half the cost of a cube. I got an SP for myself, that was closer to $100, but back in February I got my wife a brand new one for $78, that was a classic and they're quite a bit less now. She got my daugter one for her Birthday, used for $30. New classic models are only about $50. Do it. The GBA is worth having, especially if you have a Cube. I haven't actually attached my Gameboy to the Cube yet, but I will, I've got a game or two that supports it.
Metroid Prime Animal Crossings Batman Vengence (think that was the name) Skys of Arcadia Legends Mario Sunshine Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time (didn't get the Windwalker, oh well) StarFox Lost Kingdoms Resident Evil
Wavebird Wireless control A MadCatz small control S-Video Cable Carrying Case with a clip on disk holder Modem
Used for about three months, and not well used eaither. All of this stuff looked like it was taken out of the original packaging and placed into the carry-all bag.
Should we forget Movix? Movix is a tiny Linux distro that goes at the begining of CDs with movies on them to make them play without having to wory about people having their computers setup properly. I'm planning to make my wedding video and time surrounding (not the actual event of) my baby being born available to my realatives this way. Most of them don't have internet access and those that do aren't necessarily adept enough to get CODECs and the like. Between the Americas Army disk, the UT2k3 Disk, and Movix Linux is finding it's place on Windows machines and theoreticaly computers without hard disk at all. If this keeps going screw the X-Box, make generic consoles with the nForce chip, loads of RAM and no HDD. Save game progress on standard run of the mill smartcards and the like. USB keyboards, joysticks and gamepads will now rule. This is a geniune idea, wonder if I could make a few bucks?
pay you to click on ads? The person distributing the plugin would basically give you a portion of what they were making to throw ads and you and paid you click on them. Setup an entire Linux distro to do the same thing.
I would call it the "In Soviet Russia the OS pays YOU" distro. Free is hard to compete with. Paying people to use it? Bill Gates is going to crap his pants if he sees this idea getting out.
you're going to have to shine a light at the screen so you can see it, and shine a light at yourself so they can see you the whole time you're on the phone. No roaming around your room with that going on.
I agree, the Cube is more powerfully than the 64 in all respects. The N64 IS a true 64 bit console. This isn't saying that it's more powerfull than the 32 bit cube, it just means that it has to break it into chunks and reassemble, very messy. CPU emulators exsist in the PC world, they're usually used for pre-release developmental reasons (as AMD released well ahead of their first 64 bit CPUs) and for running some task that an older CPU can't handle. Since these things exsist don't expect them to be smooth.
The cube has a speed increase, though less bits. Probably good enough to handle some of the less demanding 64 games, maybe even some of the more demanding ones, but unlike in the 64 the cube would have to emulate everything previously done on chips with the 64. Sound, graphics, everything. It's theoreticaly possible, but it's one hell of a mess. A recompile would not only take care of the situation immediately, but it would also allow for better textures and models should they have chose to replace them. The hardware should automaticaly improve some of it immediately, but software tweaks can be made.
Wanna play the CPU game? The Genesis was 8 bit. Two 8 bit processors. If Atari would have "done the math" the same way Sega did they would have had a 256 or more bit system. Let's not forget "Blast Processing"
The N64 actually had a 64 bit MIPS RISC processor. Nintendo moved away from it because the software companies found it to hard to program for.
I read what was up there. I don't think I properly understood. I would see a sentance, then I would see words like NUON and Ya-what? I loose non-geeks and often geeks with my use of Jargon in my day to day speech, but this one lost me. Lots of research to even see what they hell they were talking about.
I can understand the NES emulator for the old games. It's easy that way and the games are old and simple by modern processing samples.
N64 emulator? Thats rough since the 64 was a 64 bit system and the cube is 32. A reliable 64 emulator is hard to come up with and I doubt Nintendo integrated it. Are you sure they didn't just run the Ocarina of time through the Cube compiler, maybe even a code converter then compiler? Granted they're both Nintendo systems but the 64 is just to much of a pain in the ass to emulate.
