CGA = 640*200 mono or 320*200 4 colours (two choices of palette)
EGA = 640*350 16 colours (from palette of 64)
VGA = 640*480 16 colours or 320*200 256 colours or ModeX. (From 18 bit palette).
Sound cards: AdLib (FM sound?) preceded SoundBlaster (8 bit DAC) by some time.
As for SNES vs Genesis, from the technical point of view I come down firmly on the SNES side; the genesis had a faster and cleaner processor to be sure, but the SNES had better palette, background layers, graphics limits, "mode 7", sound (8 channels of samples+FIR filters). A decent processor would have helped, sure, as Argonaut proved with StarFox and the SuperFX chip. But it was not until 3d games became the norm that processor speed was more important than decent hardware support for chars and sprites.
As for gamers, well each generation of gamers argues about the image of their machines as they are told by the television adverts. When I saw Sonic being previewed at a trade show, I thought "cool, someone's made a Felix the Cat game":-) not "Wow, I bet the TV adverts that will come out for this game will be really edgy".
The PC engine (8 bit console from NEC?) had a CD-rom drive in it which I remember playing back at the beginning of 1990, lots of weird Japanese games. I guess the PC manufacturers were a bit behind there.
Also it was a long time until PCs managed to catch up to the smoothness of the C64 in scrolling, let alone current consoles.
What sport is that then? Ten-pin bowling? We have a lot of superbowls in london (it is a chain) but I can't remember them getting much television coverage.
you bought the PS2 because it was the best deal for the games you want to play for the budget your willing to spend
No, I found it slightly offensive that I had to pay the most money for the worst hardware. But the power of Sony meant that some good games were exclusives (Kingdom Hearts, Ico, Vice City, The Getaway). If they were available on GameCube (which I had bought previously) I wouldn't have bought a PS2.
Not quite right. If you run the exact same game code (using a cross-platform library) on Xbox, Gamecube and PS2, you will see the PS2 version crawling, while the other versions (and a decent PC) run nicely. If you want the PS2 version to run as nice, you will have to do extra work. On the other hand, Sony owns an awful lot of music, as Vice City showed. They probably own one or two decent film franchises too.
I just bought a PS2 for home use and the long load times (which developers should be able to improve on) and slow frame-rate do detract very slightly from some great games. But I bought it because those games are not going to be converted to other platforms. If xbox ever gets a decent game (other than halo) I might be forced to buy one too. GameCube has a few, but they are trickling out these days.
In a months time, they will track all cars going in and out of central London, and send bills to those who haven't paid the congestion charge. This is a large scale use of video cameras and OCR and databases.
I meant as in trademark/copyright/passing off issues. Games companies have to rename products (in different territories) these days because some game released in 1981 for the Atari VCS had a similar name. Giving yourself the same name as a publicly listed company in the same country and similar trade is just asking for trouble, unless they are a subsidiary. And even then, look at Electronics Boutique suing Electronics Boutique (both companies used to be joined up). I hope "Steve Foster" knows what he is doing.
I was in a cybercafe, and I checked on my amazon account. After doing that and some browsing, the machine crashed. The client then automatically rebuilt itself from a mirror... slowly...
Amazon had still got me registered as being logged in - and had automagically turned one-click-ordering on for me (I never asked for that!).
A week later, they still thought I was logged on and some anti-social meanie using the cybercafe used one-click-ordering to send me a dozen rap CDs with parental advisory (warning: artist has no talent) at my expense.
When I got the email, it was too late to cancel the order via the web site.
After ringing them internationally (ka-ching!) they said they would cancel, but it still turned up. Naturally I refused delivery, but they kept trying to deliver, even after I rang the delivery company several times telling them I didn't want it. Eventually they gave up, and I was recredited on my credit card. A month or so later the tax inspectors rang me up asking me to pay VAT on the CDs!!! But they accepted me telling them that I refused the delivery, and I didn't order them in the first place.
