The intel 'Create and Share' cameras used to come with a few little games that you operated with the camera - like bouncing the basketball into the hoop, that kind of thing.
This was back in 1998 or 1999.
Shame they never went further with the technology - Sony were the first to put some really polished games together with it.
Well, the point I've been trying to make is that you probably don't have a powerful enough PC to emulate a PS2, and that it just doesn't make financial sense for Sony to do a PC PS2 emulator.
Whether game developers should port their games to another platform is another matter, but porting to other platforms is always expensive and may only sometimes make financial sense.
Scant comfort to those who don't own the right platform though, I know!
Sure, a large team working on the problem might help, but I don't see that it can help you that much - basically with a 3Ghz PC you've got to:
a) grab a EE instruction b) decode and jump to appropriate handling code c) execute in handling code d) increment program counter e) jump back to a)
in ten or less instructions. Don't forget there's two pipeline-befuddling jumps in there. Also, you've got to do something similar with each of the vector processors, which adds on the neccesity to do up to 8 floating point operations per 10 instructions. All of this is assuming that you've never got to stall for memory accesses, either...
It's not a case of optimisation, more a case of it just not being possible.
Also, you have to consider that for Sony it's going to lose them money. Sales of their emulator would eat into console sales and piracy would eat into their emulator sales. Also, as software, the bar for playing pirated games on it would be much lower than it is with the console. So basically for anyone with a sufficiently powerful PC, a broadband connection and a 'flexible' morality it'd end up being:
a) d/l PS2 emulator b) d/l crack and NOCD patch c) d/l images of games
And Sony doesn't get a penny. It just doesn't make sense.
"Darling, I'm ordering the Tescos - do we need any more shower gel?"
"Sorry?"
"Do we need any more shower gel?"
"WHAAAT I CAN'T HEAR YOU?"
"DO WE NEED ANY MORE SHOWER GEL?"
"NO - I ORDERED TWO BOTTLES LAST TIME"
"THANK YOU"
With IM:
(Tappitty Tappitty Tappitty)
(Tappitty Tappitty Tappitty)
(Tappitty)
There are some things it's not worth stopping what you are doing and going downstairs to just say 'yes' or 'no' about - it's not laziness. These are the things you normally shout around the house about. If you're both on IM you can just ask without needing to bawl the house down. Lovely.
Seriously, every single time you talk to a family member do you get up and make sure you talk face to face? Of course not. Some stuff you just call out about.
Sure, PCs are more powerful than the consoles, but you tend to need at least an order of magnitude more power to emulate a foreign processor, simply because you've got to interpret every instruction as it comes in, which is pretty costly.
So, for a PS2 you'd need at least a 3Ghz machine just to emulate the CPU - and yes, we've got 3Ghz machines now. However, much of the PS2 power comes from it's two vector units, and you're not going to have enough spare power to handle them as well. PCs just aren't powerful enough yet for reliable emulation.
I don't see that ever happening. The console manufacturers value the control they have over their console systems very highly - they'd much rather you buy a real console.
Also, the technical problems still exist - current PCs just don't have the power to emulate the current generation of consoles. (I suppose the possible exception to this is the Xbox, as the CPU itself would not need emulating...)
I think that regardless of how many people are into emulation, you're never going to get reliable emulation of current console systems, simply because you're not going to have enough power in your PC to emulate a console until it's already been replaced by something new.
That's only good if you want to play console five years old or older. There aren't any sufficiently good PS2/Xbox/NGC emulators yet. I' not even sure anybody's got a DC emulated well yet.
We have these three pods from Ikea that double as storage and children's seats* - here's a picture (safe for work, I promise!)
We have one of these for each console, and the games and contollers are stored in them (Apart from the Steel Battalion one, which has to be stored seperately...).
There's a rule in our house that whenever you've finished with a console, you take the game out and put it away, remove the controllers, wrap the cords around them and put them away as well. Depending on the console, sometimes you have to disconnect it and put it away as well.
At first it sound like a pain in the ass, but really it takes two minutes once you've finished playing and it makes a great difference to the room, as you don't have some tangled spaghetti of chord lying about under your TV.