Pirated games being able to use BnetD was just a side effect as far as I was concerned. My version was legal, I really wouldn't have minded serial tracking being built in. That would have required co-operation from Blizzard and a tie in to the Battle.net servers to be effective, which brings me to the next point. During that time frame (I don't know about now) Battle.net was extreamly frustrating. It was overloaded 95% of the time and was often unuseable. BnetD allowed the ISP I used to work for to put up their own Battle.net type server for their customers to use that was up even when Battle.net was frequently down. This allowed for unscheduled games between strangers, just like Battle.net did. That was usefull legal copies of the clients or not.
Fair? Maybe not. Helping out the competition, definately not. Smacking a fan around after leading him on with a carrot by "unofficial" words of support and indifference for quite a long time, definately wrong.
Shit list? I wouldn't call companies not support Linux on my "shit" list. There's lots of software made for Macs that isn't made for Windows. Are they on your shit list, or do you just not care about them? Same with Linux/Unix/Netware. Macs are expensive hardware. Intel (AMD in my case) hardware is cheap. If I could pony up all the money it took to get a Mac that cost nearly twice as much as it's PC hardware equivelant/supperior I would. As I said. I no longer want to run Blizzard games, they don't make games for my environment and they would be on my don't care list (or more like not on my "fan" list) instead they had to be jerks and wound up on my jerk list.
Yes Blizzard has millions of fans. I'm no longer one of them because I'm one of those.01%. As far as I was concerned they were, I had Blizzard, Rare, and Atari/Infogrames at the top of my list. Unfortunately Rare went to a platform I don't have (except for their few GBA titles) and Blizzard attacked the open source community. They're now in the SCO/Microsoft catagory as enemies of open source. Indifference earns indifference, support earns support, attacking earns shit list.
First of all, I'm not necessarily mad at them for not porting to my OS of choice. That caused me to go from fan to near indifferent. Just like many other software companies have done from my perspective. I'm not mad at the other companies. If they don't port I wont pay them any attention. If enough people do the same they'll eaither port or suffer.
I'm not mad at them for defending their IP rights. It's theirs and they can defend them. What caused me to get mad at them was the fact they turned a blind eye to it and some of the employees gave unofficial words of encouragement in both cases THEN they fired up the smack down out of the blue. Sort of a bait and switch or waiving a carrot. A nice simple "please cut it out" early on would have been nice a simple. Even the RIAA and MPA give (or gave) a nice please cut it out before laying the smack down, and they advertise the fact they're going to lay the smack down otherwise.
I haven't bothered looking at Blizzard in quite some time. I know most of their games worked on Mac OS9 before OSX hit. I don't know if any of their games work on OSX or not. If it works on OSX it would be trivial to do the Linux and BSD porting. Only carelessness or a vendetta would stand in the way, resources to do a Linux or regular BSD port would be minimal. Think I'll cruise the site and see if there's any OSX support on their games now.
Write in portable code to begin with and porting becomes easy. I don't expect everyone to embrace SDL right away, but leaving the engine free of dependancies on OS specific libraries would be a start.
I used to be a big Blizzard fan. I could play StarCraft and Diablo all day with the rest of them. Then one of my buddies told me about a nifty program he ran on his server called BNETd, developed by someone right here in Houston. Blizzard made no comments on the program officially, they just let it go for a couple of years. It was really cool because it was a server daemon that ran on Linux that emulated a Battle.net server. We liked it and it was good.
Then Blizzard gets their panties bunched in a knot because someone starts making a pretty cool UT mod with StarCraft characters. They put the smack down on them, and oh while we're at it we'll put the smack down on BNETd to.