So I learned "If you are not X, click here" is amazon's way of saying "Log Out" the hard way.
And one-click-ordering is the devil's tool.
I thought all US phone numbers were just 4 digits long, prefixed with 555...
And as for the UK, in a Real City(tm) it is a three digit area code (020) and an 8 digit number (72221234) which still adds up to 11. And to think my parents used to have a 3 digit phone number:-)
Last I heard, Russia instituted a flat tax and tax revenues skyrocketed because people were actually able to comply.
It may also had something to do with the new breed of tax inspector - did you see them on tv practicing their jumping and rolling with their balaclavas while carrying assault rifles? That is a rather different image from the UKs "Hector the Inspector".
I used to use WAP, well just the railtrack information service, when it first came out in the UK (Nokia 7110).
Then everything got slower and slower, as if a single 386 pc was acting as gateway to the entire network (it should take two seconds to download a page, not ten!) and the client decided to crash (really crash! I had to unplug the battery) when it got to the final screen (which said which trains to catch). So I stopped using it.
Perhaps they decided to send 2049 byte pages and I had a 2048 byte machine, who knows. It just seems that the actual service did not live up anywhere near the (very limited) technical specifications.
So, is this a bandwidth grab of internet users from ham radio? The soviets were bad enough with their "woodpecker" jamming frequencies; if every computer owner with a spare hundred dollars starts broadcasting data on ham frequencies my grandad won't be able to call out "cq cq cq" much longer:-(.
Of course if it is in a new separate band, that's something else.
Myself, I use the word "Vacuuming" and a decent vacuum cleaner (a Meile) instead. Hoover (upright) vacuum cleaners can't clean wall-to-wall carpets, are harder to push around and are generally nasty. At least the ones that landlords provide for flats are. I don't know why they are so popular in the UK, but perhaps this is related to the lack of automatic transmissions here (only old ladies have them).
The germans have purpotedly said (in a survey) "the british work the longest hours in europe. They make up for this by being the least productive". By e.g. posting to slashdot... oops...
Have you not seen mobile phones playing Pac-man, the set-top boxes, the new console releases (soon), the gameboy advance versions, for pete's sake the threatened Pac-man Movie may be coming out. So Namco is definitely capitalising on their IP, as is Nintendo and to a lesser extent some other companies. I've certainly seen a lot of Atari t-shirts about. So a multi-company compilation would be likely to missing some of the big hitters unless you have good negotiation skills.
Come on, as everyone knows, all US cops are allowed to shoot a perp in the back if he runs away and does not stop when ordered to.
Sources: all hollywood movies. I'm not sure I can find the exact law...
And I certainly remember reading in the papers about when british or german tourists go to a house to ask for directions and get blown away by the householder (I think this was usually in Florida).
On a practical level, it is obviously safer in the armored car.
Not if that armoured car goes anywhere near Heathrow or Gatwick airport it seems. Every month or so, someone just walks into one of the armoured cars and takes x million pounds of cash or pentium 3 chips or whatever. I guess the armoured car might stop the wind from blowing it away, but it doesn't seem to bother the criminals.
Yup, I can't see why they still charge money for Abba/Beatles/Iron Maiden CDs, after all they've been out for ages longer than the initial 3 month sell-by dates! Sure there are those "best of the 1980s" music CDs that have compilations on them, but even those cost more than napster...
</slashdot>
Perhaps the fact that Williams, Namco and Atari/Infogrammes are still making some money from their back catalog means they don't want to be part of a collective royalty scheme that would give equal weight to obscure (but possibly quite deserving; I would love a modern version of Crazy Climber for example) arcade manufacturers.
After all, it has taken the might of Sony (helping out with GTA: Vice City) to push through the licensing for recognisable music in a game from multiple artists; dealing with IPs from multiple companies when each would want the biggest share of the royalties would be a real pain to negotiate.
