The GBA itself isn't, but if they offloaded all of the processing to hardware it'd be okay. They didn't, though, and that limits it to 10FPS. Really nothing worthwhile except for the "wow" factor.
Odd, too, since I've seen a software based system that was a whole lot better on the GBA. A friend of mine dumped a copy of the Matrix trailer onto a flash cart and the quality WAS pretty good.
Wouldn't know about that, but I can see refresh rates pretty well in monitors. 60hz all the way up to about 85hz or so flickers, and possibly even higher rates (never tried personally)-- especially white. I can glance at a monitor and tell you what your refresh rate is.
The flicker is so bad that I have to change the default color schemes on any machine I use because the default large concentrations of white give me headaches very quickly.
POKE 32767,1 is the highspeed poke for the Tandy CoCo. I grew up with that line of computers.. ah, those were nice machines, but RS didn't support them nearly as well as they should have. I wouldn't call the line a "flop", though.. they weren't huge commercial successes, but they did do pretty well with a hardcore fanbase that was par for the day. Definitely on par with the C64, Atari, and Apple fanbases.
The PCJr didn't have EGA per spec, it had a mutant graphics style that was right between CGA and EGA that had the lower resolution of CGA but SOME of the color support of EGA (16 colors)-- it's pretty much identical to Tandy graphics, except that Tandy had some weird extensions in place that a lot of Tandy Graphics-enhanced software would check for in order to see if the program was running on a real Tandy.. leading to a good chunk of the software-base not running at all on a PCJr. That.. is an amusing irony since the Tandy was a PCJr clone.
Eh, I'll reply directly-- don't take it to mean I was being harsh. Rather, confused-- Keep in mind ascii doesn't have character values for sarcasm, insight, and parody. ^_-
Anyway, I see so many troll posts that it can sometimes be hard to tell.
Same experience here-- I've never managed to try out an N-Gage because I've never found a functional demo unit EVER. They're always crashed, totally unresponsive.
Shouldn't that be two sessions? I seem to recall DC discs have a first session with the boot information and a second session with the actual game on it-- when they're bootable. They just have the second session if you need to use the Utopia disc with it.
Hm. Well.. the 'future of commerce' might be a bit overblown, but it kinda has some grains of truth in it for probably more of us than we realize. For instance, myself-- if I can't get what I'm looking for at a reasonable price within.. oh.. 10 miles, I'll check online. Hell, I usually check online anyway just to make sure that the local prices are worth it.
They were FAR too late to market with it. Creative Labs had the market sown up by that point and had EVERYONE supporting it. In order for the DSS to take off, they would have had to have had Soundblaster compatibility much the same way the original SB needed Adlib compatibility to take off.
Er.. this has GOT to be a troll. Not a single one of these is on target.
3) They're expensive, but the price WILL drop. Etch-a-sketch? They run standard windows applications. 4) scratching the screen? Fingerprints? You've never actually seen one, have you? They're not "touch" screens-- the technology behind the pen input is completely different from a PDA.. 5) Windows itself runs just fine as a pen interface. 6) Many come with keyboards and convert to a laptop-style mode.
I don't know about the Tablet PC-- I kinda see it as being the next generation of the laptop. Once the price on the new components start falling, they _should_ just become the laptop market since the better models have keyboards and pretty much act like a laptop with a new form factor.
It's funny how IBM managed to trash the PC Jr design-- at least two of the design CONCEPTS gave another company the crown of the PC market for a number of years-- Tandy. The Tandy 1000 line was a Tandem-originated (Tandem was a manufacturer of floppy drives back in the day; not sure if they're still around) PC Jr clone that was sold to Tandy and rebranded.
Until the advent of VGA and superior audio solutions, the Tandy graphics and sound options (really originating in the PC Jr) were king..
I'm sure someone at IBM must've been kicking themselves over it.
Hate to break this to you, but the more "hardcore" gamers can definitely feel the difference. When you get to know a game so intimately as some of the FPS players do, ANY adjustment in the preciseness the mouse shows can be felt intuitively. The better players will only play better with the improved feel of the mouse. Average players may see an improvement, but it's doubtful.
You really don't even need a mousepad at all on many surfaces. If the surface isn't rough enough to make mouse movements feel abrasive or reflective enough to play with the optics, the surface should be just fine for mouse use. I've used the surface of a old, scarred wooden table with an optical mouse and even with the dents and grooves across its surface it was just fine for use.
Similar effect, but more hand movement and you lose the sensitivity for quick movements. Higher DPI just means it's more precise on the extremely tiny hand motions. I bet that if you took the time to adapt to it, you'd have a hard time using a standard mouse afterwards.
You know, listening to this makes me realize how nice it really is to have localized settings as a default. I've got one or two apps where the developer isn't from the US and used foreign defaults, which can be irritating to work with, so.. yeah.. having seen both sides of the picture, I can see your frustration.
