993), visiting the makers of a very fine game (Spectre VR), a company called Velocity, who had "Snow Crash" (Neal Stephenson) as required reading for all programmers. A very fond memory indeed, sitting in Embarcadero, watching the subs and the whales in San Francisco Bay, following along to Hiro P and the gang, while I boned up on my required reading for the job. Pleasant.
Seems to me not much has changed since then, and things (SecondLife) are pretty much as predicted. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
So I say this, if you had to have one book for games programmers to read, and not 10, which would it be?
Here here, me too.. I've been rolling with Linux since the days of the minix-list post, and I'm currently a Ubuntu user, having set up and built literally 100's of Linux systems over the decades.. For me, there's no reason not to do things the easy way, particularly if you've already done things the hard way, over and over again, under your own steam.
That said, I sure do wish it were 'easier' to get my own kernel builds integrated with the Ubuntu realm.. like, if there were a much, much easier way to make 'changes to my standard Ubuntu system' fall into my own local, easily tarball'able User Repository...
Well.. I know this may seem 'odd', but my point of view is that if you can't put up with building your system on-board, you're not building your system, or exercising your pre-production hardware, strongly enough.. You'd have to be insane to build anything on the underpowered boards. Use crosstool or buildroot and use distcc or icecream to distribute the build across as many servers as possible. Anything else is just begging to be killed by boredom. .. and I guess I should qualify.. I don't mean "only build on-board".. sure, use distcc/cross-compile for development.. but don't depend on it for relase. Building ones sysimage onboard concurrently/prior-to-release is an interesting and often extraordinary way to find hardware bugs. You don't really do embedded work thinking all hardware is perfect, do you?;)
You can cross-compile and native-compile your codebase and build a bootable image from a single Makefile, maintaining a native build along the way.. doing so is not slow, boring, or counter-productive.
Ermm... heard of Swiss Franc? Its only one of the 5 major financial-market currencies, you know.. (US$, Yen, Euro, Francs, Pounds).. contrary to popular perception, the Swiss still have their own currency.
Okay, you got me, that DSLite hacking rig looks just fine, and DSLinux does indeed look like it'll rock socks.. but until I can get a flashcart rig set up, I'll just keep coding for GP2X, and tack a 'port' to DSLite when its needed..
oh, i dunno.. for sure, the GP2X, a linux handheld console, has thousands, and thousands of games you can play on it. it truly is a massive collection, more than you would think, and not just TuxRacer or fortune, yo.. we're talking the sum total of a rather rapidly growing list of emu's, from EDSAC to Atari to Nintendo to the Arcades, and on into the 32-bit console territories..
i honestly can think of one DS game i 'must have' in my kit (elektroplankton), whereas on the gp2x, i've got, literally, 20gigs worth of SD cards, crammed to the gills with stuff.. admittedly, there are a lot of emu's on there, so thats not 'strictly linux only games', but when you've got ("Sega", "Nintendo", "Gameboy", "Atari", "MAME") on-board, the fact its a linux box is only a bonus.. powermanga is a great bash, the newly ported clonk planet 2x very fun for the train rides, vektar a worthy contender (though i'm going to port MaesltromSDL myself sooner or later, if someone else hasn't already done it), and there are just too many great things to do in the GP2X emu scene for me to even list..
Slashdot Mirror
.. to see Linux moving in. Custom interfaces for task-molded computers, and cheap too.
.. yet .. but for sure I will.
My only gripe with the OLPC is that I can't buy one for my son or daughter
.. for citizens, is to wear their own cameras as well. It'll be "Cop Camera" versus "Citizen Camera" soon enough, just watch ..
Its lovely little chiclets taught me to touch-type, its sucky Basic pushed me towards assembly, and its lack of games gave me all the inspiration I needed to write my own software .. and .. most important of all .. the Atmos is still one of the nicest looking machines, ever!
