Linux wouldn't run well on a GBA. There's no MMU, so you couldn't do swapping or read-only memory. And there's only 256k of RAM (plus 32k of faster ram), so you couldn't do a whole lot with it.
The GameBoy Advance is probably the closest we have to that today. It's a very simple, primative platform compared to other modern systems. Emulation for it is very good, and flash cartridges are fairly cheap (you can get everything you need for around $100 including shipping). If you want, you could even just buy a link cable without a cartridge for under $20, and start off by writing games that fit into the GBA's RAM.
It's easy to get started with the system, and by learning the tricks to it, you can pull off a lot more impressive games than a quick glance at the tech specs would initially suggest.
One good thing about Newark is you can always find a parking space.
If there a parking space when you need it, just hang around for 10 minutes or so and someone's car will get stolen, leaving a nice empty parking space. Problem solved!
Based on Nintendo's history, never put much faith in first release date you hear. Your odds are a lot better with the second date you hear, but don't go betting on it.
Seriously, May is 4 months away and we haven't even seen a picture of the device yet, or any indication of what games they're working on for it. We don't even know if the system will do 2D or 3D graphics. I can't see a May release date as remotely serious.
They've already announced wireless multiplayer support. The wireless adapter will come bundled with the GBA remakes of the original Pokemon games, in addition to being available seperately.
Games must specially be coded for it however, due to factors such being able to deal with signal loss due to interference.
Both the NES and SNES were designed near the end of their lifetimes. The main reason was later models had a lot of the chips on the motherboard combined to reduce the cost to make it.
The newer NES looked a lot like the SNES, and was top loading just like the SNES, which meant it broke a lot less often. The controllers were also shaped similar to the SNES controllers.
The newer SNES was pretty much just a smaller version of the original.
The current homebrew scene only has a very basic understanding of how to access normal memory cards. The demos I've seen that use them work with official memory cards, but fail with 3rd party cards.
Current homebrew developers haven't even figured out how to detect an SD card, let alone access it.
Even if the network port is faster than the disc, it makes the setup a lot less useful if you need to have a PC server running all the time to use the GameCube.
Your are right about the bootloaders for pirated games - supposedly most games are very slow, and tend to have broken features (usually sound and/or saving).
I've got the stuff necessary to do homebrew GameCube development, but I haven't had the time yet to write my own code (too busy coding for GBA). Here's how it works.
When PSO connects to Sega's servers, the first thing it does is asks the server if there are any code updates available. If so, the game downloads the update and runs the game from that code instead of what's on the disc. The game does very little to verify that it actually is connecting to Sega's servers.
To load homebrew code, set up a DNS server that answers queries for Sega's PSO server with the IP of your PC. Then run a program like PSOLoad or PSUL on your PC to send the game. Newer versions of PSOLoad include a DNS server built in.
It's rather tedius process, as there's a long load time before the PSO main menu comes up, followed by another significant load time after you choose to play online. Then you pick your character, and there's another long load time before you code loads.
There are several keyboards available for the GameCube, including one that's a keyboard and a controller combined into one. Picture a GameCube controller, cut it in half, and place a standard keyboard between the two halves.
The GameCube supports progressive scan display. It's kinda funny playing the emulated NES games in progressive scan mode - you can make out the individual pixels very clearly.
The modified BIOS tmbinc made isn't very useful. If I remember correctly, what he did was soldered an extra chip onto the GameCube motherboard containing his new BIOS. The new BIOS loaded an image from a PC on the network.
Any type of GameCube Linux won't be very useful without being able to access the disc drive. So far, there hasn't been any progress on making discs that can be read by it. You pretty much have to have a DVD manufacturing factory to do it.
It's not there as a workaround to specific flaws, it's there in case any unknown ones are discovered. Of course the code was originally designed so that these kinds of flaws weren't possible. But the code that did the security checks to deny it had flaws.
The biggest advantage this gives is it prevents the average script kiddy from being able to pull off an exploit based on the demos that are released with advisories. For the people who actually can write an exploit on their own, the salt may or may not stop them, depending on the severity of the flaw. But this definately would've helped a lot in the Netscape 4.x days.
