With all due respect, but last time I was in the US - I think the SUVs, Hummers and things equally as hideous outnumbered Accords 100 to 1.
In the Japanese car stakes it's quite interesting to see what they build for the American market. I'm guessing things like the Masda MX5 and Toyota Yaris wouldn't be real big there. (Engines 2 litres)
Hmm, well as a European - I pretty much consider all American cars as being pretty amusingly bad. That's not trying ot be insulting or whatever, it's obviously just a cultural thing.
Those big cars, big engines, sloppy suspension and those looks, oh my word. Hmm, I must catch myself because I do like plenty of yank sports cars. And obviously the Ford GT36 is probably the finest muscle car in the world.
But SUVs, Hummers and those station wagons with wood panels on the side? Oh God, make it stop.
I wish they'd stop trying to bring Cryslers over to Europe too, it's just embarrassing when they sell 3.
There is only one true monopoly, and that's the government. Even though I doubt it, but what if microsoft had something to do with this? What are you gonna do? Go to another television station in the UK. Wait a second, they are all controled by the ITC.
Huge difference between a minimum standards body like the ITC enforcing standards, than dictating content. That said, it works pretty well because the UK standard of television makes American television look neanderthal by comparison.
To obtain a television broadcasting license, an operator must pitch what the content will be. That means X amount of own-made stuff, Y amount of educational, Z documentaries and things like that.
That's why the UK has more than just the discovery channel putting out content other than sitcoms and bad sci-fis.
The ITC often forces programs to apologies on air for blatantly inappropriate and biased programming. This is good. My God you could do with that in the US.
My god, they're not even in the same league. One is a proper beer, the other is some watered down garbage. Any proper beer lover would have no difficulty telling which is which.
AB's Budweiser is unlike any beer made anywhere else in the world, because elsewhere in the world people generally have a much better standard to compare against.
What's to stop you using GoogleAPI and driving it intelligently to filter out the linkfarms and the super lame 'review' sites like Dealtime and Kelkoo etc which polute search results too?
Err, AAC has had draconian licensing right from the very start. This is why you don't see loads of free AAC stuff around because when people try, they get letters from Dolby's lawyers.
Actually the ADSL range from the exchange was increased with the introduction of RADSL which varies the upstream bit rate according to line quality. The limit is now about 5.5km of average copper quality line.
At that point, Cg will have to become a "real" compiler. Let's hope nVidia is up to the task...
That is precisely my problem with Cg. It's very limited, aimed specifically at their hardware. Yet graphics hardware is becoming much more generically programmable than this (already was, the PS2 had a more generically programmable pipeline a whole year before Nvidia hit the market with programmable shaders).
All Cg is is the easy bits of C (to make a compiler for) and a bunch of missing stuff with intrinsic functions to do the vector/shader bits. It's just as easily done with a full C/C++ compiler, and already has been by my company.
Surely Cg will be seen for what it is, a short-sighted proprietary system for supporting their hardware from a company with no experience in producing cross-platform high performance vectorizing compilers for game developers.
The game companies that have come out in support of this are all PC/Xbox based obviously. There Cg is basically an easier-to-use authoring tool for the dominating hardware's shader features.
Generic language for computer graphics this is not!
Research goes on at the top graphics hardware companies to accelerate more of the graphics pipeline by having more generic programmability. To this end, programmers will be wanting to shift more of their existing graphics pipeline onto hardware. Games programmers in particular, working on multiple platforms, value cross-platform code. So where does a custom language fit in which is tailored to some a particular vendors hardware? I'm not sure it does.
nVidia may offer ATI the ability to get on board this Cg language, but the reality will be different. What disturbs me is that nVidia's chief scientist went on record as saying that ATI's refusal to implement nVidia's shader technology (they did their own, which some consider superior) amounted to destabilising the industry. No, that would be competing dear chap.
Who exactly will need to use Cg and what market ultimate will use it? I have no doubt that PC game developers (and Xbox) will take a look at it but let's not pretend that this is a solution which embraces other vendors. Of course I'll be glad to eat my hat if ATI and Matrox come out in support of this.
It's not an entirely bad idea but writing regular language compilers for exotic hardware is more than feasible. My company has done exactly this for the PS2's vector units with a C/C++ compiler. Those VLIW co-processors are quite similar to the sort of more generically programmable hardware that you'll see in graphics hardware down the line (combined with shaders of course).
