I have to agree, this is a serious issue for DTV acceptance. What's the point of having a fancy 60" monitor in your living room if it lags worse than your broadband connection...and it's only 5 feet away.
You only have to look at the LCD industry to get a feel for just "how much" delay gamers are willing to accept. LCDs were pitifully laughed down by gamers when they had 25-50ms response times, and only recently have the 12, 16 and 20ms panels made gaming practical.
And these manufacturers think 60ms is okay? Forget about the audio delay, if everyone and their dog goes out and buys the "new HDTV compatible super Playstation 7", hooks it up to their TV, and sees their TV taking an extra 60-100ms to render an action, they'll bitch in droves. The only reason this hasn't been a major issue is because DTV is still a niche market, and gaming on DTV even moreso.
MFM hard drives from the early 80s had a claimed transfer speed of around 500-625 KB/s, give or take a little for the gap in read / write speed, which was damn fast for only 10 to 40MB.
Our midrange single-drive speeds for today top out at about 100 times that number.
Average access times have improved at a much lower rate. Typical average access times for an MFM hard drive were well under 100ms, but today's midrange drives can barely break the 10ms mark.
The hardware we have is currently pushing the limits of what we can produce affordably. Although we may be able to theoretically see 1000 times current performance with magnetic media, I certainly doubt that we can do even 10x better with current drive design philosophies.
What I expect to see to fill the gap betweeen now and wide acceptance of solid state storage is parallel storage. Sure, it's been in workstations and enterprise for years, but I'm not talking about a messy RAID 5 array with a big, expensive external controller. I'm talking about sandwiching multiple smaller disks into a standard 2.5" or 3.5" package, including internal drive array hardware.
These days, it's not about leveraging performance from one disk, but from many. This won't do much for access times, but it will quench our thirst fior bandwidth without making the drive's external interface more complex.
Re:You can find it googling, but here it is anyway
on
Is DOS Gaming Dead?
·
· Score: 1
Ahh, but I have.
The Ur-Quan Masters is a nice port, but whenI tried it it lacked that... "feel".
The 3DO code porting project is actually the closest you can get without DOS or DOSBOX, and even that doesn't feel quite right because they added various features to the 3DO port.
Yeah, I'm nit-picky. I want to play the game exactly as I remember it:P
Re:You can find it googling, but here it is anyway
on
Is DOS Gaming Dead?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Dual boot DOS! Scary, yes, and it usually requires a REAL legacy (or compatible) soundblaster to make work, but obviously it yields very nice results with more recent DOS titles.
Easier said than done successfully. Newer hardware is getting a little antsy under DOS, and it's no longer as easy to get things running perfectly.
Take this for instance: I own an original Ensoniq AudioPCI (circa 1997), the consumer market's first PCI sound card. It had flawless emulation of Soundblaster Pro, as well as decent MT32 emulation. In fact, for the longest time they had the ONLY working legacy emulation over PCI (which is why Creative acquired them).
This card has worked with all my old DOS titles on two previous motherboards, but on my current motherboard it has issues. I imagine it may have something to do with the extended interrupt space (I've noticed this board supports 32 interrupts under 2k), or perhaps people have just chosen to forget that certain DOS I/O regions were ever reserved. Anyway, I get bad sound on many old games, most notably Privateer. It makes me want to just sit back and bide my time until DOSBOX catches up with the times.
Also, I've seen some posts on here bashing VDM Sound, but it's actually very effective. The console under NT / 2k / XP is actually a full-fledged DOS emulator, and works quite well. The only reasons people have problems is because it doesn't support sound, port access, and / or a few stranger video modes.
For example, VDM Sound + 2k console will play Master of Orion just fine, but say Star Control II has an issue with the graphics rendering painfully slow. It's hit-or-miss, but it works surprisingly well.
Oh yeah, I thought I might add this, because I discovered it years ago and it's all but forgotten now: for those of you who loved The Seventh Guest, Trilobyte released an unsupported Win95 launcher for the game many moons ago that you may be able to find on Google...or I could just serve it somewhere and post a link here if anyone is interested...
I am not an economist, but this is what I have seen through observation.
As Kiryat mentioned, you don't price your vehicle indiscriminantly as high as the market will bear, and lower that price as popularity wanes.