I hate to write a program in delphi to do it, because microsoft decided to store it in a deep location using random unique identifiers as key names. (Though mozilla does the same thing with their directory structure, which annoys me...)
Mozilla had a good reason for that. If you remember back around when the 4.0 browsers were released, the most common demos of security flaws were to demo how to access specific files on the user's hard disk. Most of these flaws allowed access to any file on the hard disk, provided the exploit was hard coded with the exact path to it.
You could probably collect a lot of sensitive information if you wrote an exploit that read the file used to store saved form information and sent it to you. But by including random characters in the path to the user profile, it becomes a harder task for an exploit to retrieve information from the user's profile directory. It's not foolproof, but it's good enough to stop your average script kiddy.
No they don't. You entirely missed what I was saying. The number of people that use their computers for games are greatly outnumbered by the people who just use their computer for the web, email, and work related tasks. Besides, as Linux gains momentum, more games will come to it.
- There is no 3D hardware drivers available for the Linux kernel or for XFree86 that performs within a marginal distance from windows/MacOS 3D hardware (except pre-beta quality nVidia drivers).
I've been using nVidia's drivers since they first came out. I've never had any problems with them, and ever since the XFree 4.x drivers came out, I've gotten better performance in Linux than in Windows (both in games and OpenGL code I wrote myself and compiled for both platforms).
Your statements that "most people play games on a consol" are baseless, and no evidence exists which agrees with anything your are saying. On the other hand, there are plenty of online PC gamers, and those games just ARE NOT available on any other platforms than OS X and Windows.
Ok, you're right, if you count the people that play Solitare and Yahoo games, then computer gamers probably do outnumber console gamers. But have you ever noticed sales figures for consoles? They totally blow away PC game sales; it's not even close.
- games "like solitare" aren't even playable on linux. Just check out Yahoo online multiplayer card games, or any other online gaming community similar. You won't find it to work on Linux's web brosers.
Yahoo games are Java based. Why won't they work in Linux? It's been a few years since I've really played them, but I used to use them on Solaris and IRIX workstations. I can't imagine them working on those platforms but not on Linux.
- When we talk about games, we don't mean single player i want to blow time while I wait for my 4:00 appointment game. We are talking about online multiplayer games, which are virtually non-extant on linux and the consol.
I know that. And my whole point is that a very low percentage of computer users use their computer for 3D games. Just because the Slashdot crowd does doesn't mean that everyone else does. Besides, despite all the whining on Slashdot about no games for Linux, it doesn't seem to stop people here from using Linux.
I see gamers as the last to switch to Linux. The first will be businesses when Linux becomes a better fit to their needs than Windows. Lots of software used in engineering is available for Linux - things like Matlab and LabView. Linux will then spread thru the business to desktop, with things like Mozilla & OpenOffice being the keys to the switch. The next step will be the people who start using Linux at home because they use it at work. Finally, the gamers will switch because everyone else already did.
Most hackers and geeks would love nothing more than to get all of those good games ported over to linux.
Yes, that's certainly true. But the thing is, hackers and geeks make up the majority of the Linux userbase. So the lack of games hasn't stopped them from using Linux.
As I originally said, it's the moms and dads and business that don't use their computers for 3D games that won't go near Linux.
Games aren't a huge barrior. Particuarlly not FPS games, since those seem to be the type of game most likely to get ported to Linux. Most people play games on a console, not a PC. The most commonly used PC games are things like Solitare.
How many business require the use of games? If anything they'd be happier with an OS without many games. How many of you have parents that play Quake? My mom never played anything more than simple card games on the computer.
Really, the majority of the people who would care about the issue are the people who have nothing better to do than see how they can get an extra 1 frame per second out of Quake 3.
Games go where the market is. Not the other way around.
Like what, exactly? I love science -- I ought to, I'm a scientist at a genomics center. But the whole trend of even Earth-bound science is to do as much as possible by machine, and just have the humans look at the *data*.
That works because we're very familiar with what we're studying. And also because as soon as there is a problem, we can make the necessary adjustments quickly.
We know very little about Mars compared to what we know about Earth. And it takes about 20 minutes to send a signal a Mars lander and get a response back.
