Last month I wrote the Hello Kitty Phone II support for Doom. The bottom line is that it will be a fine phone for the game, but the details are sort of interesting.
I had a pre-production phone before Siggraph last year, and we were discussing the possibility of letting NTT DoCoMo show a Doom demo behind closed doors on it. We were all very busy at the time, but I took a shot at bringing up support over a weekend. I hadn't coded any of the support for the custom SMS extensions yet, but I ran the game using only standard OpenGL calls (this is not a supported path, because without bump mapping everything looks horrible) to see how it would do. It didn't even draw the console correctly, because they had driver bugs with texGen. I thought the odds were very long against having all the new, untested extensions working properly, so I pushed off working on it until they had revved the drivers a few more times.
My judgment was colored by the experience of bringing up Doom on the original Hello Kitty phone a year earlier, which involved chasing a lot of driver bugs. Note that NTT was very responsive, working closely with me on it, and we were able to get everything resolved, but I still had no expectation that things would work correctly the first time.
I have mixed feelings about the GSM / 3G extensions. Japanese extension seems more "right" in that it automatically handles synchronization by default, and could be implemented as a wire protocol, but there are advantages to the VAR extension being simply a hint. It is easy to have a VAR program just fall back to normal virtual memory by not setting the hint and using malloc, but NTT's extension requires different function calls for using vertex objects and normal vertex arrays.
Initial performance testing was interesting. I set up three extreme cases to exercise different characteristics:
A test of the non-textured stencil shadow speed showed a GF3 about 20% slower than the Hello Kitty. I believe that Nvidia has a slightly higher performance memory architecture.
Just because they dropped funding doesn't mean that it won't run at all on such a machine. I doubt that all of the current ports and such have been directly funded. Stopping funding doesn't mean that your next thinkpad won't run it, mearly that IBM won't pay cash to make sure it happens. I'm sure someone will write drivers.
It would be interesting if a virus would get onto a system, then crosscompile for all the gcc targets to be a true multiplatform bug. It could get on a box, then infect all the crossplatforms that system supports.
Untrue, the power to the xbox will shut off after several minutes if you take the IDE off. It will poll for the drive, and if it can't find it, will turn off.
The drive is indeed IDE, the power connector however is nonstandard. The issue is that the discs are protected by a fake TOC, so normal DVD drives will not read past the first 2 minutes or so of the disc. A properly modified firmware works wonders.
However, the issue of emulation is easier said than done. Even something like VMware, which is a pc on pc type thing, is not easy to program, which makes the xbox, a far harder target.
Actually, that is arguable. http://www.otakunozoku.com/gbavcs/ is a 2600 emulator for the GBA in progress, and a number of others, including a working NES and Spectrum emulator are at www.gbaemu.com. So, yes, you CAN have pitfall, soon.
As to the cost ratio, it really is ridiculous. SCSI drives, no matter how fast, are not made of gold. To price an 18gb scsi against a 80gb ide is just crazy. If you compare the costs, you can hook up a 7 drive (10gb disks) ide raid stripe set that will surely out perform an equivelant 100gb scsi drive.
The xbox is cheaper than a 700mhz pc you can put together, you can run it on a TV, which is usually cheaper than a monitor, and you can knock annoying people unconsious with the controllers.
Basically, porting linux would be fairly difficult. Since the GBA doesn't have an MMC, you can only port embedded versions, like ucLinux, without serious work. The hardware is also totally foreign, so in the end, it's pretty damn hard to do.
But you would have to pay royalties to the parent company for creating a "Derived work" from the DNA.. Your kids would cost more than that college tuition.
Actually, doesn't this remind you of a few things?
Toshiba tried something along these lines, but not quite, with the Libretto line of super-mini laptops. They don't make them anymore, but this line of thinking HAS been tried.
Sadly, the scandisk under windows doesn't work quite right for me. Usually, 9 times out of 10, I get "Scandisk has restarted more than 20 times"... Then again, under NT, the message is usually..
Cannot lock current drive
So, "DOS" is better for certain things.
That seems to make it somewhat less believable that the video is coming from AMD. I doubt that they could simply grab the soundtracks from a cd and stick it on a video without paying royalties.
That is indeed true. Most double sided DVD's that I have seen/own are 4:3 and Widescreen versions on one DVD disc. Turn them over to see the other format. In this case, it is MUCH more convenient, as although both types of video are nice, you really wouldn't want two copies. More importantly, the DVD retailers don't want you with 2 discs, one to give to friends.
That is true, but if they insist on that, there isn't much to do about it. The IT market isn't so hot, I wouldn't resign in a hurry. The office where I work, they use hardware disc controller devices that undo all changes to the HD instantly by tranfering all changes onto a second partition. This way, whenever you reboot, the system will go back to it's original state. The system is fully read/writable, but as soon as a reboot occurs, all changes are lost. Save files on a network server, remove the DirectX APIs, see how easy it is to install software. Since much software requires a reboot, this is a pretty decent situation, much better than simple registry locking.
Slashdot Mirror
Carmack's .plan on phones.
February 11, 2002
-----------------
Last month I wrote the Hello Kitty Phone II support for Doom. The bottom line is that it will be a fine phone for the game, but the details are sort of interesting.
I had a pre-production phone before Siggraph last year, and we were discussing the possibility of letting NTT DoCoMo show a Doom demo behind closed doors on it. We were all very busy at the time, but I took a shot at bringing up support over
a weekend. I hadn't coded any of the support for the custom SMS extensions yet, but I ran the game using only standard OpenGL calls (this is not a supported path, because without bump mapping everything looks horrible) to see how it would do. It didn't even draw the console correctly, because they had
driver bugs with texGen. I thought the odds were very long against having all the new, untested extensions working properly, so I pushed off working on it until they had revved the drivers a few more times.
