I think you should try the game Fahrenheit (also known in the US as Indigo Prophecy). It may change your perspective on things a bit. Failing that, there's always Knights of the Old Republic. KOTOR is to scripting and storytelling what Doom 3 and FEAR are to graphics.
Sorry to be offtopic to the story, but have you checked whether its a bogon filter issue? Your ISP should know if you're likely to be affected by this.
The JVM specs are indeed open, in fact much of the detail is left up to the implementer to decide how they want to approach designing it. I'm using Sun's reference implementation of the KVM* for my PhD on hardware-based Java at uni, which is available free of charge from Sun under their community source license. Its when you want Sun's Java certification on your commercial JVM that you have to pay the big bucks.
*The KVM is a J2ME machine, which is likely what these boxes are going to use - its designed to be fairly lightweight for embedded systems. They will probably come with some standard J2ME (CDC/CLDC/MIDP) APIs, and likely a custom one for menus and other disc operations.
Why the fuck do people insist on sticking games into a kids or adults category anyway? People who do that are obviously not very mature in the first place, so their argument is rather ironic I think.
I prefer to use the two categories fun and not fun (actually its a big shade of grey, but more options than right and wrong are too complex for most people). If people have such an insecurity that they can't play an awesome game because it has colours (eg Viewtiful Joe) and no blood, then thats their loss.
Just to expand on the parent's list of "non-kiddie-games" (try some of them before you snub your nose at the gamecube):
Blood Omen 2 Legacy of Kain Bloody Roar Primal Fury Burnout 1, 2 Point of Impact, Burnout Revenge Call of Duty Finest Hour Capcom Fighting Jam Capcom vs. SNK 2 EO Conflict Desert Storm 1, 2 Back to Baghdad Crazy Taxi Donkey Konga 1 & 2 Dragon Ball Z Budokai, Budokai 2 Eternal Darkness Sanity's Requiem F-Zero GX Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles Hitman 2 Silent Assassin Mario Kart Double Dash!! Mario Party 4, 5, 6, 7 Medal of Honor European Assault, Rising Sun Metal Gear Solid The Twin Snakes Mortal Kombat Deadly Alliance Need for Speed Hot Pursuit 2, Most Wanted, Underground, Underground 2 P.N. 03 Paper Mario The Thousand-Year Door Phantasy Star Online Pikmin 1 & 2 Prince of Persia 3, The Sands of Time, Warrior Within Rainbow Six Lockdown, Raven Shield Resident Evil 1, 2, 3 Nemesis, 4, Zero, CODE Veronica X Robotech Battlecry Sega Soccer Slam Serious Sam Next Encounter Skies of Arcadia Legend Soul Calibur 2 Splinter Cell 1, 4, Chaos Theory, Pandora Tomorrow Star Wars Jedi Knight 2 Jedi Outcast Star Wars Rogue Squadron 2 & 3 StarCraft Ghost Super Monkey Ball 1 & 2 Tales of Symphonia TimeSplitters 2 Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon 2 & 3 Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3, Pro Skater 4, Underground, Underground 2, American Wasteland Vandal Hearts Viewtiful Joe 1 & 2 Wario Ware Inc. Mega Party Game$ Worms 3D XIII
* Some are coming out Real Soon Now. ** This list is by no means comprehensive. *** Many of these games are multiplayer too.
Moores Law is still valid, how else do you think they fit 3 PowerPC cores on a single die?
Using the P4 to say that Moores Law is no longer valid is a bad analogy, as the P4 architecture was strongly based on getting as high a clock speed as possible. The roadmaps of CPU manufacturers point pretty strongly to multicore as being the future of processing, for two reasons: We can keep cramming more and more transistors into the same space (Moores Law), so we might as well use that space. Critical paths can only be so short (i.e. you can only have so many pipeline stages until you get diminishing (and negative) returns)), before you have to come up with other ways to improve speed.
Sure the most important factor in gaming is having fun, but I love seeing all kinds of crazy stats at the end of the game. Those who don't care for them don't have to look at them. Yes there will always be stat-whores, but you can just ignore them.
Its interesting to see how your performance changes over time, and what metrics you can use to measure it (accuracy, kill/death ratios, etc). There are also stats that have entertainment value, like who killed you the most, and what your favourite weapon or map is. As well as in objective based team games, stats on how many times a player has done certain objectives are nice to know - eg flag caps, bombs placed, tanks destroyed, etc. I'd often track my own accuracy stats in Quake 3 deathmatches, and even though the correlation between stats and 'winning' is only so deep (debatable to say the least), it is rewarding to see yourself improving over time.