If one of you slashdot readers can persuade several of the rights holders of the ROMs to provide a compilation legally, you will have my greatest respect; negotiation skills like that are formidable.
Slashdot Mirror
CGA = 640*200 mono or 320*200 4 colours (two choices of palette)
EGA = 640*350 16 colours (from palette of 64)
VGA = 640*480 16 colours or 320*200 256 colours or ModeX. (From 18 bit palette).
Sound cards: AdLib (FM sound?) preceded SoundBlaster (8 bit DAC) by some time.
As for SNES vs Genesis, from the technical point of view I come down firmly on the SNES side; the genesis had a faster and cleaner processor to be sure, but the SNES had better palette, background layers, graphics limits, "mode 7", sound (8 channels of samples+FIR filters). A decent processor would have helped, sure, as Argonaut proved with StarFox and the SuperFX chip. But it was not until 3d games became the norm that processor speed was more important than decent hardware support for chars and sprites.
As for gamers, well each generation of gamers argues about the image of their machines as they are told by the television adverts. When I saw Sonic being previewed at a trade show, I thought "cool, someone's made a Felix the Cat game" :-) not "Wow, I bet the TV adverts that will come out for this game will be really edgy".
Also it was a long time until PCs managed to catch up to the smoothness of the C64 in scrolling, let alone current consoles.
What sport is that then? Ten-pin bowling? We have a lot of superbowls in london (it is a chain) but I can't remember them getting much television coverage.
No, I found it slightly offensive that I had to pay the most money for the worst hardware. But the power of Sony meant that some good games were exclusives (Kingdom Hearts, Ico, Vice City, The Getaway). If they were available on GameCube (which I had bought previously) I wouldn't have bought a PS2.
for (std::vector<mytype>::size_type i = 0; i < myvar.size(); ++i) { ... }
And hoping that mytype is indeed the type of myvar.
Or creating a whole new class just to use for_each
When in the olden days it was
for (int i = 0; ...
Or could we cheat a little and try
for (size_t i = 0; ...
what's the other one?
Not quite right. If you run the exact same game code (using a cross-platform library) on Xbox, Gamecube and PS2, you will see the PS2 version crawling, while the other versions (and a decent PC) run nicely. If you want the PS2 version to run as nice, you will have to do extra work. On the other hand, Sony owns an awful lot of music, as Vice City showed. They probably own one or two decent film franchises too.
I just bought a PS2 for home use and the long load times (which developers should be able to improve on) and slow frame-rate do detract very slightly from some great games. But I bought it because those games are not going to be converted to other platforms. If xbox ever gets a decent game (other than halo) I might be forced to buy one too. GameCube has a few, but they are trickling out these days.
In a months time, they will track all cars going in and out of central London, and send bills to those who haven't paid the congestion charge. This is a large scale use of video cameras and OCR and databases.
I meant as in trademark/copyright/passing off issues. Games companies have to rename products (in different territories) these days because some game released in 1981 for the Atari VCS had a similar name. Giving yourself the same name as a publicly listed company in the same country and similar trade is just asking for trouble, unless they are a subsidiary. And even then, look at Electronics Boutique suing Electronics Boutique (both companies used to be joined up). I hope "Steve Foster" knows what he is doing.
The wonders of a pretty web-site with no content on it.
Amazon had still got me registered as being logged in - and had automagically turned one-click-ordering on for me (I never asked for that!).
A week later, they still thought I was logged on and some anti-social meanie using the cybercafe used one-click-ordering to send me a dozen rap CDs with parental advisory (warning: artist has no talent) at my expense.
When I got the email, it was too late to cancel the order via the web site.
After ringing them internationally (ka-ching!) they said they would cancel, but it still turned up. Naturally I refused delivery, but they kept trying to deliver, even after I rang the delivery company several times telling them I didn't want it. Eventually they gave up, and I was recredited on my credit card. A month or so later the tax inspectors rang me up asking me to pay VAT on the CDs!!! But they accepted me telling them that I refused the delivery, and I didn't order them in the first place.
