"Things like this are disturbing. It's become acceptable, in today's society, for a company to tell it's customers how they can and can't use their products."
That's not what's happening here. They're telling a company (or team?) trying to sell the product for a profit not to do that. It doesn't help that their site for it touts "1400 GBA games, 1200 GBC games, 600 GB games"
Not saying I'm siding with Nintendo on this one, but the fact that they're expecting to make a profit ilegally off of Nintendo isn't helping their case any. You'll notice other free emulators are out there and not under legal scrutiny. (Note: That's not to say they won't down the road.)
Frankly, this is a road they should not have tried to travel. Who can seriously look at that system with that emulator and not expect Nintendo to go apeshit over it? Derrrr.
"Apple will spend much more time and money tweaking G4/5 + Velocity Engine encoding than x86 encoding."
Just because Apple's behind it doesn't mean that's automatically true. Granted, it's possible they would. However, consider that they're trying to get Quicktime out there and the best way to do that is to make it fly on the broadest range of machines possible.
"Or it could be "The Guide to Eunuch's Defenestration" - imagine a bunch of geeks throwing Eunuchs out the 6th story window. A slightly disturbing image to say the least. "
"before I die, I'd love to see a company actually try to innovate, instead of sueing. "
Didja read the article? Heh. Believe it or not, this isn't your typical "hey you forgot to include us!" case, it's a "you signed something saying you'd do something and now you're not, stick to your contract."
If they were suing without this contractual obligation over their heads, I'd agree with you.
"With a PC, both the processors are working to the same goal, but to the GBA-DS, each one will be working to do different things, one to each screen... I'm so scared.:-)"
You sure it's all that different? You've got multiple threads performing different tasks, and they often have to communicate with each other. Seems like you'd have a similar problem on a dual proc PC.
"It would be nice to see one of the developers who have looked at it (they must exist) to get a perspective one way or another."
I imagine their response would be like "Well, when you have a map on one screen and the action on the other, it's a piece of cake. But when you try to make one the front view and the other the rear view.. well then you run into mischief."
"In the meantime the GP32 is (still!) looking like a damn tasty treat."
"westlake writes 'According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, RealNetworks has sued Major League Baseball over its use of Windows Media. "
Wrong. They're suing MLB for NOT using Real. This news would be mildly more interesting if MS told MLB not to use Real. But the article doesn't say that happened, so put your pitchfork down. I can't believe that's the headline over there.
Actually, Real's probably in the right over this assuming the contract is as clearly stated as it is mentioned in the article.
"As for the two processors, the thing which scares me is effectively having to do IPC just to get stuff to appear on the second screen. Unless they provide an SDK which made it all happen automagically, it will be evil. Evil!"
Pardon my naieveness*, but wouldn't the real problem be if they shared memory or not? If it's dual proc like how a PC works, it wouldn't be that big of deal?
On the other hand, if they have seperate memory.. well yeah I can see what you mean.
(*Never been much of a programmer.. I'm genuinely curious of the pros and cons here.)
" (sounds like a game developer's worst nightmare if you ask me... writing two programs which need to communicate just to get one game? No thanks.)"
I have mixed feelings about that. On one hand, you've got the Sega Saturn. It had two processors, and the developers had a real difficult time on it. On the other hand, though, they were trying to sync the two procs for one screen. The DS, having two screens, means it has a processor for each screen. That's not so bad. I imagine anyway...
"Anyway I didn't find any problem with the Doom engine on GBA... it was smooth, even if the lack of a mouse made the gameplay suck"
Eh I blew it. I really should have fleshed out my thoughts a little more in my original post. What they've managed to get the GBA to do is little more than scaling a few sprites around. This is in contrast to the N-Gage which is actually pushing polygonal elements around. On one hand, my original statement was wrong, on the other, it wasn't so wrong in the sense that you're not going to see a lot of Playstation ports to the system.
"And who was dumb enough to think that people would be willing to take out the battery to switch cartridges?"
Heh. The problems you've mentioned, though they suck, are somewhat tolerable. What REALLY bugged me about the N-Gages was that all the demo units I played with had a "out of memory" message that you get when the phone feels it's time to reboot. I have enough of these problems as a Windows gamer, I aint taking that on the road.