To top it off, I had by that time pretty much stopped playing Blizzard games. You see, during the time period I migrated slowly over to Linux until finally I no longer wasted drive space on a Windows partition. I could make Blizzard games run with Wine, but it was never quite like it should be. Heck, all my other favorite games like UT, Descent, Quake 3, later on UT2K3 and quite a few others I just wont bother ratteling off ran great and NATIVELY on Linux. Blizzard was the only game publisher I gave a shit about that fully shunned Linux in all ways. I simply placed them on the not give a shit about list. They'll stay there until they start supporting Linux and offer an apology to the maker of BNETd. Giving him a job or something would make a great apology in my eyes, but just admiting they should have said something earlier or not laid the smack down so hard out of the blue would be enough for me.
When Blizzards gone I'll miss them about as much as I'll as miss Britney Spears when she runs out of steam, which will be about the same amount as I've missed N'Sync. None.
Die Blizzard. You haven't done what you need as a game company to keep an audiance. Sometimes kickass games isn't enough. Lay down your 2x4, your OS blinders, and your attitude and you'll be right next to Atari/Infogrames in my book again.
How is a game going to become a long lasting classic if the hardware meant to run it stopped being manufactured 20+ years ago and the publishers were pricks about their property and wouldn't release it into the public domain or allow it to be ported? Emulators may take up some of the slack but don't count on those doing the job.
To bad it doesn't go for older systems. I've looked into this control before, but I really wanted it to support the N64 for Killer Instinct Gold. My brother in law and I used to go at it for hours, and face it, arcade style controls are the best for fighting games.
BTW, here's what's IMHO the best SNES fighter stick ever, though it would be nice if they made an adapter for that to.
Not enough detail in the article or on the manufactures site. Does the key have the drives encrytion data, or does it unlock by opening up a part of the BIOS that only matches that key. Still, not enough info and I did read the article.
but if the court ordered investigator is actually at your keyboard, or they're checking through normal network means isn't this pointless? Okay, granted if my job is to look through peoples hard disk all day I'm going to want to take the disk out of their machine and use my machine to look at their data, but using their's doesn't exactly make it impossible, only inconvient. I guess if they destroyed their own board to hide evidence that would work. Another thing, your board frys. You loose all your data. I don't know how many times in my line of work I have had to replace a mother board and make sure the data from the old drive survived.
So if you're standing around with a group of your radio buddies, your beeper/phone goes off and it's your wife. Not only do all your buddies get to here about what kind of a bastard you are, any one else who can understand morse code in audio range can here about how she's leaving you for Steve.
Here's an idea, the RIAA can work with the justice department, SCO, Direct TV, and the MPA to setup a P2P lawsuit sharing suite!
It would contain the bank account information of everyone in America. When an account appears with substantial funds, one of the organizations investigates the individual for any copywrite infringements, Linux use, or the purchase of a smart card writer. If any of the criteria come up postive, they mark the individual for each transgression. The justice department then transfer funds automaticaly and without warning from the transgressors bank account to the victimized group.
All parties involved (except for the justice department) would supply programs and employees to scour the bank account data and the other file sharing networks, and connect the two together.
thats accurate, 2D is cheaper than 3D, at least in engine development. It can be cheaper to hack together a 3D game on a pre-exsisting engine than it is to develop a grand 2D game from the ground up, but there are 2D engines to. I was just being a smart ass about old games being ported.
Many orders of magnitude less to write? Not necessarily, they were just written a long time ago. Seems to me about 1/2 the GBAs library is ported old games from the NES, SNES and Genesis. Not that this is a bad thing, they were good games to begin with, the only thing the GBA is lacking is the X and Y buttons.
At least the game library expands rapidly with games STILL worth playing.
Slashdot Mirror
half the cost of a cube. I got an SP for myself, that was closer to $100, but back in February I got my wife a brand new one for $78, that was a classic and they're quite a bit less now. She got my daugter one for her Birthday, used for $30. New classic models are only about $50. Do it. The GBA is worth having, especially if you have a Cube. I haven't actually attached my Gameboy to the Cube yet, but I will, I've got a game or two that supports it.
