There seems to be an ongoing obsession by the media and the vaporious "Video iPod". For the past 4 years the media has been claiming that a video iPod is just around the corner, and every time word leaks that Apple is about to make an iPod related announcement, the media starts reporting that it is without a doubt a Video iPod.
I think it is time for the media (and public) to realize that the Video iPod ISN'T just around the corner, and that it may not be available for years yet, if ever.
I don't think a video iPod is a bad idea, it's just sad that the media is in a perpetual "Video iPod coming soon!" frame of mind.
Not going to come out (if it ever does) in time to matter for the PS3.
Slashdot's title is very misleading. Their title:
"Advent Children Director Wants To Redo FFVII"
What was actually said was more along the lines of "A remake would be neat, but is impossible anytime soon since his schedule is too full, and there is no time."
Why do they have to do all that? Is there really any reason they can't just re-implement the game?
Think about it like this; start with a straight port, meaning the exact same 2D textures and low-poly 3D models on the PS3. Then replace all the models with 3D ones, and textures (tilemaps) with 3D scenery. Replace all the special effects with nice pixel shaders, throw in some new effects where it wasn't possible before, and you now have a new game, identical in every way but media, which is vastly improved.
Now imagine them doing that directly; designing the new game from the ground up with the new technology, but scene-for-scene identical to the old one. In other words, same game, new graphics.
802.11g is, in nearly every case, fast enough for simple internet sharing. Very few people have broadband faster than 10mbit, and multiple people using that internet connection are sharing it anyhow, so you're fine. For streaming video, it depends what you are streaming and to how many devices. DVDs are, IIRC, something like 7 or 8 megabits. Assuming there is some distance between the AP and device receiving the stream, you could only really do one stream at a time on an 802.11g network. Unless we're talking MPEG-4, then you can probably make do with 1 or 2 megabits.
I was under the impression that most of the wasted bandwidth on wireless networks is from collisions and transmission errors. Assuming that efficiency of modulation is also a major factor, would it not stand to reason that when you take 240mbit and then take into account collisions, transmission errors, overhead, and the shared bandwidth nature, you're still going to get a real-world throughput of significantly less than 100mbit?
Current 802.11g devices have a theoretical throughput of 54mbit, and a real-world throughput of actual data of 10 to 20mbit. So it follows that Airgo's new cards will permit 40 to 80 megabits.
Now, wired 100mbit networks can reach 80mbit real-world speeds (Actual after-overhead bandwidth), so at first glance it looks like we're there. Except we're not.
The important things to keep in mind is that wireless networks behave like hubs, not switches, and on top of that all data must go through the access point. So if you have two computers close to an AP, you take up 40mbit for computer -> AP, and the other 40mbit for AP -> computer.
In other words, they claim 240mbit, but the fastest real-world transfer between two wireless devices is probably about 40mbit, IF those computers are very close to the access point. If the computers are a bit further away, you will get 20mbit. 4 computers doing 2 transfers and each transfer goes at 10mbit.
So you see? 4 computers 50 feet away and you're already down from 240mbit to 10mbit. This is very far away from wired performance.
Google's unreleased translator isn't based on simple word correlations; neither is the current translator for that matter. The current ones seem to be more phrase-correlation specific. As in it knows a bit about context, so that it knows "Suite à la publications" should be "Following the publications" instead of "Following at the publications". Because "à la" could directly translate to "at the" or "with the" or even "to the". So it does use a bit of context to correlate groups of words. It still seems to be fairly simplistic.
Google's new tool goes way beyond that though. As I understand it, it goes way deeper into taking context into account by comparing the use of a group of words in a sentence compared to uses in similar sentances. I think.
Language processing is still a million miles off, and analyzing a mountain of text is only a fraction of the solution.
Well, certainly Google's "Universal Translator" is a big step forward. The problem is, has anybody actually seen it in action? It looked amazing when announced, and a big deal was made over it. But nobody seems to have heard anything since. The only translation tools that Google has available are their "old" Google Language Tools, which isn't really much better than SysTran.
