I am in the same camp as you, two years ago I decided to leave the upgrade cycle and went for a mac and a console.
Now I am on a dual core mac mini which also will replace my old pc for legacy gaming and a Nintendo DS and could not be happier.
Overall the costs are pretty much the same as on the wintel camp, but the time I spend configuring the machine is way less.
It is bullshit, all a stack computer basically does is to shift the register based ops back into the stack pointer domain, there is not too much to win there except the processors become somewhat simpler. The code itself in fact becomes even somewhat larger due to more excessive stack operations.
Many VMs nowadays use stack machines in their core processing (java,.net, lisp etc...) the reason for this is that those machines map easier to many processor architectures than a vm which uses lots of registers.
against its own success on that console, besides the technical issues is the constant war against homebrewers. Many people simply have bought that thing for homebrew and emulation, and now shun to buy new games due to enforced firmware upgrades which would lock them out of the homebrew stuff.
If sony was wise, they would work on a scheme which would push the homebrewers into a legal domain without sacrificing their own business model (provide an update secure sandbox for the homebrewers on the hardware side)
but we are speaking of Sony here.
The emissions are partially caused by using oil based Diesel, if you run on fry fat or vegetable oils the issue is entirely different.
Anyway in Europe the entire emission problem has been tackled in the newer generation of Diesel cars (post 1995) very successfully by applying catalysator filters for particle filtering etc... besides that the current generation of diesel motors is at the same level of gasoline per kilometer as hybrid cars.
(I am running an 1995 Audi A6 which runs on 4-6 liters per 100km)
Mercedes and Audi are the biggest propagators of this technology...
As for the fry fat, vegetable oil etc... it is not a mass market solution due to the fact of not having enough growing area, but in the end to get rid of the massive oil dependency we need a combined approach probably.
I think in the medium run we will se hibrid fuels which cut down on the percentage of natural oil, by substitution parts of it with fry fat, grease etc... until real alternatives are found, only a certain percentage will use altered engines which run entirely on fry fat (like a handful of people do over here)
But Cedega used to be a big pile of problematic software.
The problem is that some games run really well (mostly a handful of the top 10)
but most of them just run, with occasional hangs lots of graphical glitches etc...
I dont think the mac version will be better, because the problems are not Cedegas but
the system itself is broken by design.
In the long run it probably it is better just to dual boot, or wait for parallels
to add a decent 3d passthrough layer to their VM, thank to wait for Cedega to be
able to run your favorite game.
not the fuel itself but its engines, normal diesel engines with slight alterations can run on grease, fry fat, and a lot of other natural substances, why this potential has not been tapped more is beyound me.
The IMDB is not really a good reference for such statistics
because most people simply do not know the early movies anymore,
you will find hardly any voter, who knows the 1929 version of Nosferatu
which still is one of the main references for modern vampire or generally horror
movies, you also will not find many who know the 1975 Werner Herzog Remake, which
qualitywise definitely belongs onto the list.
While movies like Star Wars Episode 1,2,3 are arguable some of the worst movies
ever made but you still can find them there.
Such best of movies lists are highly dubious due to various reasons, the main one
that most voters of such lists have a very limited scope of what has been done
outside of there teen years/20s...
Get out of american tv for a while, only galactica really is worth watching, while on the other hand lately a lot of excellent tv shows come from england. Starting with the probably best sitcom ever, Coupling (not the US garbage version but the really good english one), add to that the latest Dr. Who incarnation and its follow up series, also add to that Ultraviolet, probably one of the best Vampire series ever made.
I recently went to a film festival of young european directors, and what I saw there blew lots of professional stuff easily away.
One of the movies which gave me one of the biggest impressions was Zamedi/13, one of the best movies I have seen in the recent past (partially thriller/horror themed), you really have to look outside of the box, there is lots of talent there probably never to be discovered blowing most of the plastic garbage from hollywood away easily.
You know the main problem is not the writers, there are a load of very good writers, it is more the people who chose the scripts.
There used to be an excellent script for I robot, before Hollywood execs wanted to make a blockbuster out of it.
I Robot ended up as utter garbage and not a single line of the original script survived.
(The original script was done by a well known sci fi author/script writer, the final script
was done by the drones the beancounters hired to make a blockbuster out of it)
You see where the problem really is...
Good question, I am running currently on a dual core and can see situations where 4 cores would make sense
(especially when parallels and a video software are plugging at least 1.5 cores)
I think the main performance problem in the immediate future will be less processor speed
but more the speed bumps you get from massive parallel disk io, which will be a huge issue.
But I do not think 8 cores do not make sense in the long future, especially now that lots of desktop apps
will moved towards a more parallel domain to get speed gains from the better threading multicores provide.
