The OS/2 subsystem is still there, in some form. To witness it in all its glory you can download for instance a Thinkpad BIOS update from IBM's support pages. After running the program that created the boot disk the task manager showed the OS/2 subsystem was left running.
As opposed to MAME, this emulator wouldn't need to be cycle-accurate, and all library calls can be intercepted and run natively (including the actual rendering).
Also Codeplay's VectorC (Windows, Playstation2), Metrowerk's CodeWarrior (just about any platform under the sun). For embedded work there's plenty of cross compilers, most CPU vendors have their own toolchains etc. Many of these are special-purpose compilers and have only niche markets, but there are tons of compilers available overall.
Nowadays LCC-Win32 is a very different compiler from LCC. Jacob Navia bought a license for LCC3.6 (IIRC) and has developed it independently since then. His version has lots of features (eg. optimizers, C99) not in Fraser's and Hanson's LCC. And then there's the whole win32 thing too.. (There is also a "rival" LCC for Windows written by a Swede, called Pelles C.)
Related to the topic, are there any consumer-level capture devices that can use a straight RGB signal? I'd like to connect my consoles to my computer, but composite and S-video are just too fuzzy. I specifically would like to display the picture in a window, so XRGB2 etc. are not an option.
(About the "review", is there some law stating that all "hardware enthusiast" sites must be so craptastic?)
The promotion wasn't cancelled, it was a PR stunt and a hoax. As was the guy suposedly camping outside a store for a year to be the first to buy Turok whatever, as was their plan on putting ads on gravestones, as was their offer to pay people's speeding tickets on the release of Burnout.
It's not only console/game programmers who would benefit from some low-level knowledge. At work, the majority of people have never touched hardware directly and come asking for advice on bit-level presentation and stuff. If the debugger breaks in a part of code they don't have the sources for, they're hopelessly lost because they don't even have a basic understanding of assembly language. It's even worse at university, though. Since Java is now the official teaching language you have classrooms full of people who can't grasp even the concept of pointers.
I agree with those that say that there is no more room for assembly language development (especially in application software), but having even some knowledge about it is so handy it should be mandatory.
I don't know, why don't you tell me since you seem to have that information?
It's not only security issues - it might just be some small change that mean only strictly following the documented method for foo works anymore. For a sort-of related example (not intended as advocacy), some Linux programs using libusb won't work as-is when ported to Windows, because the Linux USB stack performs some hardware initialisation that let them get away with not following the standard as strictly as they should.
No, they're finding out just how many broken applications and drivers people will expect to "just work" after installing the SP. If they wouldn't have to worry about backwards compatibility they would have been done a long time ago.
Apparently Fujitsu licensed Habitat and released it on their FM Towns machine. There was also a Habitat 2, which AFAIK only appeared on the Sega Saturn. Both came out only in Japan.
I got through the first level, and to the first bossfight. Basically I circled some big ship for about 10 minutes until it finally blew up.
My most boring bossfight ever was Psycho Mantis in Metal Gear Solid on the Playstation. Dumb as I am I never got the "use your other brain" hint and beat him the "straight" way. You could get in one hit during his minute-long pattern and I probably spent close to an hour trying until I finally killed him.
Japanese console RPGs. Nothing like a one-hour game that's extended to 40+ hours by including tons and tons of irritating, unavoidable random encounters. There's little more tedious than having to trudge through endless maze dungeons where you can take at most five steps before having to waste another couple of minutes fighting some stupid creature that popped out of nowhere. Add to that mechanics that were outdated twenty years ago (seriously, compare the early Ultimas and the latest and greatest out of Japan, and after you've scraped away the candy-coating you're left with a far less enjoyable game) and you're forced to draw the conclusion that they're designed for lobotomy victims
Article? Discussing? simoniker must have included the wrong link in the summary..
Anyway, I do think it's a bit annoying that developers have to put huge tits on everything. I get a feeling they think that no matter what shit they release, put some big tits in the ads and on all the female characters and people will still buy it.
Yesterday I spent a good six hours unsuccessfully trying to get networking to work on my laptop before giving up in disgust. I haven't experienced anything equally frustrating since setting up PPP in '97 or so. Today I spent ten minutes swearing over why adding an item to the KDE menu didn't work until I found some webpages telling me I had to nuke some directories from my homedir, but at least I got it working. It's been a very very long time since I had these kinds of problems under Windows. And let's not talk about why my soundcard doesn't work (but worked in the previous distro release) and how the hardware browsing applet manages to freeze the entire system.
Some people seem to have big problems with Windows, but Linux has plenty of big ugly warts itself.
Then you need a GB Player, they're good and cheap. If you don't have a Gamecube they're good and cheap as well. Surely that is a small price to pay for a game of Bionic Commando?
