I love the refreshing education on how people in india pronounce several common terms in a way that we can not understand let alone repeat.
Personally, I love getting transferred to the US. (I'm Canadian). I get to hear all about the evils of a "rooter", "wahless" connections, and the ever popular "lah bub" (light bulb). I also have the absolute joy of hearing temperatures given to me in fahrenheit, and clueless techs who have no idea what celcius is. I also have had the absolute joy of being asked for an American credit card, as it was inconcievable that there was a world outside of the US of A (mind you, this last item was in person, and I was also asked for California ID, rather on the phone, but the point remains). And of course, the USA's finest... *drumroll* being told that component cables would not increase the quality of picture on my PSX games (by a Sony rep).
Fuck GTA. I want a pimping game. You can drive your car around by holding the wiimote like a steering wheel, and bounce it up and down to bounce your car. You can pimp smack your hoes by backhanding them with the wiimote... Ah, that would be fun.
As the quote you posted mentions, that's only for this year. So DS owners have bought on average, 3.5 games over the last 6 months. While PSP owners have bought on average, 1.2 games over the last 6 months. It's entirely likely that there are a great many people who bought a PSP, got a game or two, and haven't bought one since.
Why spend hundreds of hours making a game that no one can/would use. Seems like alot of work for no gain. Stick to computers for homebrews and cellphones for portables, easier and much bigger audiences.
I am the author of Dissonance. Before developing it, I had a tiny bit of NDS programming under my belt, a moderate amount of GBA, and a fair amount of PC. I am not a licensed developer, which means that my work will eventually... as you mentioned, be viewed by a very small number of people. However, it's not always about that.
I wrote Dissonance first and foremost, for myself. I've wanted a portable internet radio client from day 1. As soon as the homebrew scene got to the point that it was realistic to code one, I wrote it. I worked day and night getting it out the door, and it felt GOOD when I got it out the door. I had overcome many obstacles, and had a whole lot of fun coding for such a well made system. In the end, my product didn't do me a whole lot of good (yet), but it made me happy to code it, and I got to code something useful for the NDS. At the end of the day, isn't that why we code things for free? To have some fun, and try to make something that's useful while we're at it? My main interest just doesn't lie with PCs. I prefer handhelds, and I like to have a little more to work with than a cell phone.
I have GC Linux booting, and running off of an NFS share from my file server. I also hear that the optical drive is accessible from Linux. I'm not sure about regular homebrew, but I would imagine it's not much different. My intention though is to leverage the NFS share for all it's worth, and make my GameCube into a media terminal. I have mostly just been playing around with it though, and haven't gotten it doing anything constructive yet (I'm too lazy to recompile the kernel with the patch for my keyboard). I did buy an 8cm DVD-RW though.
No offense man... but if I was trying to figure out what sort of person you were by looking online, and I found your name associated with gay porn... I probably wouldn't want to click on the picture either.
You stand on the second hand of a clock and ravage the next thousand years. The entire world crumbles in front of your big prick, the dawn breaking on a broken world of your creation, and you send up a prayer demanding more light.
In the window across from you, a woman stands knock-kneed with her cunt pushed forward, holding the edge of her dress with greasy fists. Marvelous if she were to suddenly fall through the glass! Dream of the men bleeding from their feet on the sidewalk below, their frock coats dragging through the splinters!
You have found God in His burning bush and have risen from the ashes beneath its branches. You are in a sore struggle with the French girl, but it isn't possible for you to last with her crying and her mumbling: oh, c'est bon!
You think about how the stars have exploded, and the birds that came from the death of the heavens are not as free as you.
DO YOU?
a) Swallow the confusion which nourishes the artist and makes him madly inhuman, and come. b) Come, and stare at your crumpled pants.
Yes it does, but there are problems. (The same problems that exist in SuSE. No DRI being the #1). However, AIGLX is fairly stable, and I've been running it on my laptop for about 2 months now. There are some problems with playing video, and 3D graphics have a tendency to flicker, but I don't do any gaming on my laptop, so it doesn't bother me. I just make sure that I have a 2D screensaver selected, and it's fine.