The funny thing is, that the desktop now follows the same model most server applications have been
following for years now, with massiv parallelism. I think also the same tools, mainly vm based languages,
with good garbage collection and a good threading api will be applied on the client in the long run as well
to keep things manageable.
You bring it to the point, the only really interesting thing on the PSP is homebrew stuff and Sony tries to prevent these things to happen by enforcing firmware updates for newer games.
So every psp owner has to face the fact, either homebrew or commercial games, now many of those buyers simply stick with homebrew, which means a sure loss for sony, because it cannot sell newer games to this demographic.
Only two things have prevented those people to switch to the DS which is way friendlier with homebrew (as of now only a plugin module on the top and an sd adapter on the bottom is needed), those two missing things are a snes emulator which works well and a mame port. Once this is done, you can say goodbye to the PSP as preferred homebrew choice. Sony with its own stupidity of shooting itself into the foot will take care of the rest.
Are you from Sonys marketing department? All I can see is a bullshit bingo. Sony really has to be careful that they do not ride another betamax, minidisk, dat name whatever proprietary format from them you like...
In the end the stuation will be that we will have dual players, but no standard will take over in the initial years, simply due to the stupidity of sony of pulling off yet another proprietary format no one needs, and then saying "suck it bitch" to its consumers over and over via the PS3 press releases the last months (I havent seen such a huge pr desaster in years).
Neither format will take over any time soon, Sony hops Blue Ray will with the PS3, but they outpriced themselves.
I am hardcore enough, with having played many Ultimas having been into gaming since 1980 having played a lot mainstream titles over the years, having played most Lucasarts adventures. Yet I love some of the simplistic stuff on the DS, like Wario Touch. It is a different kind of gaming which I could enjoy on early consoles and which died out over the years.
That does not mean I do not like deep long running games, but both types of games have their pros and cons.
Wrong my friend, first the PIII in the xbox is a heavily castrated design with a smaller cache, secondly do not underestimate the PowerPC design, it took intel ages (Until in fact the pentium-m) to have comparable speeds per clock to the power pc designs.
In fact I am not sure if the powerpc in the nintendo is not faster than the celeron in the original x-box.
The main problem with the Grim Fandango and even worse with Monkey Island 4 was, that they tried to shoehorn an analog dual gamepad control into a mouse keyboard interface.
With both adventures it was clear that the controls were made for the console generation of its time, but never were ported to those machines.
When I started Grim I just asked myself WTF were they thinking, the game easly would have worked 1o times better with a normal point and click interface even with the same graphics.
It is the quality of the game that Grim could survive this control onslaught and still becoming a classic (grim fandango in my opinion is one of the best works of lucasarts story and puzzlewise) but the mediocre Monkey Island 4 could not.
Both games could have worked without any reworking of the graphics as point and click games, I still shudder on the thought on what they were thinking pushing this dreadful interface into more than one game.
Actually also recommendable from the homebrew site, is the DS scummvm port, this thing is close to perfect to play the old lucasarts adventure games, lower screen touchpad point and click upper screen automatic closeup of your characters position.
Nintendo DS, this platform already within the last months has had two higly successful adventure game releases
one being Phoenix Wright
the other one Another Code by Cing. The next one, Hotel Dusk already is in the line, adventure games fit perfectly into the lineup of the machine, which also has a very high emphasis on adult puzzle games like Dr. Kawashis Brain Jogging,and also the stylus is a perfect blend to point and click mechanisms.
Toplink also has been there fore ages (92 or 93), the patent is not worth the toilet paper it was written on, and as usual the USPTO has proven not to have any knowledge of the fields it grants patents on.
You have to think differently, those 600 dollars are spent, but if this system is the same as in Europe those 600 dollars are subsidized by the phone companies by extending the contract binding another 1-2 years.
Over here in europe most people have brand new phones, due to the fact that they do not pay for them directly or only a small amount of cash, but by extending their contract bindings.
Nah, Sony managed to do that all by itself, Microsoft in this case is innocent. But I somehow get the feeling that this guy has a problem or has a problem with his employer, every smoke he has blowing so far was worse for his employer.
Ahem that is the biggest false myths in history of gaming that doom was the first game to do 3d well. Looking Glass deserves the credit. The Ultima Underworlds were released even before Wolfenstein 3d, had doom like graphics (even full peudo 3d, with pits you could walk in), a physics engine and full environmental interaction and npcs wandering around.
In fact ID software got the idea of its 3d engine for wolf3d when they saw an early beta of the first underworld game at a games con...
