Recent content by duffer

Yeah, it hasn't been a good year for US accounting standards, has it? :cry: Even if Sony is using US accounting rules, which I think perhaps they are because Sony is traded on the US stock exchange, it's possible that they account for their losses in different ways. For example, they...

Remember, however, that the $177M / quarter loss includes all the money-losing media and entertainment things that MS does (including MSN, interactive TV, and Windows CE if I'm not mistaken). The same quarter last year the same division lost $60 M. So the Xbox might not be responsible for all of...

Lots of incidental technical factoids about the history of Xbox Live and the way the service was developed. The Ultimate Xbox Live Interview

Oops. :oops: Pretend I didn't post this yet, then. :oops: Still, from all the GDC talk slides and drivers and demos that are showing up. I can only assume that the SDK will be made available publicly sometime soon.

No, it's not because the NV30 is late or not. It's because the additional features of the NV30 aren't compelling enough to spend the extra time to support. I would say the same thing even if the NV30 and 9700 were out at the same time. I think many developers will consider the 9700's...

Well, now that the DX9 beta is public, we can share our thoughts about it without breaking any NDAs. I think that the following features are the coolest parts of DX9: + Floating Point pixel pipeline. + Being able to write to multiple render targets. (Good for multi-pass.) + HLSL, which...

You'd be wrong. :-D The tiny texture cache caused N64 games to have bland textures, but the lack of CD ROM was a much bigger problem, because it strangled games both for lack of data and much more importantly for lack of a cheap, quickly reproduced game media. Check out the book...

I think the N64 using ROM instead of CD-ROM has been the worst architectural decision so far. It cost them that whole console generation. In this generation I think the possible candidates are: + GameCube's lack of DVD support. + Xbox's lack of in-the-box DVD support. + Xbox's hard disk...

Yep, sure looks like it! (Unless it's a completely meaningless PR announcement.) Rambus said it will show plans to get bandwidth of 6.4GB/sec per Yellowstone RDRAM chip. If Sony uses two Yellowstone RDRAM chips, the same number as in the PS2, that would give PS3 12.8 GB/sec of main RAM...

Backwards compatability has always struck me as an overrated feature. While it's clear that backwards compatability helped the PS2, this is largely because it allowed the PS2 to launch a year before any good games were available for it. It's not clear that lack of backwards compatability...

Back to the original topic, I think that tools like the Sony performance analyzer can help developers improve their game's performance, which can translate into better graphics. I haven't heard of equivalent tools for Xbox or GameCube, but I have heard of similar tools for NVIDIA PC hardware...

Nope. I was in to home computer games when that came out. But now that I think about it, I remember that I used to play the original Atari Star Wars arcade machine, which is basicly a rail shooter. And I've played the side-scrolling shooters (like Zaxxon, Xevious, and so on), which are...

From reading that link it seems that , OUM is a non-volitile memory technology that might someday replace Flash. What application would it have in a game console? I guess it could be used as a memory card medium. But it doesn't sound like it would be fast enough to be used as a RAM or EDRAM...

I just played through the Panzer Dragoon Orta demo in this month's Official Xbox Magazine DVD. I was impressed. PDO has come a long way since E3. Then it was just sort of boring. Now it's very pretty and smooth. (But still too easy, although maybe it's just the demo.) I could tell this was...

What's the acronym OUM stand for?