No operating system overhead? And what do you think the xbox does, force every game to write their own OS? Don't kid yourself, the XBOX has a full OS.
Fine, so the C3 isn't incredibly fast. I didn't claim it was (Only that I thought there was a chance that it was faster than the XBOX's CPU, and it isn't THAT far off).
My original point stands though, the C3 has way more than enough power to emulate any 16-bit platform.
The nano-ITX mobo comes with (up to) a 1GHz Via C3. It might even be faster than the Xbox's 733MHz P3. I doubt it would have any trouble with any 16-bit consoles. As I said, you're not going to do PSX or N64 emulation due to the lack of 3D hardware, but anything 2D should be emulated just fine.
nano-ITX motherboards aren't uselessly slow, just not up to modern (Pentium-M) equivalents. But you're getting a 12 cm by 12 cm motherboard, so 1GHz and a 1GB SODIMM is pretty damned nice for something a lot smaller than a Mac Mini.
A lack of support for a platform that doesn't currently exist in retail isn't exactly a big deal. Besides, Rosetta (a rebranded version of Transitive's incredibly impressive QuickTransit emulator) has made big gains over the past few months, and it isn't even out in retail yet.
Sure, some apps are not going to run incredibly well under Rosetta, but when you consider that we're talking about going from a slow single-core G4 (first Mactels will be notebooks, it seems) to a speedy dual-core Yonah, I think that the immense performance increase in raw processing power will help offset some of the slowdown due to the emulation. And the emulation results I saw were already impressive BEFORE Rosetta got any improvements, and that was on a single-core P4.
I've used both. IE4 was way better than NS4. NS4 was just a horrible, horrible browser that I am doing my best to forget. That was what originally put me off of the Mozilla suite, I couldn't get past the default NS4 skin, even if it was easy to change.
The problem is that the XBOX is just a tad larger than a nano-itx machine;)
The goal of my, errm, fantasy, was to create as small an emulation box as possible. With a nano-itx motherboard (Still difficult to obtain as they have only just now entered limited availability in Japan), you could create an emulation box that is fanless and actually much smaller than a Mac Mini (Mac Mini is 16.5cm wide/deep, nano-itx mobos are 12cm).
The xbox, while certainly more capable (and cheaper), is much larger and noisier.
On the other hand, making a sleek enough case for a nano-itx mobo would be the tough part, since no cases exist at present.
Still, I do understand your point about the xbox. The thing is great for stuff like that. It is just that it was my fantasy, so I fantasized about the tiniest solution I could think of that could handle it:P
I have to agree. The IGN article puts down emulated NES gaming as being incompatible and buggy. This couldn't be further from the truth. NES (and even SNES) emulation has been under development for so long that it is, in my opinion, pretty close to flawless.
I'd rather build my own NES out of a mini-itx/nano-itx/other sufficiently small device. Throw in a cheap 10 or 20 gig 2.5" hard drive for all the ROMs, and a few SmartJoy adapters (that allow the use of classic console controllers via USB), plug it into a TV, and you'd have a much more powerful system. Sure, it'd be more expensive, but wouldn't it be so much more cool to have such a tiny box able to play so many thousands of games at full speed with incredible accuracy?
You could even write a nice menu system to run on boot to choose between emulators and games, making the machine seem more like a remade console. Perhaps run something like 98lite/xplite/minimal linux in order to speed up boot times. Something like XP modded to always use hibernation to shut down would be pretty fast to boot. Though with Linux you could completely customize the boot process to look less like a PC.
I long ago became convinced that the US doesn't actually have a government, but instead is run by a series of competing corporations.
Is the US government so horribly corrupt that it cannot be saved? We're not talking about a third world country here, though with the number of bribe-backed bills being submitted (and passed into law!!) it is getting harder and harder to tell.
I take issue with this comment: "used by Sony BMG to thwart illegal copying of music on CDs"
Since when was it illegal to copy a music CD to put it on ones iPod? Doing so with regular music CDs doesn't violate the DMCA since there is no protection circumvention or reverse engineering going on, so this SHOULD still be legal in the US.
Of course, IANAA (I Am Not An American), so I may have it wrong.
Well, as I said, my sympathy only vanished when I read they were bundling the things with pirated games. If they were just modding the things and nothing else, I'd have no objections. If nothing else, Xbox Media Center is reason alone for a modded xbox. But they obviously weren't modding these things to be used for Limux and XBMC.
Killing off Windows gaming would be quite a blow, but it would hardly kill off PC gaming. It would just change it.