" I honestly can't say I've ever heard even one person say, "You know, I really wish I could make phone calls on this, too."
You're missing the point a bit. The reason why one would want a game machine/phone/camera/mp3 player/pda/etc is that most people carry cell phones around with them non-stop. Whereas a game machine, MP3 player, camera, pda, etc usually only go with you when you know you're going to want it. Often the moment comes where you want one of these devices for whatever reason, and you didn't bring it because you've only got so many pockets.
I can at least speak for myself. I have a Nokia 3650. It is my alarm clock and calendar. I get news on it from time to time via the internet, usually when I'm waiting for Burgerville to deliver my meal. Yesterday I played Snake while waiting for an appointment to start. Its camera has come in handy numerous times. Just recently I snapped a photo of my nephew being silly at a restaraunt. To do all this stuff traditionally, instead of carrying around a small phone, I'd have to wear a trench coat or something. I'd look like Inspector Friggin Gadget.
"Was Sony ever considered a gaming company before they released the Playstation?"
I see what you're saying, but this particular example is a bit faulty on the grounds that Sony's had its hands in entertainment for years. Walkmans, VCRs, TVs, etc. It wasn't a huge leap for Sony to go into the gaming world, nor would it have been for Nokia really.
"...in which the 3D Realms founder argues "Nokia means cell phones to consumers. So, when Nokia jumps into the games market, it doesn't make sense to people"
Pretty lame argument. If anything, the Nokia brand helped N-Gage. The problems they have with that machine have nothing to do with the name on the package. They have everything to do with it performing poorly as a cell phone and a game machine. A no-name company could easily wipe the floor with them in this space.
Don't get me wrong, branding can help. (It can also detract.) But slapping the name Nintendo on this machine wouldn't have done it a lick of good.
I played a practical joke on my friends back in my high school programming course. Back in the DOS days, Norton had a tool where you could mess with the data stored on the FAT table. I came to school with a floppy that had reported it had over a gigabyte of free space. Heh it was funny watching their eyes get big. Sadly, there were no females around to demonstrate my technological prowess.
"I think camping is completely fair, but quite boring unless the game mode allows for it (if you're defending a spot, for example)."
I agree. I have seen abusive camping before, though. I played a deathmatch on a very busy server one night. Somebody sat right in front of a respawn site with a railgun. Every time somebody materialized *ZAP* killed them. He won every single game.
"I think there are all too many people who would be casual game players, but who can't get into anything, because while they're trying to figure out what's going on, people like this dude NAIL them."
I've seen my share of this. I've seen a lot of people cry "FAGGOT CAMPER!!". I know I've been the victim of that. Evidently, sitting on a sniper perch and sniping is against the unwritten rules when you become proficient at it. I have never ever once heard "Hey man, you're making this too hard for me. Could you please scale it back a bit so I can have a little fun here?" I promise you that if somebody approached me nicely about it instead of shouting obscenities at me, I would have altered my approach for everybody to have more fun.
So is the problem that people get too good at it, or is the problem that nobody's taking the opportunity to just ask nicely?
" That said however, CBS has CSI and Survivor, for most people $1/month is nowhere near good enough."
Depends on how one does the math. If you have lots of channels, and the ones that disappeared are less than 1/30th of the total channels, then to a bean counter it's not so unreasonable.
I agree that it sucks, but if they were to deduct like $5, then you'd expect that 1/6th of the channels were gone, or something like that.
Slashdot Mirror
"Basically Nintendo is saying "Now pay us again, you consumer piece of shit."
As would Sega, Microsoft, Sony, SNK, etc...
"Things like this are disturbing. It's become acceptable, in today's society, for a company to tell it's customers how they can and can't use their products."
That's not what's happening here. They're telling a company (or team?) trying to sell the product for a profit not to do that. It doesn't help that their site for it touts "1400 GBA games, 1200 GBC games, 600 GB games"
Not saying I'm siding with Nintendo on this one, but the fact that they're expecting to make a profit ilegally off of Nintendo isn't helping their case any. You'll notice other free emulators are out there and not under legal scrutiny. (Note: That's not to say they won't down the road.)
Frankly, this is a road they should not have tried to travel. Who can seriously look at that system with that emulator and not expect Nintendo to go apeshit over it? Derrrr.
