I think the biggest thing a discrete audio card can give nowadays is accelerated MIDI. Ever tried playing or creating a MIDI file in software? It can easily use 10% CPU on playback, with a card that accelerates this, its zero.
You've got an absolutely horrendous MIDI implementation then. The GameBoy Advance, with it's 16.7 MHz ARM7, is capable of handling 8 channels of MIDI at about 30% CPU usage. On a modern processor, MIDI should take essentially no power.
Last time I looked into dedicated sound cards (the SoundBlaster Live was a really good card back then), very few cards did MIDI in hardware anymore.
I've seen heavy table-based websites crawl on IE7, so it's not a moot point. Tables are inherantly more complex due to the 3x increase in markup (1 DIV versus TABLE - TR - TD), and cause the browser to do more work, than with a simple stylesheet.
That entirely depends on the layout of the specific page. Table layout is extremely regular, so once you've started parsing the table, you can infer a lot about the rest of it. Consecutive table rows/cols have much more in common than consecutive divs do.
Also, the previously mentioned point about browsers being incapable of rendering page content until the entire markup is downloaded still stands.
That hasn't been true since Netscape 4. One of the key design goals of Mozilla's Gecko engine was that it wouldn't limitations like that. I don't think IE ever had that limitation.
The older browsers you speak of that render tables slowly (really just Netscape 4.x and older) also don't do a very good job of CSS. Essentially, in those cases where table rendering speed is an issue, you don't really have a choice of another way to do it.
No they wouldn't. A couple thousand dollars per developer for a dev kit is a drop in the bucket compared to the production costs of a large game. Settling for a homebrew toolchain would cost far more in lost productivity than it would to buy the dev kits.
And even if Sony did open up the hardware completely for homebrew, you still need distribution channels. Considering PS3 games ship on 27 GB discs, they aren't very download friendly. And obviously there is a benefit to using Sony made discs with copy protection over downloadable games without copy protection.
Palm was definitely involved in the Zoomer. The Palm Pilot came out around 95, whereas the Zoomer was about 92. Palm wrote the PIM software and I believe also the desktop sync, Geoworks did the OS, Casio the hardware, and Tandy the marketing. I've still got the SDK lying around somewhere, which included the Palm apps. I'm not sure who did the handwriting recognition, but Palm released Graffiti as an upgrade later on.
I really don't know that much about the Zoomer, as I didn't know too much about it until after they stopped making it, but everyone at Geoworks consistently said that users loved the Zoomer, with the only complaint being it was too slow.
HP's device was the OmniGo. 240x240 screen, with a double jointed hinge so that you could flip the keyboard all the way around behind the screen and use it strictly as a touch screen device. I had one of them - kinda sorta liked it, but in the end, I felt it did an ok job at everything, but didn't do a great job at anything.
The Newton didn't have too much to do with Palm. Right about the same time as the Newton came out, Palm, Geoworks, Casio, and Tandy worked together to release the Zoomer. It was 8086 based PDA that ran GEOS. The general feedback on it was that it was a great product, but it was too slow. Geoworks had wanted it to be 386 based, but I believe it was Tandy who insisted on the 8086.
Anyway, after that venture, Palm split off on their own, and everyone knows the story from there.
Think about what you're saying. They made sure they had enough manufacturing capacity to meet their predicted sales. Demand is higher than that, hence the shortage.
I have considered this. However, (pulling numbers out of my ass) a typical Wii monitor is 27 inches from corner to corner. A typical PC monitor is 17 inches from corner to corner, which is only 40% of the area. How are players going to fit four grown people around a 17" monitor? Or how is a self-publishing microstudio going to teach customers how to set up every make and model of video card for television output?
You can usually fit at least two people comfortably around a computer, so you can get some multiplayer. There's also LAN play, which is huge with the college crowd.
I'd strongly recommend that you give a serious go at making a DS game with an aim at getting published. Stop complaining and thinking up ways to fail and just give it a serious try.
Try publishers that like independent teams like O3, Gamecock, or Alten8. You'll probably end up with a better deal working through them anyway.
And for your scenario, say you did finish it for PC. We're well into the age of USB. New computers come with plenty of USB ports. It's not hard for someone to hook up multiple controllers.
If you've got a good game idea, create a demo. Polish it up extremely well. If you're aiming for a console title, try to make something that fits within the technical specs of the system you're targeting.
I'd recommend going the DS route. Grab the homebrew tools and make something good that runs on the DS. Shop it around. There are publishers that like independent teams. It's hard, but certainly doable if you put in the effort.