One possible outcome is that it would drive a good number of gamers over to Linux, which works with their existing hardware. Yes, the Linux gaming landscape isn't as good as Windows, but it IS a viable game platform. Somebody might even produce a gaming-specific Linux distro that comes bundled with Cedega, a huge number of gaming-related drivers, a specialized X interface designed to simply launch and install games, and a boot CD that seamlessly turned any Windows PC into a dual-boot box.
A more likely outcome would simply be that the PC gaming industry would be driven indy save for a very small number of larger developers that continue to maintain Linux ports of console games.
Either way it would drive forward the adoption of Linux. And the gaming-oriented Linux distro isn't such a bad idea even for today. Replace dual-booting with Windows with dual-booting with Linux and you could have a very easy way to set up any Linux box for gaming.
Things may work differently in Slovenia, where Sloncek is based. As much as it pains some people, the US legal system is thankfully irrelevant outside the US:)
I was also going to post a similar expression of disgust, until I read this:
During the investigation, undercover agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement paid $265 to have a modification chip, a hard drive and 77 pirated games installed on an Xbox, according to the criminal complaint."
Google shows AdWords advertisements on google.com, same as AdSense. The advertisements are essentially AdSense with a different format. This isn't really very big news.
The problem with your entire argument is that Microsoft is taking the opposite stance. Bill Gates has said that he has neglected PC gaming and intends to change that. Microsoft's XNA (Microsoft's game development platform used first in the XBOX360) is designed to make it easier to promote cross-platform games that are easy to port to PC or vice versa.
PC sales aren't slumping either. They're growing. Laptops are starting to take over more and more of the market, and gaming capabilities in laptops are becomming increasingly important.
In short, I don't think you've thought this through.
Which bugs me. Video decoding and encoding acceleration should be possible on older cards by using the GPU as a math coprocessor. Video postprocessing or decoding effects could easily be accelerated by older cards, or done in software.
I don't think that sort of fixed image functionality would be any cheaper than existing fixed-image LCDs like you describe. I know that fixed-image LCDs cost less than ePaper, since somebody priced the parts in such a toy and came up with 25 cents for the whole toy, not just the LCD. The ePaper would be a bit thinner, though. Not sure if that would matter all that much in practice.
The SWG NGE is also a desperate last-ditch effort to save a dying game, keep that in mind. I highly doubt that it can take the game from dying to millions of customers, especially after they drove away all the core fans that used to play the game. I think that, if anything, it will only hasten the death of SWG. And I've never even played the game, so it isn't like I'm biased against the NGE off the bat.
The game-and-watch type LCD screens can only display fixed images. ePaper has a grid of pixels, and can therefore display arbitrary images much like a computer screen. There are orders of magnitude more complexity there. Imagine one sheet of ePaper that could display every page in a news paper, versus a fixed LCD like the Game And Watch that could only display one page. That's the difference here.
I don't think their products would fly off the shelves. I think people would tend to the much cheaper non-enhanced boxes, since the cereal inside would be the same.
Remember that supermarkets don't lose money manufacturing generic brand cereal, increasing the price of premium brand only increases the incentive to buy the generic equivalent;)
Personally, I find the local generic Lucky Charms brand identical in every single respect to the real thing, and I don't bother buying actual Lucky Charms anymore, when I do.
Would not that method require storing locational data for the pixels? Or would you use run-length encoding? Locational data would be a killer, considering that the location information would be several times the size of a one-bit pixel. RLE might work, because by only storing the pixels that differ from the shared regions you'd be increasing the number of zero-pixels.
Sigh, look past the number. If somebody steals a hundred CDs worth a thousand dollars, does THAT justify society paying tens of thousands of dollars in prison costs? I don't think so. Society should be paying the burden of somebody elses's digital piracy. Prison should be used to keep dangerous or violent people off the street, not punish somebody for downloading ones and zeros onto their computer. Restitution can be made in a way that doesn't harm society more than the crime.
Because face it, prison costs do more damage to society than any damage the crime caused, in this case.
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No operating system overhead? And what do you think the xbox does, force every game to write their own OS? Don't kid yourself, the XBOX has a full OS.
Fine, so the C3 isn't incredibly fast. I didn't claim it was (Only that I thought there was a chance that it was faster than the XBOX's CPU, and it isn't THAT far off).
My original point stands though, the C3 has way more than enough power to emulate any 16-bit platform.