.. now *that* was total integration .. ;)
I had an MSX for a while (Yamaha), but only for the superlative MIDI support
All they have to do is make their user-base screen the video's by answering, honestly, these questions associated with every item:
"Was this original material? Have you seen it before?"
In other words, Home Of The Super-Stars, 2.0
.. than my current Powerbook. But SGI never made one. They wussed out and decided it was 'too hard' to make decent computers that the rest of humanity outside the big-metal bubble could use.
..
Pity, it would've been fun to use to chase storms
oh sorry that second one must have come out in the last few months. You didn't have to get all high and mighty about it,
.. its just that, you see, I'm a very inspired GP2X developer driven to do innovative things with the GP2X handheld (such as port MidiShareGP2X, use the GP2X's as a host platform for music-composition apps, etc).
If I came off that way, I apologize
I'll agree with you, for sure, that maintaining an SD-card is tricky for most people, but in fact this is not a requirement of the GP2X, for it supports such ease-of-use as "insert cartridge, turn on, play" out of the box. Developers can ship their games in such a way that, if extracted to a fresh SD card, that SD card functions just like a gameboy cartridge.. its just that the perception of the need within the existing coder/hacker scene is not there so perhaps you're not seeing that the GP2X is, indeed, capable of that functionaly you require.
In fact, dig a bit deeper into the admittedly murky (*ahem*) GP2X scene, and you'll see that there are indeed "GP2X MonsterPacks" that are prepared by a smart few for just this purpose: put contents of MonsterPack on fresh SD card, put SD card in GP2X, boot up, and play. Just like your Gameboy.
For what other games console can you name 400 developers? (grin) You can go to gp32x.com right now and get yourself a list of thriving coders making daily releases.
The GP2X has 2 released commercial games, not 'just 1'. And over 1,000 non-commercial releases. This is why its hot: its a wild frontier for people to get their game code on unhindered by competition and market posession by bigger fish.
EB, and other retail outlets, are owned by commercial developers, and people with a vested interest in seeing that homebrew consoles don't edge in on that space. Don't count on such vendors ever letting in the 'little guys' - this doesn't mean the little guy won't grow, though. 40,000 shipped units is not a trifle, and if you're a homebrew developer looking to cottage-industry your apps into a viable expanding market, this is it. 1,000 customers is still a lotta moolah for the little guy.
Every single day we hear of new coders working on apps for the GP2X, and almost every week we hear of someone in this community making a deal for real $$$ with their games and apps. This isn't going to stop, and is a viable tractor of new innovation..
Case in point: Did you ever think you'd run this on your portable game console, with a simple download? How about this?
.. because of the bedroom coders. Such a platform wouldn't have survived - and done as well as it has - without bedroom coders.
The major platform/console mfr's need to recognize this. Hopefully we'll see them do so in the near future..
I've got an EDSAC in my pocket.
Would be open to the public, would encourage thousands and thousands of people - no matter who they are - to come to the event and play, indulge in the joy of game-playing, immerse themselves in a weeklong festival of games, games, and nothing but games. New releases could be made during this period, game companies would be able to plan their schedules around the week-long event, big surprises and huge capers could occur, and the general public would be actively involved - not because they were 'allowed' to, but because they're simply a big part of the event.
..
There would be sufficient organization to let the industry communicate amongst itself - heck, why not set up a back-end "Dealer Network" so that all the regular business deals could be done amidst the chaos of releases, parties, highscore table overflows, etc.
I mean, honestly, the more this E3 business comes out, the more it seems like its being run by people who are actively suppressing the whole point of Games in the first place: TO HAVE FUN. Surely, there has to be a way to align "TO MAKE MONEY" with "TO HAVE FUN" in a big event in such a way that everyone wins, and for me that would mean taking off all the barriers to entry to the temple that the E3 priests have been erecting, and making it a huge worship-fest of games, games, games.