You study the market and set a price point that will cover your investment and reap a handsome profit, amortized over an expected window of viability. You sell less cars as time goes on, or get rid of "overstocks" with "sales" rather than lower the MSRP.
What this means is prices remain stable, and that is something people like. Fluctuating car prices would totally screw over perceived value, thus causing mayhem for the resale market.
Just imagine if Chevy decided that the MSRP for this year's Cavalier was going to be $10,000. That's a lower price than the 1996 cav was, by the original poster's numbers. It would have a domino effect because all Cavaliers in the same family (1996 on) would have to compete with a cheaper version of themselves. The resale prices would fall.
A car that would have been 12,000 - 17,000 6 years ago (the Caviler which is going off the market now) NOW costs 20,000 fully loaded! Thats 3000 more for the EXACT SAME CAR FULLY LOADED 6 YEARS AGO.
MOD PARENT DOWN (-1 doesn't live on planet earth)
Ever hear of a thing called inflation? Even though it has been fairly low in the last 10 years, it has still been there.
Let's take your example: A car selling in 1998 that starts at $12k, and comes fully-loaded at $17k would start at $13,700 today, $19,425 fully-loaded. Sound like the prices you see today?
Sounds like the absolute best shave ever, but there are some cavaets. The razor can run with SIXTEEN blades, but only if you have to cut short hairs. Also, it also requires 2 additional plugs in your bathroom. Worse, you'll probably see reduced shaving quality in exchange for speed.
If Nintendo wanted this kind of functionality with the Gamecube, they should have shipped the system with interactive controllers (ala the Dreamcast VMU).
It's not as if this is a NEW concept. The problem is, a controller with a VMU costs $20, which makes the GBA seem like one damn expensive controller. There are MANY people who will never own a GBA, and it hurts Nintendo's ability to get developers onboard because their potential market is that much smaller.
The VERY BEST insanity effect I ever experienced in Eternal Darkness:
I was up late playing, and suddenly my TV MUTES!
I even see a little green text screen overlay "MUTE" in the corner. Forget the fact that it wasn't -exactly- like my TV's MUTE overlay, it was close enough.
I was scambling for the remote, thinking I had sat on it, when the sound came back on. Then my character screamed "This isn't happening!" Best mindtrick ever.
Honorable mentions (spoilers):
* A layer of bugs start crawling on top of the screen. The problem gets worse as you move to more rooms. It starts with only one bug, so you actually think it's real.
* You walk into a room where you know you've killed everything, and suddenly one of the previous enemies shows up right behind you. Then you freak out and go back to the entrance of the room.
* The naturalist with the flintlock pistol: the gun would occasionally fire unexpectedly when he was going nuts. That part was REAL (and wasted oh so much ammo). What made this even more fun was, one time when he was reloading, he hallucinated that he blew his own head off.
Then there's the standard "room is too small" or "celing is bleeding" or "walking on the celing" or "your characters limbs fall off" hallucinations. This game is so much fun with your sanity meter low.
Are you sure the ABS came on? Did you hear and feel the typical high-frequency feedback? ABS only engages when you're losing contact with the road surface.
The thing is, MOST SUVs out there have SEVERELY UNDERRATED braking systems. This means that if you were expecting an SUV to brake anywhere near as quickly as a car, you've got another thing coming. This has nothing to do with the ABS aspsct - they'll brake crappily if you never lose traction. But if you do happen to lose traction, you'll be very happy you have the ABS. Crappy braking is better than no braking.
Phd 1: hey you know i really love all these neutron releases from the uranium. Let's tell the entire world physics community.
Phd 2: i know dude they are totally cool.
Phd 1: yeah... and if i can get a critical mass of purified U-235 together a chain reaction could start... we could solve the entire worlds energy problem. Let's tell the entire world physics community.
* WWII starts *
Phd 2: hey but isnt it dangerous? We could even end up blowing up the world.
Phd 1: yeah, but what's even worse, all scientists the world over now know that Uranium is fissible. The Germans and Japanese are probably working on a bomb as we speak.
Phd 2: let's get the US scientific community to inform the US government. We need to have a weapon before the Germans do, or we've already lost.
Mr. iSuck Politician #1: it isn't proven. Get lost.
Mr. iSuck Politician #2: it costs too much. Get lost.
Mr. iSuck Politician #n: Okay, okay, we'll build the damn thing.
there goes hiroshima... nagasaki.
