I'm not sure on import filters specifically (as I've never had any need to develop one, and can't find the documentation I'm looking for at the moment), but simply parsing the data and loading it into a spreadsheet should be relatively easy for anyone familiar with Excel development.
Of course, assuming that the data's well-formed XML, the new version of Excel shouldn't have a problem with it once it's removed from the zip file (though I haven't tried to make sure of this). Excel XP complains about not being able to find the dtd file when it tries to open the unzipped xml files, which may simply be caused by not having OpenOffice.org installed on this machine;)
Woah, but according to Intel's (dong ding dong dit!) TV advertising, if I use their brand of CPU, my internet connection speed will increase, i'll be able to write CD-ROMs and my polygons will be smoother!
Yeah, if you have a P-100 right now some of this might actually be true.
The N64 only had a 100Mhz CPU but they sold it on its bus bandwidth (pity it had such a small on-chip texture cache and cartridges)
Consoles generally don't sell on technical specs. On the other hand, the 16-bit era established that some things can differentiate the consoles in the minds of consumers, such as 8-bit vs 16-bit vs 32-bit vs 64-bit.
- on my 1000Mhz PC I think someone gave it a teensy cache, so it runs like a dog on certain programs.
All depends on the CPU being used. I never had a problem with my 1GHz P3, until it fried because a screw was dislodged in a move and found it's way into a bad place. If it weren't for that, I'd probably still be using it.
I think you mistook what I said. I didn't mean how many people would have 512MB of RAM, as I think this is about average today. Instead I meant how many would actually be using it? Under Win2k I tend to be using about 300MB of RAM most of the time, and the applications I'm running are certainly not the average user's set of apps. I'd imagine that if I had a well-configured Linux box for the same purposes I could probably cut it down to 200-250MB at most.
Market share is the percentage of all items sold during a given time period, and has nothing to do with how many have sold overall (ie since the system was released), which would be user base.
In other words, if the stores sell 100 Cubes, 50 XBoxes, and 60 PS2s, it doesn't matter that last month they sold 25 Cubes, 60 XBoxes, and 75 PS2s, or that there are already 50 million PS2s out there. The market share of the Cube would be nearly 50% if everyone sold the same ratios above. If everyone went out today and bought a PS2, XBox, and GameCube, each would have 33.3% of the market for today.
Woah, can I have your GBA please? Mine is only the standard 16.7Mhz ARM7TDMI and I didn't know you could overclock them like that! I guess 20 times that would be a 333Mhz RISC chip with decent memory - hardly beyond the realms of possibility for a PDA or cellphone.
I should've looked before I wrote, but I assumed, and we can all see where that got me. Then again, it has an 8080 chip for GB compatability, too, that's gotta be worth something;)
And yes, PC's 100Mhz (or 133Mhz) busses suck - I reckon if you are thrashing memory a 450Mhz PC can be slower than a zero-wait-state 333Mhz RISC chip (of course the usual answer is "so don't thrash memory then!").
Yeah, those 100MHz and 133MHz busses, in my computers that are over 2 years old, which ran at 400, 500, 600, and 1000 MHz, all seemed just fine with 256 and 512MB of RAM. Then again, running a significantly faster bus in my current computer (over 1 year old for the motherboard, CPU, and RAM) didn't make nearly as much difference as upgrading the video card from a 64MB GeForce 2GTS to a 128MB GeForce 4Ti. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you crunch the numbers) for most gamers, the GPU is actually more important than the CPU today, though you still need enough of a CPU to get things moving.
Why are you introducing this completely artificial price limit on the phone, but do not have similar artificial price limit on the PDA?
Why the price limit on the phone? I have had a cell phone for less than a year and have already had to have it replaced. Why would I want to spend more than $100 on something that might not last me a year? Furthermore, it's a phone, what's the point? It's primary purpose is to make and receive calls, and that is the only thing it's required to do well. If it costs more and actually does that one thing not quite as well as a phone that costs nothing, why would I buy it? As for the PDA portion of the argument, I don't own a PDA, but have been considering it. I haven't decided, yet, what my price limit is on a PDA, but it definitely exists somewhere. I'd have to say that when it comes down to it, I don't want my PDA being repaired when my phone doesn't work or vice-versa, and frankly even the cheap-ass free phone I have now has many of the functions most people buy PDAs to receive (contacts, synchs with Outlook and possibly other programs, for starters).
This is just plain stupid. I prefer to have a new phone over an old one. Also, I prefer to spend my $500 on the phone rather than having a lousy free phone phone and a PDA.
Good for you. Personally, my free phone works great and cost me nothing, and my plan is the best available in my area by far. If I bought an N-gage, it would mean switching plans, if I buy a Hip-Top, which my carrier supports, the plan options aren't completely clear, so before I even think about spending $200-250 I have to make absolutely sure that they won't screw me on the plan. Everything in the middle offers minimal useful functionality above the free phone I have, but costs $50-200. Then there's the fact that there are only about 6 phones (other than the older ones) that my carrier supports in the first place, and, like I already said, between the Hip-Top and what I already have for free, there's minimal gain for a definitive cost. Colour screens and polyphonic ring tones are not what I consider worth $100 or more. Many of the more expensive phones don't even have as much memory as the phone I already have, although it's not like I need 20 million contacts, either.
Let me turn your point completely over to show how silly it is: I actually got my PDA for free and I am not willing to to pay more than 100 euros for a new PDA. A PDA for 100 euros sucks. Thus a modern 500 euro phone is a better solution. Also, my PDA has a gray scale display so it is pretty much useless for gaming.
OK, that's nice, but in what situation would you get a free PDA and/or have anything stopping you from choosing from all PDA models available. In my case, I'm very aware that I haven't even seen a cell phone that works well for gaming, and I have a very limited choice of phones in the first place (or I switch plans and get screwed there), so the cost of the phone is almost completely based on the benefits of the new phone, which are almost none. Then again, I don't know that I'd have any reason for a colour screen on a PDA, either, unless I found one that was good for gaming (and I was looking at the Zodiacs, but I have to play with one before I can make that kind of decision).
Perhaps you should recheck before posting. I have not claimed that cell phones are more powerful than PDAs. It was another person replying to my original message who put that statement into my mouth. In my original post I claimed that the performance is about the same.
You are correct, your original post states: Play with the phone, it is likely to have much more computing resources than the GBA, and about the same as that bulky PDA.
I would simply have to point out that many of the phones that near the power of PDAs are almost equally bulky, though. At that point, it comes to a question of whether or not you want to carry that around if all you need is a phone, but again I haven't spent a lot of time looking at p
Ever tried to find a decent flight simulator on a console? Good luck searching for one. There are plenty of games (and genres of games) that are better on a PC than they are on a console.
I can't think of the last time I saw a new PC flight simulator on the shelves, either. Perhaps I just need enlightenment. Oh, wait, just remembered that MS releases one every year or so, so now I have to qualify with combat flight simulators, as I don't remember MS continuing their combat series (but I could be wrong). It's really a genre I'm not as interested in as I used to be. On the other hand, Crimson Skies sounds like the kind of game I'd like to play (arcade flight game).