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I am in the same camp as you, two years ago I decided to leave the upgrade cycle and went for a mac and a console. Now I am on a dual core mac mini which also will replace my old pc for legacy gaming and a Nintendo DS and could not be happier. Overall the costs are pretty much the same as on the wintel camp, but the time I spend configuring the machine is way less.
It is bullshit, all a stack computer basically does is to shift the register based ops back into the stack pointer domain, there is not too much to win there except the processors become somewhat simpler. The code itself in fact becomes even somewhat larger due to more excessive stack operations. Many VMs nowadays use stack machines in their core processing (java, .net, lisp etc...) the reason for this is that those machines map easier to many processor architectures than a vm which uses lots of registers.
against its own success on that console, besides the technical issues is the constant war against homebrewers. Many people simply have bought that thing for homebrew and emulation, and now shun to buy new games due to enforced firmware upgrades which would lock them out of the homebrew stuff. If sony was wise, they would work on a scheme which would push the homebrewers into a legal domain without sacrificing their own business model (provide an update secure sandbox for the homebrewers on the hardware side) but we are speaking of Sony here.
The emissions are partially caused by using oil based Diesel, if you run on fry fat or vegetable oils the issue is entirely different. Anyway in Europe the entire emission problem has been tackled in the newer generation of Diesel cars (post 1995) very successfully by applying catalysator filters for particle filtering etc... besides that the current generation of diesel motors is at the same level of gasoline per kilometer as hybrid cars. (I am running an 1995 Audi A6 which runs on 4-6 liters per 100km) Mercedes and Audi are the biggest propagators of this technology... As for the fry fat, vegetable oil etc... it is not a mass market solution due to the fact of not having enough growing area, but in the end to get rid of the massive oil dependency we need a combined approach probably. I think in the medium run we will se hibrid fuels which cut down on the percentage of natural oil, by substitution parts of it with fry fat, grease etc... until real alternatives are found, only a certain percentage will use altered engines which run entirely on fry fat (like a handful of people do over here)
But Cedega used to be a big pile of problematic software. The problem is that some games run really well (mostly a handful of the top 10) but most of them just run, with occasional hangs lots of graphical glitches etc... I dont think the mac version will be better, because the problems are not Cedegas but the system itself is broken by design. In the long run it probably it is better just to dual boot, or wait for parallels to add a decent 3d passthrough layer to their VM, thank to wait for Cedega to be able to run your favorite game.
There is one console doing this, it is called pc...
not the fuel itself but its engines, normal diesel engines with slight alterations can run on grease, fry fat, and a lot of other natural substances, why this potential has not been tapped more
is beyound me.
The IMDB is not really a good reference for such statistics because most people simply do not know the early movies anymore, you will find hardly any voter, who knows the 1929 version of Nosferatu which still is one of the main references for modern vampire or generally horror movies, you also will not find many who know the 1975 Werner Herzog Remake, which qualitywise definitely belongs onto the list. While movies like Star Wars Episode 1,2,3 are arguable some of the worst movies ever made but you still can find them there. Such best of movies lists are highly dubious due to various reasons, the main one that most voters of such lists have a very limited scope of what has been done outside of there teen years/20s...
Get out of american tv for a while, only galactica really is worth watching, while on the other hand lately a lot of excellent tv shows come from england. Starting with the probably best sitcom ever, Coupling (not the US garbage version but the really good english one), add to that the latest Dr. Who incarnation and its follow up series, also add to that Ultraviolet, probably one of the best Vampire series ever made.
I recently went to a film festival of young european directors, and what I saw there blew lots of professional stuff easily away. One of the movies which gave me one of the biggest impressions was Zamedi/13, one of the best movies I have seen in the recent past (partially thriller/horror themed), you really have to look outside of the box, there is lots of talent there probably never to be discovered blowing most of the plastic garbage from hollywood away easily.
You know the main problem is not the writers, there are a load of very good writers, it is more the people who chose the scripts. There used to be an excellent script for I robot, before Hollywood execs wanted to make a blockbuster out of it. I Robot ended up as utter garbage and not a single line of the original script survived. (The original script was done by a well known sci fi author/script writer, the final script was done by the drones the beancounters hired to make a blockbuster out of it) You see where the problem really is...
Good question, I am running currently on a dual core and can see situations where 4 cores would make sense (especially when parallels and a video software are plugging at least 1.5 cores) I think the main performance problem in the immediate future will be less processor speed but more the speed bumps you get from massive parallel disk io, which will be a huge issue. But I do not think 8 cores do not make sense in the long future, especially now that lots of desktop apps will moved towards a more parallel domain to get speed gains from the better threading multicores provide. The funny thing is, that the desktop now follows the same model most server applications have been following for years now, with massiv parallelism. I think also the same tools, mainly vm based languages, with good garbage collection and a good threading api will be applied on the client in the long run as well to keep things manageable.
