That's exactly what was confusing, though. The Flipper GPU had no shaders. It was created in the era before vertex and pixel shaders were commonplace. It did have 8 texture combiners, but those were still fixed-function.
Another example of government thinking that they can artificially manipulate the market.
... by mandating that all new devices meet minimum requirements for electrical safety? And that older equipment be reinspected before sale to ensure that they also meet the minimum requirements (unless it's "vintage" or for export)?
What really gets at me is that people ever really thought that the used games/ham radio/vintage stereo equipment markets were ever going to be hurt in any meaningful way by needing to certify that plugging a device into AC power won't make it explode.
I know that with the specs released, it would be entirely possible for Nintendo to get a lot out of it. But I still don't believe them. One thing made me stop believing the story all on its own:
Revolution's ATI-provided "Hollywood" GPU clocks in at 243MHz. By comparison, GameCube's GPU ran at 162MHz, while the GPU on the original Xbox was clocked at 233MHz. Sources we spoke with suggest that it is unlikely the GPU will feature any added shaders, as has been speculated.
My problem? No shaders. I find it absolutely absurd that Nintendo and ATi would team up and make a GPU that refuses to adopt now 4-year-old common-practice technology. Unless they want to make the system incredibly difficult to port to, I highly doubt they'd do something like that. I understand that it being slower isn't necessarily bad, since it only has to render at 640x480 instead of 1280x720, but not having any vertex or pixel shaders simply doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
I know that it seems like it would be easy to believe that the Revolution would be just a suped up gamecube, but do you seriously think that they'd even bother manufacturing a CPU below 1GHz at this point? The difference in price between 750 MHz and 1 GHz in this day and age has got to be microscopic, and it really wouldn't be worth cripling the system that much.
I actually only read the article because the title is so misleading. I have a Mac G5 with OSX and a Pentium 4 with WinXP at work, and the Pentium 4 is easily faster than the G5 (though granted it is a year newer). The OSX GUI is smooth as silk, but Photoshop takes ages to resize things...
At any rate, would it be at all possible to get Zonk to change the title from "Why Windows is Slow" to "Why Windows Development is Slow?" It would cut down on stupid posts and system wars.
And on that note, I don't think MS has a problem with being overzealous in supporting legacy hardware... I think they support any and all hardware as best they can so that they don't get sued for antitrust again. Not supporting certain hardware could be seen as exerting undue influence on the industry. Apple, however, not only doesn't support legacy hardware, they also don't support a wide range of current hardware. I've always seen that as a problem, personally.
I figured it would select the language based upon your system's settings. Remember on old European Mega Drive games, there'd be a language selector at the beginning? Same thing, except handled automatically.
The catch is that there's now no reason for one to mod a system except to play copied games (since you won't need to mod your system to play import games). Also, it means game makers can save money by only needing to press one disc, not a different disc for each region.
Re:A lot less than meets the eye
on
Region-free PS3
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Furthermore, most current graphics hardware is capible of displaying in either PAL or NTSC or SECAM, etc... I think there will likely still be some sort of region identification, but probably more like it's done on the DS: it'll ship with a default region selected, and you'll be able to change it in the options. It's probably the simplest solution to "What display do I use when I boot up for the first time ever?"
Where in the world do you work that your company would allow you to (a) choose your hardware, and (b) have any say in what OS is installed? Pretty much everywhere I've ever worked, these decisions are made by IT for funding, legal, and technical reasons.
I understand why one would want to have a triple boot machine... that sounds very nice. But as far as finding a company that would allow you to buy one with company funds, use a hack to get Windows running, and then install the software they own on a computing platform that they don't support is unrealistic at best.
They haven't trademarked the concept of a super hero, just the term. What I don't get is how one could trademark a classification or genre. The way it seems to me (and please let me know if I'm way off base), it's like if one record company could trademark a genre (let's say "punk") and then prevent all other companies from releasing music using the genre name, regardless of the fact that that's the correct classification... and also preventing people from making a "punk hour" at a bar even if they'll be having a live performance and the term is applicable. Does that seem like a good analogy?
First, they're saying that developers can use the Revolution controller devkit with the GameCube devkit. Also, it's been mentioned several times in the past (no links handy) that the Revolution will in essence be an evolution of the GameCube hardware.
It's also not a finished controller. And at $2000 per dev kit + game licensing fees, they can afford to make a cross platform SDK.