Some of us older gamers can remember the time when consoles couldn't even save games unless the cartridge came with built-in storage (ie, almost anything that came before the PS1), and it's only recently that online multiplayer gaming has become possible on the latest generation of consoles.
Yes, I think most of us can remember the cart saves, just like we know that memory cards only became necessary because of the optical disc. Now, of course, console manufacturers love memory cards because they're cheap hunks of plastic and silicon with a battery that they sell for 10-20x their cost.
Still, try finding a real equivalent of Everquest or even Warcraft III on a PS2/X-Box/GC. You can get close, but not close enough to earn you a cigar.
Well, there's Everquest, but I think everyone already admitted that RTS games and consoles don't work well. There are some developers working on RTS games that have a more console-friendly interface, but I don't think they're out yet (in fact, I think one of them is being made by some developers that left Blizzard which had previously worked on the War/Star-craft games).
Now platform games on the PC? Japanese-style RPGs? Racing titles equivalent to GT3 (and soon GT4)? Arcade racers (Mario Kart, F-Zero)? Fighting games?
We can do this all day, most of us already know which types of games play best on which platforms, and there are only a handful of people trying to make the genres work on the other platform types. Halo was the first FPS I ever played that felt like it really worked on a game pad, not to say that I'd want to play it against PC users online, as I'd rather play on my PC in that environment, knowing that my trackball will stomp the shit out of mice and gamepads alike;) but rather that the game worked well with the pad as a single player game, unlike most other FPS games. I bought Mortal Kombat 4 for the PC because the graphics were far better, but the gameplay just sucked because gamepads tended to be a rather tricky situation with older versions of Windows (I haven't tried to play it on XP) and playing with a keyboard just wasn't doing it.
I have my consoles for the games that belong on consoles and my PC for the games that belong on PCs. I spend the money I used to spend on video card upgrades on consoles, and only buy new video cards every 18 months or so instead of 6 or 12 months like I used to.
oops, pseudonym, not psuedonym, but at least I wasn't completely off (like I originally feared after I hit post and before I looked it up to make sure).
Anyway, many people make the same types of accusations about sci-fi and horror that are often made about romance novels, and it's easy enough to find certain authors and a number of examples that would prove the point that these genres tend to be highly derivative, but the true names in the fields tend to be either very original or bring their own voice to the field in a way that makes the story their own.
heh, right... until you go browse the romatic novels. My wife picks up 10 to 20 of them from the local library every week and I swear they are all the same book with just the character names changed.
Exactly. The same could probably be said about many other genres, but the effort required from one individual to create a book is usually greater than the effort from any single individual to create something in any other medium. Some writers are more prolific than others, some are more formulaic than others, but overall it's one of the most direct forms of media, coming from the author to the reader with little intervention (depending, of course, on the level of involvement from the editors), and even the most derivative of works will often have a voice that is unique to the author.
Given that I've never read a romance novel, I really can't make any claims about them, except that I've never seen anyone actually defend them as being anything more than what everyone claims they are. Given that many authors in that field use psuedonyms, I don't think many of them are given to delusions about what they're writing, either, unlike say John Romero (and his marketing staff) when his team was developing Daikatana.
When was the last time you used a good phone? Take a look at the Symbian series 60 phones, run a few benchmarks and come back.
Regardless of other comments, let's take a quick check. I play games, a lot. I have a fairly expensive computer on which I play games, I have 4 current-generation consoles in my home on which I play more games, I have 3 GBAs (1 original version and 2 SPs, one of which I gave to my gf when I decided to buy a black one) on which I play even more games (and those games I play on the Cube as well through the GB Player), and I have a cell phone, on which I play the Othello game that came with it.
You want to know what matters to me when I'm looking at phones? What can I get for less than $100 without switching (or changing) my plan? I've been looking at the Danger Hip-Top (or wtf it's called) for a while now, but I would probably have to change my plan and pay ~$200-250 for the phone. Considering that I've already had to replace my current phone in less than a year, there's no way in hell I'm paying $200-250 for a phone. The phone I have now cost me nothing, and replacing it also cost nothing (because they couldn't figure out what was wrong with it or that anything I had done had caused it to stop working), and the only time gaming on it even comes into question is in ~5 minute bursts when I didn't expect to not be doing anything (because otherwise I'd have a GBA).
These are roughly 20 x faster than a GBA and about 40 % of the fastest PDAs, with 20 times the battery life. BTW, the fastest PDA's have 450 MHz, but are only around 100 MHz (Pentium equivalent) in computing power as the memory subsystem is so slow (minimal caches, narrow bandwidth) -- and even much less for floating point intensive computation.
OK, so now you're saying a cell phone that's 20x faster than a GBA (a 200MHz ARM) is ~40% the speed of a 100MHz Pentium (in other words, a mid to high-end 4x86), so I could probably play Doom to find the rough equivalent of PC games.
If you had read my comment, you should have notice that I did not claim that a modern phone has more resources than a PDA, but and about the same computational resources.
If I read your comment the way it was written (and remember it correctly) you actually stated that cell phones were more powerful than PDAs. Perhaps you simply mistyped, or maybe I'm remembering what I read incorrectly.
I am the CEO of a game house that has created several globally marketed games, and I know what I am talking about. The phones will be the platform for mobile gaming, especially the multi-player games. N-gage is just showing the direction, but the real, normal, traditional phones will be the gaming platform of the future, no matter if you like it or not.
If N-gage is 'showing the direction', then the direction is down the toilet. If it's showing the direction the technology will be going on future cell phones, then people are going to stop buying cell phones until they understand some basics of the way people use phones, and the way people play games (if they actually want people to play games). As it is, Nokia showed a lack of understanding of both sides, as people don't want to use the N-gage for either. As for cell phone games in general, most people seem to want quick games that they can play while barely paying attention, not ports of old console games. I believe someone else already pointed this out. Most of the companies that have actually made money making cell phone games are making games just like that, and are doing them with low budgets and short development times, and that is what it takes for them to make money from those titles. Guess what, that's where it's likely to stay.
Ten years and gaming without communication can only be found in museums.
That's completely unlikely if you're talking about communication in the terms of networking, or multiplayer gaming. No one will ever give up single-player gaming. The PC gamers should have taught everyone th
I play GBA games at almost any given time, though most frequently at the laundrymat (which, as you state, is to save sanity), but often on my GB Player or when watching TV (during commercials, again probably to save sanity as I've noticed my tolerance for commercials has gotten very low the last couple months), or when someone else is watching the TV I have my consoles connected to and I just don't feel like playing a PC game.
On the other hand, I play games on my cell phone only when I'm on a smoke break and no one else is around to talk to. I played them at the laundrymat before I got my GBA, but now it's just habit to put the SP in my pocket when I'm taking the laundry to my car.
The bitter pill about the Mac is, there isn't a cheap entry level option. There isn't a generic option to cut their teeth on, so the only option is the top shelf. I'm a wintel guy as well and before I got my new latop, I was on the fence about an iMac.
