I believe the Atari vs. Activision lawsuit was regarding NDAs, while in the Sega vs. Accolade case Sega argued that getting games to run on the Megadrive was trademark infringement (I think you have to store the string "SEGA" at a specific memory location or something similar). The court's decision was that since this trademarked data was only in machine-readable form and essential to getting code running on the hardware it was OK to include it in the ROM of unlicensed cartridges.
Another consequence of this lawsuit was that Sega started researching protection systems based on the same idea of protected trademarks, but that would have the trademarked data in human-readable form. You can find several variations of the scheme in the USPTO database, including optically verifying the presence of the Sega logo on the label of a cartridge, or the label side of a CD. The method they ultimately settled for and used in the Saturn was to have a specific bit pattern form the Sega logo on the data surface of the CD, and using the laser pickup to verify its presence. The logo is also present between the two data areas on a Dreamcast GD-ROM, but I don't know if it's an effective part of the protection system there.
Sega vs. Accolade had another, much bigger impact which is why it would be my pick for the top spot. The company that benefited the most from the lawsuit was not Accolade, but Electronic Arts.
At the time EOA (as they were still known as) was looking to move away from home computers like the Amiga due to rampant piracy, but was also unwilling to pay the licensing fees and fighting over shelf space and cartridge allotments and all the other ways console developers were dicked around with. So to them the case verdict was the best thing that could have happened: they could develop and release all the games they wanted without paying Sega a cent, and they were already big enough that they could handle distribution etc. themselves. From Sega's perspecive however this was a disaster, and eager to get their piece of the action (and presumably to stop other developers from following EOA's example) negotiated a deal with Electronic Arts that was much more favourable than the one offered to normal developers. The details of the deal are to my knowledge not public, but the result speaks for itself: EOA started pumping out a huge number of games on the Megadrive that generally also sold well due to their overall high quality, and EA Games (as they rebranded themselves as) became the humongous industry giant it is today.
Of course, the deal Sega made later came back to bite them in the ass when EA refused to support the Dreamcast which according to some was the biggest reason it did so poorly in the US and Europe.
It doesn't need to push the hardware particularly hard, but if it's the only game using that particular engine Microsoft may think they're getting more bang for their buck by focusing on games using some common component.
I'm one of those holding out for a price drop. However, with the PS3's current price Microsoft have no need to start a price war and if the reports on the hardware's profitablity are true the Xbox unit is probably under some pressure to recoup at least some of the money spent so far.
The other thing I'm waiting for is the 65 nm versions of the chips rumoured to be coming next year. The reduced manufacturing costs may actually allow Microsoft to lower the prices while still maintaining a profit, and the reduced power consumption would hopefully lead to a more quiet cooling solution.
Because they were drawn using the Megadrive's graphics chip. The 32x setup worked by combining the Megadrive's video signal with its own graphics, so you needed one cable connecting the Megadrive's video out to the 32x's video in, and one cable connecting the 32x's video out to your TV.
When I first bought my Playstation I didn't have money for a memory card, so I played Silent Hill for three days straight until my nerves became so fried I simply had to shut it off.
More scary games: Alien: Resurrection for the PS1 and the Ravenholm level in Half-Life 2.
You better boycott Nintendo and Microsoft as well, as they were all part of killing the "old" Lik-Sang in 2002. (A legally separate, but strangely similar company took over the name and resumed business later, no doubt the same will happen now.)
Replying to myself here, but the name I was looking for was "Street Hassle" (apparently also released as "Bop'n'Rumble" in the U.S.). Looking at the screenshots it seems the NES version also replaced the blind, stick-wielding old guys with baseball-bat wielding hooligans. Removing the game's over-the-top humour really robs the NES version of its only saving grace so it's no wonder it is so poorly rated.
Bad Street Brawler was published on at least the C64 under another name (that I can't think of now to save my life), and I thought that it was a pretty funny game if not a particularly good one. However it seems that besides the name change the game was also sanitized for the NES - the midget strongmen were handbag-wielding grannies in the (original?) computer version. I've never played the NES version and it's been ages since I played the C64 version, but does anyone know if there were other differences as well?
The colour encoding is done by the hardware, the developer doesn't need to care about it beyond possibly setting a mode bit in the init code (and choose a colour scheme that works on NTSC). The issue is that many console developers still code their games with a fixed 60Hz or 50Hz refresh rate in mind, and with a fixed resolution. When the display parameters change, the effects range from the game running at the wrong speed, squished/chopped off graphics to breaking the game completely. The only reason for this is crap code that really is inexcusable in this day and age.
If your TV supports NTSC encoding you don't, otherwise RGB is the way to go. (Your TV still needs to support 60Hz, but if it has an RGB SCART socket it almost certainly does.)