So I learned "If you are not X, click here" is amazon's way of saying "Log Out" the hard way. And one-click-ordering is the devil's tool.
A pity this "startup" borrowed the name of a 1981-founded company that owns infinium.com NASDAQ: INFM which doesn't mention this announcement.
It's not like it's a common english word...
I thought all US phone numbers were just 4 digits long, prefixed with 555...
And as for the UK, in a Real City(tm) it is a three digit area code (020) and an 8 digit number (72221234) which still adds up to 11. And to think my parents used to have a 3 digit phone number :-)
This may have some impact on the result (I presume to make it closer).
Of course the constant stream of "opinion polls" before the election may mitigate this effect, but it does seem a strange thing to do.
It may also had something to do with the new breed of tax inspector - did you see them on tv practicing their jumping and rolling with their balaclavas while carrying assault rifles? That is a rather different image from the UKs "Hector the Inspector".
Next thing they'll claim that developers are capable of writing documentation and test cases... the crazy deluded journalists!
Then everything got slower and slower, as if a single 386 pc was acting as gateway to the entire network (it should take two seconds to download a page, not ten!) and the client decided to crash (really crash! I had to unplug the battery) when it got to the final screen (which said which trains to catch). So I stopped using it.
Perhaps they decided to send 2049 byte pages and I had a 2048 byte machine, who knows. It just seems that the actual service did not live up anywhere near the (very limited) technical specifications.
Of course if it is in a new separate band, that's something else.
Myself, I use the word "Vacuuming" and a decent vacuum cleaner (a Meile) instead. Hoover (upright) vacuum cleaners can't clean wall-to-wall carpets, are harder to push around and are generally nasty. At least the ones that landlords provide for flats are. I don't know why they are so popular in the UK, but perhaps this is related to the lack of automatic transmissions here (only old ladies have them).
The germans have purpotedly said (in a survey) "the british work the longest hours in europe. They make up for this by being the least productive". By e.g. posting to slashdot... oops...
Good variations of asteroids include Pang, and the manta ray level in super mario sunshine.
Have you not seen mobile phones playing Pac-man, the set-top boxes, the new console releases (soon), the gameboy advance versions, for pete's sake the threatened Pac-man Movie may be coming out. So Namco is definitely capitalising on their IP, as is Nintendo and to a lesser extent some other companies. I've certainly seen a lot of Atari t-shirts about. So a multi-company compilation would be likely to missing some of the big hitters unless you have good negotiation skills.
Oh, so you're going to give Guantanemo bay back to Castro then? :-)
I seem to vaguely recall the US gained it in the spanish-american war (where they also conquered the phillipines).
Sources: all hollywood movies. I'm not sure I can find the exact law...
And I certainly remember reading in the papers about when british or german tourists go to a house to ask for directions and get blown away by the householder (I think this was usually in Florida).
Not if that armoured car goes anywhere near Heathrow or Gatwick airport it seems. Every month or so, someone just walks into one of the armoured cars and takes x million pounds of cash or pentium 3 chips or whatever. I guess the armoured car might stop the wind from blowing it away, but it doesn't seem to bother the criminals.
</slashdot>
Perhaps the fact that Williams, Namco and Atari/Infogrammes are still making some money from their back catalog means they don't want to be part of a collective royalty scheme that would give equal weight to obscure (but possibly quite deserving; I would love a modern version of Crazy Climber for example) arcade manufacturers.
After all, it has taken the might of Sony (helping out with GTA: Vice City) to push through the licensing for recognisable music in a game from multiple artists; dealing with IPs from multiple companies when each would want the biggest share of the royalties would be a real pain to negotiate.
If one of you slashdot readers can persuade several of the rights holders of the ROMs to provide a compilation legally, you will have my greatest respect; negotiation skills like that are formidable.