"You *are* allowed to make backups and fair-use copies. Wailing lawyers don't change this fact. "
Every manual for a Nintendo game specifically states that you cannot back it up. What exactly overrides that?
(Note: I'm asking out of genuine curiosity, not in defense of Nintendo.)
"Author the DVD on your mac friend's computer"
Man I wish I had a few more friends so the odds of finding one with a Mac would go up.
"Apple will spend much more time and money tweaking G4/5 + Velocity Engine encoding than x86 encoding."
Just because Apple's behind it doesn't mean that's automatically true. Granted, it's possible they would. However, consider that they're trying to get Quicktime out there and the best way to do that is to make it fly on the broadest range of machines possible.
"Encoding time is important only if you do this regularly. "
It's also important if you wish to capture video and encode it in real time, a la software based TiVo.
Don't underestimate that aspect of encoding.
"Or it could be "The Guide to Eunuch's Defenestration" - imagine a bunch of geeks throwing Eunuchs out the 6th story window. A slightly disturbing image to say the least. "
Oh dear. Isn't OSX based on Eunuchs?
"before I die, I'd love to see a company actually try to innovate, instead of sueing. "
Didja read the article? Heh. Believe it or not, this isn't your typical "hey you forgot to include us!" case, it's a "you signed something saying you'd do something and now you're not, stick to your contract."
If they were suing without this contractual obligation over their heads, I'd agree with you.
"With a PC, both the processors are working to the same goal, but to the GBA-DS, each one will be working to do different things, one to each screen... I'm so scared. :-)"
You sure it's all that different? You've got multiple threads performing different tasks, and they often have to communicate with each other. Seems like you'd have a similar problem on a dual proc PC.
"It would be nice to see one of the developers who have looked at it (they must exist) to get a perspective one way or another."
I imagine their response would be like "Well, when you have a map on one screen and the action on the other, it's a piece of cake. But when you try to make one the front view and the other the rear view.. well then you run into mischief."
"In the meantime the GP32 is (still!) looking like a damn tasty treat."
Any interesting titles on it?
"westlake writes 'According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, RealNetworks has sued Major League Baseball over its use of Windows Media. "
Wrong. They're suing MLB for NOT using Real. This news would be mildly more interesting if MS told MLB not to use Real. But the article doesn't say that happened, so put your pitchfork down. I can't believe that's the headline over there.
Actually, Real's probably in the right over this assuming the contract is as clearly stated as it is mentioned in the article.
"As for the two processors, the thing which scares me is effectively having to do IPC just to get stuff to appear on the second screen. Unless they provide an SDK which made it all happen automagically, it will be evil. Evil!"
Pardon my naieveness*, but wouldn't the real problem be if they shared memory or not? If it's dual proc like how a PC works, it wouldn't be that big of deal?
On the other hand, if they have seperate memory.. well yeah I can see what you mean.
(*Never been much of a programmer.. I'm genuinely curious of the pros and cons here.)
" (sounds like a game developer's worst nightmare if you ask me... writing two programs which need to communicate just to get one game? No thanks.)"
I have mixed feelings about that. On one hand, you've got the Sega Saturn. It had two processors, and the developers had a real difficult time on it. On the other hand, though, they were trying to sync the two procs for one screen. The DS, having two screens, means it has a processor for each screen. That's not so bad. I imagine anyway...
"Anyway I didn't find any problem with the Doom engine on GBA... it was smooth, even if the lack of a mouse made the gameplay suck"
Eh I blew it. I really should have fleshed out my thoughts a little more in my original post. What they've managed to get the GBA to do is little more than scaling a few sprites around. This is in contrast to the N-Gage which is actually pushing polygonal elements around. On one hand, my original statement was wrong, on the other, it wasn't so wrong in the sense that you're not going to see a lot of Playstation ports to the system.
Oh well, I blew my original post. Sorry.
" Shouldn't they be focusing on flying the damn plane?!"
Maybe they heard about Excel's easter egg.
"Except for the GBAs"
GBA can barely play a watered down port of DOOM.
GP32? Okay, I grant you that. I didn't think about it since it's not very main stream, but yes, you're right.
PDAs? Eh. I was thinking about game machines here. They can do some okay 3D stuff, though. So yeah, you're right there.