I find it rather amusing that you say that backwards compatibility is impossible because of architecture changes, and that Microsoft isn't "Pulling a Nintendo".
Another poster already mentioned that the PS2's architecture is vastly different from the PSX, and backwards compatibility was maintained by adding the PSX CPU to the system, giving it the task of I/O. Not to mention that the PS3 (apparently) is fully compatible with the PS2 despite even more radical changes. Presumably this is done through software emulation, as legacy hardware doesn't seem to be included.
But back to my point about pulling a Nintendo, let's talk about the GBA and NDS. The GBA is very different from the GB or GBC... how was backward compatibility maintained? By creating a special cart reader that would read all the carts, and including the CPU from the GBC in the GBA. The GBC CPU isn't normally used, and there's a hardware switch inside the cart reader that will activate the power to the right CPU based on cartridge size. How does the NDS do it? Well, they included an entirely seperate cartridge reader for GBA games, and included a GBA CPU. The GBA CPU is actually used for NDS specific stuff, such as sound, input, wireless, etc. when a NDS game is selected, but disables the ARM9 (NDS primary CPU) when a GBA game is selected.
So... no, Microsoft is pulling a Microsoft. Rather than include legacy hardware or write a proper emulator, they are just saying that they did a good job and patting themselves on the back.
How exactly do you make money on open source games? They are a different beast entirely from regular apps. If someone is paying for support for a game, then there's something very wrong going on. I mean, I'm all for open source software, but I've never been able to figure out how to code them, and still put food on the table. As a result, most of my games have been proprietary.
I just sat here for 5 minutes thinking about that actually, after I read what you said. I sat here and thought that was a terrible idea for the first 2.4 minutes. Then I started to think about how awesome that would be, if it were real.
I mean, just imagine it. Google has a site that's based entirely upon wild speculation. Anyone can post any sort of speculation, be it meaningful or not. And the speculation could be searched entirely. If by some chance the speculation came true, then Google news could automatically search through the speculations for the relevant information. And then they could have ranking links below the story. Saying something like "This story was predicted by ____ web sites", with a link to the Google Wild Speculation search. And they could have rankings of all people who write speculation for the Google Wild Speculation site. So in that way, you could find out if perhaps you were psychic, or were really good at predicting the future. Pyschics on TV would be out of jobs when it was found out that they had a 0.0001% speculation rate on Google Wild Speculation.
Meanwhile, Google would find all the real psychics, and would hire them up. Then Google would have psychics to control our minds.
Yeah, that would be awesome. I should go code that right now.
I can just picture this in the context of a rectal exam. "Actually, I'd have to say, the exam was quite nice considering the hardware". That doesn't make it pleasant, or something I would deliberately seek out. Until the DS and the Wii, FPS gaming firmly belonged on the PC.
Yeah, I realized that it was XFCE a few moments after I hit submit.;) It just looked so gnomish the first time I looked at it, that I hadn't really thought to look deeper. (I'm running Ubuntu 6.06 with AIGLX and Compiz, which looks fairly similar)
Looks like Gnome System Monitor to me. Comes standard with Gnome. Not really sure what distro it is, it looks fairly heavily customized. But if I had to guess, I would say Debian or Ubuntu, simply because they are THE Gnome desktop. (And I would hope it's not Fedora.:P)
It's probably due to the fact that it IS a console game. With PC games, the barrier to entry is minimal. There are many free or low cost engines that you can use for your game, and anyone who wants to publish a PC game needs only to find a publisher who is willing to make the CDs and put them on store shelves. As a result, the cost is much lower than when you consider the console costs...
On a console, only licensed developers are allowed to make games. This means purchasing an expensive devkit, and the developer's software. From there, an engine must either be bought from another developer, or developed from scratch, or ported from another platform. And lastly, the game when finished must again be sent to a publisher for publishing. But the difference here is that the console manufactururer will take royalty payments for each game sold, and the games that are produced need to be produced on special media. This means sending the game to one of a select few factories for mass production.