Don't blame everything you hate in this world solely on the government. It took 40 years of atomic research around the world to crack the secrets of fission, and it took the real threat of the weapon being used on us to build one.
No, the sound quality went to hell after version 2.22 because they dropped the Fraunhofer codec. I believe it was because Fraunhofer was raising ( or enforcing?) licenses on their suddenly valuable IP.
They ended up making a replacement codec in-house. A lot of people initially complained about the sound quality, but they improved it with every release, and supposedly since 2.666 the rendering bugs have been removed. It sounds great, and performs well.
I know exactly what he was talking about, I used to do support for Gateways (my college had a deal with them for labs, faculty and direct to student sales).
The early Pentium IIs they released in 1997 were standard ATX systems. As for the CD-ROM, on some models it had a curved front on the loading tray to match the decorative curved front of the case. You do know that you can replace loading trays quite easily, don't you?
The only reason why such asthetic changes were made was because many PC manufacturers were making them at the time to distingush themselves in a crowded marketplace. In 1998-99 Gateway changed their case designs and removed all the curved plastic, as big market leaders like Dell were forcing them to cut corners to remain competitive.
Also, I can't vouch for every system they've ever made, but every Gateway system I encountered ( vintage 1997 or later ) used an ATX-compliant PS.
Gotta agree, I spent so may hours learning all the tricks in that game, and pushing the system. I even remember coming up with a way to make intelligent switched multi-track networks despite the game's limitations.
My roommate I've been living with for about 6 months used to be a Sim City 2000 junkie. I turned him on to TTDX and he's been playing that ever since:P
And no, I don't think you can play without an opponent, but the AI usually doesn't cause much worry early on in the game. As for the slow start, you can speed things up by increasing the starting loan and increasing industry density - this makes it easier for both AI and humans.
I did a paper on this back in college. Such a terrible misuse of the law, but even then it was hardly a new idea.
Ford's defense was two-pronged - it attempted to show that there was prior art for most aspects of the Selden patent, and it also sought to prove that almost no aspect of the originally patented invention (1879) was in use in a modern automobile.
Prior art included numerous examples of self-propelled steam vehicles. To refute the claim that Selden's modified Brayton engine was the first internal combustion engine design capable of propelling itself and a vehicle, Ford concentrated on the older 2-cycle engine developed by Lenoir in the early 1860s. The engine was hydrogen powered, and had even been used to drive a crude vehicle well before Selden filed his patent.
Since Selden's entire defense depended on the vehicle actually working and propelling itself, an engineering team was tasked to build working models of the Selden vehicle (both with modern components, and to the original specs). As a counterpoint, Ford engineers developed a working vehicle based on Lenior's engine.
Selden's "to spec" design crawled perhaps 10 feet in it's entire lifetime, whereas the Ford Lenior design was almost as capable as modern autos, thus putting another dent in Selden's case.
As for comparing the Selden vehicle to the modern automobile, there were a couple major differences. The engine used in modern autos was the Otto 4-cycle engine, a completely different animal compared to the Brayton. The ignition system in modern autos was also electrical, as opposed to the open flame ignition of Selden's engine.
Even with such a shakey patent to ride on, Selden managed to get almost an entire industry under his belt. But he didn't make it without help - the original members of the Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers joined in despite questions as to the patent's validity because they saw it as a tool to control the industry. Once they joined together and the group gained credibility, they could refuse entry to their biggest competitors (Ford, specifically). Selden was an opportunist, but had the industry banded together against the obviously unfounded patent, he never would have gotten so far.
Thus, you can see why I hate patents so fiercely: they're so immensely corruptable, yet there's really no better realistic solution.
Well, you do bring up an interesting point, but you miss your own key observation.
Quake was released with a software renderer that was platform non-specific. OpenGL allows Carmack the same level of platform agnosticism with the benefits of hardware acceleration. Quake III requires an OpenGL accelerator, but at the time of release, OpenGL accelerators were fairly ubiquitous.
As for the platform-specific VQuake, this was back when cards could only perform well on optimimized, native rendering code. The fact is, working with Rendition actually encouraged ID to find an alternative to native ports. They did not have a good time working with the company.