"You realize there's no actual 3d hardware in the ngage, right? That's all software rendering. "
It's the only portable doing it right now.
"And who was dumb enough to think that people would be willing to take out the battery to switch cartridges?"
Heh. The problems you've mentioned, though they suck, are somewhat tolerable. What REALLY bugged me about the N-Gages was that all the demo units I played with had a "out of memory" message that you get when the phone feels it's time to reboot. I have enough of these problems as a Windows gamer, I aint taking that on the road.
" I honestly can't say I've ever heard even one person say, "You know, I really wish I could make phone calls on this, too."
You're missing the point a bit. The reason why one would want a game machine/phone/camera/mp3 player/pda/etc is that most people carry cell phones around with them non-stop. Whereas a game machine, MP3 player, camera, pda, etc usually only go with you when you know you're going to want it. Often the moment comes where you want one of these devices for whatever reason, and you didn't bring it because you've only got so many pockets.
I can at least speak for myself. I have a Nokia 3650. It is my alarm clock and calendar. I get news on it from time to time via the internet, usually when I'm waiting for Burgerville to deliver my meal. Yesterday I played Snake while waiting for an appointment to start. Its camera has come in handy numerous times. Just recently I snapped a photo of my nephew being silly at a restaraunt. To do all this stuff traditionally, instead of carrying around a small phone, I'd have to wear a trench coat or something. I'd look like Inspector Friggin Gadget.
Seriously, though, the appeal is there.
"Was Sony ever considered a gaming company before they released the Playstation?"
I see what you're saying, but this particular example is a bit faulty on the grounds that Sony's had its hands in entertainment for years. Walkmans, VCRs, TVs, etc. It wasn't a huge leap for Sony to go into the gaming world, nor would it have been for Nokia really.
"...in which the 3D Realms founder argues "Nokia means cell phones to consumers. So, when Nokia jumps into the games market, it doesn't make sense to people"
Pretty lame argument. If anything, the Nokia brand helped N-Gage. The problems they have with that machine have nothing to do with the name on the package. They have everything to do with it performing poorly as a cell phone and a game machine. A no-name company could easily wipe the floor with them in this space.
Don't get me wrong, branding can help. (It can also detract.) But slapping the name Nintendo on this machine wouldn't have done it a lick of good.
They should, instead, pursue the N-Gage SP.
I played a practical joke on my friends back in my high school programming course. Back in the DOS days, Norton had a tool where you could mess with the data stored on the FAT table. I came to school with a floppy that had reported it had over a gigabyte of free space. Heh it was funny watching their eyes get big. Sadly, there were no females around to demonstrate my technological prowess.
"I think camping is completely fair, but quite boring unless the game mode allows for it (if you're defending a spot, for example)."
I agree. I have seen abusive camping before, though. I played a deathmatch on a very busy server one night. Somebody sat right in front of a respawn site with a railgun. Every time somebody materialized *ZAP* killed them. He won every single game.
"320x240 at 15fps is NOT what I call porn."
I can make out boobs at 16 by 16. Ha! My collection's larger than yours!
"I think there are all too many people who would be casual game players, but who can't get into anything, because while they're trying to figure out what's going on, people like this dude NAIL them."
I've seen my share of this. I've seen a lot of people cry "FAGGOT CAMPER!!". I know I've been the victim of that. Evidently, sitting on a sniper perch and sniping is against the unwritten rules when you become proficient at it. I have never ever once heard "Hey man, you're making this too hard for me. Could you please scale it back a bit so I can have a little fun here?" I promise you that if somebody approached me nicely about it instead of shouting obscenities at me, I would have altered my approach for everybody to have more fun.
So is the problem that people get too good at it, or is the problem that nobody's taking the opportunity to just ask nicely?
" That said however, CBS has CSI and Survivor, for most people $1/month is nowhere near good enough."
Depends on how one does the math. If you have lots of channels, and the ones that disappeared are less than 1/30th of the total channels, then to a bean counter it's not so unreasonable.
I agree that it sucks, but if they were to deduct like $5, then you'd expect that 1/6th of the channels were gone, or something like that.
"This is because each leap "forward" seems to introduce countless new bugs and security holes. "
What I'd like to know about is the development community that's trying to surpass Windows in the UI area.