Anyways, this is my analysis of why it's likely that it works that way. But in my experience, when a game comes out for multiple platforms, such as Prince of Persia, the PC version will usually be about $10 CAD less than the others.
The extra cost of the PS3/360 games are in the development work that's needed for them. Wii is an evolutionary advancement over the GameCube, and is quite easy to develop for, or port existing engines to. This saves on development time and money. Essentially giving developers a huge kick-start.
PS3 and 360 on the other hand, have massively parallel architecture, and to get any sort of performance at all out of the machines, you need to be running at least 6 threads simultaneously. This involves a massive rewrite of pretty much all the code out there, and a LOT of development work. This is why their games are more expensive. And this is also why the Wii features a single core. (Last I heard)
There's a difference though. Nintendo NEVER shat on their fans. They never blatantly told their fans that they would buy it no matter what. Nintendo's fault was in their dealings with 3rd parties. The Nintendo 64 was intentionally developed as a very powerful console, but insanely difficult to develop for, so that smaller developers wouldn't be able to develop games. The idea was that the bigger ones would be the ones developing the games, thus lowering the amount of crappy games on the market. That plan failed, largely because it was too expensive to develop games, and Sony already had a stranglehold on the market by the time the N64 came to pass. Nintendo corrected this with the GameCube, lowering license fees dramatically, and creating hardware that was extremely easy to work with, but the damage was already done (and Sony once again beat them to market). However, the good will to 3rd parties wasn't forgotten, and we are seeing the return of 3rd parties with the DS and the Wii.
Now think about that for a second. Nintendo's biggest mistakes were basically telling 3rd parties that they would develop for their system no matter what the cost, and creating hardware that was very difficult to code for... Sony is telling the consumer that they will buy it no matter the cost, and creating hardware that is even more difficult to code for...
It will be interesting to see what history says is the more foolhardy approach. Nintendo's learned from their mistake, and are rapidly taking over the world again. Sony just seems to be getting worse.
Nope, you aren't the only one by any means. I run Linux about 90% of the time, and when I do, I don't use Amarok, RythmBox, or any of the other fugly iTunes clones. I use XMMS. And on Windows, I use Winamp. I actually do use Winamp 5, but I find that if you are VERY selective about what gets installed, then it's almost as light as Winamp 2.
Even looking at iTunes or WMP just pisses me off. Why in the hell would anyone want a media player that looks like that, and has so much bloat?
You just remind me very much of this idiotic woman I saw on the bus today who was trying to convince her 4 year old daughter that sugar was yuckie. Presumably because someone told her that sugar was unhealthy. You know what else is unhealthy? Butter, red meat, processed meat, rock and roll, human contact, etc. etc.
You know, it bothers the hell out of me when parents do that. Like I said, I was brought up in an open environment. I was free to do pretty much anything I wanted, and my parents didn't try to control what I did. They just provided me with guidance on what was good and what was not. (Although my mom was quite controlling in some aspects, that primarily dealt with physical safety. There was good reason for that though)
I just think that the overprotectiveness of some parents is just absolutely absurd. I apologize if you are not one of the people I'm referring to, but honestly, it really really sounded like it when you said that your kids weren't allowed to play video games. I've known kids who had extremely overprotective parents. They usually fell in one of two categories. Extraordinarily rebellious, who would do pretty much anything that their parents wouldn't approve of, and the type that lived in total fear of their parents, and actually followed all their insane rules (mormons anyone?).
Anyways, tell me what doctor said that video games are unquestionably unhealthy. Last I checked, they improved cognitive ability, eye-hand coordination, and problem solving skills. You sound like you are about 40... maybe a little less, maybe a little more. Do you remember when your parents told you that Rock and Roll was the devil? Think about what you are saying and doing here. Video games really are the new Rock music.