There are some good reasons for using a custom language, better control over the implicit parallelism of multiple shaders/vertices etc. However creating a new language for people to use destroys the notion of recyclable code and introduces yet more platform specific issues. And let me tell you, there's quite enough IF/THEN statements in the graphics engines of PC games as it is. Unless your work is being used by multiple developers, in which case any decent authoring tools for specific hardware may be welcomed.
Anyhow, I'm not entirely negative about nVidia's efforts - it's an interesting stab at a problem we had kind of thought everyone (but us) was ignoring. At the very least it's destined to become a more useful shader authoring tool for PC/Xbox game engine/middle ware developers.
I wonder what ATI and Matrox's approach will be. I wonder if they'd like a regular compiler for their shaders?:)
I've been a games journalist for a number of years, on print stuff that is, not the web. In my experience, travel trips, gifts and stuff like that aren't what skew review scores. Exclusive reviews and coverdisk demos are what skew reviews.
The magazines I worked on didn't play that game but in the ultra-competitive British games magazine industry, there were several who most certainly did. I remember in particular being pretty sweet with GT Interactive's PR with regards to TA: Kingdoms. I was a massive fan of the former game and thought I had an understanding that I would review this game for our magazine first because I had the best background. Bingo it turned up on the cover of another magazine, exclusive review with a Big Score.
I couldn't even review the game, it had too many show stopping bugs namely the fact that it ran at about 25% normal speed. The game sucked anyway. Up until that point I was sufficiently naive to believe that everyone was like me. The process of getting reviews for the blockbusters is very much a business negotiation in the UK. Mags barter scores (I assume, although I never saw it myself), pages, coverdisk space and cover realestate.
Still, at the end of the day if you buy a mag and it says a game is great when it's absolutely crap - then you wont buy that magazine right? That's what I don't quite get about American magazines. They've always been very bum licky crawly to publishers, but then again their reviews are pretty useless coming out 2 months after a game hits the shelves anyhow...
Later on, after I escaped journalism to work in the games industry properly, I came to realise a real home truth. Actually reviews are pretty irrelevant. In this day and age, under 20% of those buying games have EVER bought a magazine for their console, still less have looked at a web site.
Had sony thought this chip out a bit more carefully, I wholefully believe that sony wouldn't be in the current situation as they are in right now.
That's nonsense. Sony *did* predict the improvement in fab technology when it made the PS2. The GS was one of the largest and most ambitious bits of silicon the world had ever seen. The difficulty in manufacturing it was one of the reasons for the supply shortage when the console game out.
Early PS2s, before the first die-shrink, had absolutely enormous heatsinks on them and ran damn hot. It's difficult to see what else they could have done to prepare for the future.
I know what's been said before (by Kutaragi) and I know how much Sony would like to be able to do this. However I work with the PS2 and have some knowledge of how insanely complex it is. It really is not the same sort of job to provide compatibility in a forthcoming console as it was with the PS1.
One of the issues here is the fact that the PS3 is not likely to resemble the PS2 much. It wont use the same CPU, we know that already. It's unlikely that a new graphics subsystem will be like the PS2's GS either, current wisedom is that much of the work of graphics ought to be in hardware rather than using VU1 on the Emotion Engine to do a lot of the work in software.
Those are the sorts of reasons why I tend to think Sony may have to make a clean start and drop backwards compatibility. I'd be happy to be proven wrong on this front but I think it unlikely.
They make a seperate product called Secure Bat, which is really really good at PGP stuff. It even has loads of extra stuff for the majorly paranoid. Check it out.
Even in the US, the XBox still doesn't match PS2 sales. Outside of the US it's performing so badly that it's being called a failure.
20,000,000 PS2s in the market place, that means people are writing games for that console so they can sell big and make money. A shit-hot hardware console is nothing without games.
You're right. The PS2 actually has MIPS CPU called the IOP, normally just used for handling the ports and stuff but it doubles as being the core of the PS1 emulation.
That said, there's a big difference between that and putting all the bits of the PS2 on a chip and slapping that in the PS3. It'd still cost plenty of money and my feeling is that they'd want to avoid 'unnecessary' costs. The PS2 hardware is insanely complicated, making a successor 100% backwards compatible would be pretty expensive.