They can make it hard enough to do that you won't want to. Imagine if you had a game delivered through the Steam platform that loaded all data from encrypted GCF platforms, and continually changed code to prevent efforts from hooking in?
Yes, it would never be impossible to mod such a game, it would be too much trouble to bother.
ESRB remains concerned about third party modifications that undermine the accuracy of the original rating, and we are exploring ways to maintain the credibility of the rating system with consumers in light of modifications of this nature.
Since the only way to prevent a mod from affecting the rating of a game is to ban modding altogether, it looks to me like the ESRB wants to prevent modding. They might do this by automatically rating any game that supports mods with an AO rating.
This would be a huge blow against mods, and let's face it, mods drive a large portion of the game industry. Would anybody still be playing Half-Life 1 were it not for a few of the more popular mods released for it? HLDM and HL2DM only get you so far before mods take over as the dominant multiplayer experience.
For example, I loved The Spirits Within and thought it was a great movie. I enjoyed it both on a technological level, and on a storyline/execution level (I liked it as a movie) You're obviously implying that TSW was just hype, but to some people, myself included, it was more than hype, it was a good movie.
Be careful with your choice of words; not everybody hates every movie that you do.
Take a look at this and tell me why Google wouldn't do something similar for email?
I'm referring of course to the Google Mini (which powers Anandtech's search above) and the Google Search Appliance. For all we know Google might be persuaded to sign a deal to provide GMail services directly from Google's own network for the company's domain.
Or contact Google about licencing GMail. They've done this with their main product (search) with the Google Search Appliance and Google Mini. Google might be willing to allow his company to use GMail to handle their email domain, for the right price.
If Google themselves were providing the service from their own infrastructure, stability and scaling are already solved, plus it supports webmail and POP3. IMAP is missing, but if one were to secure a deal with Google that'd be a minor concern that could likely be solved.
That raises the cost of production significantly, and I doubt it would be more practical than simply storing the videos on the main card.
The entire StarCraft demo is 28MB compressed, and contains a heck of a lot. 64 to 96MB is way more than enough for the rest of the game if you're storing all the graphics and sound in compressed form and at one quarter resolution. The N64 version managed to fit the whole game into 32MB, if I remember one of the previous posts correctly. So certainly 64 to 96 megs for the DS version (which would be an even lower resolution than the N64 version) is plenty.
If you apply a clever trick, you can double the DS's effective resolution at the cost of some minor color fringing, which will help keep text readable even at smaller point sizes.
I'm familiar with sub pixel rendering, but I've never seen it used in a game on a handheld console (or any console for that matter). I was not only concerned about text though. If you cut down the sprites to half size (or render them in 3D like the N64 port and render them at half size) that gets you to 320x240. I'm pretty sure moving the status/control bar to a second screen would handle the difference between 192 and 240. But you'd have only 80% of the width. Throwing away 20% width and rendering all units, buildings, textures, etc at half size, that might not look very good. But who knows, maybe it would work.
But then you have the AC a few comments over who would buy a PSP version with less-adapted controls just because it has CD quality music. Is such a customer representative of the handheld gaming public?
I don't think so. I think that with a good composer scoring the music into MIDI with the particular hardware in mind (And I imagine able to create his own sample set) the music could be close enough to CD quality that most people wouldn't really care, or perhaps even notice the difference. Besides, people don't expect CD quality audio in a handheld.
The reason I think the PSP might have an advantage is the PSP's higher screen resolution. The PSP is 480x272. Turn the status/command bar into a sidebar and you might have 360x272, which is roughly 4:3, so no missing 20%, and you get a considerably higher resolution to boot.
The DS doesn't have enough rendering power to do the videos justice, but with encoded video, you can have much better pre-rendered video.
One important thing to keep in mind is that DS carts can be up to 1gbit (128MB), although AFAIK no game has used more than 512mbit (64MB) yet. But it IS possible. So taking 16MB for some video isn't a big problem.
Starcraft's system requirements included a Pentium CPU at 90 MHz. Throw in the fact that the Nintendo DS has hardware acceleration for tile and sprite displays, and you might be able to squeeze it into the 67 MHz of the main ARM CPU.