Another option missing on the Mac side is the option of choosing every part in the machine and assembling it yourself. There's no real direct route to that point, and many components that I would normally choose not to have in a computer are built into the motherboards for the Macs.
With a laptop, on the other hand, I'd be much more likely to choose a Mac. I don't think there's much chance that I'd choose a laptop to replace my desktop any time soon (except maybe at work, where I'm one of the few people with a desktop anyway, and am not supposed to open up the desktop to add/remove cards), so most of the software and even gaming isn't much of an issue, and I can edit code in a text editor as easily as Visual Studio (not that I'd want to do everything in a text editor for Windows-based software, but I cut my teeth programming in emacs so I can deal with it for the time I'd be using a laptop for that, and I've heard Apple's tools are fairly good for OS X development, though limited in language support).
In other words, my home desktops are built from the basics (the motherboard, cards, CPU, RAM, drives, case) so I know what's in there and have a good idea of which parts are cheap and which are not (and usually none of them are cheap, but that's another story), and I have very little that I don't use (on-board video and sound, which I can't seem to find boards without as often as I used to; and even those I could use for troubleshooting occasionally, or as a fallback if money is tight and something breaks), like a modem and wireless (yeah, my cable modem and router are on the same desk but I need wireless... like a hole in my head, wireless in the other room, on the other hand...). Additionally, after making a very large initial hardware investment 7 years ago on an extremely high-end desktop, I've only made small investments from that point on to upgrade the machine, and even the initial investment was spread out over a few months without dealing with credit (buying parts that I thought would hold their value longest first, and then the least likely to hold their value last, like the video cards and CPU (I saved about $300 on the CPU by buying it last instead of first)).
On the other hand, I'd rather have a Wacom tablet PC, so maybe I'll be waiting a bit longer before I have a Mac in my house.
Reading from video memory is very slow. It's optimized for writing, so it can't be used as general purpose storage.
Given that video memory is generally used to store data used to build scenes in 3D games and then generate a frame in a buffer, which is then usually read from to be placed into the screen buffer (what will be drawn on screen in the next refresh), this doesn't make much sense to me, and is something I haven't seen in most writing on how video cards work. We're also not talking about general storage, but the exact type of storage most of the current video memory was meant to be used for: storage of textures (images of window contents) to be rendered on the faces of polygons (the windows themselves). Now, just because X isn't going to necessarily be treating windows as polygons doesn't make storing an image of a window any different than storing a texture, nor does it make the operation of reading an image of a window any different from reading a texture.
Yes, but how fast can data be read back from video RAM to the processor ? I'm sure some visual effects can be processed by the card itself, but the main processor is also going to need speedy access to that data.
As fast as the front side bus can send it. Then again, if everything's coded properly, you're simply sending data from the processor to the card, and not back the other way very often. Anything the system needs to know would be fairly independant of the images in the video card's RAM.
In my (perhaps a little contrived) example, I was using over 64MB of video RAM. I'm sure the majority of people are still using graphics cards with 64MB or less of memory (hard-core gamers being an obvious exception).
64MB is pretty common on low-end cards now, and AGP has been common for all cards for quite some time. AGP allows the video card to use the system RAM when it's implemented properly (which most cards have done for a few years now). This is actually part of why on-board video has become more common over the last few years, because an on-board chip based on an AGP chipset can use the system RAM as it's only source of RAM. The biggest concern is that system RAM is slower than the RAM on most video cards, the access over the bus is also slower, and in some cases the amount of system RAM could be very limited. Fortunately, 128MB video cards are common, and 512MB or more of system RAM is becoming common. Most users can operate even Windows XP on 256MB of RAM (though 512MB would be better in many cases), let alone Linux.
Additionally, any AGP-based video card will be able to raid the system RAM when it needs more memory.
Modern video cards are shipping with 128MB standard and 256MB for the high end, and that's likely to increase in the next year, probably to 512MB for the high-end. 64MB is pretty much the low-end today, and you can find 32MB or less on cards here and there, but they're not going to save you much money over the 64MB cards. Some people think it's insane for a graphics card to have that much RAM, but the reality is that the graphics card does more processing in games than the CPU, and it will be able to do so much more quickly if it has a lot of local RAM available instead of having to recover the space every time it needs to load a new model or map.
Additionally, the average system RAM is slowly increasing in off-the-shelf systems, to the point where many of the people I work with are thinking that 1GB isn't unreasonable for system RAM. This isn't really being driven by system requirements so much as the general feeling that people have that they should get more for the same price they paid a few years ago, and with RAM prices significantly lower than they were a few years ago, it's not hard for OEMs to give it to them. Sure, MY 2k and XP boxes need 512MB (actually, my 2k box only has 256MB, but it does need more), but the average person doesn't spend their day sitting in front of Visual Studio, either.
Of course, you are correct in that many people have the on-board video that runs off of system RAM, but again, how many of those people are actually using 512MB of system RAM? Additionally, if Linux is trying to move towards a more desktop-friendly environment, how many average users that would be looking at Linux would be using 512MB of system RAM?
Why on earth are you so keen on funny shaped windows and all those other spurious eye-candy "features"?
It really depends on the features, but more importantly is the idea that it would be capable of using OpenGL to perform many of the functions, meaning that many of the eye-candy features would come at little to no cost. These types of features can be done by most of the video cards produced in the last 5 years with as much ease as displaying the window in the first place.
Nothind irritates me more than sitting down at somebody's box, and seeing a little drop shadow hanging behind their cursor.
What does it hurt? More importantly, why does it matter, since it can be disabled? Personally, I use a cursor at home that is a simple inversion of whatever is below it, which makes it easier for me to see it regardless of where it is on the screen.
The Windows scrolling-out menus just waste time.
On any modern PC the scrolling-out menus are in view long before you could have selected an option with the mouse, or even discerned where on the menu the option you're looking for might be, and you don't have to wait for them if you use the keyboard or go from one menu to the next.
And think how SLOW winamp 3 (or WMP 7 and above) is, when the only feature added since 2.91 was funny shaped windows?
I really couldn't say, since I stopped using it some time ago, however I would point out that WinAmp never used standard windows or controls in previous versions. iTunes for Windows has some problems drawing it's window, but manages to never interrupt playback (a problem I have with WMP sometimes), which means that at home (where all of my music is in MP3 format) it's all I use any more, despite hating the appearance of the application (but since I don't interact with the main window much, the drawing issues are not much of a problem, hopefully they can fix them, though).
Not everyone likes having their resources tied up in eye-candy. I would have preferred some bug-fixes to Winamp 2.91 over anything Winamp 3 has to offer.
The point, though, is that Winamp 3, for instance, has to do most of it's eye-candy in software, even if they bothered to code to OpenGL themselves to draw their windows, as they're being drawn over a non-OpenGL environment. They'll get some hardware acceleration (if they coded to OpenGL or DirectX), but it's not the same as it would be if the environment handled it for them. Drop shadows and transparencies are not state of the art techniques that require multiple rendering passes from current video cards. Of course, if they start talking about programmable shaders and various texture mapping techniques, you might have a point.