My money is on PS3 not being backwards compatible.
Well sure they might have been better off doing this but then this is a pretty spectacular achievement just the same and is highly worthwhile.
They're selling 20,000 PS2s a week in the UK compared to 7,000 Xboxen. 85,000 PS2s vs 5,000 Xboxen a week in Japan. I don't have the figures to hand for the US but again, more PS2s being sold than any other console. It's selling an absolutely truck loads and shows no sign of slowing down significantly.
Reducing the manufacturing cost and hence the retail cost of the console will make it's position even stronger against newcomers. Just in time for some decent games to turn up for the competition.
Re:They mention the need for plugin AMD compilers
on
If I Had a Hammer
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The article suggests that AMD write / release native compilers that plug into Visual Studio...which would be a good thing for MS programmers.
I took issue with the author writing that as well. Like it's some trivial task in software engineering to suddenly start writing a compiler which is comparable to what's out there already on the highly competitive x86 platform.
(Codeplay does this already of course)
Obviously this isn't what AMD need to do, they need to help people making compilers which support their platform. That's something I'd like to say of my company but it's hard enough work getting AMD to answer E-mail, let alone provide documentation and hardware samples of forthcoming CPUs. You'd think they'd care a bit more since we're the only people in the world making a compiler with vectorizes for 3D Now!, wouldn't you?
By contrast, Intel give us virtually everything we could want in the world short of hard cash. Even though they have a department working on their own (highly competent) compiler, they recognise that wide support of their CPUs is a good thing and they should do everything to encourage it. AMD don't quite appear to have the same attitude at present although we live in hope.
Also, AMD have kind of backed off their proprietary SIMD implementation (3D Now!) with their latest Athlon XPs. The 3D Now! Professional (as far as we can tell), is actually just the old 3D Now! but with SSE as well. An admission of defeat with regards to SIMD software support? One wonders what they're going to do with regards to double float and 128-bit integer SIMD, if anything (Hammer?). Support SSE2 and call it 3D Now! Advanced Server?
We were puzzled to see this story on NCSE, a normally on-the-money news site.
It's worth pointing out that out of all the XBox developers in the UK that I have visited (and that's a lot), every single one I saw uses Japanese controllers. The stock controllers are universally despised. Not only that, the certification process through Microsoft demands that the games work on these controllers and are tested as that.
We're all very puzzled how this utter nonsense story got out there and how NCSE picked it up. It just simply isn't true in any way shape or form. One developer I know even confirmed it with XBox developer support who said;
That is definitely not true:) I have been using that controller for about 6 months!!!!
This controller appears as a gamepad, just as the us controller, and if you look at our gamepad sample in the XDK, we provision for it's subtype, so we recognize it, as we would any controller.
We also check for this functionality with ALL games passing through certification.
MIPs parts scale fairly well as an architecture. You can put a low power single issue one in a smalldevice or make something a bit more grunty by using a dual issue and incorporating FP co-processors and so on. (PS2's EE has such a custom core) They're more suited to this sort of hack-and-slash bespoke CPU design for things which need workstation type levels of computational power than, say, ARM.
ARM's stuff has gained massive ground in the mobile devices and virtually squeezed MIPS (and everyone else) out of that market entirely. The trouble is that MIPS are being squeezed on the upper end of the scale as well by some seriously grunty main CPUs which are starting to adopte the same sort of friendliness to bespoke licensing for incorporation into VLSIs. Such as IBM's PowerPC chips. By way of an example, Sony aren't going with MIPS for the PS3, they're teaming up with IBM.
So where is left for MIPS? Sounds like they're going after SoT type applications which are in need of serious performance, niche that they are. Make something all singing, all dancing with a damn nippy core in there and you hit applications which ARM haven't got the performance for and PPC type chips don't have the power considerations and SoT/integration levels for. Good luck to them.
It's certainly an interesting challenge to write a compiler for this sort of architecture but 'people' have been on the case of writing compilers for exotic architectures for years.
My company produces a compiler for the vector units in the PS2, that's an oddball VLIW CPU. That said, I'm not certain that we'd rush to the IA-64 platform however, Intel obviously have their own compiler and unless this has serious performance issues, there just isn't the market for an IA64-enabled VectorC.
We'd rather strive to develop the fastest x86-64 compiler instead, which is a platform where more mainstream development looks likely to happen in the short to medium terms.