So anyway - three rules:
1) Have some dedicated storage for your consoles 2) Always remove controllers 3) Always wrap the cords around the controllers. This stops them tangling when stored.
Problem solved;-)
* I originally thought they would be fine as adult seats as well, but the one I tended to sit on has a bunch of huge cracks in the lid...
Okay, so we have an anonymous poster putting his address up claiming it's real. Surely, for all we know this could just be the address of some poor sap who pissed off the anonymous poster?
Seriously. It's not that hard to work out a system where you can work out whether a film is worth your time.
What you're saying is that you want a system that allows you to watch a file for free and then lets you pay if you want to. Where do you set your bar? It seems to me you're ending up watching a whole load of films for free.
GCC is okay. Currently my main problem is that I've been having to use version 2.96 (The RedHat buggy version of 2.95) rather than the newer versions.
Yes, I use GDB, but normally with a frontend, kdbg or ddd. But it is slow compared the MSVC one and it often seems unable to understand or view some of the data structures and object in the code. Also, it's missing Edit-And-Continue, which is a boon when you're writing plugins for another program, which I do quite a lot of.
As for VIM/Emacs - feh. Gimme a GUI. The MSVC one is lovely - in Linux I use jEdit, which is nice, but not anywhere near MSVC levels. I miss stuff like the intellisense autocomplete stuff - although I hear there is something similar in Emacs, Maybe sometime I'll jst have to bend over and learn how to use it. As for the jibe about a crutch - whatever. You're welcome to feel macho with your non-GUI editor, but I'm not interested in feeling macho, I'm interested in working efficiently.
As for Make - I don't really like it but use it anyway. I had a look at various other systems like SCONS (which seems better), but stuck with make as at least everyone knows a little bit of it.
(As an aside, if you're British and love your pint you might find Man Walks in to a Pub: A Sociable History of Beer by Pete Brown entertaining and informative in equal measures - I read it a couple of months back and can thoroughly recommend it!)
Really? have you enumerated all the Office functions and found equivalent OO ones?
Sure, OO has most of the stuff that the casual user needs, but the grandparent post just said that it doesn't support all the graphing things he needs. Why don't you believe him?
There are tales of an 11th-century monk building a primitive hang glider and flying it off the local Abbey tower in Malmesbury. Apparently he got quite far in it until hit by some form of catastrophe which caused him to plummet to the ground, breaking both legs. After recovering from this he decided that he probably needed to modify his design to add a tail, but the Abbot forbade him from ever trying to fly again. Shame - imagine if he had perfected his glider, almost 1000 years ago...
Also, due to the damn slashcode, all my pound signs have been removed. Remeber that 360 Pounds Sterling is 628 US Dollars! I'm sorry, but not wanting to spend $600+ on getting two computers to connect to a domain isn't cheap.
I was very pissed off to find out that the two copies of XP home we've got at home won't log on to domains. When I bought XP I couldn't find much info about the difference between Home and Pro, so I opted for a 160 saving and went for home. The problem is now I'd like to have roaming users logging on to a domain, and suddenly I find out that Xp Home is crippled. Even W98 could log onto domains. I also don't fancy shelling out for two complete new copies of Pro, which would cost me another 320...
Well, unless you're nearby heavy machinery, where else will the sound come from? I sometimes wonder what cities must have sounded like before cars. In a city centre the dominating noise almost always seems to be vehicular noise, unless you're walking by a building site.
Ah yes. I had a BBC B with a Panasonic KX-P1081 dot matrix printer, and it came with a lovely manual telling you exactly what codes you should send to drive the printer. (Mind you, it had to - if you wanted to do anything more than basic text, you needed to write the driver yourself)
I wish I had something similar for my current printer.
Slashdot Mirror
The intel 'Create and Share' cameras used to come with a few little games that you operated with the camera - like bouncing the basketball into the hoop, that kind of thing.
This was back in 1998 or 1999.
Shame they never went further with the technology - Sony were the first to put some really polished games together with it.
Well, the point I've been trying to make is that you probably don't have a powerful enough PC to emulate a PS2, and that it just doesn't make financial sense for Sony to do a PC PS2 emulator.