If you look at the most popular games of all time, (I have in mind Tetris, Final Fantasy, Unreal Tournament, GTA, Pac-Man, The Sims, WarCraft, Mario, well, you get the idea . ..) they are all fun. That's the point. But they are all respectable in their own right.
Almost half of those games don't even rank in the top 20, while games that do (Half-Life, Myst) aren't there. Mario accounts for about 25% of the top 20, though.
It is much easier to make a game where you have to kill all your enemies, as opposed to make them loyal and win their friendship and love. And besides, most of us do the more complex task in our daily lives anyway.
Civilization (and most of it's sequels and derivatives) can be played this way. Obviously, though, it has a more niche appeal than the others. Of course, a handful of the top selling games involve no conflict at all, such as Tetris and Myst.
As far as comparing books and film to video games, the problem is interactivity. A person doesn't make choices in the two proven genres, but games are participatory.
This is also why games tend to get hit by controversy and that controversy tends to stick better than it ever did with music, movies, and books. This is also why controversy stuck with pen & paper RPGs. Still, it has little to do with whether or not they can be considered art, as that's a matter of the people working on them treating them as such.
The future of game development is going to be intresting, because current game sales have been based on improved technology; not improved gameplay. (ex: UT v UT2003)
As far as I knew, UT outsold UT2003, and Unreal outsold UT. Half-Life outsold Quake 3 by quite a bit. Super Mario Bros 1 outsold all other Mario games (though SMB3 is the best selling game never officially bundled with hardware). Doom 3 might be the exception, if it does well, because it has a better name in the mainstream than Quake. There are far more non-gamers that played Doom than Quake.
The proven game genres are going to have to take a back-seat, and be modified to make some fresh ideas. Who would have thought games such as The Sims would have been so successful? What the game business needs is innovation, not this repetitive stagnation.
As with anything else, the stagnation will remain. Movies certainly suffer from it, music suffers greatly, and books slightly less so, but still to a degree. Occasionally there are those rare games that surpass the current genres and/or bring in mass appeal. I am much happier to see Half-Life on the 'top selling games of all time' charts than Myst or the Sims, because it shows that an existing genre can appeal to the masses with some effort on the part of developers. Too many people are complacent to keep doing the same old things, to try to develop something cheaply that will bring in quick cash. The Sims is actually a solid example of this, as once the actual game took off they kept turning out expansion packs that required very little change to the game itself, and brought in tons of cash. Of course, Valve is nearly as guilty with Half-Life, turning out a dozen or so versions of the game over the past 4 years and selling mods developed by fans of the game (though, of course, those fans made a pretty penny in most cases, too).
People tend to go too far into the mindset of 'we need something completely new' instead of realizing that we just need people to tell new stories and create technology that tells the stories better. Even Half-Life's story was fairly derivative of the rest of the genre, with only a few twists and changes, but the technology they developed to tell the story made it a best seller. Of course, Quake 3 was considered better from a technological standpoint, but it's technology was focused around flashy eye-candy rather than story-telling, which is why it came nowhere near the sales numbers.
On the other hand, what are the SMB games really about? Those are the best-selling ga
The iBooks top out at 1GHz, whereas the PowerBooks start at 1GHz.
At the most, at least for the near future, they'll push the high end of the G4s up a few hundred MHz in the PowerBooks and leave the iBooks alone.
You'll probably see the G5s in PowerBooks in 9-12 months, with a public showing at one of the MacWorld or similar events up to 3-6 months before they're available.
I would further guess that nearly every part of Windows above the HAL (and portions of the kernel) is written in nicely portable C or C++ code
A lot of the pre-.Net code from Microsoft is in C++, so I'd imagine that's what it's in. In fact, one person I know had an internship there and said that they were very big on making sure developers knew C++ as conceptually being a completely different language from C (something most schools don't seem to teach).
(increasing portions of 2003 are written in dotnet, but what's dotnet written in?) so actually, porting the userspace tools would seem to be a nonissue if they can get a compiler working these days.
The key with.Net is to get the CLR running on the target platform, then it doesn't matter what your code was written in. Of course, most of it is probably in Managed C++ and C#.
But, like the link says, support was dropped in 1996, and it WAS only NT (obviously). But if it's been done before it can be done again.
The same methods are used for the IA64 port, and will be used for the AMD 64-bit port. The entire OS was originally built on MIPS to re-enforce the portability, since the designers of NT felt that if they started with x86 they may never have been permitted to do the remaining ports.
GT3 was almost good enough to make me buy a PS2 but if it wasn't available at launch, I am sure you are right about their library problems at the beginning.
If GT3 wasn't available at the US launch, it was available shortly afterwards (within about 6 months), which for many people was essentially the same thing, since the PS2s themselves weren't available at launch.
On the other hand, GT3 was the first DVD title for the PS2 (many PS2 titles were still on CDs), and caused major problems in Japan and on some US consoles (which couldn't read DVDs properly).
As for whether or not people actually use the backwards compatibility, I won't buy a system anywhere near launch without it any more, and I still play PS1 games nearly as much as PS2 games, and sold my PS1 when I got the PS2 (so I could buy more PS2 games). With Final Fantasy Origins having just come out in the last 6 months or so, I hardly see myself stopping with the PS1 games any time soon. The added bonus was that places like Wal-Mart really dropped the prices on PS1 games at the PS2's release, which meant there were plenty of good titles available for a few bucks each.
Modern Radeon series cards can render faster with better image quality than Geforce FX cards, regardless of API or rendering features in use.
The article pretty much counters your statement, as it specifically mentions that the ATI cards have limitations on the complexity and accuracy of shaders well below those on the nVidia cards. The speed, on the other hand, will have to be generally accepted until nVidia can produce better drivers and optimized games are released.
The article also made a few other things fairly clear, though:
1) nVidia has fewer hard-wired limitations on the complexity of the code being run and the accuracy of the calculations being made, though each could come at the cost of speed if used heavily
2) nVidia might be easier to develop for under OpenGL because you have better access to the hardware, whereas DirectX9 in certain areas tends to more closely follow the ATI hardware (which was available to developers and MS before DirectX9 was complete)
3) As the two companies progress, the performance difference will diminish as nVidia's drivers are more heavily optimized and both manufacturers release new hardware which, on nVidia's side, means more speed to throw at the existing feature set, and on ATI's side improvements in the feature set to better leverage improvements in the speed of the hardware.
In other words, this is the closest things have ever been in this particular race, and neither company is out of it yet. The winner won't be determined by the current crop of games or hardware, but instead by what developers (and the 2 manufacturers) do after UT2004, Doom 3, and Half-Life 2.
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I'm not sure on import filters specifically (as I've never had any need to develop one, and can't find the documentation I'm looking for at the moment), but simply parsing the data and loading it into a spreadsheet should be relatively easy for anyone familiar with Excel development.