Say the lander shows a picture with an odd looking rock in it, and we want a better look at it. Just to move the lander to the other side of the rock will take at least 20 minutes - remember, it takes a while for the signal to reach the lander, and for the pictures it sends back to reach us. Add another 20 each time you want a different angle. If we had a person there looking at the rock, the whole process could be done in a minute.
A human is much better suited to react to an unexpected situation than a robot is. When travelling to another planet, odds are there will be a lot of unexpected situations.
Check back to the 1995 Consent Decree. DOS won out initially fair and square (DOS cost $100, CP/M cost $200, so people chose DOS). But when Windows came out, Microsoft's licensing agreements stated that if you wanted to include DOS or Windows on any computer you sold, you would have to pay Microsoft for both products for every system you sold, *even if it didn't include MS software*. That is the sole reason that Windows ever became popular. You would occasionally see computers running GEOS or OS/2 in stores, but not very many because of the need to pay for two OS's. The government eventually investigated Microsoft for illegal leverage of a monopoly. The result was the 1995 Consent Decree, but by then the damage had been done and the government action was too little, too late.
2. MacOS, UNIX, AmigaOS, BeOS, Solaris, etc. Operating systems have competed, and lost (so far). Is it because Microsoft practices illegal monopolistic crap? That certainly is likely to be a contributing factor. But so do other businesses that fail.
See above. Bad business decisions were factors too, but by far the largest factor was Microsoft's illegal leverage of their monopoly.
As to DR-DOS and the bogus Microsoft error messages, here's the basic story. After DR-DOS was good enough to compete with MS-DOS, Microsoft began making their products try detecting DR-DOS. If they detected it, the program would print a random error message and return you to a DOS prompt. The most notable program to do this was Windows 3.1. I'm not sure if this is correct, but I seem to recall reading in a magazine that the code to check for DR-DOS was encrypted, and that Microsoft would attempt to disable any debugger that might be running before decrypting the code, making it very difficult to figure out what the code was doing.
Regarding the Netscape trial, Microsoft's contracts with OEMs prevented them from loading Netscape onto computers they sold.
First of all, do not use JavaScript for image rollovers. It's a terrible idea and the person who thought of using JavaScript for image rollovers should be shot.
JavaScript was pretty much invented for things like that. JavaScript first showed up in Netscape 2.0, but CSS didn't show up until the 4.0 browsers.
Relying on CSS isn't always the best idea - IE does a terrible job of handling it. When I do web development, most of my time gets spent trying to work around limitations of IE. Very simple CSS works in IE, but anything even somewhat complex probably won't work right in it.
Next, you should never rely on JavaScript to do your form validation.
Yes, completely relying on JavaScript for form validation is a very stupid thing to do. But that doesn't mean you can't do initial validation with it. If you click Submit on a form, and a JavaScript alert pops up to tell you that you have to enter your phone number, it's a lot nicer than if you get the error after the page submits.
More importantly, it will get rid of the time the Mozilla team spends responding to the large number of people that constantly bitch about the feature not being there.
You're right about what the plan is. They said that a while ago in the progress reports. It's just that the roadmap page only seems to get updated once every year or so.
For starters, last time I tried Thunderbird (about 6 months ago), it used about as much memory as the suite did. Firebird seemed to use about 50% what the suite did. So by using both, my memory usage would be about 50% higher than before.
Second reason is the DOM Inspector saves a lot of time when doing web development. It's a pain to get it working with Firebird. Any builds of it I found didn't work right.
Third reason is I've seen a decent number of sites that do browser detection and won't let you in if your browser isn't on their list. Firebird rarely is on the list, however, Mozilla usually is.
I do occasionally use Composer, altho not very often. If this was the only reason, I wouldn't care.
The final (and possibly most important) reason is there is no easy way to move your mail from Mozilla to Thunderbird. Yeah, you can copy your profile directory and then go editing files to make it work, but I don't want to do that.
The original Gravis Gamepad and the Pro version both have the same circular d-pad. Circular d-pad's are terribly inprecise, as they make it incredibly difficult to move directly across the pad without accidentally hitting another direction along the way.
Slashdot Mirror
Linux wouldn't run well on a GBA. There's no MMU, so you couldn't do swapping or read-only memory. And there's only 256k of RAM (plus 32k of faster ram), so you couldn't do a whole lot with it.