Carmack was unhappy that their agreement with Rendition restricted them from making another platform-specific port, and he didn't like Direct3D. On a personal whim, he coded up an OpenGL renderer for Quake on his Intergraph workstation. 3dfx, left out in the cold by the ID - Rendition deal, seized the moment and coded up the first MCD for a consumer card. The rest is history.
The moment I realized how bad native ports are: I enjoyed VQuake on my Rendition card. Then Quakeworld was released and revolutionized the online aspects of Quake...and where was Rendition? They decided not to put in the small effort required to port VQuake's render to Quakeworld, and instead insisted end-users should use the slower and less feature-filled MiniGL.
That was the moment I realized that native ports were dead. Thanks Carmack.
Hmm. What's the main implication for streaming the textures from a cartridge rather than a CD/DVD? Throughput, etc?
Developers already learned to do this properly on the original Playstation. Did you not notice how much better quality textures games began to use toward the latter days of the PSX? Do keep in mind that this was a 2x CD-ROM drive (300K/s)...the 4x DVD-ROM drive on the PS2 has a minimum of 10x more thoroughput. How the hell do you think the Gamecube gets by with only 3MB framebuffer?
And BTW, my point was that you'd be hard pressed to find a card in 1998 that could handle trilinear/bilinear antialiasing in 4Mb
You'd be wrong. The Rendition Verite 1000 could do trilinear filtering and edge anti-aliasing on 4MB ram...in 1996, at the same resolution as your PS2 and at playable framerates no less. Just look up VQuake if you want more information.
So could the original Voodoo Graphics, according to 3dfx docs, although I never witnessed a Glide-native game that utilized AA. Even the Riva 128 and Rage Pro advertised similar capabilities, and of the 3 of them only the Rage Pro had support for more than 4MB framebuffer.
Funny thing, the v1000 had ~500MB/s video bandwidth. Sony's eDRAM can give you 9.6GB/s of texture bandwidth, but it cannot give you anti-aliasing.
Face it, FSAA an is incredibly costly method for smoothing jaggies - the only reason it became popular and Edge AA lost mindshare is because game developers were too lazy to continue making native ports of their games after the release of D3D and the rise to popularity of OpenGL. But then again, on a console, EVERY port is a native port. If Sony really wanted to bring you AA in 4MB of ram, they most certainly could; this is why people never let up on their decision to exclude this important feature.
A couple of times in the past, I've bought graphics cards from leading chip makers only to find out that various features were missing eg. DVI out, TV out. This is even though the circuit boards had solder bumps for the components and the manuals/box said that option was present.
Yeah, imagine that, manufacturers selling multiple products to varying price ranges, while avoiding the cost of designing new PCBs for every iteration. The NERVE of those manufacturers!
The features you see do exist, but you may not have seen the products with the features in question while shopping around, and you certainly didn't pay for the features.
Well, you might be surprised as how easily magnetic waves can propagate through materials.
Don't you mean a magnetic field?
How do you think 802.11 works through walls? Or cell phones? etc....
Those are high-frequency electromagnetic (far field) problems. This article refers to low-frequency mahnetic fields. Magnetic fields have much reduced range, so to be in their area of effect you really would have to hold the thing up against your skull.
The N64 certainly didn't have a problem doing anti-aliasing on 4MB of ram. While I have to agree it was kinda stupid to put so little memory in for video, you can always just stream textures.
As for trilinear, I don't think it has much of a memory cost. You're doing blending of interleaving MIPMAP levels in real-time, so it mostly cuts into your pixel thoroughput.
The 60GXP used 20GB platters, as opposed to the 75GXP's 15GB platters. It was an entirely different line.
As for me, my 30GB 75GXP bit the bullet after 14 only months of normal desktop use. Utterly unacceptable. The Barricuda IV drive I purchased as a replacement has already lasted longer than the Deathstar. So have all 5 of the Seagate drives I've purchased in the last 8 years.
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What's the big deal? I thought we already had this capability with AGP and Direct Memory Execute (DiME)?
I have to agree, this is a serious issue for DTV acceptance. What's the point of having a fancy 60" monitor in your living room if it lags worse than your broadband connection...and it's only 5 feet away.
You only have to look at the LCD industry to get a feel for just "how much" delay gamers are willing to accept. LCDs were pitifully laughed down by gamers when they had 25-50ms response times, and only recently have the 12, 16 and 20ms panels made gaming practical.