The reason PS2 Linux was made in the first place is to provide an inexpensive dev-kit for Japanese students which are looking to enter the games industry. It's not a bad idea in that regard. I'm pretty puzzled why these did this in the West though. They asked if there was much demand and naturally rather a lot of people put their hands up and expressed basic interest in the PS2 Linux. I'm not sure that there was any level of understanding (and still isn't) on why they were doing this in the first place.
In no way was this designed to be some sort of feasible Linux system in a general sense. Sony don't particularly want you hacking about making drivers and doing weird things with their hardware. In fact they've made it pretty damn difficult to do so. And as for ideas on hacking it to gain more access... I respecfully suggest that people making these overtures don't have that much of an understanding on what the PS2 hardware is like.
However if someone absorbs much of the included hardware manuals, gets a handle on some of the DMA issues and maybe learns a bit of vector unit assembly then they're some ways down the road in becoming a useful PS2 commercial developer. Is that anyone here? I doubt it.
I'm sure the debate will continue and some hard-core Linux evangelists will crow about license issues and that there ought to be unfettered access to the hardware. That's not Sony's agenda and, to be honest, why is this much of a desirable thing anyway. Quite clearly Linux on a PC is more useful in any event.
I'd really like to know if this will sell anything in the West at all. The demand for games developers is such that you can get an entry level job straight out of university anyway. If you're going to work on PS2 dev, they'll factor in that training on the 'real steel' dev-kits anyhow.
If you wanted to do home-brew game development for console-like applications, the Gameboy Advance is an infinitely more feasible platform from a technical point of view. Coupled with the fact you could give a copy of your work to someone else or demonstrate it on a stock GBA, it's got to be a more attractive platform for this sort of thing.
Slashdot Mirror
In the Japanese car stakes it's quite interesting to see what they build for the American market. I'm guessing things like the Masda MX5 and Toyota Yaris wouldn't be real big there. (Engines 2 litres)
Those big cars, big engines, sloppy suspension and those looks, oh my word. Hmm, I must catch myself because I do like plenty of yank sports cars. And obviously the Ford GT36 is probably the finest muscle car in the world.
But SUVs, Hummers and those station wagons with wood panels on the side? Oh God, make it stop.
I wish they'd stop trying to bring Cryslers over to Europe too, it's just embarrassing when they sell 3.
Huge difference between a minimum standards body like the ITC enforcing standards, than dictating content. That said, it works pretty well because the UK standard of television makes American television look neanderthal by comparison.
To obtain a television broadcasting license, an operator must pitch what the content will be. That means X amount of own-made stuff, Y amount of educational, Z documentaries and things like that.
That's why the UK has more than just the discovery channel putting out content other than sitcoms and bad sci-fis.
The ITC often forces programs to apologies on air for blatantly inappropriate and biased programming. This is good. My God you could do with that in the US.
My god, they're not even in the same league. One is a proper beer, the other is some watered down garbage. Any proper beer lover would have no difficulty telling which is which. AB's Budweiser is unlike any beer made anywhere else in the world, because elsewhere in the world people generally have a much better standard to compare against.
Sony PCG-UX50 might fit your bill. It runs palmos, has bluetooth, wifi and a keyboard. It's bastard expensive though.
Cleangoogle.com - has to be a goer.
Err, AAC has had draconian licensing right from the very start. This is why you don't see loads of free AAC stuff around because when people try, they get letters from Dolby's lawyers.
Actually the ADSL range from the exchange was increased with the introduction of RADSL which varies the upstream bit rate according to line quality. The limit is now about 5.5km of average copper quality line.
Er, so does the rest of the world.
That is precisely my problem with Cg. It's very limited, aimed specifically at their hardware. Yet graphics hardware is becoming much more generically programmable than this (already was, the PS2 had a more generically programmable pipeline a whole year before Nvidia hit the market with programmable shaders).
All Cg is is the easy bits of C (to make a compiler for) and a bunch of missing stuff with intrinsic functions to do the vector/shader bits. It's just as easily done with a full C/C++ compiler, and already has been by my company.
Surely Cg will be seen for what it is, a short-sighted proprietary system for supporting their hardware from a company with no experience in producing cross-platform high performance vectorizing compilers for game developers.