Amazingly PC developers have been able to cope with differing resolutions and frame rates for over ten years. Maybe some day this highly advanced technology will penetrate the thick skull of console developers?
I don't know if IBM considers SIMD in general obsolete but I do think they don't consider it the best technology for their traditional markets - mainframes and scientific/technical computing. For Altivec in particular it probably doesn't help that it wasn't created by IBM but rather by and for one fairly small customer. If you know otherwise, I'd be eager to read any references you have.
(It would also have been useful to fully read the post you were replying to - you are of course correct in that the SPEs do not use Altivec, even though the PPE does. At least the Xbox360's CPU also uses a modified version called VMX128, so while Altivec/VMX may be dead in IBM's own POWER CPUs they'll be making SIMD-capable CPUs for some while yet.)
The Chinese also want to be independent of western technology. If the US government are afraid of using Lenovo laptops why would the Chinese be any less suspicious of American hardware? Also, homebuilt computers lets them tailor them to local requirements (Chinese writing, built-in censorware etc.)
When you say "Cell chip" I assume you mean an implementation with one PPE and eight SPEs? I would be interested if you have figures for smaller versions, designed for use in less processing-intensive applications (digital TV, DVD players etc).
From "Cell Broadband Engine Architecture", page 39:
4.1.1 Optional Features in PowerPC Architecture, Book I (Required for CBEA)
The following facilities and instructions are considered optional in the PowerPC Architecture, but are required
for the PPE by the CBEA user mode environment.
It's also how nVidia and ATi do business - if a GPU doesn't pass validation disable the broken rendering units, lower the clock and sell it in budget cards.
I'm personally convinced that SCE was forced to adopt Blu-ray pretty much against their will at the same time that Kutaragi was demoted for spending too much money developing the PS3. It might have been the result of corporation in-fighting, with the consumer electronics and movie divisions agreeing to support the PS3 and Cell in exchange for SCE adopting Blu-ray. Given how the problems with Blu-ray have affected the PS3 I wonder if there'll be another shake-up in Sony's boardroom.
You'll also see bad sectors on modern drives when it runs out of spares. At that point you know the drive is FUBAR'd and the best thing you can hope for is to get backups before it breaks completely.
Microsoft did learn it, which is why for the 360 they insisted on getting all the rights for the CPU and GPU designs. It is apparent that they are following the model Sony set out for the PS1 and PS2, which is where you initially sell the hardware at a loss, but as technology advances you tweak the design until it becomes profitable. Owning the design also means they can choose where to fabricate the chips, instead of having to accept the prices set by Intel and nVidia.
Hear that? Jack Thompson just came in his pants.
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Doesn't anyone find it a little odd that an eight-year-old is making money playing an M-rated game?
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Another consequence of this lawsuit was that Sega started researching protection systems based on the same idea of protected trademarks, but that would have the trademarked data in human-readable form. You can find several variations of the scheme in the USPTO database, including optically verifying the presence of the Sega logo on the label of a cartridge, or the label side of a CD. The method they ultimately settled for and used in the Saturn was to have a specific bit pattern form the Sega logo on the data surface of the CD, and using the laser pickup to verify its presence. The logo is also present between the two data areas on a Dreamcast GD-ROM, but I don't know if it's an effective part of the protection system there.
At the time EOA (as they were still known as) was looking to move away from home computers like the Amiga due to rampant piracy, but was also unwilling to pay the licensing fees and fighting over shelf space and cartridge allotments and all the other ways console developers were dicked around with. So to them the case verdict was the best thing that could have happened: they could develop and release all the games they wanted without paying Sega a cent, and they were already big enough that they could handle distribution etc. themselves. From Sega's perspecive however this was a disaster, and eager to get their piece of the action (and presumably to stop other developers from following EOA's example) negotiated a deal with Electronic Arts that was much more favourable than the one offered to normal developers. The details of the deal are to my knowledge not public, but the result speaks for itself: EOA started pumping out a huge number of games on the Megadrive that generally also sold well due to their overall high quality, and EA Games (as they rebranded themselves as) became the humongous industry giant it is today.
Of course, the deal Sega made later came back to bite them in the ass when EA refused to support the Dreamcast which according to some was the biggest reason it did so poorly in the US and Europe.
It doesn't need to push the hardware particularly hard, but if it's the only game using that particular engine Microsoft may think they're getting more bang for their buck by focusing on games using some common component.
The other thing I'm waiting for is the 65 nm versions of the chips rumoured to be coming next year. The reduced manufacturing costs may actually allow Microsoft to lower the prices while still maintaining a profit, and the reduced power consumption would hopefully lead to a more quiet cooling solution.
Because they were drawn using the Megadrive's graphics chip. The 32x setup worked by combining the Megadrive's video signal with its own graphics, so you needed one cable connecting the Megadrive's video out to the 32x's video in, and one cable connecting the 32x's video out to your TV.