I mean, not like they have way to much of a choice right?
Got mine on ebay. Black in color.
Metroid Prime
Animal Crossings
Batman Vengence (think that was the name)
Skys of Arcadia Legends
Mario Sunshine
Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time (didn't get the Windwalker, oh well)
StarFox
Lost Kingdoms
Resident Evil
Wavebird Wireless control
A MadCatz small control
S-Video Cable
Carrying Case with a clip on disk holder
Modem
Used for about three months, and not well used eaither. All of this stuff looked like it was taken out of the original packaging and placed into the carry-all bag.
$230 with shipping.
Would this be a good answer?
Should we forget Movix? Movix is a tiny Linux distro that goes at the begining of CDs with movies on them to make them play without having to wory about people having their computers setup properly. I'm planning to make my wedding video and time surrounding (not the actual event of) my baby being born available to my realatives this way. Most of them don't have internet access and those that do aren't necessarily adept enough to get CODECs and the like. Between the Americas Army disk, the UT2k3 Disk, and Movix Linux is finding it's place on Windows machines and theoreticaly computers without hard disk at all. If this keeps going screw the X-Box, make generic consoles with the nForce chip, loads of RAM and no HDD. Save game progress on standard run of the mill smartcards and the like. USB keyboards, joysticks and gamepads will now rule. This is a geniune idea, wonder if I could make a few bucks?
Yeah, lets see who buys what. I would gladly take Mitsubishi Diamond Scan monitor instead of a Trinitron next time, I already use AMD.
pay you to click on ads? The person distributing the plugin would basically give you a portion of what they were making to throw ads and you and paid you click on them. Setup an entire Linux distro to do the same thing.
I would call it the "In Soviet Russia the OS pays YOU" distro. Free is hard to compete with. Paying people to use it? Bill Gates is going to crap his pants if he sees this idea getting out.
you're going to have to shine a light at the screen so you can see it, and shine a light at yourself so they can see you the whole time you're on the phone. No roaming around your room with that going on.
I agree, the Cube is more powerfully than the 64 in all respects. The N64 IS a true 64 bit console. This isn't saying that it's more powerfull than the 32 bit cube, it just means that it has to break it into chunks and reassemble, very messy. CPU emulators exsist in the PC world, they're usually used for pre-release developmental reasons (as AMD released well ahead of their first 64 bit CPUs) and for running some task that an older CPU can't handle. Since these things exsist don't expect them to be smooth.
The cube has a speed increase, though less bits. Probably good enough to handle some of the less demanding 64 games, maybe even some of the more demanding ones, but unlike in the 64 the cube would have to emulate everything previously done on chips with the 64. Sound, graphics, everything. It's theoreticaly possible, but it's one hell of a mess. A recompile would not only take care of the situation immediately, but it would also allow for better textures and models should they have chose to replace them. The hardware should automaticaly improve some of it immediately, but software tweaks can be made.
Wanna play the CPU game? The Genesis was 8 bit. Two 8 bit processors. If Atari would have "done the math" the same way Sega did they would have had a 256 or more bit system. Let's not forget "Blast Processing"
The N64 actually had a 64 bit MIPS RISC processor. Nintendo moved away from it because the software companies found it to hard to program for.
I read what was up there. I don't think I properly understood. I would see a sentance, then I would see words like NUON and Ya-what? I loose non-geeks and often geeks with my use of Jargon in my day to day speech, but this one lost me. Lots of research to even see what they hell they were talking about.
I can understand the NES emulator for the old games. It's easy that way and the games are old and simple by modern processing samples.
N64 emulator? Thats rough since the 64 was a 64 bit system and the cube is 32. A reliable 64 emulator is hard to come up with and I doubt Nintendo integrated it. Are you sure they didn't just run the Ocarina of time through the Cube compiler, maybe even a code converter then compiler? Granted they're both Nintendo systems but the 64 is just to much of a pain in the ass to emulate.