Thank god I didn't have fascist parents. I grew up in an open environment, and I am a better person for it. Needlessly removing things from your experiences for no good reason is just unhealthy.
Do you know any of these internet companies? I've looked around a few times, but I wasn't suer what was good or what wasn't. I don't often have a need for faxes, but I would like to pay a couple of bucks every now and then to make a fax online.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I love getting transferred to the US. (I'm Canadian). I get to hear all about the evils of a "rooter", "wahless" connections, and the ever popular "lah bub" (light bulb). I also have the absolute joy of hearing temperatures given to me in fahrenheit, and clueless techs who have no idea what celcius is. I also have had the absolute joy of being asked for an American credit card, as it was inconcievable that there was a world outside of the US of A (mind you, this last item was in person, and I was also asked for California ID, rather on the phone, but the point remains). And of course, the USA's finest... *drumroll* being told that component cables would not increase the quality of picture on my PSX games (by a Sony rep).
Yeah, I love getting bounced to the US.
Fuck GTA. I want a pimping game. You can drive your car around by holding the wiimote like a steering wheel, and bounce it up and down to bounce your car. You can pimp smack your hoes by backhanding them with the wiimote... Ah, that would be fun.
As the quote you posted mentions, that's only for this year. So DS owners have bought on average, 3.5 games over the last 6 months. While PSP owners have bought on average, 1.2 games over the last 6 months. It's entirely likely that there are a great many people who bought a PSP, got a game or two, and haven't bought one since.
I am the author of Dissonance. Before developing it, I had a tiny bit of NDS programming under my belt, a moderate amount of GBA, and a fair amount of PC. I am not a licensed developer, which means that my work will eventually... as you mentioned, be viewed by a very small number of people. However, it's not always about that.
I wrote Dissonance first and foremost, for myself. I've wanted a portable internet radio client from day 1. As soon as the homebrew scene got to the point that it was realistic to code one, I wrote it. I worked day and night getting it out the door, and it felt GOOD when I got it out the door. I had overcome many obstacles, and had a whole lot of fun coding for such a well made system. In the end, my product didn't do me a whole lot of good (yet), but it made me happy to code it, and I got to code something useful for the NDS. At the end of the day, isn't that why we code things for free? To have some fun, and try to make something that's useful while we're at it? My main interest just doesn't lie with PCs. I prefer handhelds, and I like to have a little more to work with than a cell phone.
I have GC Linux booting, and running off of an NFS share from my file server. I also hear that the optical drive is accessible from Linux. I'm not sure about regular homebrew, but I would imagine it's not much different. My intention though is to leverage the NFS share for all it's worth, and make my GameCube into a media terminal. I have mostly just been playing around with it though, and haven't gotten it doing anything constructive yet (I'm too lazy to recompile the kernel with the patch for my keyboard). I did buy an 8cm DVD-RW though.
No offense man... but if I was trying to figure out what sort of person you were by looking online, and I found your name associated with gay porn... I probably wouldn't want to click on the picture either.
I believe that they've fixed this in 6.06. NTFS partitions are now mounted as read-only to all users.
Yes it does, but there are problems. (The same problems that exist in SuSE. No DRI being the #1). However, AIGLX is fairly stable, and I've been running it on my laptop for about 2 months now. There are some problems with playing video, and 3D graphics have a tendency to flicker, but I don't do any gaming on my laptop, so it doesn't bother me. I just make sure that I have a 2D screensaver selected, and it's fine.
No, as far as I know, the CRIA is still completely powerless in Canada. That's why they feel they have to resort to lying to the children. ;)
I find it rather amusing that you say that backwards compatibility is impossible because of architecture changes, and that Microsoft isn't "Pulling a Nintendo".
Another poster already mentioned that the PS2's architecture is vastly different from the PSX, and backwards compatibility was maintained by adding the PSX CPU to the system, giving it the task of I/O. Not to mention that the PS3 (apparently) is fully compatible with the PS2 despite even more radical changes. Presumably this is done through software emulation, as legacy hardware doesn't seem to be included.