Also, nobody at Nintendo has said that the Revolution will be an evolution of GCN hardware. It probably will be, but nobody knows if it's an incremental evolution, or an evolution like comparing the Pentium II to a 80486.
Of course, Hillary believes it takes a community to raise a child. I, on the other hand, believe it takes parents.
Regardless of that, however, the bill at question is not meant to discover what effects various forms of electronic entertainment have on developing children without relying upon independent agencies hired by politically partisan groups to do the research. Armed with less-biased information, parents would then be able to make better educated decisions about what they do and don't allow their child to watch/play.
While I don't disagree with your views about community vs. parents in child rearing, I'm merely pointing out that this bill is only for research, and probably won't pass because it's too expansive and all-encompasing (and therefore expensive). Were they actually making recommendations on how one should raise a child, I would be on your side.
It's one thing to understand and enforce the law. It's another thing entirely to expect a group of police officers know exactly what the terms of every piece of software's EULA are.
If you'll recall, many people replying to the article (tech-savvy knolwedgeable slashdot readers) had to be informed that Firefox is not covered by GPL, and its licensing agreement allows for people to sell it.
Not that you don't have a point about how much good joysticks help flight sims... but the article was about the "worst" controllers, not very good ones.
Funny, mine is roughly 10 years old now and still works like a charm.
My guess is that you played a lot of Mario Party. I say that because the spinning motion required for a lot of minigames really wreaks havok on the analog stick. What happens is the light grey plastic that actually makes up the stick and base rubs against the outer housing, causing it to slowly be shaved away. Those shavings then get in the way and the "grit" makes the analog stick tough to use.
IIRC, the common remedy for that used to be some light scrubbing with a dry toothbrush. After a while, the plastic will wear down to the point where it no longer grinds and you won't have that issue anymore. Until then, just scrub it out every once in a while.
I'm not trying to imply that this wasn't a real honest design flaw... but in case you wanted to play your N64 without buying a new controller, the above advice should help.
It depends greatly on what it's used for. In most games, it toggles something on the HUD or brings up some sort of info, or activates something you wouldn't use often. Those times, you're glad that it's pretty much impossible to hit it by mistake.
Worst use of it was in R:Racing Evolution where it activated your rear view mirror. The problem with that? You used the right shoulder button to hit the gas. So either you switch your middle finger to gas then reach your index finger up to hit "z" (a painful and sometimes Herculean maneuver), or (like me) you make your hand limber enough to just reach up there with your thumb.
But as much as the "z" button sucked, the giant green "a" button was a work of genius. When playing a gamecube game, you should never need to ask "what button do I hit?" The answer is always "try the giant green one, dumbass."
Oh, and my comment about the X-Box "Fat" controller - what I found hard to use about it wasn't the fact that it was large, it's that the face buttons were set at my thumb's maximum reach, and (if you'll compare) are far smaller and closer together than the buttons on the small controller.
Don't be overly harsh. They probably just erred on the side of caution and came out wrong this time. Their incredulous response, however, is thoroughly mockable.
No, it doesn't count the 360. It only applies to electronics manufactured before April 2001 or electronics manufactured after April 2001 that don't have the certification sticker. Such electronics will need to get tested to get the sticker before they can be sold (but they can still be sold).
Also, as far as the power adapter is concerned. The Dreamacast is subject to certification because the power adapter is internal. The miniaturized PSOne is not since its power adapter is external (however, the power adapter itself is subject to the certification sticker). Game cartridges and console accessories are not subject to the regulation because they don't require any sort of AC/DC conversion and run on minimal power.
(In reality, the law is mildly more complicated than that, but the general internal/external/non-existant AC adapter is a relatively accurate rule-of-thumb for figuring this out.)
But not in Messiah. They used the power of your machine as a guide to generate different LOD models for each character at the start of the level, but didn't tesselate in realtime.
Also, apparently VR Baseball 2000 used the actual realtime tesselation engine (licensed from Messiah before the game ever came out) so they could more efficiently render 10 players on the field.
What ever happened to the realtime tesselation engine from Messiah? Can we have it in some game that's coming out some time later? How come the characters in Messiah and MDK were far more detailed then the characters in Enter the Matrix, which were modeled from actual people?
It comes from me trying to write some homebrew cleartype stuff to see how much it would actually help. It's quite clear when you do cleartype when you have the color sequence reversed and when you have them correct. After some futzing, I arrived at the conclusion that the top screen is RGB order and the bottom is BGR.