It stands to reason that the PC version of StarCraft also used hardware accelerated DirectDraw, so this probably can't be counted as a reason to decrease the CPU requirements. Rather it would be neccessary to show that the ARM9 (I think?) is that much faster clock-for-clock than the Pentium.
In practice, you need to see enough to tell one type of unit or terrain from another. This was doable in Warcraft 1 and other RTS games of that era, which ran at 320x200 pixels, with 256 horizontal pixels used for the playfield and the rest for the status/command bar, part of which would move up to the top screen.
Perhaps it was doable in games that required 320x200 resolutions, but StarCraft ran at 640x480, and already did a lot with such a low resolution. I can see them trying to use half-sized tile sizes with some pre-done anti-aliasing, but StarCraft already did a lot with the limited resolution it had available. With the DS's resolution of 256x192 , it's going to be crowded. The second screen will help, since you can offload a lot of stuff (the control bar among other things), but there is only so much you can do.
64MB is more than enough. All the CD was used for in StarCraft, IIRC, was the music, and the cutscenes. The music could probably be redone at acceptable quality with the wavetable synth of the DS, meaning it'd barely use any space. The video is a different story... I'm pretty sure the DS is capable of decoding mpeg-4 type video, so 16MB might be good enough 8 to 10 minutes of 250kbit video. That's good enough for 320x240 at pretty good quality, so it is more than enough for 256x192. I honestly don't remember how much FMV StarCraft had, but 8 to 10 minutes is a lot to work with.
NOW LOADING is not gaming.
StarCraft was a PC game. It had load times. Besides that, I'm pretty sure that StarCraft on the PSP wouldn't have terribly long load times; we're talking what, 64MB, 128MB, and this is on a 1.8GB disc. Plus the PSP has the CPU power to use more modern compression for images in order to speed up load times by reducing the volume of data that needs to be read.
Point is, if you can't easily tell your units what to do, especially in the rapid clickfests of advanced play, the rest doesn't matter. True, good control won't save a bad game, but bad control will wreck a good one.
Can't argue with that; I have no doubt that StarCraft's controls would play enormously better on the DS than the PSP. On the other hand,.we know it can be DONE, due to the N64 port. It would just be so much better on the DS.
Last I heard the Gamecube and XBox had sold more or less the same worldwide, with the XBox a bit ahead, but that was a while ago.
The main reason for this is that the XBox failed in Japan, whereas the GameCube failed in other markets. In the North American market, the GameCube was a failure when compared to the PS2 and XBox. My opinion is that this is because Nintendo targetted a much smaller market (younger kids) by selling the unit at a lower price than the other consoles and offering more youth-oriented games.
With Id Software (Doom, Quake) and Epic (Unreal) as well as a few other developers porting their games to Linux, linux gaming isn't non-existant, just limited. Valve is the last holdout of the big three of FPS, and they have no plans to support anything but Windows and consoles/arcades. Still, I understand Cegeda (Formerly WineX) runs Valve products decently (They actively release updates when Valve's STEAM updates cause trouble), so it is still possible to play their stuff without paying "the Microsoft tax", as you put it.
In the first place, Fuddruckers' page leaves guests with the impression that they did the game themselves. Meanwhile, they make money off of somebody else's work, without credit, acknowledgement, a link to allow visitors to return traffic to the host's site. But wait, there's more...
There is a quite obvious URL and credits in the flash game itself. They're not giving anybody the impression that they did it themselves.
Was it appropriate to hotlink the file, making it harder for users to get to his site? No. Is anybody being fooled about where it is coming from? No.
This isn't nearly so big a deal as you or even the original author is making it to be (He isn't even seeing much traffic/bandwidth from them). At worst it is a lack of curtesy that could have been easily solved by contacting the site hosting it and requesting they link to the HTML page instead of the flash file directly.
The author chose, instead of the proper thing (contacting these "fuddruckers" people), posting graphic images. The author is now just as guilty as the people doing the hotlinking were, because he mishandled the situation so badly.