But back to my point about pulling a Nintendo, let's talk about the GBA and NDS. The GBA is very different from the GB or GBC... how was backward compatibility maintained? By creating a special cart reader that would read all the carts, and including the CPU from the GBC in the GBA. The GBC CPU isn't normally used, and there's a hardware switch inside the cart reader that will activate the power to the right CPU based on cartridge size. How does the NDS do it? Well, they included an entirely seperate cartridge reader for GBA games, and included a GBA CPU. The GBA CPU is actually used for NDS specific stuff, such as sound, input, wireless, etc. when a NDS game is selected, but disables the ARM9 (NDS primary CPU) when a GBA game is selected.
So... no, Microsoft is pulling a Microsoft. Rather than include legacy hardware or write a proper emulator, they are just saying that they did a good job and patting themselves on the back.
How exactly do you make money on open source games? They are a different beast entirely from regular apps. If someone is paying for support for a game, then there's something very wrong going on. I mean, I'm all for open source software, but I've never been able to figure out how to code them, and still put food on the table. As a result, most of my games have been proprietary.
I just sat here for 5 minutes thinking about that actually, after I read what you said. I sat here and thought that was a terrible idea for the first 2.4 minutes. Then I started to think about how awesome that would be, if it were real.
I mean, just imagine it. Google has a site that's based entirely upon wild speculation. Anyone can post any sort of speculation, be it meaningful or not. And the speculation could be searched entirely. If by some chance the speculation came true, then Google news could automatically search through the speculations for the relevant information. And then they could have ranking links below the story. Saying something like "This story was predicted by ____ web sites", with a link to the Google Wild Speculation search. And they could have rankings of all people who write speculation for the Google Wild Speculation site. So in that way, you could find out if perhaps you were psychic, or were really good at predicting the future. Pyschics on TV would be out of jobs when it was found out that they had a 0.0001% speculation rate on Google Wild Speculation.
Meanwhile, Google would find all the real psychics, and would hire them up. Then Google would have psychics to control our minds.
Yeah, that would be awesome. I should go code that right now.
I can just picture this in the context of a rectal exam. "Actually, I'd have to say, the exam was quite nice considering the hardware". That doesn't make it pleasant, or something I would deliberately seek out. Until the DS and the Wii, FPS gaming firmly belonged on the PC.
Yeah, I realized that it was XFCE a few moments after I hit submit. ;) It just looked so gnomish the first time I looked at it, that I hadn't really thought to look deeper. (I'm running Ubuntu 6.06 with AIGLX and Compiz, which looks fairly similar)
Looks like Gnome System Monitor to me. Comes standard with Gnome. Not really sure what distro it is, it looks fairly heavily customized. But if I had to guess, I would say Debian or Ubuntu, simply because they are THE Gnome desktop. (And I would hope it's not Fedora. :P)
It's probably due to the fact that it IS a console game. With PC games, the barrier to entry is minimal. There are many free or low cost engines that you can use for your game, and anyone who wants to publish a PC game needs only to find a publisher who is willing to make the CDs and put them on store shelves. As a result, the cost is much lower than when you consider the console costs...
On a console, only licensed developers are allowed to make games. This means purchasing an expensive devkit, and the developer's software. From there, an engine must either be bought from another developer, or developed from scratch, or ported from another platform. And lastly, the game when finished must again be sent to a publisher for publishing. But the difference here is that the console manufactururer will take royalty payments for each game sold, and the games that are produced need to be produced on special media. This means sending the game to one of a select few factories for mass production.
Anyways, this is my analysis of why it's likely that it works that way. But in my experience, when a game comes out for multiple platforms, such as Prince of Persia, the PC version will usually be about $10 CAD less than the others.
The extra cost of the PS3/360 games are in the development work that's needed for them. Wii is an evolutionary advancement over the GameCube, and is quite easy to develop for, or port existing engines to. This saves on development time and money. Essentially giving developers a huge kick-start.