Pirated games being able to use BnetD was just a side effect as far as I was concerned. My version was legal, I really wouldn't have minded serial tracking being built in. That would have required co-operation from Blizzard and a tie in to the Battle.net servers to be effective, which brings me to the next point. During that time frame (I don't know about now) Battle.net was extreamly frustrating. It was overloaded 95% of the time and was often unuseable. BnetD allowed the ISP I used to work for to put up their own Battle.net type server for their customers to use that was up even when Battle.net was frequently down. This allowed for unscheduled games between strangers, just like Battle.net did. That was usefull legal copies of the clients or not.
.01%. As far as I was concerned they were, I had Blizzard, Rare, and Atari/Infogrames at the top of my list. Unfortunately Rare went to a platform I don't have (except for their few GBA titles) and Blizzard attacked the open source community. They're now in the SCO/Microsoft catagory as enemies of open source. Indifference earns indifference, support earns support, attacking earns shit list.
Fair? Maybe not. Helping out the competition, definately not. Smacking a fan around after leading him on with a carrot by "unofficial" words of support and indifference for quite a long time, definately wrong.
Shit list? I wouldn't call companies not support Linux on my "shit" list. There's lots of software made for Macs that isn't made for Windows. Are they on your shit list, or do you just not care about them? Same with Linux/Unix/Netware. Macs are expensive hardware. Intel (AMD in my case) hardware is cheap. If I could pony up all the money it took to get a Mac that cost nearly twice as much as it's PC hardware equivelant/supperior I would. As I said. I no longer want to run Blizzard games, they don't make games for my environment and they would be on my don't care list (or more like not on my "fan" list) instead they had to be jerks and wound up on my jerk list.
Yes Blizzard has millions of fans. I'm no longer one of them because I'm one of those
First of all, I'm not necessarily mad at them for not porting to my OS of choice. That caused me to go from fan to near indifferent. Just like many other software companies have done from my perspective. I'm not mad at the other companies. If they don't port I wont pay them any attention. If enough people do the same they'll eaither port or suffer.
I'm not mad at them for defending their IP rights. It's theirs and they can defend them. What caused me to get mad at them was the fact they turned a blind eye to it and some of the employees gave unofficial words of encouragement in both cases THEN they fired up the smack down out of the blue. Sort of a bait and switch or waiving a carrot. A nice simple "please cut it out" early on would have been nice a simple. Even the RIAA and MPA give (or gave) a nice please cut it out before laying the smack down, and they advertise the fact they're going to lay the smack down otherwise.
I haven't bothered looking at Blizzard in quite some time. I know most of their games worked on Mac OS9 before OSX hit. I don't know if any of their games work on OSX or not. If it works on OSX it would be trivial to do the Linux and BSD porting. Only carelessness or a vendetta would stand in the way, resources to do a Linux or regular BSD port would be minimal. Think I'll cruise the site and see if there's any OSX support on their games now.
Write in portable code to begin with and porting becomes easy. I don't expect everyone to embrace SDL right away, but leaving the engine free of dependancies on OS specific libraries would be a start.
I used to be a big Blizzard fan. I could play StarCraft and Diablo all day with the rest of them. Then one of my buddies told me about a nifty program he ran on his server called BNETd, developed by someone right here in Houston. Blizzard made no comments on the program officially, they just let it go for a couple of years. It was really cool because it was a server daemon that ran on Linux that emulated a Battle.net server. We liked it and it was good.
Then Blizzard gets their panties bunched in a knot because someone starts making a pretty cool UT mod with StarCraft characters. They put the smack down on them, and oh while we're at it we'll put the smack down on BNETd to.