It can't, not without anything in the DS slot. And certainly not currently without hacked firmware or a hardware hack. Please point out a site with proof that a great breakthrough has been made to allow you to run DS code off a GBA cart with nothing but a GBA cart and a stock DS. The point that you've been missing is that I don't think that the Play-Yan can suddenly become a DS product, not with a simple firmware update to the Play-Yan.
I suppose it is entirely possible that Nintendo could issue a firmware update to the DS to do this, and then a firmware update to the Play-Yan to include the DS code. But I don't know enough about such things to know how possible or easy it is.
They mentioned that their connections have gone down one by one until there is only one left. Presumably they are getting connectivity from whatever ISP that had employees that decided to tough it out, or perhaps the ISP's PoP is just running on battery or generators on autopilot.
That figure is misleading; 1700 people might be tracking his blog, but that only includes LiveJournal users that have set LiveJournal to track it for them.
The figure of 1700 ignores all the people who have LiveJournal who aren't tracking (just refreshing), and the many times more people who don't even have LiveJournal accounts.
His blog is hosted by LiveJournal. I find it highly unlikely that LiveJournal can be slashdotted considering it's enormity. Mirroring LiveJournal seems a bit silly, it is like mirroring slashdot if boingboing were to link to it, it is pointless.
Ahem. The passme is a FPGA or CPLD which sits between the DS slot and a DS cart, allowing the DS cart to perform authentication, then stepping in and injecting a branch to the GBA cart. You by definition cannot have a passme in the GBA slot. The M3 uses the DS Expansion Pak mode to inject the jump command. The technique is similar to, but significantly different from, the Passme.
Mod parent down.
Ahem. I never claimed that the M3 had a passme in the GBA slot. It ships with a device similar to the PassMe that requires an original DS game to be plugged into it. To me, a device that when looked at from a blackbox perspective is identical can be considered a "passme-type device".
You seem to just be repeating my other posts, what exactly do you consider worth modding down?
Don't mistake me for somebody who is smart, I just read a lot;)
I think GBA emulation on the iPod is highly unlikely; it seems the current issue with the iPod GB emulator is speed. The original GB had a Z80 processor, while the GBA had an ARM7 processor, IIRC. Much more complex.
As for the mystery controller, your guess is as good as mine. There are mentions of tilt resistance via gyroscopes, but I'm not thrilled with the idea; I've seen enough people playing games move their controllers all around as if it will make their characters move further, and quite honestly I really don't want to see that as part of most games.
I think some sort of configurability might be more likely. There has been mention of a touchpad, which might work out. Games could ship with small cutouts that you insert on top of the touchpad, thereby allowing for several custom controls for each game. A trackball in place of or in addition to the/an analog stick might lead to some interesting gameplay mechanics, but I think that such an control might not fit in with certain types of games.
To be honest, I haven't payed the Revolution much attention. The GameCube was a flop compared to the PS2 and XBOX, which I'm convinced is due to Nintendo policy more than the system itself. They have been so secretive with the Revolution that they haven't really given me any reason to pay attention. That and the fact that Nintendo is way behind the ball with the Revolution expected to ship some time in 2006 and 2007, I'm more focused on the 360 and PS3 right now.
On interesting feature of the Revolution is that Nintendo is going to stick a bunch of emulators on it. NES/SNES/N64/GameCube are looking likely, so they're going to cover the entire spectrum. The console has 512MB of flash memory for storage of games. They may not even be limited to Nintendo consoles. The creator of Sonic the Hedgehog has expressed hopes that the Sega Genesis will also be emulated, something that Sega may support now that they're out of the hardware business and into the business of writing games for Nintendo hardware.
Gah, I've gone off rambling again. I'll admit I was planning on buying a 360 until the cost was announced to be $400 US, which is a bit more than I'm willing to spend on a console once you factor in the first few games and the VGA adapter and the mandatory bundles that most retailers have planned.