The DS is not locked for regions (i.e. You can play Japanese games on American-released systems with no modification). And it will definitely require some sort of English (or at least Latin) text input and display in order for it to be useful on this English-dominated web of ours. So as long as you're willing to learn the menus through trial and error, buying the Japanese version should be just as good as waiting for a NA or EU release.
Oddly enough, that just makes me think "I hope it supports RSS feeds." Think about it... turn on, go to your RSS feeds, see what's changed since you were last using it. Or maybe I should just sign up for Google Reader instead.:P
Slashdot Mirror
There wouldn't be much point to making it believable with the 'aprilfools' tag on it.
That's exactly what was confusing, though. The Flipper GPU had no shaders. It was created in the era before vertex and pixel shaders were commonplace. It did have 8 texture combiners, but those were still fixed-function.
What really gets at me is that people ever really thought that the used games/ham radio/vintage stereo equipment markets were ever going to be hurt in any meaningful way by needing to certify that plugging a device into AC power won't make it explode.
I know that it seems like it would be easy to believe that the Revolution would be just a suped up gamecube, but do you seriously think that they'd even bother manufacturing a CPU below 1GHz at this point? The difference in price between 750 MHz and 1 GHz in this day and age has got to be microscopic, and it really wouldn't be worth cripling the system that much.
I actually only read the article because the title is so misleading. I have a Mac G5 with OSX and a Pentium 4 with WinXP at work, and the Pentium 4 is easily faster than the G5 (though granted it is a year newer). The OSX GUI is smooth as silk, but Photoshop takes ages to resize things...
At any rate, would it be at all possible to get Zonk to change the title from "Why Windows is Slow" to "Why Windows Development is Slow?" It would cut down on stupid posts and system wars.
And on that note, I don't think MS has a problem with being overzealous in supporting legacy hardware... I think they support any and all hardware as best they can so that they don't get sued for antitrust again. Not supporting certain hardware could be seen as exerting undue influence on the industry. Apple, however, not only doesn't support legacy hardware, they also don't support a wide range of current hardware. I've always seen that as a problem, personally.
I figured it would select the language based upon your system's settings. Remember on old European Mega Drive games, there'd be a language selector at the beginning? Same thing, except handled automatically.
The catch is that there's now no reason for one to mod a system except to play copied games (since you won't need to mod your system to play import games). Also, it means game makers can save money by only needing to press one disc, not a different disc for each region.
Furthermore, most current graphics hardware is capible of displaying in either PAL or NTSC or SECAM, etc ... I think there will likely still be some sort of region identification, but probably more like it's done on the DS: it'll ship with a default region selected, and you'll be able to change it in the options. It's probably the simplest solution to "What display do I use when I boot up for the first time ever?"
Where in the world do you work that your company would allow you to (a) choose your hardware, and (b) have any say in what OS is installed? Pretty much everywhere I've ever worked, these decisions are made by IT for funding, legal, and technical reasons.
I understand why one would want to have a triple boot machine... that sounds very nice. But as far as finding a company that would allow you to buy one with company funds, use a hack to get Windows running, and then install the software they own on a computing platform that they don't support is unrealistic at best.
They haven't trademarked the concept of a super hero, just the term. What I don't get is how one could trademark a classification or genre. The way it seems to me (and please let me know if I'm way off base), it's like if one record company could trademark a genre (let's say "punk") and then prevent all other companies from releasing music using the genre name, regardless of the fact that that's the correct classification... and also preventing people from making a "punk hour" at a bar even if they'll be having a live performance and the term is applicable. Does that seem like a good analogy?
I patented it and they're no longer allowed to use it.
It's also not a finished controller. And at $2000 per dev kit + game licensing fees, they can afford to make a cross platform SDK.
Also, nobody at Nintendo has said that the Revolution will be an evolution of GCN hardware. It probably will be, but nobody knows if it's an incremental evolution, or an evolution like comparing the Pentium II to a 80486.
Regardless of that, however, the bill at question is not meant to discover what effects various forms of electronic entertainment have on developing children without relying upon independent agencies hired by politically partisan groups to do the research. Armed with less-biased information, parents would then be able to make better educated decisions about what they do and don't allow their child to watch/play.