The computer world really is US-centric for the most part, at least in the Windows world.
Personally, I'm a little more cynical about the core team-- overall core team competency has been questioned of late, resulting in several branches of the code. I'm not so cynical to call them incompetent outright-- I've no experience with them directly, so how could I say such, but in either case they've decided to let things go in the direction they have.
Now we just need to see how the structure holds up and see where the actual 'power' in the organization is going to be. In plain english, to see who's going to be OKing the executive decisions now.
Most of the live distros support these. a "USB Key" is basically a USB flash drive. I picked one (128MB) up from Best Buy for $40-- plug it in and you've suddenly got an extra drive. Mine has saved my ass more than a few times at work so far-- I had a system die recently where it hadn't been on the tape backup but all of the data I had been working with had been copied onto my memstick.
They have some really nice uses once you actually think about how you could use one-- keep a mixture of important windows and linux tools on it so you've got the tools you need to actually get work done no matter which OS you're sitting in front of, for instance.
There's one game series to put the argument to you: try any of the Guilty Gear X titles. The art is all hand-drawn cel-style and extremely high resolution. You can't get that kind of detail on polygons with the existing hardware we're using today.
Don't forget about the really good R-Type Delta for PS1. R-Type Delta didn't pioneer the design, but it's part of a three game set for PS1 that merge 2D and 3D gaming into a good sidescrolling shooter.
The three games are Einhander (the best of the three, hands down!), R-Type Delta, and G-Darius.
They've changed engines two or three times now, which is a sure sign of problems-- without going through a huge redesign session, they'd be working with specs geared to an older engine. Sure, you can up the polycount and detail, but there are things inherent to the engine itself that probably won't have been taken into account in the upgrade.
I expect the game won't be all it's been hyped to be, but then, that's a given considering how long this has been hyped. Even Max Payne finally made it to release. DNF.. is going to be THE legend in terms of either vaporware or turkey software depending on if they EVER release it.
While the fuel to keep such a thing operating would be expensive, it WOULD be cool to have one for the good ol' cross-country commute. Go home to see the family for the holidays in style!
Slashdot Mirror
The GBA itself isn't, but if they offloaded all of the processing to hardware it'd be okay. They didn't, though, and that limits it to 10FPS. Really nothing worthwhile except for the "wow" factor.
Odd, too, since I've seen a software based system that was a whole lot better on the GBA. A friend of mine dumped a copy of the Matrix trailer onto a flash cart and the quality WAS pretty good.
Wouldn't know about that, but I can see refresh rates pretty well in monitors. 60hz all the way up to about 85hz or so flickers, and possibly even higher rates (never tried personally)-- especially white. I can glance at a monitor and tell you what your refresh rate is.
The flicker is so bad that I have to change the default color schemes on any machine I use because the default large concentrations of white give me headaches very quickly.
POKE 32767,1 is the highspeed poke for the Tandy CoCo. I grew up with that line of computers.. ah, those were nice machines, but RS didn't support them nearly as well as they should have. I wouldn't call the line a "flop", though.. they weren't huge commercial successes, but they did do pretty well with a hardcore fanbase that was par for the day. Definitely on par with the C64, Atari, and Apple fanbases.
The PCJr didn't have EGA per spec, it had a mutant graphics style that was right between CGA and EGA that had the lower resolution of CGA but SOME of the color support of EGA (16 colors)-- it's pretty much identical to Tandy graphics, except that Tandy had some weird extensions in place that a lot of Tandy Graphics-enhanced software would check for in order to see if the program was running on a real Tandy.. leading to a good chunk of the software-base not running at all on a PCJr. That.. is an amusing irony since the Tandy was a PCJr clone.
Eh, I'll reply directly-- don't take it to mean I was being harsh. Rather, confused-- Keep in mind ascii doesn't have character values for sarcasm, insight, and parody. ^_-
Anyway, I see so many troll posts that it can sometimes be hard to tell.
No harm, no foul.
Same experience here-- I've never managed to try out an N-Gage because I've never found a functional demo unit EVER. They're always crashed, totally unresponsive.
Shouldn't that be two sessions? I seem to recall DC discs have a first session with the boot information and a second session with the actual game on it-- when they're bootable. They just have the second session if you need to use the Utopia disc with it.
The configuration menu system on the DC is WinCE-based, and some games run from WinCE, but there's really minimal WinCE influence on the DC.
Well, VoIP's already used by millions who don't even know they're using it. A lot of the standard phone backbone at AT&T is based on VoIP.
Hm. Well.. the 'future of commerce' might be a bit overblown, but it kinda has some grains of truth in it for probably more of us than we realize. For instance, myself-- if I can't get what I'm looking for at a reasonable price within.. oh.. 10 miles, I'll check online. Hell, I usually check online anyway just to make sure that the local prices are worth it.