My judgment was colored by the experience of bringing up Doom on the original Hello Kitty phone a year earlier, which involved chasing a lot of driver bugs. Note that NTT was very responsive, working closely with me on it, and we were able to get everything resolved, but I still had no expectation that things would work correctly the first time.
I have mixed feelings about the GSM / 3G extensions.
Japanese extension seems more "right" in that it automatically handles synchronization by default, and could be implemented as a wire protocol, but there are advantages to the VAR extension being simply a hint. It is easy to have a VAR program just fall back to normal virtual memory by not setting the
hint and using malloc, but NTT's extension requires different function calls for using vertex objects and normal vertex arrays.
Initial performance testing was interesting. I set up three extreme cases to exercise different characteristics:
A test of the non-textured stencil shadow speed showed a GF3 about 20% slower than the Hello Kitty. I believe that Nvidia has a slightly higher performance memory
architecture.
On the topic of current US Phones:
Do not buy a US Phone for Doom.
Just because they dropped funding doesn't mean that it won't run at all on such a machine. I doubt that all of the current ports and such have been directly funded. Stopping funding doesn't mean that your next thinkpad won't run it, mearly that IBM won't pay cash to make sure it happens. I'm sure someone will write drivers.
Just great, now all those aluminum foil hat guys can start making anit-radiation dental floss and tooth paste..
Tom's is usually thoroughly long, but that doesn't mean correct. I agree, alot of the information is irrelevant, and thus don't really matter.
I think that it's -> Next
There -> Next
To allow -> Next
More of those -> Next
Damn ads.
It would be interesting if a virus would get onto a system, then crosscompile for all the gcc targets to be a true multiplatform bug. It could get on a box, then infect all the crossplatforms that system supports.
Untrue, the power to the xbox will shut off after several minutes if you take the IDE off. It will poll for the drive, and if it can't find it, will turn off.
The drive is indeed IDE, the power connector however is nonstandard. The issue is that the discs are protected by a fake TOC, so normal DVD drives will not read past the first 2 minutes or so of the disc. A properly modified firmware works wonders.
However, the issue of emulation is easier said than done. Even something like VMware, which is a pc on pc type thing, is not easy to program, which makes the xbox, a far harder target.
Actually, that is arguable. http://www.otakunozoku.com/gbavcs/ is a 2600 emulator for the GBA in progress, and a number of others, including a working NES and Spectrum emulator are at www.gbaemu.com. So, yes, you CAN have pitfall, soon.
I can see it now, 4 years from now.
Athlon 46XP 600 terahertz: $150
Visible Light: 430 THz to 750 THz
Removing a heatsink from an athlon to produce a useable "gas" flame: priceless.
Or, try Progress Quest, a d2 type clone, that can quit, and alt-tab in no time at all.
www.progressquest.com
No need to stop playing, since you don't need to do all the clicking, and fast paced decisions. In fact, it does it for you.
As to the cost ratio, it really is ridiculous. SCSI drives, no matter how fast, are not made of gold. To price an 18gb scsi against a 80gb ide is just crazy. If you compare the costs, you can hook up a 7 drive (10gb disks) ide raid stripe set that will surely out perform an equivelant 100gb scsi drive.
I thought it was a typo, Today is a great day for that OS/2 user.
The xbox is cheaper than a 700mhz pc you can put together, you can run it on a TV, which is usually cheaper than a monitor, and you can knock annoying people unconsious with the controllers.
Basically, porting linux would be fairly difficult. Since the GBA doesn't have an MMC, you can only port embedded versions, like ucLinux, without serious work. The hardware is also totally foreign, so in the end, it's pretty damn hard to do.
Not impossible, but still really hard.
The classic gaming joke is still better.
Duke Nukem Forever will be released real soon!
But you would have to pay royalties to the parent company for creating a "Derived work" from the DNA.. Your kids would cost more than that college tuition.
Actually, doesn't this remind you of a few things? Toshiba tried something along these lines, but not quite, with the Libretto line of super-mini laptops. They don't make them anymore, but this line of thinking HAS been tried.
Don't call people morons if you haven't seen the effect of cleartype. Cleartype does have an effect when viewed on a CRT. You are a coward.
Sadly, the scandisk under windows doesn't work quite right for me. Usually, 9 times out of 10, I get "Scandisk has restarted more than 20 times"... Then again, under NT, the message is usually.. Cannot lock current drive So, "DOS" is better for certain things.
That seems to make it somewhat less believable that the video is coming from AMD. I doubt that they could simply grab the soundtracks from a cd and stick it on a video without paying royalties.
That is indeed true. Most double sided DVD's that I have seen/own are 4:3 and Widescreen versions on one DVD disc. Turn them over to see the other format. In this case, it is MUCH more convenient, as although both types of video are nice, you really wouldn't want two copies. More importantly, the DVD retailers don't want you with 2 discs, one to give to friends.
That is true, but if they insist on that, there isn't much to do about it. The IT market isn't so hot, I wouldn't resign in a hurry. The office where I work, they use hardware disc controller devices that undo all changes to the HD instantly by tranfering all changes onto a second partition. This way, whenever you reboot, the system will go back to it's original state. The system is fully read/writable, but as soon as a reboot occurs, all changes are lost. Save files on a network server, remove the DirectX APIs, see how easy it is to install software. Since much software requires a reboot, this is a pretty decent situation, much better than simple registry locking.
Humanoid...Linux...Anyone see these things as real life Quake 3 Bots?
Then again, you'd start complaining about expansion vocal options... That would be interesting, a cat that eats Smart Media chips.
Hmm... these cats must be saving up energy in order to do some kind of uber leap.