Slashdot Mirror
There seems to be an ongoing obsession by the media and the vaporious "Video iPod". For the past 4 years the media has been claiming that a video iPod is just around the corner, and every time word leaks that Apple is about to make an iPod related announcement, the media starts reporting that it is without a doubt a Video iPod.
I think it is time for the media (and public) to realize that the Video iPod ISN'T just around the corner, and that it may not be available for years yet, if ever.
I don't think a video iPod is a bad idea, it's just sad that the media is in a perpetual "Video iPod coming soon!" frame of mind.
Not going to come out (if it ever does) in time to matter for the PS3.
Slashdot's title is very misleading. Their title:
"Advent Children Director Wants To Redo FFVII"
What was actually said was more along the lines of "A remake would be neat, but is impossible anytime soon since his schedule is too full, and there is no time."
Why do they have to do all that? Is there really any reason they can't just re-implement the game?
Think about it like this; start with a straight port, meaning the exact same 2D textures and low-poly 3D models on the PS3. Then replace all the models with 3D ones, and textures (tilemaps) with 3D scenery. Replace all the special effects with nice pixel shaders, throw in some new effects where it wasn't possible before, and you now have a new game, identical in every way but media, which is vastly improved.
Now imagine them doing that directly; designing the new game from the ground up with the new technology, but scene-for-scene identical to the old one. In other words, same game, new graphics.
802.11g is, in nearly every case, fast enough for simple internet sharing. Very few people have broadband faster than 10mbit, and multiple people using that internet connection are sharing it anyhow, so you're fine. For streaming video, it depends what you are streaming and to how many devices. DVDs are, IIRC, something like 7 or 8 megabits. Assuming there is some distance between the AP and device receiving the stream, you could only really do one stream at a time on an 802.11g network. Unless we're talking MPEG-4, then you can probably make do with 1 or 2 megabits.
I was under the impression that most of the wasted bandwidth on wireless networks is from collisions and transmission errors. Assuming that efficiency of modulation is also a major factor, would it not stand to reason that when you take 240mbit and then take into account collisions, transmission errors, overhead, and the shared bandwidth nature, you're still going to get a real-world throughput of significantly less than 100mbit?
4x the speed is still not that great.
Current 802.11g devices have a theoretical throughput of 54mbit, and a real-world throughput of actual data of 10 to 20mbit. So it follows that Airgo's new cards will permit 40 to 80 megabits.
Now, wired 100mbit networks can reach 80mbit real-world speeds (Actual after-overhead bandwidth), so at first glance it looks like we're there. Except we're not.
The important things to keep in mind is that wireless networks behave like hubs, not switches, and on top of that all data must go through the access point. So if you have two computers close to an AP, you take up 40mbit for computer -> AP, and the other 40mbit for AP -> computer.
In other words, they claim 240mbit, but the fastest real-world transfer between two wireless devices is probably about 40mbit, IF those computers are very close to the access point. If the computers are a bit further away, you will get 20mbit. 4 computers doing 2 transfers and each transfer goes at 10mbit.
So you see? 4 computers 50 feet away and you're already down from 240mbit to 10mbit. This is very far away from wired performance.
Google's unreleased translator isn't based on simple word correlations; neither is the current translator for that matter. The current ones seem to be more phrase-correlation specific. As in it knows a bit about context, so that it knows "Suite à la publications" should be "Following the publications" instead of "Following at the publications". Because "à la" could directly translate to "at the" or "with the" or even "to the". So it does use a bit of context to correlate groups of words. It still seems to be fairly simplistic.
Google's new tool goes way beyond that though. As I understand it, it goes way deeper into taking context into account by comparing the use of a group of words in a sentence compared to uses in similar sentances. I think.
Language processing is still a million miles off, and analyzing a mountain of text is only a fraction of the solution.
Well, certainly Google's "Universal Translator" is a big step forward. The problem is, has anybody actually seen it in action? It looked amazing when announced, and a big deal was made over it. But nobody seems to have heard anything since. The only translation tools that Google has available are their "old" Google Language Tools, which isn't really much better than SysTran.
So, a question to google: Where's the beef?