Both Opera and Firefox support SVG natively out of the box. That is as much as the market as you're going to get without IE stepping up with support.
But then programs like PowerFPU were available that emulated the 040's FPU at near realtime speeds by doing the math on the PowerPC's FPU.
. com/softmacos.html
SoftFPU and PowerFPU are actually still available via the wayback machine (It cached the actual downloads):
http://web.archive.org/web/20020602022733/www.jna
The nano-ITX mobo comes with (up to) a 1GHz Via C3. It might even be faster than the Xbox's 733MHz P3. I doubt it would have any trouble with any 16-bit consoles. As I said, you're not going to do PSX or N64 emulation due to the lack of 3D hardware, but anything 2D should be emulated just fine.
nano-ITX motherboards aren't uselessly slow, just not up to modern (Pentium-M) equivalents. But you're getting a 12 cm by 12 cm motherboard, so 1GHz and a 1GB SODIMM is pretty damned nice for something a lot smaller than a Mac Mini.
A lack of support for a platform that doesn't currently exist in retail isn't exactly a big deal. Besides, Rosetta (a rebranded version of Transitive's incredibly impressive QuickTransit emulator) has made big gains over the past few months, and it isn't even out in retail yet.
Sure, some apps are not going to run incredibly well under Rosetta, but when you consider that we're talking about going from a slow single-core G4 (first Mactels will be notebooks, it seems) to a speedy dual-core Yonah, I think that the immense performance increase in raw processing power will help offset some of the slowdown due to the emulation. And the emulation results I saw were already impressive BEFORE Rosetta got any improvements, and that was on a single-core P4.
I've used both. IE4 was way better than NS4. NS4 was just a horrible, horrible browser that I am doing my best to forget. That was what originally put me off of the Mozilla suite, I couldn't get past the default NS4 skin, even if it was easy to change.
The problem is that the XBOX is just a tad larger than a nano-itx machine ;)
:P
The goal of my, errm, fantasy, was to create as small an emulation box as possible. With a nano-itx motherboard (Still difficult to obtain as they have only just now entered limited availability in Japan), you could create an emulation box that is fanless and actually much smaller than a Mac Mini (Mac Mini is 16.5cm wide/deep, nano-itx mobos are 12cm).
The xbox, while certainly more capable (and cheaper), is much larger and noisier.
On the other hand, making a sleek enough case for a nano-itx mobo would be the tough part, since no cases exist at present.
Still, I do understand your point about the xbox. The thing is great for stuff like that. It is just that it was my fantasy, so I fantasized about the tiniest solution I could think of that could handle it
I have to agree. The IGN article puts down emulated NES gaming as being incompatible and buggy. This couldn't be further from the truth. NES (and even SNES) emulation has been under development for so long that it is, in my opinion, pretty close to flawless.
I'd rather build my own NES out of a mini-itx/nano-itx/other sufficiently small device. Throw in a cheap 10 or 20 gig 2.5" hard drive for all the ROMs, and a few SmartJoy adapters (that allow the use of classic console controllers via USB), plug it into a TV, and you'd have a much more powerful system. Sure, it'd be more expensive, but wouldn't it be so much more cool to have such a tiny box able to play so many thousands of games at full speed with incredible accuracy?
You could even write a nice menu system to run on boot to choose between emulators and games, making the machine seem more like a remade console. Perhaps run something like 98lite/xplite/minimal linux in order to speed up boot times. Something like XP modded to always use hibernation to shut down would be pretty fast to boot. Though with Linux you could completely customize the boot process to look less like a PC.
I long ago became convinced that the US doesn't actually have a government, but instead is run by a series of competing corporations.
Is the US government so horribly corrupt that it cannot be saved? We're not talking about a third world country here, though with the number of bribe-backed bills being submitted (and passed into law!!) it is getting harder and harder to tell.
I take issue with this comment: "used by Sony BMG to thwart illegal copying of music on CDs"
Since when was it illegal to copy a music CD to put it on ones iPod? Doing so with regular music CDs doesn't violate the DMCA since there is no protection circumvention or reverse engineering going on, so this SHOULD still be legal in the US.
Of course, IANAA (I Am Not An American), so I may have it wrong.
Well, as I said, my sympathy only vanished when I read they were bundling the things with pirated games. If they were just modding the things and nothing else, I'd have no objections. If nothing else, Xbox Media Center is reason alone for a modded xbox. But they obviously weren't modding these things to be used for Limux and XBMC.