;)
Of course, assuming that the data's well-formed XML, the new version of Excel shouldn't have a problem with it once it's removed from the zip file (though I haven't tried to make sure of this). Excel XP complains about not being able to find the dtd file when it tries to open the unzipped xml files, which may simply be caused by not having OpenOffice.org installed on this machine
Woah, but according to Intel's (dong ding dong dit!) TV advertising, if I use their brand of CPU, my internet connection speed will increase, i'll be able to write CD-ROMs and my polygons will be smoother!
Yeah, if you have a P-100 right now some of this might actually be true.
The N64 only had a 100Mhz CPU but they sold it on its bus bandwidth (pity it had such a small on-chip texture cache and cartridges)
Consoles generally don't sell on technical specs. On the other hand, the 16-bit era established that some things can differentiate the consoles in the minds of consumers, such as 8-bit vs 16-bit vs 32-bit vs 64-bit.
- on my 1000Mhz PC I think someone gave it a teensy cache, so it runs like a dog on certain programs.
All depends on the CPU being used. I never had a problem with my 1GHz P3, until it fried because a screw was dislodged in a move and found it's way into a bad place. If it weren't for that, I'd probably still be using it.
I think you mistook what I said. I didn't mean how many people would have 512MB of RAM, as I think this is about average today. Instead I meant how many would actually be using it? Under Win2k I tend to be using about 300MB of RAM most of the time, and the applications I'm running are certainly not the average user's set of apps. I'd imagine that if I had a well-configured Linux box for the same purposes I could probably cut it down to 200-250MB at most.
Market share is the percentage of all items sold during a given time period, and has nothing to do with how many have sold overall (ie since the system was released), which would be user base.
In other words, if the stores sell 100 Cubes, 50 XBoxes, and 60 PS2s, it doesn't matter that last month they sold 25 Cubes, 60 XBoxes, and 75 PS2s, or that there are already 50 million PS2s out there. The market share of the Cube would be nearly 50% if everyone sold the same ratios above. If everyone went out today and bought a PS2, XBox, and GameCube, each would have 33.3% of the market for today.
I think when it comes to Mario, they're relying on the GB Player and the Super Mario Advance line.
Woah, can I have your GBA please? Mine is only the standard 16.7Mhz ARM7TDMI and I didn't know you could overclock them like that! I guess 20 times that would be a 333Mhz RISC chip with decent memory - hardly beyond the realms of possibility for a PDA or cellphone.
;)
I should've looked before I wrote, but I assumed, and we can all see where that got me. Then again, it has an 8080 chip for GB compatability, too, that's gotta be worth something
And yes, PC's 100Mhz (or 133Mhz) busses suck - I reckon if you are thrashing memory a 450Mhz PC can be slower than a zero-wait-state 333Mhz RISC chip (of course the usual answer is "so don't thrash memory then!").
Yeah, those 100MHz and 133MHz busses, in my computers that are over 2 years old, which ran at 400, 500, 600, and 1000 MHz, all seemed just fine with 256 and 512MB of RAM. Then again, running a significantly faster bus in my current computer (over 1 year old for the motherboard, CPU, and RAM) didn't make nearly as much difference as upgrading the video card from a 64MB GeForce 2GTS to a 128MB GeForce 4Ti. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you crunch the numbers) for most gamers, the GPU is actually more important than the CPU today, though you still need enough of a CPU to get things moving.
Why are you introducing this completely artificial price limit on the phone, but do not have similar artificial price limit on the PDA?
Why the price limit on the phone? I have had a cell phone for less than a year and have already had to have it replaced. Why would I want to spend more than $100 on something that might not last me a year? Furthermore, it's a phone, what's the point? It's primary purpose is to make and receive calls, and that is the only thing it's required to do well. If it costs more and actually does that one thing not quite as well as a phone that costs nothing, why would I buy it? As for the PDA portion of the argument, I don't own a PDA, but have been considering it. I haven't decided, yet, what my price limit is on a PDA, but it definitely exists somewhere. I'd have to say that when it comes down to it, I don't want my PDA being repaired when my phone doesn't work or vice-versa, and frankly even the cheap-ass free phone I have now has many of the functions most people buy PDAs to receive (contacts, synchs with Outlook and possibly other programs, for starters).
This is just plain stupid. I prefer to have a new phone over an old one. Also, I prefer to spend my $500 on the phone rather than having a lousy free phone phone and a PDA.
Good for you. Personally, my free phone works great and cost me nothing, and my plan is the best available in my area by far. If I bought an N-gage, it would mean switching plans, if I buy a Hip-Top, which my carrier supports, the plan options aren't completely clear, so before I even think about spending $200-250 I have to make absolutely sure that they won't screw me on the plan. Everything in the middle offers minimal useful functionality above the free phone I have, but costs $50-200. Then there's the fact that there are only about 6 phones (other than the older ones) that my carrier supports in the first place, and, like I already said, between the Hip-Top and what I already have for free, there's minimal gain for a definitive cost. Colour screens and polyphonic ring tones are not what I consider worth $100 or more. Many of the more expensive phones don't even have as much memory as the phone I already have, although it's not like I need 20 million contacts, either.
Let me turn your point completely over to show how silly it is: I actually got my PDA for free and I am not willing to to pay more than 100 euros for a new PDA. A PDA for 100 euros sucks. Thus a modern 500 euro phone is a better solution. Also, my PDA has a gray scale display so it is pretty much useless for gaming.
OK, that's nice, but in what situation would you get a free PDA and/or have anything stopping you from choosing from all PDA models available. In my case, I'm very aware that I haven't even seen a cell phone that works well for gaming, and I have a very limited choice of phones in the first place (or I switch plans and get screwed there), so the cost of the phone is almost completely based on the benefits of the new phone, which are almost none. Then again, I don't know that I'd have any reason for a colour screen on a PDA, either, unless I found one that was good for gaming (and I was looking at the Zodiacs, but I have to play with one before I can make that kind of decision).
Perhaps you should recheck before posting. I have not claimed that cell phones are more powerful than PDAs. It was another person replying to my original message who put that statement into my mouth. In my original post I claimed that the performance is about the same.
You are correct, your original post states: Play with the phone, it is likely to have much more computing resources than the GBA, and about the same as that bulky PDA.
I would simply have to point out that many of the phones that near the power of PDAs are almost equally bulky, though. At that point, it comes to a question of whether or not you want to carry that around if all you need is a phone, but again I haven't spent a lot of time looking at p
Ever tried to find a decent flight simulator on a console? Good luck searching for one. There are plenty of games (and genres of games) that are better on a PC than they are on a console.
;) but rather that the game worked well with the pad as a single player game, unlike most other FPS games. I bought Mortal Kombat 4 for the PC because the graphics were far better, but the gameplay just sucked because gamepads tended to be a rather tricky situation with older versions of Windows (I haven't tried to play it on XP) and playing with a keyboard just wasn't doing it.