And these manufacturers think 60ms is okay? Forget about the audio delay, if everyone and their dog goes out and buys the "new HDTV compatible super Playstation 7", hooks it up to their TV, and sees their TV taking an extra 60-100ms to render an action, they'll bitch in droves. The only reason this hasn't been a major issue is because DTV is still a niche market, and gaming on DTV even moreso.
Yes, just from the top of my head...
MFM hard drives from the early 80s had a claimed transfer speed of around 500-625 KB/s, give or take a little for the gap in read / write speed, which was damn fast for only 10 to 40MB.
Our midrange single-drive speeds for today top out at about 100 times that number.
Average access times have improved at a much lower rate. Typical average access times for an MFM hard drive were well under 100ms, but today's midrange drives can barely break the 10ms mark.
The hardware we have is currently pushing the limits of what we can produce affordably. Although we may be able to theoretically see 1000 times current performance with magnetic media, I certainly doubt that we can do even 10x better with current drive design philosophies.
What I expect to see to fill the gap betweeen now and wide acceptance of solid state storage is parallel storage. Sure, it's been in workstations and enterprise for years, but I'm not talking about a messy RAID 5 array with a big, expensive external controller. I'm talking about sandwiching multiple smaller disks into a standard 2.5" or 3.5" package, including internal drive array hardware.
These days, it's not about leveraging performance from one disk, but from many. This won't do much for access times, but it will quench our thirst fior bandwidth without making the drive's external interface more complex.
Ahh, but I have.
... "feel".
:P
The Ur-Quan Masters is a nice port, but whenI tried it it lacked that
The 3DO code porting project is actually the closest you can get without DOS or DOSBOX, and even that doesn't feel quite right because they added various features to the 3DO port.
Yeah, I'm nit-picky. I want to play the game exactly as I remember it
Dual boot DOS! Scary, yes, and it usually requires a REAL legacy (or compatible) soundblaster to make work, but obviously it yields very nice results with more recent DOS titles.
Easier said than done successfully. Newer hardware is getting a little antsy under DOS, and it's no longer as easy to get things running perfectly.
Take this for instance: I own an original Ensoniq AudioPCI (circa 1997), the consumer market's first PCI sound card. It had flawless emulation of Soundblaster Pro, as well as decent MT32 emulation. In fact, for the longest time they had the ONLY working legacy emulation over PCI (which is why Creative acquired them).
This card has worked with all my old DOS titles on two previous motherboards, but on my current motherboard it has issues. I imagine it may have something to do with the extended interrupt space (I've noticed this board supports 32 interrupts under 2k), or perhaps people have just chosen to forget that certain DOS I/O regions were ever reserved. Anyway, I get bad sound on many old games, most notably Privateer. It makes me want to just sit back and bide my time until DOSBOX catches up with the times.
Also, I've seen some posts on here bashing VDM Sound, but it's actually very effective. The console under NT / 2k / XP is actually a full-fledged DOS emulator, and works quite well. The only reasons people have problems is because it doesn't support sound, port access, and / or a few stranger video modes.
For example, VDM Sound + 2k console will play Master of Orion just fine, but say Star Control II has an issue with the graphics rendering painfully slow. It's hit-or-miss, but it works surprisingly well.
Oh yeah, I thought I might add this, because I discovered it years ago and it's all but forgotten now: for those of you who loved The Seventh Guest, Trilobyte released an unsupported Win95 launcher for the game many moons ago that you may be able to find on Google...or I could just serve it somewhere and post a link here if anyone is interested...
I am not an economist, but this is what I have seen through observation.
As Kiryat mentioned, you don't price your vehicle indiscriminantly as high as the market will bear, and lower that price as popularity wanes.
You study the market and set a price point that will cover your investment and reap a handsome profit, amortized over an expected window of viability. You sell less cars as time goes on, or get rid of "overstocks" with "sales" rather than lower the MSRP.
What this means is prices remain stable, and that is something people like. Fluctuating car prices would totally screw over perceived value, thus causing mayhem for the resale market.
Just imagine if Chevy decided that the MSRP for this year's Cavalier was going to be $10,000. That's a lower price than the 1996 cav was, by the original poster's numbers. It would have a domino effect because all Cavaliers in the same family (1996 on) would have to compete with a cheaper version of themselves. The resale prices would fall.