The game companies that have come out in support of this are all PC/Xbox based obviously. There Cg is basically an easier-to-use authoring tool for the dominating hardware's shader features.
Generic language for computer graphics this is not!
I'm not sure I'll ever fully understand Slashdot.
nVidia may offer ATI the ability to get on board this Cg language, but the reality will be different. What disturbs me is that nVidia's chief scientist went on record as saying that ATI's refusal to implement nVidia's shader technology (they did their own, which some consider superior) amounted to destabilising the industry. No, that would be competing dear chap.
Who exactly will need to use Cg and what market ultimate will use it? I have no doubt that PC game developers (and Xbox) will take a look at it but let's not pretend that this is a solution which embraces other vendors. Of course I'll be glad to eat my hat if ATI and Matrox come out in support of this.
It's not an entirely bad idea but writing regular language compilers for exotic hardware is more than feasible. My company has done exactly this for the PS2's vector units with a C/C++ compiler. Those VLIW co-processors are quite similar to the sort of more generically programmable hardware that you'll see in graphics hardware down the line (combined with shaders of course).
There are some good reasons for using a custom language, better control over the implicit parallelism of multiple shaders/vertices etc. However creating a new language for people to use destroys the notion of recyclable code and introduces yet more platform specific issues. And let me tell you, there's quite enough IF/THEN statements in the graphics engines of PC games as it is. Unless your work is being used by multiple developers, in which case any decent authoring tools for specific hardware may be welcomed.
Anyhow, I'm not entirely negative about nVidia's efforts - it's an interesting stab at a problem we had kind of thought everyone (but us) was ignoring. At the very least it's destined to become a more useful shader authoring tool for PC/Xbox game engine/middle ware developers.
I wonder what ATI and Matrox's approach will be. I wonder if they'd like a regular compiler for their shaders? :)
The magazines I worked on didn't play that game but in the ultra-competitive British games magazine industry, there were several who most certainly did. I remember in particular being pretty sweet with GT Interactive's PR with regards to TA: Kingdoms. I was a massive fan of the former game and thought I had an understanding that I would review this game for our magazine first because I had the best background. Bingo it turned up on the cover of another magazine, exclusive review with a Big Score.
I couldn't even review the game, it had too many show stopping bugs namely the fact that it ran at about 25% normal speed. The game sucked anyway. Up until that point I was sufficiently naive to believe that everyone was like me. The process of getting reviews for the blockbusters is very much a business negotiation in the UK. Mags barter scores (I assume, although I never saw it myself), pages, coverdisk space and cover realestate.
Still, at the end of the day if you buy a mag and it says a game is great when it's absolutely crap - then you wont buy that magazine right? That's what I don't quite get about American magazines. They've always been very bum licky crawly to publishers, but then again their reviews are pretty useless coming out 2 months after a game hits the shelves anyhow...
Later on, after I escaped journalism to work in the games industry properly, I came to realise a real home truth. Actually reviews are pretty irrelevant. In this day and age, under 20% of those buying games have EVER bought a magazine for their console, still less have looked at a web site.
Early PS2s, before the first die-shrink, had absolutely enormous heatsinks on them and ran damn hot. It's difficult to see what else they could have done to prepare for the future.
One of the issues here is the fact that the PS3 is not likely to resemble the PS2 much. It wont use the same CPU, we know that already. It's unlikely that a new graphics subsystem will be like the PS2's GS either, current wisedom is that much of the work of graphics ought to be in hardware rather than using VU1 on the Emotion Engine to do a lot of the work in software.
Those are the sorts of reasons why I tend to think Sony may have to make a clean start and drop backwards compatibility. I'd be happy to be proven wrong on this front but I think it unlikely.
They make a seperate product called Secure Bat, which is really really good at PGP stuff. It even has loads of extra stuff for the majorly paranoid. Check it out.
20,000,000 PS2s in the market place, that means people are writing games for that console so they can sell big and make money. A shit-hot hardware console is nothing without games.
That said, there's a big difference between that and putting all the bits of the PS2 on a chip and slapping that in the PS3. It'd still cost plenty of money and my feeling is that they'd want to avoid 'unnecessary' costs. The PS2 hardware is insanely complicated, making a successor 100% backwards compatible would be pretty expensive.
My money is on PS3 not being backwards compatible.