I can't think of the last time I saw a new PC flight simulator on the shelves, either. Perhaps I just need enlightenment. Oh, wait, just remembered that MS releases one every year or so, so now I have to qualify with combat flight simulators, as I don't remember MS continuing their combat series (but I could be wrong). It's really a genre I'm not as interested in as I used to be. On the other hand, Crimson Skies sounds like the kind of game I'd like to play (arcade flight game).
Some of us older gamers can remember the time when consoles couldn't even save games unless the cartridge came with built-in storage (ie, almost anything that came before the PS1), and it's only recently that online multiplayer gaming has become possible on the latest generation of consoles.
Yes, I think most of us can remember the cart saves, just like we know that memory cards only became necessary because of the optical disc. Now, of course, console manufacturers love memory cards because they're cheap hunks of plastic and silicon with a battery that they sell for 10-20x their cost.
Still, try finding a real equivalent of Everquest or even Warcraft III on a PS2/X-Box/GC. You can get close, but not close enough to earn you a cigar.
Well, there's Everquest, but I think everyone already admitted that RTS games and consoles don't work well. There are some developers working on RTS games that have a more console-friendly interface, but I don't think they're out yet (in fact, I think one of them is being made by some developers that left Blizzard which had previously worked on the War/Star-craft games).
Now platform games on the PC? Japanese-style RPGs? Racing titles equivalent to GT3 (and soon GT4)? Arcade racers (Mario Kart, F-Zero)? Fighting games?
We can do this all day, most of us already know which types of games play best on which platforms, and there are only a handful of people trying to make the genres work on the other platform types. Halo was the first FPS I ever played that felt like it really worked on a game pad, not to say that I'd want to play it against PC users online, as I'd rather play on my PC in that environment, knowing that my trackball will stomp the shit out of mice and gamepads alike
I have my consoles for the games that belong on consoles and my PC for the games that belong on PCs. I spend the money I used to spend on video card upgrades on consoles, and only buy new video cards every 18 months or so instead of 6 or 12 months like I used to.
oops, pseudonym, not psuedonym, but at least I wasn't completely off (like I originally feared after I hit post and before I looked it up to make sure).
Anyway, many people make the same types of accusations about sci-fi and horror that are often made about romance novels, and it's easy enough to find certain authors and a number of examples that would prove the point that these genres tend to be highly derivative, but the true names in the fields tend to be either very original or bring their own voice to the field in a way that makes the story their own.
heh, right... until you go browse the romatic novels. My wife picks up 10 to 20 of them from the local library every week and I swear they are all the same book with just the character names changed.
Exactly. The same could probably be said about many other genres, but the effort required from one individual to create a book is usually greater than the effort from any single individual to create something in any other medium. Some writers are more prolific than others, some are more formulaic than others, but overall it's one of the most direct forms of media, coming from the author to the reader with little intervention (depending, of course, on the level of involvement from the editors), and even the most derivative of works will often have a voice that is unique to the author.
Given that I've never read a romance novel, I really can't make any claims about them, except that I've never seen anyone actually defend them as being anything more than what everyone claims they are. Given that many authors in that field use psuedonyms, I don't think many of them are given to delusions about what they're writing, either, unlike say John Romero (and his marketing staff) when his team was developing Daikatana.
When was the last time you used a good phone? Take a look at the Symbian series 60 phones, run a few benchmarks and come back.
Regardless of other comments, let's take a quick check. I play games, a lot. I have a fairly expensive computer on which I play games, I have 4 current-generation consoles in my home on which I play more games, I have 3 GBAs (1 original version and 2 SPs, one of which I gave to my gf when I decided to buy a black one) on which I play even more games (and those games I play on the Cube as well through the GB Player), and I have a cell phone, on which I play the Othello game that came with it.
You want to know what matters to me when I'm looking at phones? What can I get for less than $100 without switching (or changing) my plan? I've been looking at the Danger Hip-Top (or wtf it's called) for a while now, but I would probably have to change my plan and pay ~$200-250 for the phone. Considering that I've already had to replace my current phone in less than a year, there's no way in hell I'm paying $200-250 for a phone. The phone I have now cost me nothing, and replacing it also cost nothing (because they couldn't figure out what was wrong with it or that anything I had done had caused it to stop working), and the only time gaming on it even comes into question is in ~5 minute bursts when I didn't expect to not be doing anything (because otherwise I'd have a GBA).
These are roughly 20 x faster than a GBA and about 40 % of the fastest PDAs, with 20 times the battery life. BTW, the fastest PDA's have 450 MHz, but are only around 100 MHz (Pentium equivalent) in computing power as the memory subsystem is so slow (minimal caches, narrow bandwidth) -- and even much less for floating point intensive computation.
OK, so now you're saying a cell phone that's 20x faster than a GBA (a 200MHz ARM) is ~40% the speed of a 100MHz Pentium (in other words, a mid to high-end 4x86), so I could probably play Doom to find the rough equivalent of PC games.
If you had read my comment, you should have notice that I did not claim that a modern phone has more resources than a PDA, but and about the same computational resources.
If I read your comment the way it was written (and remember it correctly) you actually stated that cell phones were more powerful than PDAs. Perhaps you simply mistyped, or maybe I'm remembering what I read incorrectly.
I am the CEO of a game house that has created several globally marketed games, and I know what I am talking about. The phones will be the platform for mobile gaming, especially the multi-player games. N-gage is just showing the direction, but the real, normal, traditional phones will be the gaming platform of the future, no matter if you like it or not.
If N-gage is 'showing the direction', then the direction is down the toilet. If it's showing the direction the technology will be going on future cell phones, then people are going to stop buying cell phones until they understand some basics of the way people use phones, and the way people play games (if they actually want people to play games). As it is, Nokia showed a lack of understanding of both sides, as people don't want to use the N-gage for either. As for cell phone games in general, most people seem to want quick games that they can play while barely paying attention, not ports of old console games. I believe someone else already pointed this out. Most of the companies that have actually made money making cell phone games are making games just like that, and are doing them with low budgets and short development times, and that is what it takes for them to make money from those titles. Guess what, that's where it's likely to stay.
Ten years and gaming without communication can only be found in museums.
That's completely unlikely if you're talking about communication in the terms of networking, or multiplayer gaming. No one will ever give up single-player gaming. The PC gamers should have taught everyone th
I play GBA games at almost any given time, though most frequently at the laundrymat (which, as you state, is to save sanity), but often on my GB Player or when watching TV (during commercials, again probably to save sanity as I've noticed my tolerance for commercials has gotten very low the last couple months), or when someone else is watching the TV I have my consoles connected to and I just don't feel like playing a PC game.
On the other hand, I play games on my cell phone only when I'm on a smoke break and no one else is around to talk to. I played them at the laundrymat before I got my GBA, but now it's just habit to put the SP in my pocket when I'm taking the laundry to my car.
The bitter pill about the Mac is, there isn't a cheap entry level option. There isn't a generic option to cut their teeth on, so the only option is the top shelf. I'm a wintel guy as well and before I got my new latop, I was on the fence about an iMac.