They can make it hard enough to do that you won't want to. Imagine if you had a game delivered through the Steam platform that loaded all data from encrypted GCF platforms, and continually changed code to prevent efforts from hooking in?
Yes, it would never be impossible to mod such a game, it would be too much trouble to bother.
This statement worries me:
ESRB remains concerned about third party modifications that undermine the accuracy of the original rating, and we are exploring ways to maintain the credibility of the rating system with consumers in light of modifications of this nature.
Since the only way to prevent a mod from affecting the rating of a game is to ban modding altogether, it looks to me like the ESRB wants to prevent modding. They might do this by automatically rating any game that supports mods with an AO rating.
This would be a huge blow against mods, and let's face it, mods drive a large portion of the game industry. Would anybody still be playing Half-Life 1 were it not for a few of the more popular mods released for it? HLDM and HL2DM only get you so far before mods take over as the dominant multiplayer experience.
Well, no movie can ever truely be "just hype"
For example, I loved The Spirits Within and thought it was a great movie. I enjoyed it both on a technological level, and on a storyline/execution level (I liked it as a movie) You're obviously implying that TSW was just hype, but to some people, myself included, it was more than hype, it was a good movie.
Be careful with your choice of words; not everybody hates every movie that you do.
Take a look at this and tell me why Google wouldn't do something similar for email?
I'm referring of course to the Google Mini (which powers Anandtech's search above) and the Google Search Appliance. For all we know Google might be persuaded to sign a deal to provide GMail services directly from Google's own network for the company's domain.
Or contact Google about licencing GMail. They've done this with their main product (search) with the Google Search Appliance and Google Mini. Google might be willing to allow his company to use GMail to handle their email domain, for the right price.
If Google themselves were providing the service from their own infrastructure, stability and scaling are already solved, plus it supports webmail and POP3. IMAP is missing, but if one were to secure a deal with Google that'd be a minor concern that could likely be solved.
That raises the cost of production significantly, and I doubt it would be more practical than simply storing the videos on the main card.
The entire StarCraft demo is 28MB compressed, and contains a heck of a lot. 64 to 96MB is way more than enough for the rest of the game if you're storing all the graphics and sound in compressed form and at one quarter resolution. The N64 version managed to fit the whole game into 32MB, if I remember one of the previous posts correctly. So certainly 64 to 96 megs for the DS version (which would be an even lower resolution than the N64 version) is plenty.
If you apply a clever trick, you can double the DS's effective resolution at the cost of some minor color fringing, which will help keep text readable even at smaller point sizes.
I'm familiar with sub pixel rendering, but I've never seen it used in a game on a handheld console (or any console for that matter). I was not only concerned about text though. If you cut down the sprites to half size (or render them in 3D like the N64 port and render them at half size) that gets you to 320x240. I'm pretty sure moving the status/control bar to a second screen would handle the difference between 192 and 240. But you'd have only 80% of the width. Throwing away 20% width and rendering all units, buildings, textures, etc at half size, that might not look very good. But who knows, maybe it would work.
But then you have the AC a few comments over who would buy a PSP version with less-adapted controls just because it has CD quality music. Is such a customer representative of the handheld gaming public?
I don't think so. I think that with a good composer scoring the music into MIDI with the particular hardware in mind (And I imagine able to create his own sample set) the music could be close enough to CD quality that most people wouldn't really care, or perhaps even notice the difference. Besides, people don't expect CD quality audio in a handheld.
The reason I think the PSP might have an advantage is the PSP's higher screen resolution. The PSP is 480x272. Turn the status/command bar into a sidebar and you might have 360x272, which is roughly 4:3, so no missing 20%, and you get a considerably higher resolution to boot.
The DS doesn't have enough rendering power to do the videos justice, but with encoded video, you can have much better pre-rendered video.
One important thing to keep in mind is that DS carts can be up to 1gbit (128MB), although AFAIK no game has used more than 512mbit (64MB) yet. But it IS possible. So taking 16MB for some video isn't a big problem.