The GameBoy Advance is probably the closest we have to that today. It's a very simple, primative platform compared to other modern systems. Emulation for it is very good, and flash cartridges are fairly cheap (you can get everything you need for around $100 including shipping). If you want, you could even just buy a link cable without a cartridge for under $20, and start off by writing games that fit into the GBA's RAM.
It's easy to get started with the system, and by learning the tricks to it, you can pull off a lot more impressive games than a quick glance at the tech specs would initially suggest.
One good thing about Newark is you can always find a parking space.
If there a parking space when you need it, just hang around for 10 minutes or so and someone's car will get stolen, leaving a nice empty parking space. Problem solved!
Console games being on discs is fairly recent. All the older consoles used cartridges, which came in boxes.
Based on Nintendo's history, never put much faith in first release date you hear. Your odds are a lot better with the second date you hear, but don't go betting on it.
Seriously, May is 4 months away and we haven't even seen a picture of the device yet, or any indication of what games they're working on for it. We don't even know if the system will do 2D or 3D graphics. I can't see a May release date as remotely serious.
They've already announced wireless multiplayer support. The wireless adapter will come bundled with the GBA remakes of the original Pokemon games, in addition to being available seperately.
Games must specially be coded for it however, due to factors such being able to deal with signal loss due to interference.
Both the NES and SNES were designed near the end of their lifetimes. The main reason was later models had a lot of the chips on the motherboard combined to reduce the cost to make it.
The newer NES looked a lot like the SNES, and was top loading just like the SNES, which meant it broke a lot less often. The controllers were also shaped similar to the SNES controllers.
The newer SNES was pretty much just a smaller version of the original.
The current homebrew scene only has a very basic understanding of how to access normal memory cards. The demos I've seen that use them work with official memory cards, but fail with 3rd party cards.
Current homebrew developers haven't even figured out how to detect an SD card, let alone access it.
Even if the network port is faster than the disc, it makes the setup a lot less useful if you need to have a PC server running all the time to use the GameCube.
Your are right about the bootloaders for pirated games - supposedly most games are very slow, and tend to have broken features (usually sound and/or saving).
I've got the stuff necessary to do homebrew GameCube development, but I haven't had the time yet to write my own code (too busy coding for GBA). Here's how it works.
When PSO connects to Sega's servers, the first thing it does is asks the server if there are any code updates available. If so, the game downloads the update and runs the game from that code instead of what's on the disc. The game does very little to verify that it actually is connecting to Sega's servers.
To load homebrew code, set up a DNS server that answers queries for Sega's PSO server with the IP of your PC. Then run a program like PSOLoad or PSUL on your PC to send the game. Newer versions of PSOLoad include a DNS server built in.
It's rather tedius process, as there's a long load time before the PSO main menu comes up, followed by another significant load time after you choose to play online. Then you pick your character, and there's another long load time before you code loads.
There are several keyboards available for the GameCube, including one that's a keyboard and a controller combined into one. Picture a GameCube controller, cut it in half, and place a standard keyboard between the two halves.
The GameCube supports progressive scan display. It's kinda funny playing the emulated NES games in progressive scan mode - you can make out the individual pixels very clearly.
The modified BIOS tmbinc made isn't very useful. If I remember correctly, what he did was soldered an extra chip onto the GameCube motherboard containing his new BIOS. The new BIOS loaded an image from a PC on the network.
Any type of GameCube Linux won't be very useful without being able to access the disc drive. So far, there hasn't been any progress on making discs that can be read by it. You pretty much have to have a DVD manufacturing factory to do it.
It's not there as a workaround to specific flaws, it's there in case any unknown ones are discovered. Of course the code was originally designed so that these kinds of flaws weren't possible. But the code that did the security checks to deny it had flaws.
The biggest advantage this gives is it prevents the average script kiddy from being able to pull off an exploit based on the demos that are released with advisories. For the people who actually can write an exploit on their own, the salt may or may not stop them, depending on the severity of the flaw. But this definately would've helped a lot in the Netscape 4.x days.
I hate to write a program in delphi to do it, because microsoft decided to store it in a deep location using random unique identifiers as key names. (Though mozilla does the same thing with their directory structure, which annoys me...)