Whether game developers should port their games to another platform is another matter, but porting to other platforms is always expensive and may only sometimes make financial sense.
Scant comfort to those who don't own the right platform though, I know!
A Fucking robot? Cooooool....
Why hasn't it been in Slashdot?
Sure, a large team working on the problem might help, but I don't see that it can help you that much - basically with a 3Ghz PC you've got to:
a) grab a EE instruction
b) decode and jump to appropriate handling code
c) execute in handling code
d) increment program counter
e) jump back to a)
in ten or less instructions. Don't forget there's two pipeline-befuddling jumps in there. Also, you've got to do something similar with each of the vector processors, which adds on the neccesity to do up to 8 floating point operations per 10 instructions. All of this is assuming that you've never got to stall for memory accesses, either...
It's not a case of optimisation, more a case of it just not being possible.
Also, you have to consider that for Sony it's going to lose them money. Sales of their emulator would eat into console sales and piracy would eat into their emulator sales. Also, as software, the bar for playing pirated games on it would be much lower than it is with the console. So basically for anyone with a sufficiently powerful PC, a broadband connection and a 'flexible' morality it'd end up being:
a) d/l PS2 emulator
b) d/l crack and NOCD patch
c) d/l images of games
And Sony doesn't get a penny. It just doesn't make sense.
Oh get off your high horse.
Without IM:
"Darling, I'm ordering the Tescos - do we need any more shower gel?"
"Sorry?"
"Do we need any more shower gel?"
"WHAAAT I CAN'T HEAR YOU?"
"DO WE NEED ANY MORE SHOWER GEL?"
"NO - I ORDERED TWO BOTTLES LAST TIME"
"THANK YOU"
With IM:
(Tappitty Tappitty Tappitty)
(Tappitty Tappitty Tappitty)
(Tappitty)
There are some things it's not worth stopping what you are doing and going downstairs to just say 'yes' or 'no' about - it's not laziness. These are the things you normally shout around the house about. If you're both on IM you can just ask without needing to bawl the house down. Lovely.
Seriously, every single time you talk to a family member do you get up and make sure you talk face to face? Of course not. Some stuff you just call out about.
Sure, PCs are more powerful than the consoles, but you tend to need at least an order of magnitude more power to emulate a foreign processor, simply because you've got to interpret every instruction as it comes in, which is pretty costly.
So, for a PS2 you'd need at least a 3Ghz machine just to emulate the CPU - and yes, we've got 3Ghz machines now. However, much of the PS2 power comes from it's two vector units, and you're not going to have enough spare power to handle them as well. PCs just aren't powerful enough yet for reliable emulation.
I don't see that ever happening. The console manufacturers value the control they have over their console systems very highly - they'd much rather you buy a real console.
Also, the technical problems still exist - current PCs just don't have the power to emulate the current generation of consoles. (I suppose the possible exception to this is the Xbox, as the CPU itself would not need emulating...)
I think that regardless of how many people are into emulation, you're never going to get reliable emulation of current console systems, simply because you're not going to have enough power in your PC to emulate a console until it's already been replaced by something new.
That's only good if you want to play console five years old or older. There aren't any sufficiently good PS2/Xbox/NGC emulators yet. I' not even sure anybody's got a DC emulated well yet.
We have these three pods from Ikea that double as storage and children's seats* - here's a picture (safe for work, I promise!)
;-)
We have one of these for each console, and the games and contollers are stored in them (Apart from the Steel Battalion one, which has to be stored seperately...).
There's a rule in our house that whenever you've finished with a console, you take the game out and put it away, remove the controllers, wrap the cords around them and put them away as well. Depending on the console, sometimes you have to disconnect it and put it away as well.
At first it sound like a pain in the ass, but really it takes two minutes once you've finished playing and it makes a great difference to the room, as you don't have some tangled spaghetti of chord lying about under your TV.
So anyway - three rules:
1) Have some dedicated storage for your consoles
2) Always remove controllers
3) Always wrap the cords around the controllers. This stops them tangling when stored.
Problem solved
* I originally thought they would be fine as adult seats as well, but the one I tended to sit on has a bunch of huge cracks in the lid...