Starcraft's system requirements included a Pentium CPU at 90 MHz. Throw in the fact that the Nintendo DS has hardware acceleration for tile and sprite displays, and you might be able to squeeze it into the 67 MHz of the main ARM CPU.
It stands to reason that the PC version of StarCraft also used hardware accelerated DirectDraw, so this probably can't be counted as a reason to decrease the CPU requirements. Rather it would be neccessary to show that the ARM9 (I think?) is that much faster clock-for-clock than the Pentium.
In practice, you need to see enough to tell one type of unit or terrain from another. This was doable in Warcraft 1 and other RTS games of that era, which ran at 320x200 pixels, with 256 horizontal pixels used for the playfield and the rest for the status/command bar, part of which would move up to the top screen.
Perhaps it was doable in games that required 320x200 resolutions, but StarCraft ran at 640x480, and already did a lot with such a low resolution. I can see them trying to use half-sized tile sizes with some pre-done anti-aliasing, but StarCraft already did a lot with the limited resolution it had available. With the DS's resolution of 256x192 , it's going to be crowded. The second screen will help, since you can offload a lot of stuff (the control bar among other things), but there is only so much you can do.
64MB is more than enough. All the CD was used for in StarCraft, IIRC, was the music, and the cutscenes. The music could probably be redone at acceptable quality with the wavetable synth of the DS, meaning it'd barely use any space. The video is a different story... I'm pretty sure the DS is capable of decoding mpeg-4 type video, so 16MB might be good enough 8 to 10 minutes of 250kbit video. That's good enough for 320x240 at pretty good quality, so it is more than enough for 256x192. I honestly don't remember how much FMV StarCraft had, but 8 to 10 minutes is a lot to work with.
NOW LOADING is not gaming.
StarCraft was a PC game. It had load times. Besides that, I'm pretty sure that StarCraft on the PSP wouldn't have terribly long load times; we're talking what, 64MB, 128MB, and this is on a 1.8GB disc. Plus the PSP has the CPU power to use more modern compression for images in order to speed up load times by reducing the volume of data that needs to be read.
Point is, if you can't easily tell your units what to do, especially in the rapid clickfests of advanced play, the rest doesn't matter. True, good control won't save a bad game, but bad control will wreck a good one.
Can't argue with that; I have no doubt that StarCraft's controls would play enormously better on the DS than the PSP. On the other hand,.we know it can be DONE, due to the N64 port. It would just be so much better on the DS.
Last I heard the Gamecube and XBox had sold more or less the same worldwide, with the XBox a bit ahead, but that was a while ago.
The main reason for this is that the XBox failed in Japan, whereas the GameCube failed in other markets. In the North American market, the GameCube was a failure when compared to the PS2 and XBox. My opinion is that this is because Nintendo targetted a much smaller market (younger kids) by selling the unit at a lower price than the other consoles and offering more youth-oriented games.
With Id Software (Doom, Quake) and Epic (Unreal) as well as a few other developers porting their games to Linux, linux gaming isn't non-existant, just limited. Valve is the last holdout of the big three of FPS, and they have no plans to support anything but Windows and consoles/arcades. Still, I understand Cegeda (Formerly WineX) runs Valve products decently (They actively release updates when Valve's STEAM updates cause trouble), so it is still possible to play their stuff without paying "the Microsoft tax", as you put it.
In the first place, Fuddruckers' page leaves guests with the impression that they did the game themselves. Meanwhile, they make money off of somebody else's work, without credit, acknowledgement, a link to allow visitors to return traffic to the host's site. But wait, there's more...
There is a quite obvious URL and credits in the flash game itself. They're not giving anybody the impression that they did it themselves.
Was it appropriate to hotlink the file, making it harder for users to get to his site? No. Is anybody being fooled about where it is coming from? No.
This isn't nearly so big a deal as you or even the original author is making it to be (He isn't even seeing much traffic/bandwidth from them). At worst it is a lack of curtesy that could have been easily solved by contacting the site hosting it and requesting they link to the HTML page instead of the flash file directly.