At the low end, go to any high school or other such environment, do a quick poll, and you will generally find far more amature artists then amature programmers (who are not just webmasters).
A very small subset of artists are capable of creating game art. The subset gets much smaller when you limit yourself to pixel art with tight color and tile count restrictions. It's *really* hard to find capable artists for a 2D game.
Not a clue how hard they are to find though when you get outside of pixel art.
Just a little advice... there's a DS flash cart called the DS-Xtreme. I bought one, and it worked great for about a month or two. After that it started freezing up randomly. I left a message on their support site, and after about two and a half weeks they replied with a new firmware update to try. Loading it completely hosed the unit. 9 times out of 10 the DS doesn't recognize the card at all. On the rare occasions that it does recognize the card, attempting to use it freezes the DS instantly.
The problems look to be rather common. It seems like the manufacturing plant slightly tweaks each batch, causing unexpected problems each time.
The DS-X is also $125 for a 512 MB cart. This Datel product is $40, so it's looking pretty good to me right now.
Just out of curiosity, what is the harm in Microsoft "discontinuing" VB? Granted, no new versions of the language will be released, nor patches for compilers, etc., but that doesn't suddenly make current tools stop working. Why is their discontinuation of VB so terrible for companies that use the language?
Visual Studio 6 won't install on Vista. IT was supposed to install it for me today to do some testing of our existing products. I didn't get all the details, but the gist of it was that the basic install completed but didn't actually work. The service packs wouldn't even install.
Ok, so you say develop on XP with Vista in mind. If you do that, how do you debug problems that only occur on Vista?
To me, the key of it is "well regulated militia". I always took that to imply that there needed to be some sort of organized group involved. Roughly speaking, a random guy with a few screws loose isn't guaranteed a gun, but if you want to have a Maybury Milita you can.
I fully understand your interpretation. Taken as an independent statement without any context whatsoever, I'd probably agree with that interpretation. But once you put that line back in context, it's horribly out of place. You can just discard half the sentence and nothing changes from a legal perspective. You just can't do that elsewhere. Why would they choose to add unnecessary details onto what could otherwise be 100% clear with no room for questions?
Of course, maybe they did mean your interpretation, but were very hesitant to go that far and felt they had to justify it.
I really don't know... about all I'm certain about is that it's not at all clear what they're saying.
Little debate on what the second amendment says? It's the only vague one. It's awkwardly worded and broken into two parts. If they wanted to have a blanket right to bears arms, then the first part is completely unnecessary. No where else in the constitution or bill of rights do they try to justify things. It's all written without much extra verbage, except for one sentence which is twice as long as needed to convey a basic right.
It's certainly possible that they did mean a blanket right, but I find that very hard to believe. Simply removing the first half of the text would have left no doubt of what they meant. But they chose to put in a lot of extra wording. There has to be a purpose to that.
My wife used to love the 80s music channel they had under the old system. But now they replaced that with "Ethel" or "Fred" or somesuch, and it sucks ass. The selection isn't as good as it used to be.
That's because you're looking at the wrong channels. Ethel focuses on modern rock with a lot of 90's stuff mixed in. Ethel mixes radio singles with other album tracks, or even occasionally semi-obscure stuff.
Fred I'm not so sure about, but I think it exclusively plays non-radio tracks. It's described as "Ground-breaking alternative hits from the late 70's to early 90's." I don't know much about it, but it's nothing like an 80's station.
Music lovers want a smörgåsbord of endless new and old music that is either thrown in as a "freebie" or totally free.
And Slashdot users want computer manufacturers to constantly ship them the latest models for free. They also know that things don't work that way.
And if the selection is varied enough, THEN and ONLY THEN will the music lover plunk down the cash for the goods.
That's the point of satellite radio. You should research it a little rather than making horribly wrong assumptions based off a very limited sampling.
Satellite radio is only for boring old people who still think Cadillacs are cool looking cars or who think they're being radical when they buy a modern Volkswagen Beetle.
No clue where you got that from...
XM is for people who want variety, and don't want the same songs repeated every hour (although they do have a few top 40 stations for that).
Sirius is for people who like FM style playlists but want a wider choice of stations.
Your comments are dead on. If my XM stations go away, then it's no longer worth paying for. If I wanted playlits like Sirius, I'd just listen to FM and save myself the monthly bill.
That said, there still are redundancies. Most of XM's stations in the 20's are just variants of your typical FM stations. Not to mention there are duplicates within there, as you have the XM programmed commercial free ones and the ClearChannel programmed ones with commercials. The rock stations are really different between XM and Sirius. I don't know about other music types, but I'd assume that's generally the case.