They were FAR too late to market with it. Creative Labs had the market sown up by that point and had EVERYONE supporting it. In order for the DSS to take off, they would have had to have had Soundblaster compatibility much the same way the original SB needed Adlib compatibility to take off.
Er.. this has GOT to be a troll. Not a single one of these is on target.
3) They're expensive, but the price WILL drop. Etch-a-sketch? They run standard windows applications.
4) scratching the screen? Fingerprints? You've never actually seen one, have you? They're not "touch" screens-- the technology behind the pen input is completely different from a PDA..
5) Windows itself runs just fine as a pen interface.
6) Many come with keyboards and convert to a laptop-style mode.
I don't know about the Tablet PC-- I kinda see it as being the next generation of the laptop. Once the price on the new components start falling, they _should_ just become the laptop market since the better models have keyboards and pretty much act like a laptop with a new form factor.
It's funny how IBM managed to trash the PC Jr design-- at least two of the design CONCEPTS gave another company the crown of the PC market for a number of years-- Tandy. The Tandy 1000 line was a Tandem-originated (Tandem was a manufacturer of floppy drives back in the day; not sure if they're still around) PC Jr clone that was sold to Tandy and rebranded.
Until the advent of VGA and superior audio solutions, the Tandy graphics and sound options (really originating in the PC Jr) were king..
I'm sure someone at IBM must've been kicking themselves over it.
Hate to break this to you, but the more "hardcore" gamers can definitely feel the difference. When you get to know a game so intimately as some of the FPS players do, ANY adjustment in the preciseness the mouse shows can be felt intuitively. The better players will only play better with the improved feel of the mouse. Average players may see an improvement, but it's doubtful.
You really don't even need a mousepad at all on many surfaces. If the surface isn't rough enough to make mouse movements feel abrasive or reflective enough to play with the optics, the surface should be just fine for mouse use. I've used the surface of a old, scarred wooden table with an optical mouse and even with the dents and grooves across its surface it was just fine for use.
Similar effect, but more hand movement and you lose the sensitivity for quick movements. Higher DPI just means it's more precise on the extremely tiny hand motions. I bet that if you took the time to adapt to it, you'd have a hard time using a standard mouse afterwards.
You know, listening to this makes me realize how nice it really is to have localized settings as a default. I've got one or two apps where the developer isn't from the US and used foreign defaults, which can be irritating to work with, so.. yeah.. having seen both sides of the picture, I can see your frustration.
The computer world really is US-centric for the most part, at least in the Windows world.
Personally, I'm a little more cynical about the core team-- overall core team competency has been questioned of late, resulting in several branches of the code. I'm not so cynical to call them incompetent outright-- I've no experience with them directly, so how could I say such, but in either case they've decided to let things go in the direction they have.
Now we just need to see how the structure holds up and see where the actual 'power' in the organization is going to be. In plain english, to see who's going to be OKing the executive decisions now.
Most of the live distros support these. a "USB Key" is basically a USB flash drive. I picked one (128MB) up from Best Buy for $40-- plug it in and you've suddenly got an extra drive. Mine has saved my ass more than a few times at work so far-- I had a system die recently where it hadn't been on the tape backup but all of the data I had been working with had been copied onto my memstick.
They have some really nice uses once you actually think about how you could use one-- keep a mixture of important windows and linux tools on it so you've got the tools you need to actually get work done no matter which OS you're sitting in front of, for instance.
There's one game series to put the argument to you: try any of the Guilty Gear X titles. The art is all hand-drawn cel-style and extremely high resolution. You can't get that kind of detail on polygons with the existing hardware we're using today.
Don't forget about the really good R-Type Delta for PS1. R-Type Delta didn't pioneer the design, but it's part of a three game set for PS1 that merge 2D and 3D gaming into a good sidescrolling shooter.
The three games are Einhander (the best of the three, hands down!), R-Type Delta, and G-Darius.
Huh. Sounds like what we need to get IBM acquitted is Darl McBride's head on a stick. I don't think anyone here is adverse to THAT idea...
They've changed engines two or three times now, which is a sure sign of problems-- without going through a huge redesign session, they'd be working with specs geared to an older engine. Sure, you can up the polycount and detail, but there are things inherent to the engine itself that probably won't have been taken into account in the upgrade.
I expect the game won't be all it's been hyped to be, but then, that's a given considering how long this has been hyped. Even Max Payne finally made it to release. DNF.. is going to be THE legend in terms of either vaporware or turkey software depending on if they EVER release it.
Mmmm.. I'd suggest dumping the paintball gun in favor of something like.. oh.. THIS.
While the fuel to keep such a thing operating would be expensive, it WOULD be cool to have one for the good ol' cross-country commute. Go home to see the family for the holidays in style!