A car that would have been 12,000 - 17,000 6 years ago (the Caviler which is going off the market now) NOW costs 20,000 fully loaded! Thats 3000 more for the EXACT SAME CAR FULLY LOADED 6 YEARS AGO.
MOD PARENT DOWN (-1 doesn't live on planet earth)
Ever hear of a thing called inflation? Even though it has been fairly low in the last 10 years, it has still been there.
Let's take your example: A car selling in 1998 that starts at $12k, and comes fully-loaded at $17k would start at $13,700 today, $19,425 fully-loaded. Sound like the prices you see today?
See this calculator for reference.
Maybe you should wait a little longer. I hear Gilette is coming out with a SIXTEEN blade razor that is just going to shock the entire market.
Just look at this feature list:
* Pore Shader v3.0
* Quad Lubricant Mappers
* 512-point crossbar handle interface
* Real-time suspension systen (for accurate bump mapping)
Sounds like the absolute best shave ever, but there are some cavaets. The razor can run with SIXTEEN blades, but only if you have to cut short hairs. Also, it also requires 2 additional plugs in your bathroom. Worse, you'll probably see reduced shaving quality in exchange for speed.
May be... But still I'm afraid that the size of your STWM is not going to impress your girlfriend.
That depends. If you can actually remember her birthday and your anniversary, you're obviously a keeper!
I'm just going to say this:
If Nintendo wanted this kind of functionality with the Gamecube, they should have shipped the system with interactive controllers (ala the Dreamcast VMU).
It's not as if this is a NEW concept. The problem is, a controller with a VMU costs $20, which makes the GBA seem like one damn expensive controller. There are MANY people who will never own a GBA, and it hurts Nintendo's ability to get developers onboard because their potential market is that much smaller.
The VERY BEST insanity effect I ever experienced in Eternal Darkness:
I was up late playing, and suddenly my TV MUTES!
I even see a little green text screen overlay "MUTE" in the corner. Forget the fact that it wasn't -exactly- like my TV's MUTE overlay, it was close enough.
I was scambling for the remote, thinking I had sat on it, when the sound came back on. Then my character screamed "This isn't happening!" Best mindtrick ever.
Honorable mentions (spoilers):
* A layer of bugs start crawling on top of the screen. The problem gets worse as you move to more rooms. It starts with only one bug, so you actually think it's real.
* You walk into a room where you know you've killed everything, and suddenly one of the previous enemies shows up right behind you. Then you freak out and go back to the entrance of the room.
* The naturalist with the flintlock pistol: the gun would occasionally fire unexpectedly when he was going nuts. That part was REAL (and wasted oh so much ammo). What made this even more fun was, one time when he was reloading, he hallucinated that he blew his own head off.
Then there's the standard "room is too small" or "celing is bleeding" or "walking on the celing" or "your characters limbs fall off" hallucinations. This game is so much fun with your sanity meter low.
Are you sure the ABS came on? Did you hear and feel the typical high-frequency feedback? ABS only engages when you're losing contact with the road surface.
The thing is, MOST SUVs out there have SEVERELY UNDERRATED braking systems. This means that if you were expecting an SUV to brake anywhere near as quickly as a car, you've got another thing coming. This has nothing to do with the ABS aspsct - they'll brake crappily if you never lose traction. But if you do happen to lose traction, you'll be very happy you have the ABS. Crappy braking is better than no braking.
More like this:
Phd 1: hey you know i really love all these neutron releases from the uranium. Let's tell the entire world physics community.
Phd 2: i know dude they are totally cool.
Phd 1: yeah... and if i can get a critical mass of purified U-235 together a chain reaction could start... we could solve the entire worlds energy problem. Let's tell the entire world physics community.
* WWII starts *
Phd 2: hey but isnt it dangerous? We could even end up blowing up the world.
Phd 1: yeah, but what's even worse, all scientists the world over now know that Uranium is fissible. The Germans and Japanese are probably working on a bomb as we speak.
Phd 2: let's get the US scientific community to inform the US government. We need to have a weapon before the Germans do, or we've already lost.
Mr. iSuck Politician #1: it isn't proven. Get lost.
Mr. iSuck Politician #2: it costs too much. Get lost.
Mr. iSuck Politician #n: Okay, okay, we'll build the damn thing.
there goes hiroshima... nagasaki.
Don't blame everything you hate in this world solely on the government. It took 40 years of atomic research around the world to crack the secrets of fission, and it took the real threat of the weapon being used on us to build one.