Okay, so we have an anonymous poster putting his address up claiming it's real. Surely, for all we know this could just be the address of some poor sap who pissed off the anonymous poster?
Be careful, people.
Limiting access to a shitty little scratched up disc that only cost the companies $0.05 to make for $17 a pop is rape, plain and simple
Listen, if you want a big supply of 'shitty little discs' really cheap, I'll sell you as many as you want for $0.25 a disc.
Wait - you wanted music on them?
Seriously. It's not that hard to work out a system where you can work out whether a film is worth your time.
What you're saying is that you want a system that allows you to watch a file for free and then lets you pay if you want to. Where do you set your bar? It seems to me you're ending up watching a whole load of films for free.
GCC is okay. Currently my main problem is that I've been having to use version 2.96 (The RedHat buggy version of 2.95) rather than the newer versions.
Yes, I use GDB, but normally with a frontend, kdbg or ddd. But it is slow compared the MSVC one and it often seems unable to understand or view some of the data structures and object in the code. Also, it's missing Edit-And-Continue, which is a boon when you're writing plugins for another program, which I do quite a lot of.
As for VIM/Emacs - feh. Gimme a GUI. The MSVC one is lovely - in Linux I use jEdit, which is nice, but not anywhere near MSVC levels. I miss stuff like the intellisense autocomplete stuff - although I hear there is something similar in Emacs, Maybe sometime I'll jst have to bend over and learn how to use it. As for the jibe about a crutch - whatever. You're welcome to feel macho with your non-GUI editor, but I'm not interested in feeling macho, I'm interested in working efficiently.
As for Make - I don't really like it but use it anyway. I had a look at various other systems like SCONS (which seems better), but stuck with make as at least everyone knows a little bit of it.
So where are these Development tools for Linux that are better than the ones you can get for Windows?
I miss the Visual Studio debugger so...
Hell, I'm with you there! Cheers!
(As an aside, if you're British and love your pint you might find Man Walks in to a Pub: A Sociable History of Beer by Pete Brown entertaining and informative in equal measures - I read it a couple of months back and can thoroughly recommend it!)
OO can do anything office can
Really? have you enumerated all the Office functions and found equivalent OO ones?
Sure, OO has most of the stuff that the casual user needs, but the grandparent post just said that it doesn't support all the graphing things he needs. Why don't you believe him?
PSO isn't a MMORPG. It's an Online Fourplayer Hack-And-Slash Game With A Lobby.
There are tales of an 11th-century monk building a primitive hang glider and flying it off the local Abbey tower in Malmesbury. Apparently he got quite far in it until hit by some form of catastrophe which caused him to plummet to the ground, breaking both legs. After recovering from this he decided that he probably needed to modify his design to add a tail, but the Abbot forbade him from ever trying to fly again. Shame - imagine if he had perfected his glider, almost 1000 years ago...
For the metric among us.
Yes, it's up there now, but back when I got XP I'm pretty sure that page didn't exist ( http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.microsoft. com/windowsxp/winxpqanda.asp)
Also, due to the damn slashcode, all my pound signs have been removed. Remeber that 360 Pounds Sterling is 628 US Dollars! I'm sorry, but not wanting to spend $600+ on getting two computers to connect to a domain isn't cheap.
I was very pissed off to find out that the two copies of XP home we've got at home won't log on to domains. When I bought XP I couldn't find much info about the difference between Home and Pro, so I opted for a 160 saving and went for home. The problem is now I'd like to have roaming users logging on to a domain, and suddenly I find out that Xp Home is crippled. Even W98 could log onto domains. I also don't fancy shelling out for two complete new copies of Pro, which would cost me another 320...
There's no such thing as a free port. Even if you're using largely the same APIs.
Well, unless you're nearby heavy machinery, where else will the sound come from? I sometimes wonder what cities must have sounded like before cars. In a city centre the dominating noise almost always seems to be vehicular noise, unless you're walking by a building site.
Ah yes. I had a BBC B with a Panasonic KX-P1081 dot matrix printer, and it came with a lovely manual telling you exactly what codes you should send to drive the printer. (Mind you, it had to - if you wanted to do anything more than basic text, you needed to write the driver yourself)
I wish I had something similar for my current printer.