PS3 and 360 on the other hand, have massively parallel architecture, and to get any sort of performance at all out of the machines, you need to be running at least 6 threads simultaneously. This involves a massive rewrite of pretty much all the code out there, and a LOT of development work. This is why their games are more expensive. And this is also why the Wii features a single core. (Last I heard)
There's a difference though. Nintendo NEVER shat on their fans. They never blatantly told their fans that they would buy it no matter what. Nintendo's fault was in their dealings with 3rd parties. The Nintendo 64 was intentionally developed as a very powerful console, but insanely difficult to develop for, so that smaller developers wouldn't be able to develop games. The idea was that the bigger ones would be the ones developing the games, thus lowering the amount of crappy games on the market. That plan failed, largely because it was too expensive to develop games, and Sony already had a stranglehold on the market by the time the N64 came to pass. Nintendo corrected this with the GameCube, lowering license fees dramatically, and creating hardware that was extremely easy to work with, but the damage was already done (and Sony once again beat them to market). However, the good will to 3rd parties wasn't forgotten, and we are seeing the return of 3rd parties with the DS and the Wii.
Now think about that for a second. Nintendo's biggest mistakes were basically telling 3rd parties that they would develop for their system no matter what the cost, and creating hardware that was very difficult to code for... Sony is telling the consumer that they will buy it no matter the cost, and creating hardware that is even more difficult to code for...
It will be interesting to see what history says is the more foolhardy approach. Nintendo's learned from their mistake, and are rapidly taking over the world again. Sony just seems to be getting worse.
Nope, you aren't the only one by any means. I run Linux about 90% of the time, and when I do, I don't use Amarok, RythmBox, or any of the other fugly iTunes clones. I use XMMS. And on Windows, I use Winamp. I actually do use Winamp 5, but I find that if you are VERY selective about what gets installed, then it's almost as light as Winamp 2.
Even looking at iTunes or WMP just pisses me off. Why in the hell would anyone want a media player that looks like that, and has so much bloat?
You just remind me very much of this idiotic woman I saw on the bus today who was trying to convince her 4 year old daughter that sugar was yuckie. Presumably because someone told her that sugar was unhealthy. You know what else is unhealthy? Butter, red meat, processed meat, rock and roll, human contact, etc. etc.
You know, it bothers the hell out of me when parents do that. Like I said, I was brought up in an open environment. I was free to do pretty much anything I wanted, and my parents didn't try to control what I did. They just provided me with guidance on what was good and what was not. (Although my mom was quite controlling in some aspects, that primarily dealt with physical safety. There was good reason for that though)
I just think that the overprotectiveness of some parents is just absolutely absurd. I apologize if you are not one of the people I'm referring to, but honestly, it really really sounded like it when you said that your kids weren't allowed to play video games. I've known kids who had extremely overprotective parents. They usually fell in one of two categories. Extraordinarily rebellious, who would do pretty much anything that their parents wouldn't approve of, and the type that lived in total fear of their parents, and actually followed all their insane rules (mormons anyone?).
Anyways, tell me what doctor said that video games are unquestionably unhealthy. Last I checked, they improved cognitive ability, eye-hand coordination, and problem solving skills. You sound like you are about 40... maybe a little less, maybe a little more. Do you remember when your parents told you that Rock and Roll was the devil? Think about what you are saying and doing here. Video games really are the new Rock music.
Now kids spend extensive amount of time playing games at home. Sad. I have a small son, but I won't let him do the same :)
That sounds pretty evil to me.
Thank god I didn't have fascist parents. I grew up in an open environment, and I am a better person for it. Needlessly removing things from your experiences for no good reason is just unhealthy.
You mean this? It's hardly news, but the first pictures were released at E3.
Do you know any of these internet companies? I've looked around a few times, but I wasn't suer what was good or what wasn't. I don't often have a need for faxes, but I would like to pay a couple of bucks every now and then to make a fax online.