No, the sound quality went to hell after version 2.22 because they dropped the Fraunhofer codec. I believe it was because Fraunhofer was raising ( or enforcing?) licenses on their suddenly valuable IP.
They ended up making a replacement codec in-house. A lot of people initially complained about the sound quality, but they improved it with every release, and supposedly since 2.666 the rendering bugs have been removed. It sounds great, and performs well.
Gotta agree with this.
UML adds exactly nothing to what we were already doing. It just provides a standardized toolkit so everyone understand each other a little better.
Funny thing is, our corporation has standardized on Artisan as a design tool. Key point: Atrisan's toolsets differ a bit from "standard" UML.
So much for standardization.
I know exactly what he was talking about, I used to do support for Gateways (my college had a deal with them for labs, faculty and direct to student sales).
The early Pentium IIs they released in 1997 were standard ATX systems. As for the CD-ROM, on some models it had a curved front on the loading tray to match the decorative curved front of the case. You do know that you can replace loading trays quite easily, don't you?
The only reason why such asthetic changes were made was because many PC manufacturers were making them at the time to distingush themselves in a crowded marketplace. In 1998-99 Gateway changed their case designs and removed all the curved plastic, as big market leaders like Dell were forcing them to cut corners to remain competitive.
Also, I can't vouch for every system they've ever made, but every Gateway system I encountered ( vintage 1997 or later ) used an ATX-compliant PS.
Gotta agree, I spent so may hours learning all the tricks in that game, and pushing the system. I even remember coming up with a way to make intelligent switched multi-track networks despite the game's limitations.
:P
My roommate I've been living with for about 6 months used to be a Sim City 2000 junkie. I turned him on to TTDX and he's been playing that ever since
And no, I don't think you can play without an opponent, but the AI usually doesn't cause much worry early on in the game. As for the slow start, you can speed things up by increasing the starting loan and increasing industry density - this makes it easier for both AI and humans.
I did a paper on this back in college. Such a terrible misuse of the law, but even then it was hardly a new idea.
Ford's defense was two-pronged - it attempted to show that there was prior art for most aspects of the Selden patent, and it also sought to prove that almost no aspect of the originally patented invention (1879) was in use in a modern automobile.
Prior art included numerous examples of self-propelled steam vehicles. To refute the claim that Selden's modified Brayton engine was the first internal combustion engine design capable of propelling itself and a vehicle, Ford concentrated on the older 2-cycle engine developed by Lenoir in the early 1860s. The engine was hydrogen powered, and had even been used to drive a crude vehicle well before Selden filed his patent.
Since Selden's entire defense depended on the vehicle actually working and propelling itself, an engineering team was tasked to build working models of the Selden vehicle (both with modern components, and to the original specs). As a counterpoint, Ford engineers developed a working vehicle based on Lenior's engine.
Selden's "to spec" design crawled perhaps 10 feet in it's entire lifetime, whereas the Ford Lenior design was almost as capable as modern autos, thus putting another dent in Selden's case.
As for comparing the Selden vehicle to the modern automobile, there were a couple major differences. The engine used in modern autos was the Otto 4-cycle engine, a completely different animal compared to the Brayton. The ignition system in modern autos was also electrical, as opposed to the open flame ignition of Selden's engine.
Even with such a shakey patent to ride on, Selden managed to get almost an entire industry under his belt. But he didn't make it without help - the original members of the Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers joined in despite questions as to the patent's validity because they saw it as a tool to control the industry. Once they joined together and the group gained credibility, they could refuse entry to their biggest competitors (Ford, specifically). Selden was an opportunist, but had the industry banded together against the obviously unfounded patent, he never would have gotten so far.
Thus, you can see why I hate patents so fiercely: they're so immensely corruptable, yet there's really no better realistic solution.
Well, you do bring up an interesting point, but you miss your own key observation.
Quake was released with a software renderer that was platform non-specific. OpenGL allows Carmack the same level of platform agnosticism with the benefits of hardware acceleration. Quake III requires an OpenGL accelerator, but at the time of release, OpenGL accelerators were fairly ubiquitous.
As for the platform-specific VQuake, this was back when cards could only perform well on optimimized, native rendering code. The fact is, working with Rendition actually encouraged ID to find an alternative to native ports. They did not have a good time working with the company.