They're selling 20,000 PS2s a week in the UK compared to 7,000 Xboxen. 85,000 PS2s vs 5,000 Xboxen a week in Japan. I don't have the figures to hand for the US but again, more PS2s being sold than any other console. It's selling an absolutely truck loads and shows no sign of slowing down significantly.
Reducing the manufacturing cost and hence the retail cost of the console will make it's position even stronger against newcomers. Just in time for some decent games to turn up for the competition.
Obviously this isn't what AMD need to do, they need to help people making compilers which support their platform. That's something I'd like to say of my company but it's hard enough work getting AMD to answer E-mail, let alone provide documentation and hardware samples of forthcoming CPUs. You'd think they'd care a bit more since we're the only people in the world making a compiler with vectorizes for 3D Now!, wouldn't you?
By contrast, Intel give us virtually everything we could want in the world short of hard cash. Even though they have a department working on their own (highly competent) compiler, they recognise that wide support of their CPUs is a good thing and they should do everything to encourage it. AMD don't quite appear to have the same attitude at present although we live in hope.
Also, AMD have kind of backed off their proprietary SIMD implementation (3D Now!) with their latest Athlon XPs. The 3D Now! Professional (as far as we can tell), is actually just the old 3D Now! but with SSE as well. An admission of defeat with regards to SIMD software support? One wonders what they're going to do with regards to double float and 128-bit integer SIMD, if anything (Hammer?). Support SSE2 and call it 3D Now! Advanced Server?
Typo sorry. SoC was what I meant, System on Chip.
It's worth pointing out that out of all the XBox developers in the UK that I have visited (and that's a lot), every single one I saw uses Japanese controllers. The stock controllers are universally despised. Not only that, the certification process through Microsoft demands that the games work on these controllers and are tested as that.
We're all very puzzled how this utter nonsense story got out there and how NCSE picked it up. It just simply isn't true in any way shape or form. One developer I know even confirmed it with XBox developer support who said;
End of story.ARM's stuff has gained massive ground in the mobile devices and virtually squeezed MIPS (and everyone else) out of that market entirely. The trouble is that MIPS are being squeezed on the upper end of the scale as well by some seriously grunty main CPUs which are starting to adopte the same sort of friendliness to bespoke licensing for incorporation into VLSIs. Such as IBM's PowerPC chips. By way of an example, Sony aren't going with MIPS for the PS3, they're teaming up with IBM.
So where is left for MIPS? Sounds like they're going after SoT type applications which are in need of serious performance, niche that they are. Make something all singing, all dancing with a damn nippy core in there and you hit applications which ARM haven't got the performance for and PPC type chips don't have the power considerations and SoT/integration levels for. Good luck to them.
My company produces a compiler for the vector units in the PS2, that's an oddball VLIW CPU. That said, I'm not certain that we'd rush to the IA-64 platform however, Intel obviously have their own compiler and unless this has serious performance issues, there just isn't the market for an IA64-enabled VectorC.
We'd rather strive to develop the fastest x86-64 compiler instead, which is a platform where more mainstream development looks likely to happen in the short to medium terms.
In no way was this designed to be some sort of feasible Linux system in a general sense. Sony don't particularly want you hacking about making drivers and doing weird things with their hardware. In fact they've made it pretty damn difficult to do so. And as for ideas on hacking it to gain more access... I respecfully suggest that people making these overtures don't have that much of an understanding on what the PS2 hardware is like.
However if someone absorbs much of the included hardware manuals, gets a handle on some of the DMA issues and maybe learns a bit of vector unit assembly then they're some ways down the road in becoming a useful PS2 commercial developer. Is that anyone here? I doubt it.
I'm sure the debate will continue and some hard-core Linux evangelists will crow about license issues and that there ought to be unfettered access to the hardware. That's not Sony's agenda and, to be honest, why is this much of a desirable thing anyway. Quite clearly Linux on a PC is more useful in any event.
I'd really like to know if this will sell anything in the West at all. The demand for games developers is such that you can get an entry level job straight out of university anyway. If you're going to work on PS2 dev, they'll factor in that training on the 'real steel' dev-kits anyhow.
If you wanted to do home-brew game development for console-like applications, the Gameboy Advance is an infinitely more feasible platform from a technical point of view. Coupled with the fact you could give a copy of your work to someone else or demonstrate it on a stock GBA, it's got to be a more attractive platform for this sort of thing.