The price difference in Europe is roughly 100 dollars, so go figure where the sales difference comes from :-)
You bring it to the point, the only really interesting thing on the PSP is homebrew stuff and Sony tries to prevent these things to happen by enforcing firmware updates for newer games. So every psp owner has to face the fact, either homebrew or commercial games, now many of those buyers simply stick with homebrew, which means a sure loss for sony, because it cannot sell newer games to this demographic. Only two things have prevented those people to switch to the DS which is way friendlier with homebrew (as of now only a plugin module on the top and an sd adapter on the bottom is needed), those two missing things are a snes emulator which works well and a mame port. Once this is done, you can say goodbye to the PSP as preferred homebrew choice. Sony with its own stupidity of shooting itself into the foot will take care of the rest.
Are you from Sonys marketing department? All I can see is a bullshit bingo. Sony really has to be careful that they do not ride another betamax, minidisk, dat name whatever proprietary format from them you like... In the end the stuation will be that we will have dual players, but no standard will take over in the initial years, simply due to the stupidity of sony of pulling off yet another proprietary format no one needs, and then saying "suck it bitch" to its consumers over and over via the PS3 press releases the last months (I havent seen such a huge pr desaster in years). Neither format will take over any time soon, Sony hops Blue Ray will with the PS3, but they outpriced themselves.
I am hardcore enough, with having played many Ultimas having been into gaming since 1980 having played a lot mainstream titles over the years, having played most Lucasarts adventures. Yet I love some of the simplistic stuff on the DS, like Wario Touch. It is a different kind of gaming which I could enjoy on early consoles and which died out over the years. That does not mean I do not like deep long running games, but both types of games have their pros and cons.
Wrong my friend, first the PIII in the xbox is a heavily castrated design with a smaller cache, secondly do not underestimate the PowerPC design, it took intel ages (Until in fact the pentium-m) to have comparable speeds per clock to the power pc designs. In fact I am not sure if the powerpc in the nintendo is not faster than the celeron in the original x-box.
The main problem with the Grim Fandango and even worse with Monkey Island 4 was, that they tried to shoehorn an analog dual gamepad control into a mouse keyboard interface. With both adventures it was clear that the controls were made for the console generation of its time, but never were ported to those machines. When I started Grim I just asked myself WTF were they thinking, the game easly would have worked 1o times better with a normal point and click interface even with the same graphics. It is the quality of the game that Grim could survive this control onslaught and still becoming a classic (grim fandango in my opinion is one of the best works of lucasarts story and puzzlewise) but the mediocre Monkey Island 4 could not. Both games could have worked without any reworking of the graphics as point and click games, I still shudder on the thought on what they were thinking pushing this dreadful interface into more than one game.
Actually also recommendable from the homebrew site, is the DS scummvm port, this thing is close to perfect to play the old lucasarts adventure games, lower screen touchpad point and click upper screen automatic closeup of your characters position.
Nintendo DS, this platform already within the last months has had two higly successful adventure game releases one being Phoenix Wright the other one Another Code by Cing. The next one, Hotel Dusk already is in the line, adventure games fit perfectly into the lineup of the machine, which also has a very high emphasis on adult puzzle games like Dr. Kawashis Brain Jogging,and also the stylus is a perfect blend to point and click mechanisms.
Toplink also has been there fore ages (92 or 93), the patent is not worth the toilet paper it was written on, and as usual the USPTO has proven not to have any knowledge of the fields it grants patents on.
You have to think differently, those 600 dollars are spent, but if this system is the same as in Europe those 600 dollars are subsidized by the phone companies by extending the contract binding another 1-2 years. Over here in europe most people have brand new phones, due to the fact that they do not pay for them directly or only a small amount of cash, but by extending their contract bindings.
Nah, Sony managed to do that all by itself, Microsoft in this case is innocent. But I somehow get the feeling that this guy has a problem or has a problem with his employer, every smoke he has blowing so far was worse for his employer.
A commodore hat a better bang for the buck, it basically was a full blown pc...
Ahem that is the biggest false myths in history of gaming that doom was the first game to do 3d well. Looking Glass deserves the credit. The Ultima Underworlds were released even before Wolfenstein 3d, had doom like graphics (even full peudo 3d, with pits you could walk in), a physics engine and full environmental interaction and npcs wandering around. In fact ID software got the idea of its 3d engine for wolf3d when they saw an early beta of the first underworld game at a games con...