Carmack was unhappy that their agreement with Rendition restricted them from making another platform-specific port, and he didn't like Direct3D. On a personal whim, he coded up an OpenGL renderer for Quake on his Intergraph workstation. 3dfx, left out in the cold by the ID - Rendition deal, seized the moment and coded up the first MCD for a consumer card. The rest is history.
The moment I realized how bad native ports are: I enjoyed VQuake on my Rendition card. Then Quakeworld was released and revolutionized the online aspects of Quake...and where was Rendition? They decided not to put in the small effort required to port VQuake's render to Quakeworld, and instead insisted end-users should use the slower and less feature-filled MiniGL.
That was the moment I realized that native ports were dead. Thanks Carmack.
Hmm. What's the main implication for streaming the textures from a cartridge rather than a CD/DVD? Throughput, etc?
Developers already learned to do this properly on the original Playstation. Did you not notice how much better quality textures games began to use toward the latter days of the PSX? Do keep in mind that this was a 2x CD-ROM drive (300K/s)...the 4x DVD-ROM drive on the PS2 has a minimum of 10x more thoroughput. How the hell do you think the Gamecube gets by with only 3MB framebuffer?
And BTW, my point was that you'd be hard pressed to find a card in 1998 that could handle trilinear/bilinear antialiasing in 4Mb
You'd be wrong. The Rendition Verite 1000 could do trilinear filtering and edge anti-aliasing on 4MB ram...in 1996, at the same resolution as your PS2 and at playable framerates no less. Just look up VQuake if you want more information.
So could the original Voodoo Graphics, according to 3dfx docs, although I never witnessed a Glide-native game that utilized AA. Even the Riva 128 and Rage Pro advertised similar capabilities, and of the 3 of them only the Rage Pro had support for more than 4MB framebuffer.
Funny thing, the v1000 had ~500MB/s video bandwidth. Sony's eDRAM can give you 9.6GB/s of texture bandwidth, but it cannot give you anti-aliasing.
Face it, FSAA an is incredibly costly method for smoothing jaggies - the only reason it became popular and Edge AA lost mindshare is because game developers were too lazy to continue making native ports of their games after the release of D3D and the rise to popularity of OpenGL. But then again, on a console, EVERY port is a native port. If Sony really wanted to bring you AA in 4MB of ram, they most certainly could; this is why people never let up on their decision to exclude this important feature.
A couple of times in the past, I've bought graphics cards from leading chip makers only to find out that various features were missing eg. DVI out, TV out. This is even though the circuit boards had solder bumps for the components and the manuals/box said that option was present.
Yeah, imagine that, manufacturers selling multiple products to varying price ranges, while avoiding the cost of designing new PCBs for every iteration. The NERVE of those manufacturers!
The features you see do exist, but you may not have seen the products with the features in question while shopping around, and you certainly didn't pay for the features.
Yeah, I noticed that in every single category, if they had a runaway winner, it just happened to be a game made in the last 10 years.
These kids aren't qualified to judge the difference between Zork, Pitfall or anything from the NES...it's all before their time.
Count 'em, every single major series category that had a game release in the last 10 years, a game from that time period was always chosen as #1.
Kids.
Well, you might be surprised as how easily magnetic waves can propagate through materials.
Don't you mean a magnetic field?
How do you think 802.11 works through walls? Or cell phones? etc....
Those are high-frequency electromagnetic (far field) problems. This article refers to low-frequency mahnetic fields. Magnetic fields have much reduced range, so to be in their area of effect you really would have to hold the thing up against your skull.
You don't think so, eh?
The N64 certainly didn't have a problem doing anti-aliasing on 4MB of ram. While I have to agree it was kinda stupid to put so little memory in for video, you can always just stream textures.
As for trilinear, I don't think it has much of a memory cost. You're doing blending of interleaving MIPMAP levels in real-time, so it mostly cuts into your pixel thoroughput.
Thought I'd just clarify...
The 60GXP used 20GB platters, as opposed to the 75GXP's 15GB platters. It was an entirely different line.
As for me, my 30GB 75GXP bit the bullet after 14 only months of normal desktop use. Utterly unacceptable. The Barricuda IV drive I purchased as a replacement has already lasted longer than the Deathstar. So have all 5 of the Seagate drives I've purchased in the last 8 years.