It's also included as an unlockable in Metroid Prime on the Gamecube (complete Metroid Fusion and link the GBA and Cube). It probably uses the same emulator that's used in the Zelda collection and Animal Crossing.
The only thing I remember about them are some rather dubious advertising campaigns, which I don't think they actually ever meant to follow through on.
They didn't and they were all fake. The people in their ads were revealed to be paid actors, the guy who was supposed to camp outside a gaming store for Turok Whatever buggered off after a day or so, they pulled the offer to pay traffic fines on the release of Burnout etc. I'm very surprised that so many people bought the ads, but they were hugely successful in generating press for the games.
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Poorly, in my experience. Try explaining to any Sega-fanboy that their precious Dreamcast is a 32-bit box and you'll see.
The Gamecube is a 32 bit system, with a CPU nearly identical to IBM's PPC750 models.
The OS/2 subsystem is still there, in some form. To witness it in all its glory you can download for instance a Thinkpad BIOS update from IBM's support pages. After running the program that created the boot disk the task manager showed the OS/2 subsystem was left running.
As opposed to MAME, this emulator wouldn't need to be cycle-accurate, and all library calls can be intercepted and run natively (including the actual rendering).
Indeed, this is the most sensible Tom Lord I've seen yet. Fortunately he has stopped going round free software projects asking for a million dollars.
Also Codeplay's VectorC (Windows, Playstation2), Metrowerk's CodeWarrior (just about any platform under the sun).
For embedded work there's plenty of cross compilers, most CPU vendors have their own toolchains etc. Many of these are special-purpose compilers and have only niche markets, but there are tons of compilers available overall.
Nowadays LCC-Win32 is a very different compiler from LCC. Jacob Navia bought a license for LCC3.6 (IIRC) and has developed it independently since then. His version has lots of features (eg. optimizers, C99) not in Fraser's and Hanson's LCC. And then there's the whole win32 thing too.. (There is also a "rival" LCC for Windows written by a Swede, called Pelles C.)
PAL hardware does - the only recent one that didn't was the N64 which for some reason didn't support anything better than S-video.
(About the "review", is there some law stating that all "hardware enthusiast" sites must be so craptastic?)
The promotion wasn't cancelled, it was a PR stunt and a hoax. As was the guy suposedly camping outside a store for a year to be the first to buy Turok whatever, as was their plan on putting ads on gravestones, as was their offer to pay people's speeding tickets on the release of Burnout.
It's even worse at university, though. Since Java is now the official teaching language you have classrooms full of people who can't grasp even the concept of pointers.
I agree with those that say that there is no more room for assembly language development (especially in application software), but having even some knowledge about it is so handy it should be mandatory.
The documentation is however a bit lacking, which IMO makes it less-than-ideal as a starting platform.
Near the end of the clip it looks like they're using Dreamcast arcade sticks.
I don't know, why don't you tell me since you seem to have that information?
It's not only security issues - it might just be some small change that mean only strictly following the documented method for foo works anymore. For a sort-of related example (not intended as advocacy), some Linux programs using libusb won't work as-is when ported to Windows, because the Linux USB stack performs some hardware initialisation that let them get away with not following the standard as strictly as they should.
No, they're finding out just how many broken applications and drivers people will expect to "just work" after installing the SP. If they wouldn't have to worry about backwards compatibility they would have been done a long time ago.
Apparently Fujitsu licensed Habitat and released it on their FM Towns machine. There was also a Habitat 2, which AFAIK only appeared on the Sega Saturn. Both came out only in Japan.
Nope, the C64 version looked just like that as well.
Japanese console RPGs. Nothing like a one-hour game that's extended to 40+ hours by including tons and tons of irritating, unavoidable random encounters.
There's little more tedious than having to trudge through endless maze dungeons where you can take at most five steps before having to waste another couple of minutes fighting some stupid creature that popped out of nowhere. Add to that mechanics that were outdated twenty years ago (seriously, compare the early Ultimas and the latest and greatest out of Japan, and after you've scraped away the candy-coating you're left with a far less enjoyable game) and you're forced to draw the conclusion that they're designed for lobotomy victims
Anyway, I do think it's a bit annoying that developers have to put huge tits on everything. I get a feeling they think that no matter what shit they release, put some big tits in the ads and on all the female characters and people will still buy it.
Some people seem to have big problems with Windows, but Linux has plenty of big ugly warts itself.
Then you need a GB Player, they're good and cheap. If you don't have a Gamecube they're good and cheap as well. Surely that is a small price to pay for a game of Bionic Commando?
There was a Bionic Commando game released for the Gameboy Color, you could try finding that one.
It's also included as an unlockable in Metroid Prime on the Gamecube (complete Metroid Fusion and link the GBA and Cube). It probably uses the same emulator that's used in the Zelda collection and Animal Crossing.