Another option missing on the Mac side is the option of choosing every part in the machine and assembling it yourself. There's no real direct route to that point, and many components that I would normally choose not to have in a computer are built into the motherboards for the Macs.
With a laptop, on the other hand, I'd be much more likely to choose a Mac. I don't think there's much chance that I'd choose a laptop to replace my desktop any time soon (except maybe at work, where I'm one of the few people with a desktop anyway, and am not supposed to open up the desktop to add/remove cards), so most of the software and even gaming isn't much of an issue, and I can edit code in a text editor as easily as Visual Studio (not that I'd want to do everything in a text editor for Windows-based software, but I cut my teeth programming in emacs so I can deal with it for the time I'd be using a laptop for that, and I've heard Apple's tools are fairly good for OS X development, though limited in language support).
In other words, my home desktops are built from the basics (the motherboard, cards, CPU, RAM, drives, case) so I know what's in there and have a good idea of which parts are cheap and which are not (and usually none of them are cheap, but that's another story), and I have very little that I don't use (on-board video and sound, which I can't seem to find boards without as often as I used to; and even those I could use for troubleshooting occasionally, or as a fallback if money is tight and something breaks), like a modem and wireless (yeah, my cable modem and router are on the same desk but I need wireless... like a hole in my head, wireless in the other room, on the other hand...). Additionally, after making a very large initial hardware investment 7 years ago on an extremely high-end desktop, I've only made small investments from that point on to upgrade the machine, and even the initial investment was spread out over a few months without dealing with credit (buying parts that I thought would hold their value longest first, and then the least likely to hold their value last, like the video cards and CPU (I saved about $300 on the CPU by buying it last instead of first)).
On the other hand, I'd rather have a Wacom tablet PC, so maybe I'll be waiting a bit longer before I have a Mac in my house.
Reading from video memory is very slow. It's optimized for writing, so it can't be used as general purpose storage.
Given that video memory is generally used to store data used to build scenes in 3D games and then generate a frame in a buffer, which is then usually read from to be placed into the screen buffer (what will be drawn on screen in the next refresh), this doesn't make much sense to me, and is something I haven't seen in most writing on how video cards work. We're also not talking about general storage, but the exact type of storage most of the current video memory was meant to be used for: storage of textures (images of window contents) to be rendered on the faces of polygons (the windows themselves). Now, just because X isn't going to necessarily be treating windows as polygons doesn't make storing an image of a window any different than storing a texture, nor does it make the operation of reading an image of a window any different from reading a texture.
Yes, but how fast can data be read back from video RAM to the processor ? I'm sure some visual effects can be processed by the card itself, but the main processor is also going to need speedy access to that data.
As fast as the front side bus can send it. Then again, if everything's coded properly, you're simply sending data from the processor to the card, and not back the other way very often. Anything the system needs to know would be fairly independant of the images in the video card's RAM.
In my (perhaps a little contrived) example, I was using over 64MB of video RAM. I'm sure the majority of people are still using graphics cards with 64MB or less of memory (hard-core gamers being an obvious exception).
64MB is pretty common on low-end cards now, and AGP has been common for all cards for quite some time. AGP allows the video card to use the system RAM when it's implemented properly (which most cards have done for a few years now). This is actually part of why on-board video has become more common over the last few years, because an on-board chip based on an AGP chipset can use the system RAM as it's only source of RAM. The biggest concern is that system RAM is slower than the RAM on most video cards, the access over the bus is also slower, and in some cases the amount of system RAM could be very limited. Fortunately, 128MB video cards are common, and 512MB or more of system RAM is becoming common. Most users can operate even Windows XP on 256MB of RAM (though 512MB would be better in many cases), let alone Linux.
Additionally, any AGP-based video card will be able to raid the system RAM when it needs more memory.
Modern video cards are shipping with 128MB standard and 256MB for the high end, and that's likely to increase in the next year, probably to 512MB for the high-end. 64MB is pretty much the low-end today, and you can find 32MB or less on cards here and there, but they're not going to save you much money over the 64MB cards. Some people think it's insane for a graphics card to have that much RAM, but the reality is that the graphics card does more processing in games than the CPU, and it will be able to do so much more quickly if it has a lot of local RAM available instead of having to recover the space every time it needs to load a new model or map.
Additionally, the average system RAM is slowly increasing in off-the-shelf systems, to the point where many of the people I work with are thinking that 1GB isn't unreasonable for system RAM. This isn't really being driven by system requirements so much as the general feeling that people have that they should get more for the same price they paid a few years ago, and with RAM prices significantly lower than they were a few years ago, it's not hard for OEMs to give it to them. Sure, MY 2k and XP boxes need 512MB (actually, my 2k box only has 256MB, but it does need more), but the average person doesn't spend their day sitting in front of Visual Studio, either.
Of course, you are correct in that many people have the on-board video that runs off of system RAM, but again, how many of those people are actually using 512MB of system RAM? Additionally, if Linux is trying to move towards a more desktop-friendly environment, how many average users that would be looking at Linux would be using 512MB of system RAM?
Why on earth are you so keen on funny shaped windows and all those other spurious eye-candy "features"?
It really depends on the features, but more importantly is the idea that it would be capable of using OpenGL to perform many of the functions, meaning that many of the eye-candy features would come at little to no cost. These types of features can be done by most of the video cards produced in the last 5 years with as much ease as displaying the window in the first place.
Nothind irritates me more than sitting down at somebody's box, and seeing a little drop shadow hanging behind their cursor.
What does it hurt? More importantly, why does it matter, since it can be disabled? Personally, I use a cursor at home that is a simple inversion of whatever is below it, which makes it easier for me to see it regardless of where it is on the screen.
The Windows scrolling-out menus just waste time.
On any modern PC the scrolling-out menus are in view long before you could have selected an option with the mouse, or even discerned where on the menu the option you're looking for might be, and you don't have to wait for them if you use the keyboard or go from one menu to the next.
And think how SLOW winamp 3 (or WMP 7 and above) is, when the only feature added since 2.91 was funny shaped windows?
I really couldn't say, since I stopped using it some time ago, however I would point out that WinAmp never used standard windows or controls in previous versions. iTunes for Windows has some problems drawing it's window, but manages to never interrupt playback (a problem I have with WMP sometimes), which means that at home (where all of my music is in MP3 format) it's all I use any more, despite hating the appearance of the application (but since I don't interact with the main window much, the drawing issues are not much of a problem, hopefully they can fix them, though).
Not everyone likes having their resources tied up in eye-candy. I would have preferred some bug-fixes to Winamp 2.91 over anything Winamp 3 has to offer.
The point, though, is that Winamp 3, for instance, has to do most of it's eye-candy in software, even if they bothered to code to OpenGL themselves to draw their windows, as they're being drawn over a non-OpenGL environment. They'll get some hardware acceleration (if they coded to OpenGL or DirectX), but it's not the same as it would be if the environment handled it for them. Drop shadows and transparencies are not state of the art techniques that require multiple rendering passes from current video cards. Of course, if they start talking about programmable shaders and various texture mapping techniques, you might have a point.