I guess it comes down to whether or not they get to keep all the bandwidth. If they do, there's enough cost reduction just from the elimination of redundant things to make things profitable. Remember, they're both on the brink of profitability right now. If they start messing with the music channels though, they're screwed.
The talk stations on both brands have commercials. XM has four or five music stations which are run by ClearChannel and have commercials. Those stations pretty much just waste bandwidth, as XM has there own commercial free equivalents to the ClearChannel stations.
The real issue is that the people trying to push genetically modified foods onto the market are also trying to avoid labeling them as such. And in this particular case, they're also trying to hide research that shows potential problems with the food. The research may be bogus, or it may not. But there's no way of knowing unless they release it.
In general, people just don't feel comfortable when others try to change things that are important while trying to prevent you from knowing about it.
Given the suggestion that GM foods might be more harmful than old-school foods, wouldn't the sane thing be to *increase* testing? What's wrong with these idiots?
There weren't any details in the story, but it depends on what type of testing is being planned. You don't want to do human testing if the early testing on lab rats doesn't look good.
People don't drop 10,000 on a high-end plasma because they don't care about graphics. If graphics didn't matter, then console makers wouldn't literally lose money on hardware to push the graphics envelope.
Yeah, but about 10% of households in the US have HDTVs. When you leave the US, the numbers get lower.
PS3's weren't hard to find back in the first week of January. As I walked through Times Square in NYC a few times, I saw several stores with signs in the windows saying they had PS3s in stock. I didn't bother to verify, but I can't see why they'd keep those signs up if they didn't really have them.
It would be an interesting legal battle if someone tried making a Mac clone. Remember the Sega vs Accolade case. The courts ruled it isn't a copyright / trademark violation to use Sega's logo in an unlicensed game because the logo is required for interoperability. The TPM keys is the same concept, just more advanced. As for the TPM chip configuration, Apple uses stock Intel parts now, so that's not a big deal.
You're probably thinking about the old ROM code required to run the Classic OS. It's certainly illegal to just copy that, but you could clean room reverse engineer it like Compaq did with the IBM BIOS.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the biggest thing a discrete audio card can give nowadays is accelerated MIDI. Ever tried playing or creating a MIDI file in software? It can easily use 10% CPU on playback, with a card that accelerates this, its zero.
You've got an absolutely horrendous MIDI implementation then. The GameBoy Advance, with it's 16.7 MHz ARM7, is capable of handling 8 channels of MIDI at about 30% CPU usage. On a modern processor, MIDI should take essentially no power.
Last time I looked into dedicated sound cards (the SoundBlaster Live was a really good card back then), very few cards did MIDI in hardware anymore.
I've seen heavy table-based websites crawl on IE7, so it's not a moot point. Tables are inherantly more complex due to the 3x increase in markup (1 DIV versus TABLE - TR - TD), and cause the browser to do more work, than with a simple stylesheet.
That entirely depends on the layout of the specific page. Table layout is extremely regular, so once you've started parsing the table, you can infer a lot about the rest of it. Consecutive table rows/cols have much more in common than consecutive divs do.
Also, the previously mentioned point about browsers being incapable of rendering page content until the entire markup is downloaded still stands.
That hasn't been true since Netscape 4. One of the key design goals of Mozilla's Gecko engine was that it wouldn't limitations like that. I don't think IE ever had that limitation.
The older browsers you speak of that render tables slowly (really just Netscape 4.x and older) also don't do a very good job of CSS. Essentially, in those cases where table rendering speed is an issue, you don't really have a choice of another way to do it.
No they wouldn't. A couple thousand dollars per developer for a dev kit is a drop in the bucket compared to the production costs of a large game. Settling for a homebrew toolchain would cost far more in lost productivity than it would to buy the dev kits.
And even if Sony did open up the hardware completely for homebrew, you still need distribution channels. Considering PS3 games ship on 27 GB discs, they aren't very download friendly. And obviously there is a benefit to using Sony made discs with copy protection over downloadable games without copy protection.
Palm was definitely involved in the Zoomer. The Palm Pilot came out around 95, whereas the Zoomer was about 92. Palm wrote the PIM software and I believe also the desktop sync, Geoworks did the OS, Casio the hardware, and Tandy the marketing. I've still got the SDK lying around somewhere, which included the Palm apps. I'm not sure who did the handwriting recognition, but Palm released Graffiti as an upgrade later on.