Mozilla had a good reason for that. If you remember back around when the 4.0 browsers were released, the most common demos of security flaws were to demo how to access specific files on the user's hard disk. Most of these flaws allowed access to any file on the hard disk, provided the exploit was hard coded with the exact path to it.
You could probably collect a lot of sensitive information if you wrote an exploit that read the file used to store saved form information and sent it to you. But by including random characters in the path to the user profile, it becomes a harder task for an exploit to retrieve information from the user's profile directory. It's not foolproof, but it's good enough to stop your average script kiddy.
- Home desktop users want to play 3d video games.
No they don't. You entirely missed what I was saying. The number of people that use their computers for games are greatly outnumbered by the people who just use their computer for the web, email, and work related tasks. Besides, as Linux gains momentum, more games will come to it.
- There is no 3D hardware drivers available for the Linux kernel or for XFree86 that performs within a marginal distance from windows/MacOS 3D hardware (except pre-beta quality nVidia drivers).
I've been using nVidia's drivers since they first came out. I've never had any problems with them, and ever since the XFree 4.x drivers came out, I've gotten better performance in Linux than in Windows (both in games and OpenGL code I wrote myself and compiled for both platforms).
Your statements that "most people play games on a consol" are baseless, and no evidence exists which agrees with anything your are saying. On the other hand, there are plenty of online PC gamers, and those games just ARE NOT available on any other platforms than OS X and Windows.
Ok, you're right, if you count the people that play Solitare and Yahoo games, then computer gamers probably do outnumber console gamers. But have you ever noticed sales figures for consoles? They totally blow away PC game sales; it's not even close.
- games "like solitare" aren't even playable on linux. Just check out Yahoo online multiplayer card games, or any other online gaming community similar. You won't find it to work on Linux's web brosers.
Yahoo games are Java based. Why won't they work in Linux? It's been a few years since I've really played them, but I used to use them on Solaris and IRIX workstations. I can't imagine them working on those platforms but not on Linux.
- When we talk about games, we don't mean single player i want to blow time while I wait for my 4:00 appointment game. We are talking about online multiplayer games, which are virtually non-extant on linux and the consol.
I know that. And my whole point is that a very low percentage of computer users use their computer for 3D games. Just because the Slashdot crowd does doesn't mean that everyone else does. Besides, despite all the whining on Slashdot about no games for Linux, it doesn't seem to stop people here from using Linux.
I see gamers as the last to switch to Linux. The first will be businesses when Linux becomes a better fit to their needs than Windows. Lots of software used in engineering is available for Linux - things like Matlab and LabView. Linux will then spread thru the business to desktop, with things like Mozilla & OpenOffice being the keys to the switch. The next step will be the people who start using Linux at home because they use it at work. Finally, the gamers will switch because everyone else already did.
Most hackers and geeks would love nothing more than to get all of those good games ported over to linux.
Yes, that's certainly true. But the thing is, hackers and geeks make up the majority of the Linux userbase. So the lack of games hasn't stopped them from using Linux.
As I originally said, it's the moms and dads and business that don't use their computers for 3D games that won't go near Linux.
Games aren't a huge barrior. Particuarlly not FPS games, since those seem to be the type of game most likely to get ported to Linux. Most people play games on a console, not a PC. The most commonly used PC games are things like Solitare.
How many business require the use of games? If anything they'd be happier with an OS without many games. How many of you have parents that play Quake? My mom never played anything more than simple card games on the computer.
Really, the majority of the people who would care about the issue are the people who have nothing better to do than see how they can get an extra 1 frame per second out of Quake 3.
Games go where the market is. Not the other way around.
Like what, exactly? I love science -- I ought to, I'm a scientist at a genomics center. But the whole trend of even Earth-bound science is to do as much as possible by machine, and just have the humans look at the *data*.
That works because we're very familiar with what we're studying. And also because as soon as there is a problem, we can make the necessary adjustments quickly.
We know very little about Mars compared to what we know about Earth. And it takes about 20 minutes to send a signal a Mars lander and get a response back.