Commodore's CDTV and C64GS are maybe even more deserving of a place than the CD32.
More scary games: Alien: Resurrection for the PS1 and the Ravenholm level in Half-Life 2.
You better boycott Nintendo and Microsoft as well, as they were all part of killing the "old" Lik-Sang in 2002. (A legally separate, but strangely similar company took over the name and resumed business later, no doubt the same will happen now.)
Replying to myself here, but the name I was looking for was "Street Hassle" (apparently also released as "Bop'n'Rumble" in the U.S.). Looking at the screenshots it seems the NES version also replaced the blind, stick-wielding old guys with baseball-bat wielding hooligans. Removing the game's over-the-top humour really robs the NES version of its only saving grace so it's no wonder it is so poorly rated.
Bad Street Brawler was published on at least the C64 under another name (that I can't think of now to save my life), and I thought that it was a pretty funny game if not a particularly good one. However it seems that besides the name change the game was also sanitized for the NES - the midget strongmen were handbag-wielding grannies in the (original?) computer version. I've never played the NES version and it's been ages since I played the C64 version, but does anyone know if there were other differences as well?
The colour encoding is done by the hardware, the developer doesn't need to care about it beyond possibly setting a mode bit in the init code (and choose a colour scheme that works on NTSC). The issue is that many console developers still code their games with a fixed 60Hz or 50Hz refresh rate in mind, and with a fixed resolution. When the display parameters change, the effects range from the game running at the wrong speed, squished/chopped off graphics to breaking the game completely. The only reason for this is crap code that really is inexcusable in this day and age.
If your TV supports NTSC encoding you don't, otherwise RGB is the way to go. (Your TV still needs to support 60Hz, but if it has an RGB SCART socket it almost certainly does.)
Amazingly PC developers have been able to cope with differing resolutions and frame rates for over ten years. Maybe some day this highly advanced technology will penetrate the thick skull of console developers?
I don't know if IBM considers SIMD in general obsolete but I do think they don't consider it the best technology for their traditional markets - mainframes and scientific/technical computing. For Altivec in particular it probably doesn't help that it wasn't created by IBM but rather by and for one fairly small customer. If you know otherwise, I'd be eager to read any references you have.
(It would also have been useful to fully read the post you were replying to - you are of course correct in that the SPEs do not use Altivec, even though the PPE does. At least the Xbox360's CPU also uses a modified version called VMX128, so while Altivec/VMX may be dead in IBM's own POWER CPUs they'll be making SIMD-capable CPUs for some while yet.)The Chinese also want to be independent of western technology. If the US government are afraid of using Lenovo laptops why would the Chinese be any less suspicious of American hardware? Also, homebuilt computers lets them tailor them to local requirements (Chinese writing, built-in censorware etc.)
If this is the same machine that was demoed earlier this year it's not a laptop.
When you say "Cell chip" I assume you mean an implementation with one PPE and eight SPEs? I would be interested if you have figures for smaller versions, designed for use in less processing-intensive applications (digital TV, DVD players etc).
From "Cell Broadband Engine Architecture", page 39:
4.1.1 Optional Features in PowerPC Architecture, Book I (Required for CBEA) The following facilities and instructions are considered optional in the PowerPC Architecture, but are required for the PPE by the CBEA user mode environment.
- Floating reciprocal estimate single A-form (fres)
- Floating reciprocal square-root estimate A-form (frsqte)
- Vector/SIMD multimedia extension
SIMD also has nothing to do with SMP (symmetrical multi-processing).It's also how nVidia and ATi do business - if a GPU doesn't pass validation disable the broken rendering units, lower the clock and sell it in budget cards.
I'm personally convinced that SCE was forced to adopt Blu-ray pretty much against their will at the same time that Kutaragi was demoted for spending too much money developing the PS3. It might have been the result of corporation in-fighting, with the consumer electronics and movie divisions agreeing to support the PS3 and Cell in exchange for SCE adopting Blu-ray. Given how the problems with Blu-ray have affected the PS3 I wonder if there'll be another shake-up in Sony's boardroom.
Ultima Underworld - it didn't have guns, but otherwise featured everything its successor System Shock had.
You'll also see bad sectors on modern drives when it runs out of spares. At that point you know the drive is FUBAR'd and the best thing you can hope for is to get backups before it breaks completely.
Microsoft did learn it, which is why for the 360 they insisted on getting all the rights for the CPU and GPU designs. It is apparent that they are following the model Sony set out for the PS1 and PS2, which is where you initially sell the hardware at a loss, but as technology advances you tweak the design until it becomes profitable. Owning the design also means they can choose where to fabricate the chips, instead of having to accept the prices set by Intel and nVidia.
Doesn't anyone find it a little odd that an eight-year-old is making money playing an M-rated game?
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