To top it off, I had by that time pretty much stopped playing Blizzard games. You see, during the time period I migrated slowly over to Linux until finally I no longer wasted drive space on a Windows partition. I could make Blizzard games run with Wine, but it was never quite like it should be. Heck, all my other favorite games like UT, Descent, Quake 3, later on UT2K3 and quite a few others I just wont bother ratteling off ran great and NATIVELY on Linux. Blizzard was the only game publisher I gave a shit about that fully shunned Linux in all ways. I simply placed them on the not give a shit about list. They'll stay there until they start supporting Linux and offer an apology to the maker of BNETd. Giving him a job or something would make a great apology in my eyes, but just admiting they should have said something earlier or not laid the smack down so hard out of the blue would be enough for me.
When Blizzards gone I'll miss them about as much as I'll as miss Britney Spears when she runs out of steam, which will be about the same amount as I've missed N'Sync. None.
Die Blizzard. You haven't done what you need as a game company to keep an audiance. Sometimes kickass games isn't enough. Lay down your 2x4, your OS blinders, and your attitude and you'll be right next to Atari/Infogrames in my book again.
How is a game going to become a long lasting classic if the hardware meant to run it stopped being manufactured 20+ years ago and the publishers were pricks about their property and wouldn't release it into the public domain or allow it to be ported? Emulators may take up some of the slack but don't count on those doing the job.
To bad it doesn't go for older systems. I've looked into this control before, but I really wanted it to support the N64 for Killer Instinct Gold. My brother in law and I used to go at it for hours, and face it, arcade style controls are the best for fighting games.
BTW, here's what's IMHO the best SNES fighter stick ever, though it would be nice if they made an adapter for that to.
got goatsed? Was there a counter? I'm gussing it was a record, though I doubt anyone Guiness actually has a standing record. Who would want to verify?
Not enough detail in the article or on the manufactures site. Does the key have the drives encrytion data, or does it unlock by opening up a part of the BIOS that only matches that key. Still, not enough info and I did read the article.
but if the court ordered investigator is actually at your keyboard, or they're checking through normal network means isn't this pointless? Okay, granted if my job is to look through peoples hard disk all day I'm going to want to take the disk out of their machine and use my machine to look at their data, but using their's doesn't exactly make it impossible, only inconvient. I guess if they destroyed their own board to hide evidence that would work. Another thing, your board frys. You loose all your data. I don't know how many times in my line of work I have had to replace a mother board and make sure the data from the old drive survived.
or is it just and access "key"?
So if you're standing around with a group of your radio buddies, your beeper/phone goes off and it's your wife. Not only do all your buddies get to here about what kind of a bastard you are, any one else who can understand morse code in audio range can here about how she's leaving you for Steve.
Talk about your nightmare.
Here's an idea, the RIAA can work with the justice department, SCO, Direct TV, and the MPA to setup a P2P lawsuit sharing suite!
It would contain the bank account information of everyone in America. When an account appears with substantial funds, one of the organizations investigates the individual for any copywrite infringements, Linux use, or the purchase of a smart card writer. If any of the criteria come up postive, they mark the individual for each transgression. The justice department then transfer funds automaticaly and without warning from the transgressors bank account to the victimized group.
All parties involved (except for the justice department) would supply programs and employees to scour the bank account data and the other file sharing networks, and connect the two together.
thats accurate, 2D is cheaper than 3D, at least in engine development. It can be cheaper to hack together a 3D game on a pre-exsisting engine than it is to develop a grand 2D game from the ground up, but there are 2D engines to. I was just being a smart ass about old games being ported.
Many orders of magnitude less to write? Not necessarily, they were just written a long time ago. Seems to me about 1/2 the GBAs library is ported old games from the NES, SNES and Genesis. Not that this is a bad thing, they were good games to begin with, the only thing the GBA is lacking is the X and Y buttons.
At least the game library expands rapidly with games STILL worth playing.
I considered posting this anonymously, but I really do apprechiate your view and didn't want to hide that.
I don't see where we disagreed all that much, we're just looking down the road from slightly different vantage points.