Stats are also good for server admins, who can use them to track average player patterns. Times when player numbers are at their peak and most popular maps come to mind as useful stats to know, for managing server load, default map rotations and the like.
There are good reasons for both emulation and keeping old consoles alive. Both are reasonably mutually exclusive. To suggest that one is to the detriment of the other is plain crazy.
I love my collection of old consoles. I regularly play Shining Force 3 and Radiant Silvergun on my one of my many Saturns. I also play my SNES, Megadrive and Dreamcast fairly often. I keep them because I like to collect computer game stuff (and some of the games were just awesome), but I really hope to one day show my grandchildren the collection of consoles that I grew up with, that is if they still work. Sure they will laugh at the crappy graphics of Mario and Sonic (and even more so at the c64), but they may appreciate seeing how far things have advanced in 50 years. Showing people the hardware is important in my opinion, since its something they can see, and the actual thing represents itself better than a bunch of code.
On the other hand, I also love whipping out Winkawaks and playing Puzzle Bobble or Money Idol Exchanger (check this out if you like Puzzle Bobble!) with my friends (convenient, since I don't own an arcade cabinet/console version). Emulation is great because you can play all your games on one machine, use whatever control method you want, save states, easy home development, hacking, and in 100 years time when no one's hardware works anymore it will be the only way to play the games. Current emulation is not perfect however, and will not be for a long time. A few people have touched on the issue of sound emulation. Wave based playback is a no-brainer to emulate, but the older consoles that synthesize their sound are much much harder to emulate 100% correctly. Comparing a game on Megadrive and Genecyst (I haven't tried a more recent MD emu), the sound difference was very noticeable. Emulation of synth chips is hard in software. Because 100% emulation is still a fair way off for many of my consoles (especially Saturn and Dreamcast - I hope these improve soon!), I'll still keep playing my hardware versions.
So back to the point, we should look after our old hardware as best as we can, but also strive to develop emulators that can be considered perfect so that when the hardware dies, the games will continue to live on.
Slashdot Mirror
A man.
I think you should try the game Fahrenheit (also known in the US as Indigo Prophecy). It may change your perspective on things a bit.
Failing that, there's always Knights of the Old Republic. KOTOR is to scripting and storytelling what Doom 3 and FEAR are to graphics.
Sorry to be offtopic to the story, but have you checked whether its a bogon filter issue? Your ISP should know if you're likely to be affected by this.
SDL.
The JVM specs are indeed open, in fact much of the detail is left up to the implementer to decide how they want to approach designing it. I'm using Sun's reference implementation of the KVM* for my PhD on hardware-based Java at uni, which is available free of charge from Sun under their community source license.
:).
Its when you want Sun's Java certification on your commercial JVM that you have to pay the big bucks.
*The KVM is a J2ME machine, which is likely what these boxes are going to use - its designed to be fairly lightweight for embedded systems. They will probably come with some standard J2ME (CDC/CLDC/MIDP) APIs, and likely a custom one for menus and other disc operations.
Sorry for all the acronyms
Why the fuck do people insist on sticking games into a kids or adults category anyway? People who do that are obviously not very mature in the first place, so their argument is rather ironic I think.
I prefer to use the two categories fun and not fun (actually its a big shade of grey, but more options than right and wrong are too complex for most people). If people have such an insecurity that they can't play an awesome game because it has colours (eg Viewtiful Joe) and no blood, then thats their loss.
Just to expand on the parent's list of "non-kiddie-games" (try some of them before you snub your nose at the gamecube):
Blood Omen 2 Legacy of Kain
Bloody Roar Primal Fury
Burnout 1, 2 Point of Impact, Burnout Revenge
Call of Duty Finest Hour
Capcom Fighting Jam
Capcom vs. SNK 2 EO
Conflict Desert Storm 1, 2 Back to Baghdad
Crazy Taxi
Donkey Konga 1 & 2
Dragon Ball Z Budokai, Budokai 2
Eternal Darkness Sanity's Requiem
F-Zero GX
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles
Hitman 2 Silent Assassin
Mario Kart Double Dash!!