The more a person profits from Games, it seems, the more they lose sight of the original point in the first place. This happens in all industries of course - the tired, old, rich, millionaires jealously guarding their temples from the hoards of the new, eager, un-enlightened masses from which they themselves, once, were also borne
I'm sitting here with my 17" Powerbook well and truly on my lap, and while it does feel warm (a fact for which I am grateful, as it is cold outside) it is most certainly still usable as a laptop.
My girlfriends Macbook, however, is a serious bed-warmer, so she'll be getting smcFanControl installed at the next convenient moment..
I won't mind your property being tracked, any way you want to, while its in my posession, as long as it gets me on the plane and outta your hokey country .. so an RFIDPass would work, in my opinion.
I understand that there is a deep-seated 'need' for super-secret intelligence to hide itself, but how exactly are air samples taken over North Korea, legally? Technically?
I remember, oh how long ago now it seems (1993), visiting the makers of a very fine game (Spectre VR), a company called Velocity, who had "Snow Crash" (Neal Stephenson) as required reading for all programmers. A very fond memory indeed, sitting in Embarcadero, watching the subs and the whales in San Francisco Bay, following along to Hiro P and the gang, while I boned up on my required reading for the job. Pleasant.
Seems to me not much has changed since then, and things (SecondLife) are pretty much as predicted. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
So I say this, if you had to have one book for games programmers to read, and not 10, which would it be?
Here here, me too
That said, I sure do wish it were 'easier' to get my own kernel builds integrated with the Ubuntu realm
Which other community/country, pray thee, has "caste" as part of its social structure?
Its not just for lunch, in India, dude. Words can be used everywhere. You should try that.
What? are you mascotistic??
.. I know this may seem 'odd', but my point of view is that if you can't put up with building your system on-board, you're not building your system, or exercising your pre-production hardware, strongly enough ..
.. and I guess I should qualify .. I don't mean "only build on-board" .. sure, use distcc/cross-compile for development .. but don't depend on it for relase. Building ones sysimage onboard concurrently/prior-to-release is an interesting and often extraordinary way to find hardware bugs. You don't really do embedded work thinking all hardware is perfect, do you? ;)
.. doing so is not slow, boring, or counter-productive.
Well
You'd have to be insane to build anything on the underpowered boards. Use crosstool or buildroot and use distcc or icecream to distribute the build across as many servers as possible. Anything else is just begging to be killed by boredom.
You can cross-compile and native-compile your codebase and build a bootable image from a single Makefile, maintaining a native build along the way
.. they flip the switch, its all good.
..
I mean, that should be enough time to do all the things I always wanted to do when/if I knew the world was going to end
Ermm... heard of Swiss Franc? Its only one of the 5 major financial-market currencies, you know .. (US$, Yen, Euro, Francs, Pounds) .. contrary to popular perception, the Swiss still have their own currency.
#1: I am not Indian. Where do you get off on assuming that?
#2: You are labelling me with all kinds of lovely labels in defense of your wonderful system of personal psycho-analysis, and so, in your rush to attack me further, here is a word you might want to put on a t-shirt of appropriate size, and wear proudly around your little universe..
Disgusting idiot. India would be better off without filthy jerks like you, who are obsessed with their twisted concepts of "caste".
I rest my case. Put me in your little box.
Okay, you got me, that DSLite hacking rig looks just fine, and DSLinux does indeed look like it'll rock socks .. but until I can get a flashcart rig set up, I'll just keep coding for GP2X, and tack a 'port' to DSLite when its needed ..
oh, i dunno
the GP2X has, very definitely and in flying colors, one thing the DS doesn't have: audience-participation in the development process. the open source games realm is, truly, blossoming.. there have lately been quite a few interesting games popping up on the strictly-linux-only scene, not to mention a rather large porting effort is well under way and doesn't seem to be losing any kind of steam
i honestly can think of one DS game i 'must have' in my kit (elektroplankton), whereas on the gp2x, i've got, literally, 20gigs worth of SD cards, crammed to the gills with stuff
Its a nice hack indeed, to add IDE to a DS, but if you invest in an Open Game Console in the first place, you'll find its not so hard to do yourself ..