While I don't disagree with your views about community vs. parents in child rearing, I'm merely pointing out that this bill is only for research, and probably won't pass because it's too expansive and all-encompasing (and therefore expensive). Were they actually making recommendations on how one should raise a child, I would be on your side.
It's one thing to understand and enforce the law. It's another thing entirely to expect a group of police officers know exactly what the terms of every piece of software's EULA are.
If you'll recall, many people replying to the article (tech-savvy knolwedgeable slashdot readers) had to be informed that Firefox is not covered by GPL, and its licensing agreement allows for people to sell it.
Not that you don't have a point about how much good joysticks help flight sims... but the article was about the "worst" controllers, not very good ones.
Funny, mine is roughly 10 years old now and still works like a charm.
My guess is that you played a lot of Mario Party. I say that because the spinning motion required for a lot of minigames really wreaks havok on the analog stick. What happens is the light grey plastic that actually makes up the stick and base rubs against the outer housing, causing it to slowly be shaved away. Those shavings then get in the way and the "grit" makes the analog stick tough to use.
IIRC, the common remedy for that used to be some light scrubbing with a dry toothbrush. After a while, the plastic will wear down to the point where it no longer grinds and you won't have that issue anymore. Until then, just scrub it out every once in a while.
I'm not trying to imply that this wasn't a real honest design flaw... but in case you wanted to play your N64 without buying a new controller, the above advice should help.
It depends greatly on what it's used for. In most games, it toggles something on the HUD or brings up some sort of info, or activates something you wouldn't use often. Those times, you're glad that it's pretty much impossible to hit it by mistake.
Worst use of it was in R:Racing Evolution where it activated your rear view mirror. The problem with that? You used the right shoulder button to hit the gas. So either you switch your middle finger to gas then reach your index finger up to hit "z" (a painful and sometimes Herculean maneuver), or (like me) you make your hand limber enough to just reach up there with your thumb.
But as much as the "z" button sucked, the giant green "a" button was a work of genius. When playing a gamecube game, you should never need to ask "what button do I hit?" The answer is always "try the giant green one, dumbass."
Oh, and my comment about the X-Box "Fat" controller - what I found hard to use about it wasn't the fact that it was large, it's that the face buttons were set at my thumb's maximum reach, and (if you'll compare) are far smaller and closer together than the buttons on the small controller.
Don't be overly harsh. They probably just erred on the side of caution and came out wrong this time. Their incredulous response, however, is thoroughly mockable.
No, it doesn't count the 360. It only applies to electronics manufactured before April 2001 or electronics manufactured after April 2001 that don't have the certification sticker. Such electronics will need to get tested to get the sticker before they can be sold (but they can still be sold).
Also, as far as the power adapter is concerned. The Dreamacast is subject to certification because the power adapter is internal. The miniaturized PSOne is not since its power adapter is external (however, the power adapter itself is subject to the certification sticker). Game cartridges and console accessories are not subject to the regulation because they don't require any sort of AC/DC conversion and run on minimal power.
(In reality, the law is mildly more complicated than that, but the general internal/external/non-existant AC adapter is a relatively accurate rule-of-thumb for figuring this out.)
But not in Messiah. They used the power of your machine as a guide to generate different LOD models for each character at the start of the level, but didn't tesselate in realtime.
Also, apparently VR Baseball 2000 used the actual realtime tesselation engine (licensed from Messiah before the game ever came out) so they could more efficiently render 10 players on the field.
Dear Dave Perry,
What ever happened to the realtime tesselation engine from Messiah? Can we have it in some game that's coming out some time later? How come the characters in Messiah and MDK were far more detailed then the characters in Enter the Matrix, which were modeled from actual people?
It comes from me trying to write some homebrew cleartype stuff to see how much it would actually help. It's quite clear when you do cleartype when you have the color sequence reversed and when you have them correct. After some futzing, I arrived at the conclusion that the top screen is RGB order and the bottom is BGR.
No, that was the article before this one. Go back and re-post. :-P
The DS is not locked for regions (i.e. You can play Japanese games on American-released systems with no modification). And it will definitely require some sort of English (or at least Latin) text input and display in order for it to be useful on this English-dominated web of ours. So as long as you're willing to learn the menus through trial and error, buying the Japanese version should be just as good as waiting for a NA or EU release.
Oddly enough, that just makes me think "I hope it supports RSS feeds." Think about it... turn on, go to your RSS feeds, see what's changed since you were last using it. Or maybe I should just sign up for Google Reader instead. :P