Killing off Windows gaming would be quite a blow, but it would hardly kill off PC gaming. It would just change it.
One possible outcome is that it would drive a good number of gamers over to Linux, which works with their existing hardware. Yes, the Linux gaming landscape isn't as good as Windows, but it IS a viable game platform. Somebody might even produce a gaming-specific Linux distro that comes bundled with Cedega, a huge number of gaming-related drivers, a specialized X interface designed to simply launch and install games, and a boot CD that seamlessly turned any Windows PC into a dual-boot box.
A more likely outcome would simply be that the PC gaming industry would be driven indy save for a very small number of larger developers that continue to maintain Linux ports of console games.
Either way it would drive forward the adoption of Linux. And the gaming-oriented Linux distro isn't such a bad idea even for today. Replace dual-booting with Windows with dual-booting with Linux and you could have a very easy way to set up any Linux box for gaming.
Things may work differently in Slovenia, where Sloncek is based. As much as it pains some people, the US legal system is thankfully irrelevant outside the US :)
I was also going to post a similar expression of disgust, until I read this:
During the investigation, undercover agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement paid $265 to have a modification chip, a hard drive and 77 pirated games installed on an Xbox, according to the criminal complaint."
No sympathy, then.
Google shows AdWords advertisements on google.com, same as AdSense. The advertisements are essentially AdSense with a different format. This isn't really very big news.
The problem with your entire argument is that Microsoft is taking the opposite stance. Bill Gates has said that he has neglected PC gaming and intends to change that. Microsoft's XNA (Microsoft's game development platform used first in the XBOX360) is designed to make it easier to promote cross-platform games that are easy to port to PC or vice versa.
PC sales aren't slumping either. They're growing. Laptops are starting to take over more and more of the market, and gaming capabilities in laptops are becomming increasingly important.
In short, I don't think you've thought this through.
Which bugs me. Video decoding and encoding acceleration should be possible on older cards by using the GPU as a math coprocessor. Video postprocessing or decoding effects could easily be accelerated by older cards, or done in software.
You need the Mobility Modder, which allows the Catalyst drivers to install on notebooks.
Alternatively check if ATI's Catalyst Mobility drivers, designed specifically for notebooks, supports your brand of notebook.
"No, sorry, i lost your point. what was it? and who modded you insightful?"
Somebody who actually did get my point, which was that complaining about the name was annoyingly silly and pointless.
I don't think that sort of fixed image functionality would be any cheaper than existing fixed-image LCDs like you describe. I know that fixed-image LCDs cost less than ePaper, since somebody priced the parts in such a toy and came up with 25 cents for the whole toy, not just the LCD. The ePaper would be a bit thinner, though. Not sure if that would matter all that much in practice.
The SWG NGE is also a desperate last-ditch effort to save a dying game, keep that in mind. I highly doubt that it can take the game from dying to millions of customers, especially after they drove away all the core fans that used to play the game. I think that, if anything, it will only hasten the death of SWG. And I've never even played the game, so it isn't like I'm biased against the NGE off the bat.
The game-and-watch type LCD screens can only display fixed images. ePaper has a grid of pixels, and can therefore display arbitrary images much like a computer screen. There are orders of magnitude more complexity there. Imagine one sheet of ePaper that could display every page in a news paper, versus a fixed LCD like the Game And Watch that could only display one page. That's the difference here.
I don't think their products would fly off the shelves. I think people would tend to the much cheaper non-enhanced boxes, since the cereal inside would be the same.
;)
Remember that supermarkets don't lose money manufacturing generic brand cereal, increasing the price of premium brand only increases the incentive to buy the generic equivalent
Personally, I find the local generic Lucky Charms brand identical in every single respect to the real thing, and I don't bother buying actual Lucky Charms anymore, when I do.
Would not that method require storing locational data for the pixels? Or would you use run-length encoding? Locational data would be a killer, considering that the location information would be several times the size of a one-bit pixel. RLE might work, because by only storing the pixels that differ from the shared regions you'd be increasing the number of zero-pixels.
Sigh, look past the number. If somebody steals a hundred CDs worth a thousand dollars, does THAT justify society paying tens of thousands of dollars in prison costs? I don't think so. Society should be paying the burden of somebody elses's digital piracy. Prison should be used to keep dangerous or violent people off the street, not punish somebody for downloading ones and zeros onto their computer. Restitution can be made in a way that doesn't harm society more than the crime.
Because face it, prison costs do more damage to society than any damage the crime caused, in this case.