If you look at the most popular games of all time, (I have in mind Tetris, Final Fantasy, Unreal Tournament, GTA, Pac-Man, The Sims, WarCraft, Mario, well, you get the idea . . .) they are all fun. That's the point. But they are all respectable in their own right.
Almost half of those games don't even rank in the top 20, while games that do (Half-Life, Myst) aren't there. Mario accounts for about 25% of the top 20, though.
It is much easier to make a game where you have to kill all your enemies, as opposed to make them loyal and win their friendship and love. And besides, most of us do the more complex task in our daily lives anyway.
Civilization (and most of it's sequels and derivatives) can be played this way. Obviously, though, it has a more niche appeal than the others. Of course, a handful of the top selling games involve no conflict at all, such as Tetris and Myst.
As far as comparing books and film to video games, the problem is interactivity. A person doesn't make choices in the two proven genres, but games are participatory.
This is also why games tend to get hit by controversy and that controversy tends to stick better than it ever did with music, movies, and books. This is also why controversy stuck with pen & paper RPGs. Still, it has little to do with whether or not they can be considered art, as that's a matter of the people working on them treating them as such.
The future of game development is going to be intresting, because current game sales have been based on improved technology; not improved gameplay. (ex: UT v UT2003)
As far as I knew, UT outsold UT2003, and Unreal outsold UT. Half-Life outsold Quake 3 by quite a bit. Super Mario Bros 1 outsold all other Mario games (though SMB3 is the best selling game never officially bundled with hardware). Doom 3 might be the exception, if it does well, because it has a better name in the mainstream than Quake. There are far more non-gamers that played Doom than Quake.
The proven game genres are going to have to take a back-seat, and be modified to make some fresh ideas. Who would have thought games such as The Sims would have been so successful? What the game business needs is innovation, not this repetitive stagnation.
As with anything else, the stagnation will remain. Movies certainly suffer from it, music suffers greatly, and books slightly less so, but still to a degree. Occasionally there are those rare games that surpass the current genres and/or bring in mass appeal. I am much happier to see Half-Life on the 'top selling games of all time' charts than Myst or the Sims, because it shows that an existing genre can appeal to the masses with some effort on the part of developers. Too many people are complacent to keep doing the same old things, to try to develop something cheaply that will bring in quick cash. The Sims is actually a solid example of this, as once the actual game took off they kept turning out expansion packs that required very little change to the game itself, and brought in tons of cash. Of course, Valve is nearly as guilty with Half-Life, turning out a dozen or so versions of the game over the past 4 years and selling mods developed by fans of the game (though, of course, those fans made a pretty penny in most cases, too).
People tend to go too far into the mindset of 'we need something completely new' instead of realizing that we just need people to tell new stories and create technology that tells the stories better. Even Half-Life's story was fairly derivative of the rest of the genre, with only a few twists and changes, but the technology they developed to tell the story made it a best seller. Of course, Quake 3 was considered better from a technological standpoint, but it's technology was focused around flashy eye-candy rather than story-telling, which is why it came nowhere near the sales numbers.
On the other hand, what are the SMB games really about? Those are the best-selling ga
The iBooks top out at 1GHz, whereas the PowerBooks start at 1GHz.
At the most, at least for the near future, they'll push the high end of the G4s up a few hundred MHz in the PowerBooks and leave the iBooks alone.
You'll probably see the G5s in PowerBooks in 9-12 months, with a public showing at one of the MacWorld or similar events up to 3-6 months before they're available.
One of the Windows CE.Net pages has this little piece of info:
/ mobile/default.asp
Support for over 200 separate 32-bit CPUs from the ARM, MIPS, SH, and x86 architectures.
Over at http://www.microsoft.com/Windows/Embedded/devices
I think MS is doing a lot more cross-platform work than people would normally believe.
I would further guess that nearly every part of Windows above the HAL (and portions of the kernel) is written in nicely portable C or C++ code
.Net is to get the CLR running on the target platform, then it doesn't matter what your code was written in. Of course, most of it is probably in Managed C++ and C#.
A lot of the pre-.Net code from Microsoft is in C++, so I'd imagine that's what it's in. In fact, one person I know had an internship there and said that they were very big on making sure developers knew C++ as conceptually being a completely different language from C (something most schools don't seem to teach).
(increasing portions of 2003 are written in dotnet, but what's dotnet written in?) so actually, porting the userspace tools would seem to be a nonissue if they can get a compiler working these days.
The key with
But, like the link says, support was dropped in 1996, and it WAS only NT (obviously). But if it's been done before it can be done again.
The same methods are used for the IA64 port, and will be used for the AMD 64-bit port. The entire OS was originally built on MIPS to re-enforce the portability, since the designers of NT felt that if they started with x86 they may never have been permitted to do the remaining ports.
GT3 was almost good enough to make me buy a PS2 but if it wasn't available at launch, I am sure you are right about their library problems at the beginning.
If GT3 wasn't available at the US launch, it was available shortly afterwards (within about 6 months), which for many people was essentially the same thing, since the PS2s themselves weren't available at launch.
On the other hand, GT3 was the first DVD title for the PS2 (many PS2 titles were still on CDs), and caused major problems in Japan and on some US consoles (which couldn't read DVDs properly).
As for whether or not people actually use the backwards compatibility, I won't buy a system anywhere near launch without it any more, and I still play PS1 games nearly as much as PS2 games, and sold my PS1 when I got the PS2 (so I could buy more PS2 games). With Final Fantasy Origins having just come out in the last 6 months or so, I hardly see myself stopping with the PS1 games any time soon. The added bonus was that places like Wal-Mart really dropped the prices on PS1 games at the PS2's release, which meant there were plenty of good titles available for a few bucks each.
Modern Radeon series cards can render faster with better image quality than Geforce FX cards, regardless of API or rendering features in use.
The article pretty much counters your statement, as it specifically mentions that the ATI cards have limitations on the complexity and accuracy of shaders well below those on the nVidia cards. The speed, on the other hand, will have to be generally accepted until nVidia can produce better drivers and optimized games are released.
The article also made a few other things fairly clear, though:
1) nVidia has fewer hard-wired limitations on the complexity of the code being run and the accuracy of the calculations being made, though each could come at the cost of speed if used heavily
2) nVidia might be easier to develop for under OpenGL because you have better access to the hardware, whereas DirectX9 in certain areas tends to more closely follow the ATI hardware (which was available to developers and MS before DirectX9 was complete)
3) As the two companies progress, the performance difference will diminish as nVidia's drivers are more heavily optimized and both manufacturers release new hardware which, on nVidia's side, means more speed to throw at the existing feature set, and on ATI's side improvements in the feature set to better leverage improvements in the speed of the hardware.
In other words, this is the closest things have ever been in this particular race, and neither company is out of it yet. The winner won't be determined by the current crop of games or hardware, but instead by what developers (and the 2 manufacturers) do after UT2004, Doom 3, and Half-Life 2.