I really don't know that much about the Zoomer, as I didn't know too much about it until after they stopped making it, but everyone at Geoworks consistently said that users loved the Zoomer, with the only complaint being it was too slow.
HP's device was the OmniGo. 240x240 screen, with a double jointed hinge so that you could flip the keyboard all the way around behind the screen and use it strictly as a touch screen device. I had one of them - kinda sorta liked it, but in the end, I felt it did an ok job at everything, but didn't do a great job at anything.
The Newton didn't have too much to do with Palm. Right about the same time as the Newton came out, Palm, Geoworks, Casio, and Tandy worked together to release the Zoomer. It was 8086 based PDA that ran GEOS. The general feedback on it was that it was a great product, but it was too slow. Geoworks had wanted it to be 386 based, but I believe it was Tandy who insisted on the 8086.
Anyway, after that venture, Palm split off on their own, and everyone knows the story from there.
Think about what you're saying. They made sure they had enough manufacturing capacity to meet their predicted sales. Demand is higher than that, hence the shortage.
I have considered this. However, (pulling numbers out of my ass) a typical Wii monitor is 27 inches from corner to corner. A typical PC monitor is 17 inches from corner to corner, which is only 40% of the area. How are players going to fit four grown people around a 17" monitor? Or how is a self-publishing microstudio going to teach customers how to set up every make and model of video card for television output?
You can usually fit at least two people comfortably around a computer, so you can get some multiplayer. There's also LAN play, which is huge with the college crowd.
I'd strongly recommend that you give a serious go at making a DS game with an aim at getting published. Stop complaining and thinking up ways to fail and just give it a serious try.
If that happens, then your game isn't very good.
Try publishers that like independent teams like O3, Gamecock, or Alten8. You'll probably end up with a better deal working through them anyway.
And for your scenario, say you did finish it for PC. We're well into the age of USB. New computers come with plenty of USB ports. It's not hard for someone to hook up multiple controllers.
If you've got a good game idea, create a demo. Polish it up extremely well. If you're aiming for a console title, try to make something that fits within the technical specs of the system you're targeting.
I'd recommend going the DS route. Grab the homebrew tools and make something good that runs on the DS. Shop it around. There are publishers that like independent teams. It's hard, but certainly doable if you put in the effort.
At the low end, go to any high school or other such environment, do a quick poll, and you will generally find far more amature artists then amature programmers (who are not just webmasters).
A very small subset of artists are capable of creating game art. The subset gets much smaller when you limit yourself to pixel art with tight color and tile count restrictions. It's *really* hard to find capable artists for a 2D game.
Not a clue how hard they are to find though when you get outside of pixel art.
Support marked my issue as private. I listed the issue number anyway in case an admin was reading.
What good is a warranty if the company won't respond to you?
Just a little advice... there's a DS flash cart called the DS-Xtreme. I bought one, and it worked great for about a month or two. After that it started freezing up randomly. I left a message on their support site, and after about two and a half weeks they replied with a new firmware update to try. Loading it completely hosed the unit. 9 times out of 10 the DS doesn't recognize the card at all. On the rare occasions that it does recognize the card, attempting to use it freezes the DS instantly.
The problems look to be rather common. It seems like the manufacturing plant slightly tweaks each batch, causing unexpected problems each time.
The DS-X is also $125 for a 512 MB cart. This Datel product is $40, so it's looking pretty good to me right now.
Just out of curiosity, what is the harm in Microsoft "discontinuing" VB? Granted, no new versions of the language will be released, nor patches for compilers, etc., but that doesn't suddenly make current tools stop working. Why is their discontinuation of VB so terrible for companies that use the language?
Visual Studio 6 won't install on Vista. IT was supposed to install it for me today to do some testing of our existing products. I didn't get all the details, but the gist of it was that the basic install completed but didn't actually work. The service packs wouldn't even install.
Ok, so you say develop on XP with Vista in mind. If you do that, how do you debug problems that only occur on Vista?
To me, the key of it is "well regulated militia". I always took that to imply that there needed to be some sort of organized group involved. Roughly speaking, a random guy with a few screws loose isn't guaranteed a gun, but if you want to have a Maybury Milita you can.
I fully understand your interpretation. Taken as an independent statement without any context whatsoever, I'd probably agree with that interpretation. But once you put that line back in context, it's horribly out of place. You can just discard half the sentence and nothing changes from a legal perspective. You just can't do that elsewhere. Why would they choose to add unnecessary details onto what could otherwise be 100% clear with no room for questions?