The author chose, instead of the proper thing (contacting these "fuddruckers" people), posting graphic images. The author is now just as guilty as the people doing the hotlinking were, because he mishandled the situation so badly.
It can't, not without anything in the DS slot. And certainly not currently without hacked firmware or a hardware hack. Please point out a site with proof that a great breakthrough has been made to allow you to run DS code off a GBA cart with nothing but a GBA cart and a stock DS. The point that you've been missing is that I don't think that the Play-Yan can suddenly become a DS product, not with a simple firmware update to the Play-Yan.
I suppose it is entirely possible that Nintendo could issue a firmware update to the DS to do this, and then a firmware update to the Play-Yan to include the DS code. But I don't know enough about such things to know how possible or easy it is.
They mentioned that their connections have gone down one by one until there is only one left. Presumably they are getting connectivity from whatever ISP that had employees that decided to tough it out, or perhaps the ISP's PoP is just running on battery or generators on autopilot.
That figure is misleading; 1700 people might be tracking his blog, but that only includes LiveJournal users that have set LiveJournal to track it for them.
The figure of 1700 ignores all the people who have LiveJournal who aren't tracking (just refreshing), and the many times more people who don't even have LiveJournal accounts.
His blog is hosted by LiveJournal. I find it highly unlikely that LiveJournal can be slashdotted considering it's enormity. Mirroring LiveJournal seems a bit silly, it is like mirroring slashdot if boingboing were to link to it, it is pointless.
Ahem. The passme is a FPGA or CPLD which sits between the DS slot and a DS cart, allowing the DS cart to perform authentication, then stepping in and injecting a branch to the GBA cart. You by definition cannot have a passme in the GBA slot. The M3 uses the DS Expansion Pak mode to inject the jump command. The technique is similar to, but significantly different from, the Passme.
Mod parent down.
Ahem. I never claimed that the M3 had a passme in the GBA slot. It ships with a device similar to the PassMe that requires an original DS game to be plugged into it. To me, a device that when looked at from a blackbox perspective is identical can be considered a "passme-type device".
You seem to just be repeating my other posts, what exactly do you consider worth modding down?
Don't mistake me for somebody who is smart, I just read a lot ;)
I think GBA emulation on the iPod is highly unlikely; it seems the current issue with the iPod GB emulator is speed. The original GB had a Z80 processor, while the GBA had an ARM7 processor, IIRC. Much more complex.
As for the mystery controller, your guess is as good as mine. There are mentions of tilt resistance via gyroscopes, but I'm not thrilled with the idea; I've seen enough people playing games move their controllers all around as if it will make their characters move further, and quite honestly I really don't want to see that as part of most games.
I think some sort of configurability might be more likely. There has been mention of a touchpad, which might work out. Games could ship with small cutouts that you insert on top of the touchpad, thereby allowing for several custom controls for each game. A trackball in place of or in addition to the/an analog stick might lead to some interesting gameplay mechanics, but I think that such an control might not fit in with certain types of games.
To be honest, I haven't payed the Revolution much attention. The GameCube was a flop compared to the PS2 and XBOX, which I'm convinced is due to Nintendo policy more than the system itself. They have been so secretive with the Revolution that they haven't really given me any reason to pay attention. That and the fact that Nintendo is way behind the ball with the Revolution expected to ship some time in 2006 and 2007, I'm more focused on the 360 and PS3 right now.
On interesting feature of the Revolution is that Nintendo is going to stick a bunch of emulators on it. NES/SNES/N64/GameCube are looking likely, so they're going to cover the entire spectrum. The console has 512MB of flash memory for storage of games. They may not even be limited to Nintendo consoles. The creator of Sonic the Hedgehog has expressed hopes that the Sega Genesis will also be emulated, something that Sega may support now that they're out of the hardware business and into the business of writing games for Nintendo hardware.
Gah, I've gone off rambling again. I'll admit I was planning on buying a 360 until the cost was announced to be $400 US, which is a bit more than I'm willing to spend on a console once you factor in the first few games and the VGA adapter and the mandatory bundles that most retailers have planned.