Mario Party 4, 5, 6, 7
Medal of Honor European Assault, Rising Sun
Metal Gear Solid The Twin Snakes
Mortal Kombat Deadly Alliance
Need for Speed Hot Pursuit 2, Most Wanted, Underground, Underground 2
P.N. 03
Paper Mario The Thousand-Year Door
Phantasy Star Online
Pikmin 1 & 2
Prince of Persia 3, The Sands of Time, Warrior Within
Rainbow Six Lockdown, Raven Shield
Resident Evil 1, 2, 3 Nemesis, 4, Zero, CODE Veronica X
Robotech Battlecry
Sega Soccer Slam
Serious Sam Next Encounter
Skies of Arcadia Legend
Soul Calibur 2
Splinter Cell 1, 4, Chaos Theory, Pandora Tomorrow
Star Wars Jedi Knight 2 Jedi Outcast
Star Wars Rogue Squadron 2 & 3
StarCraft Ghost
Super Monkey Ball 1 & 2
Tales of Symphonia
TimeSplitters 2
Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon 2 & 3
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3, Pro Skater 4, Underground, Underground 2, American Wasteland
Vandal Hearts
Viewtiful Joe 1 & 2
Wario Ware Inc. Mega Party Game$
Worms 3D
XIII
* Some are coming out Real Soon Now.
** This list is by no means comprehensive.
*** Many of these games are multiplayer too.
These days it would seem that if you have enough money anything is enforcable.
Moores Law is still valid, how else do you think they fit 3 PowerPC cores on a single die?
Using the P4 to say that Moores Law is no longer valid is a bad analogy, as the P4 architecture was strongly based on getting as high a clock speed as possible. The roadmaps of CPU manufacturers point pretty strongly to multicore as being the future of processing, for two reasons:
We can keep cramming more and more transistors into the same space (Moores Law), so we might as well use that space.
Critical paths can only be so short (i.e. you can only have so many pipeline stages until you get diminishing (and negative) returns)), before you have to come up with other ways to improve speed.
Sure the most important factor in gaming is having fun, but I love seeing all kinds of crazy stats at the end of the game. Those who don't care for them don't have to look at them. Yes there will always be stat-whores, but you can just ignore them.
Its interesting to see how your performance changes over time, and what metrics you can use to measure it (accuracy, kill/death ratios, etc). There are also stats that have entertainment value, like who killed you the most, and what your favourite weapon or map is. As well as in objective based team games, stats on how many times a player has done certain objectives are nice to know - eg flag caps, bombs placed, tanks destroyed, etc.
I'd often track my own accuracy stats in Quake 3 deathmatches, and even though the correlation between stats and 'winning' is only so deep (debatable to say the least), it is rewarding to see yourself improving over time.
Stats are also good for server admins, who can use them to track average player patterns. Times when player numbers are at their peak and most popular maps come to mind as useful stats to know, for managing server load, default map rotations and the like.
There are good reasons for both emulation and keeping old consoles alive. Both are reasonably mutually exclusive. To suggest that one is to the detriment of the other is plain crazy.
I love my collection of old consoles. I regularly play Shining Force 3 and Radiant Silvergun on my one of my many Saturns. I also play my SNES, Megadrive and Dreamcast fairly often. I keep them because I like to collect computer game stuff (and some of the games were just awesome), but I really hope to one day show my grandchildren the collection of consoles that I grew up with, that is if they still work. Sure they will laugh at the crappy graphics of Mario and Sonic (and even more so at the c64), but they may appreciate seeing how far things have advanced in 50 years. Showing people the hardware is important in my opinion, since its something they can see, and the actual thing represents itself better than a bunch of code.
On the other hand, I also love whipping out Winkawaks and playing Puzzle Bobble or Money Idol Exchanger (check this out if you like Puzzle Bobble!) with my friends (convenient, since I don't own an arcade cabinet/console version). Emulation is great because you can play all your games on one machine, use whatever control method you want, save states, easy home development, hacking, and in 100 years time when no one's hardware works anymore it will be the only way to play the games.
Current emulation is not perfect however, and will not be for a long time. A few people have touched on the issue of sound emulation. Wave based playback is a no-brainer to emulate, but the older consoles that synthesize their sound are much much harder to emulate 100% correctly. Comparing a game on Megadrive and Genecyst (I haven't tried a more recent MD emu), the sound difference was very noticeable. Emulation of synth chips is hard in software. Because 100% emulation is still a fair way off for many of my consoles (especially Saturn and Dreamcast - I hope these improve soon!), I'll still keep playing my hardware versions.
So back to the point, we should look after our old hardware as best as we can, but also strive to develop emulators that can be considered perfect so that when the hardware dies, the games will continue to live on.