Of course, maybe they did mean your interpretation, but were very hesitant to go that far and felt they had to justify it.
I really don't know... about all I'm certain about is that it's not at all clear what they're saying.
Little debate on what the second amendment says? It's the only vague one. It's awkwardly worded and broken into two parts. If they wanted to have a blanket right to bears arms, then the first part is completely unnecessary. No where else in the constitution or bill of rights do they try to justify things. It's all written without much extra verbage, except for one sentence which is twice as long as needed to convey a basic right.
It's certainly possible that they did mean a blanket right, but I find that very hard to believe. Simply removing the first half of the text would have left no doubt of what they meant. But they chose to put in a lot of extra wording. There has to be a purpose to that.
My wife used to love the 80s music channel they had under the old system. But now they replaced that with "Ethel" or "Fred" or somesuch, and it sucks ass. The selection isn't as good as it used to be.
That's because you're looking at the wrong channels. Ethel focuses on modern rock with a lot of 90's stuff mixed in. Ethel mixes radio singles with other album tracks, or even occasionally semi-obscure stuff.
Fred I'm not so sure about, but I think it exclusively plays non-radio tracks. It's described as "Ground-breaking alternative hits from the late 70's to early 90's." I don't know much about it, but it's nothing like an 80's station.
Music lovers want a smörgåsbord of endless new and old music that is either thrown in as a "freebie" or totally free.
And Slashdot users want computer manufacturers to constantly ship them the latest models for free. They also know that things don't work that way.
And if the selection is varied enough, THEN and ONLY THEN will the music lover plunk down the cash for the goods.
That's the point of satellite radio. You should research it a little rather than making horribly wrong assumptions based off a very limited sampling.
Satellite radio is only for boring old people who still think Cadillacs are cool looking cars or who think they're being radical when they buy a modern Volkswagen Beetle.
No clue where you got that from...
XM is for people who want variety, and don't want the same songs repeated every hour (although they do have a few top 40 stations for that).
Sirius is for people who like FM style playlists but want a wider choice of stations.
Your comments are dead on. If my XM stations go away, then it's no longer worth paying for. If I wanted playlits like Sirius, I'd just listen to FM and save myself the monthly bill.
That said, there still are redundancies. Most of XM's stations in the 20's are just variants of your typical FM stations. Not to mention there are duplicates within there, as you have the XM programmed commercial free ones and the ClearChannel programmed ones with commercials. The rock stations are really different between XM and Sirius. I don't know about other music types, but I'd assume that's generally the case.
I guess it comes down to whether or not they get to keep all the bandwidth. If they do, there's enough cost reduction just from the elimination of redundant things to make things profitable. Remember, they're both on the brink of profitability right now. If they start messing with the music channels though, they're screwed.
The talk stations on both brands have commercials. XM has four or five music stations which are run by ClearChannel and have commercials. Those stations pretty much just waste bandwidth, as XM has there own commercial free equivalents to the ClearChannel stations.
The real issue is that the people trying to push genetically modified foods onto the market are also trying to avoid labeling them as such. And in this particular case, they're also trying to hide research that shows potential problems with the food. The research may be bogus, or it may not. But there's no way of knowing unless they release it.
In general, people just don't feel comfortable when others try to change things that are important while trying to prevent you from knowing about it.
Given the suggestion that GM foods might be more harmful than old-school foods, wouldn't the sane thing be to *increase* testing? What's wrong with these idiots?
There weren't any details in the story, but it depends on what type of testing is being planned. You don't want to do human testing if the early testing on lab rats doesn't look good.
People don't drop 10,000 on a high-end plasma because they don't care about graphics. If graphics didn't matter, then console makers wouldn't literally lose money on hardware to push the graphics envelope.
Yeah, but about 10% of households in the US have HDTVs. When you leave the US, the numbers get lower.
PS3's weren't hard to find back in the first week of January. As I walked through Times Square in NYC a few times, I saw several stores with signs in the windows saying they had PS3s in stock. I didn't bother to verify, but I can't see why they'd keep those signs up if they didn't really have them.
It would be an interesting legal battle if someone tried making a Mac clone. Remember the Sega vs Accolade case. The courts ruled it isn't a copyright / trademark violation to use Sega's logo in an unlicensed game because the logo is required for interoperability. The TPM keys is the same concept, just more advanced. As for the TPM chip configuration, Apple uses stock Intel parts now, so that's not a big deal.
You're probably thinking about the old ROM code required to run the Classic OS. It's certainly illegal to just copy that, but you could clean room reverse engineer it like Compaq did with the IBM BIOS.