Actually, when I think Nintendo I think about a dumptruck demolishing buildings to clear a path for a truck carrying around sensitive nuclear thingies.
That and a drunken squirrel urinating on foul-mouthed demons (and smelling once that fire gets put out).
"Itsa me, the guy with the laptop machine-gun you just walked in range of!"
I hear the graphics chip is very friendly at the hardware level. Though a new driver will be needed anyways.
The show stopper is working out how to burn a 3 inch 1.5 gigabyte disc and work around the data encryption and other anti-piracy schemes (which Nintendo is very serious about, and will be far more difficult to get around than was CSS to be sure).
The more data you need to suck off of disk the longer the user waits. GameCube has 6:1 compression for textures which is supported directly by the graphics chip, not only decreasing load times, but also decreasing internal bus bandwidth needs. Or at least offsetting them to make room for more cool effects.
If the extra space is needed I doubt it would be much more expensive to pack in two disks.
In general though, I don't see why it would be needed. The GPU can make some pretty nice stuff realtime.
And these discs will store about 1.5 gigabytes of data, and have transfer speeds of 2-3 megabytes a second (depending on where the laser is). Load times will be further decreased by 16 megabytes of auxillary RAM that can be used as a preload buffer.
They make damned good hardware. Their latest is a shining example of that.
I'd be asking when Sony will be getting out of the hardware business soon. Their hardware is always outclassed in short periods of time. Then of course all the people who got it continue to cleave to the blocky-twinkly imbalanced machine whose load times strike fear into all who have yet to be desensitized by it.
All they seem to be good at are FMV clips and the occasional hard-fought hardware demo.
Yeah, the cartridges hurt the N64 pretty bad. At least it had nicely filtered graphics and minimal load times. (oh, lets not forget who started the whole analog control and rumbling controller thing)
Re:Did you expect any differently?
on
$1200 Cheap!
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· Score: 1
Then you might want to consider that purple lunchbox with a cool looking Star Wars game for $250.
Re:Did you expect any differently?
on
$1200 Cheap!
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· Score: 1
Just because Nintendo isn't blowing gigabucks on advertising doesn't mean they're a broke little company trying to push their little plumber mascots to keep their staff paid.
Ever think that they're saving alot of money by waiting until theres actually a threat of people being able to say "Yeah, I'll buy that now!"?
Now imagine they've been smart about this for a while and imagine what they may have lurking in their bank...
1. Regularly using reasonably costing commercial music you have not bought is bad.
2. Placing music on media that cannot played (like on a CD-ROM drive) without warning the purchasers is bad.
3. Point-to-point transfer of commercial music to combat otherwise inability to play above media currently owned is good and well within the moral rights of the f**ked consumer (even better in lossless format).
4. Regardless of imaginary losses to piracy (not necessarily to real ones, which are not always avoidable), the ability to sample music in lossy formats to enable the consumer to effectively direct their dollars towards satisfactory music is good, often even to the evil beings trying to destroy the sharing networks.
5. The warped notion that purchasers should be forced to pay full price for polluted (watermarked) audio is bad.
6. The next time I see (insert overexposed crap-'musician'), I want to see (said musician) on one of those flaming crosses in the background of a Madonna video.
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at least the lunch boxes, uhh, GameCubes won't be horribly outclassed in a years time.
That and a drunken squirrel urinating on foul-mouthed demons (and smelling once that fire gets put out).
"Itsa me, the guy with the laptop machine-gun you just walked in range of!"
The show stopper is working out how to burn a 3 inch 1.5 gigabyte disc and work around the data encryption and other anti-piracy schemes (which Nintendo is very serious about, and will be far more difficult to get around than was CSS to be sure).
That would be ATI vs. SGI. IBM just did the CPU.
If the extra space is needed I doubt it would be much more expensive to pack in two disks.
In general though, I don't see why it would be needed. The GPU can make some pretty nice stuff realtime.
Problem? Like a unified memory architecture with high latency RDRAM in the middle of it all?
The nice part being X-Box has already blown a small bit of their advertising budget. Nintendo is waiting for a certain point on the presale curve.
And these discs will store about 1.5 gigabytes of data, and have transfer speeds of 2-3 megabytes a second (depending on where the laser is). Load times will be further decreased by 16 megabytes of auxillary RAM that can be used as a preload buffer.
They make damned good hardware. Their latest is a shining example of that.
I'd be asking when Sony will be getting out of the hardware business soon. Their hardware is always outclassed in short periods of time. Then of course all the people who got it continue to cleave to the blocky-twinkly imbalanced machine whose load times strike fear into all who have yet to be desensitized by it.
All they seem to be good at are FMV clips and the occasional hard-fought hardware demo.
Yeah, the cartridges hurt the N64 pretty bad. At least it had nicely filtered graphics and minimal load times. (oh, lets not forget who started the whole analog control and rumbling controller thing)
That does exist. AMax, PCTask, ShapeShifter, Emplant, etc.
That had to be pretty late in the game as far as when they were making Amigas. Because thats new to me.
Unless it was a quickly discarded feature in AmigaOS 1.0 - 1.1, I'm pretty sure it never existed at all.
I have to agree it was sad that Amiga didn't catch with the masses. Long live emulation! :-)
Amigas preferred 880K formatting. They didn't have to put a gap between each sector, who hoo!
Then you might want to consider that purple lunchbox with a cool looking Star Wars game for $250.
Ever think that they're saving alot of money by waiting until theres actually a threat of people being able to say "Yeah, I'll buy that now!"?
Now imagine they've been smart about this for a while and imagine what they may have lurking in their bank...
Yup, getting really expensive to replace your windshield wipers nowadays....
Or will XBox have a $2400 bundle now? :-)
Sorry pal, PS2 is the TIMMY! of the next gen consoles. Its hard to program, slow to load stuff on, and it can't do anything horribly fancy.
Versus Nintendo and NVidia the PS2 should hopefully be reduced to a funky looking DVD player by the end of the year.
Wheres the logic in those frikkin' huge statues?
Should have had a mantis saying "BANJO!" in the slash-logo...
That was a fugly princess too! :-)
Bit by bit, You don't need to put up a satellite to wire an apartment building.
Networking stuff is CHEAP. A few people here already have their own home networks.
Link them, leap over the technological hurdles, create an internet where big commerce does not exist.
Sorta like hands around the world, but with cat-5.
2. Placing music on media that cannot played (like on a CD-ROM drive) without warning the purchasers is bad.
3. Point-to-point transfer of commercial music to combat otherwise inability to play above media currently owned is good and well within the moral rights of the f**ked consumer (even better in lossless format).
4. Regardless of imaginary losses to piracy (not necessarily to real ones, which are not always avoidable), the ability to sample music in lossy formats to enable the consumer to effectively direct their dollars towards satisfactory music is good, often even to the evil beings trying to destroy the sharing networks.
5. The warped notion that purchasers should be forced to pay full price for polluted (watermarked) audio is bad.
6. The next time I see (insert overexposed crap-'musician'), I want to see (said musician) on one of those flaming crosses in the background of a Madonna video.