Say the lander shows a picture with an odd looking rock in it, and we want a better look at it. Just to move the lander to the other side of the rock will take at least 20 minutes - remember, it takes a while for the signal to reach the lander, and for the pictures it sends back to reach us. Add another 20 each time you want a different angle. If we had a person there looking at the rock, the whole process could be done in a minute.
A human is much better suited to react to an unexpected situation than a robot is. When travelling to another planet, odds are there will be a lot of unexpected situations.
No you couldn't. IIS and Apache both implement the HTTP standard, but only one of them was vulnerable to Code Red et al.
Exchange, sendmail, qmail, etc all implement the SMTP standard. They're all vulnerable to abuse via spam.
1. DOS does not equal windows
Check back to the 1995 Consent Decree. DOS won out initially fair and square (DOS cost $100, CP/M cost $200, so people chose DOS). But when Windows came out, Microsoft's licensing agreements stated that if you wanted to include DOS or Windows on any computer you sold, you would have to pay Microsoft for both products for every system you sold, *even if it didn't include MS software*. That is the sole reason that Windows ever became popular. You would occasionally see computers running GEOS or OS/2 in stores, but not very many because of the need to pay for two OS's. The government eventually investigated Microsoft for illegal leverage of a monopoly. The result was the 1995 Consent Decree, but by then the damage had been done and the government action was too little, too late.
2. MacOS, UNIX, AmigaOS, BeOS, Solaris, etc. Operating systems have competed, and lost (so far). Is it because Microsoft practices illegal monopolistic crap? That certainly is likely to be a contributing factor. But so do other businesses that fail.
See above. Bad business decisions were factors too, but by far the largest factor was Microsoft's illegal leverage of their monopoly.
As to DR-DOS and the bogus Microsoft error messages, here's the basic story. After DR-DOS was good enough to compete with MS-DOS, Microsoft began making their products try detecting DR-DOS. If they detected it, the program would print a random error message and return you to a DOS prompt. The most notable program to do this was Windows 3.1. I'm not sure if this is correct, but I seem to recall reading in a magazine that the code to check for DR-DOS was encrypted, and that Microsoft would attempt to disable any debugger that might be running before decrypting the code, making it very difficult to figure out what the code was doing.
Regarding the Netscape trial, Microsoft's contracts with OEMs prevented them from loading Netscape onto computers they sold.
First of all, do not use JavaScript for image rollovers. It's a terrible idea and the person who thought of using JavaScript for image rollovers should be shot.
JavaScript was pretty much invented for things like that. JavaScript first showed up in Netscape 2.0, but CSS didn't show up until the 4.0 browsers.
Relying on CSS isn't always the best idea - IE does a terrible job of handling it. When I do web development, most of my time gets spent trying to work around limitations of IE. Very simple CSS works in IE, but anything even somewhat complex probably won't work right in it.
Next, you should never rely on JavaScript to do your form validation.
Yes, completely relying on JavaScript for form validation is a very stupid thing to do. But that doesn't mean you can't do initial validation with it. If you click Submit on a form, and a JavaScript alert pops up to tell you that you have to enter your phone number, it's a lot nicer than if you get the error after the page submits.
More importantly, it will get rid of the time the Mozilla team spends responding to the large number of people that constantly bitch about the feature not being there.
You're right about what the plan is. They said that a while ago in the progress reports. It's just that the roadmap page only seems to get updated once every year or so.
For starters, last time I tried Thunderbird (about 6 months ago), it used about as much memory as the suite did. Firebird seemed to use about 50% what the suite did. So by using both, my memory usage would be about 50% higher than before.
Second reason is the DOM Inspector saves a lot of time when doing web development. It's a pain to get it working with Firebird. Any builds of it I found didn't work right.
Third reason is I've seen a decent number of sites that do browser detection and won't let you in if your browser isn't on their list. Firebird rarely is on the list, however, Mozilla usually is.
I do occasionally use Composer, altho not very often. If this was the only reason, I wouldn't care.
The final (and possibly most important) reason is there is no easy way to move your mail from Mozilla to Thunderbird. Yeah, you can copy your profile directory and then go editing files to make it work, but I don't want to do that.
The original Gravis Gamepad and the Pro version both have the same circular d-pad. Circular d-pad's are terribly inprecise, as they make it incredibly difficult to move directly across the pad without accidentally hitting another direction along the way.