Nintendo Technology
- Thread starter Peppermonkey
- Start date
Magnum PI said:
First off it was ArtX who designed Flipper, not ATi in any way. ATi bought ArtX long after Flipper was completed.
And it was MoSys who developed 1T-SRAM.
But I have to cut in here and say, NINTENDO DESIGNED THE GAMECUBE regardless what any of you silly boys want to think! Kudos to Magnum for trying to hint at this.
It doesn't matter who designed all the chips. It's who puts the parts together and calls it a 'console' that designed it.
Let's look back to the NES for a great example... it contains a whopping 2KB RAM and a 6502 processor. That's it. Nothing more.
So should we say that the creators of the 6502 are the designers of NES? Oh hell NO we wouldn't! That's just silly!
Moving forward to SNES, the sound chip was made by SONY and the central processor was a 65816 - evolution of the 6502. So once again the 6502's designers designed SNES? Or better yet, SONY did it! It's really a SONY console!
Then we have other consoles like Sega Saturn... the processors and sound chip are all Hitachi processors. So did Hitachi design Saturn? Absolutely not! It's a SEGA console.
Saying Nintendo didn't design the GameCube is absolutely ridiculous.
Nintendo told the hardware developers what they were looking for (for example, a low-cost well-balanced machine designed specifically for games) and the hardware guys started working. As time passed, Nintendo and the developers conversed and made sure that the right sacrifices were made.. and made sure that the hardware's power would be easily accessible.
All in all, hardware developers like ArtX/MoSys/IBM/etc create the hardware, Nintendo/developers design the system.
That's how I see it, anyway..
All in all, hardware developers like ArtX/MoSys/IBM/etc create the hardware, Nintendo/developers design the system.
That's how I see it, anyway..
Ty
Nintendo giving away there biggest franchise for no reason what so ever would be a little more then human error don't you think? It would be more a case of the entire of Nintendo going stark raving mad
Basically this is the way I see it. When I say "I don't believe the wireless rumour" I still have a tiny doubt. But when I say "I don't believe the Zelda rumour", I have no doubt what so ever.
But that's just my opinion of course, maybe you know enough about wireless tech to know that this is uterly impossible and have no doubt about that.
BTW what does it matter if Nintendo didn't design the whole of GameCube by themselves? Sony didn't design PS2 by themselves either (infact AFAIK no company has ever designed a console by themselves). Does that mean Sony ect can't come up with breakthrough technologies? Alsom as you said, Nintendo partnered with other companies to design GC. So why would you think they would have to make this rumoured technology themselves?
I don't know why I'm bothering to discuss this anyway, I don't even believe the rumour Just bored I suppose, time to go and play TS2 I think.
Nintendo giving away there biggest franchise for no reason what so ever would be a little more then human error don't you think? It would be more a case of the entire of Nintendo going stark raving mad
Basically this is the way I see it. When I say "I don't believe the wireless rumour" I still have a tiny doubt. But when I say "I don't believe the Zelda rumour", I have no doubt what so ever.
But that's just my opinion of course, maybe you know enough about wireless tech to know that this is uterly impossible and have no doubt about that.
BTW what does it matter if Nintendo didn't design the whole of GameCube by themselves? Sony didn't design PS2 by themselves either (infact AFAIK no company has ever designed a console by themselves). Does that mean Sony ect can't come up with breakthrough technologies? Alsom as you said, Nintendo partnered with other companies to design GC. So why would you think they would have to make this rumoured technology themselves?
I don't know why I'm bothering to discuss this anyway, I don't even believe the rumour
Just bored I suppose, time to go and play TS2 I think.My point about Nintendo not designing the GCN themselves was not meant to be a knock against Nintendo in any way. For many generations console manufactuers have outsourced 'parts' in one form or another. It was to illustrate that fact that here is a company that doesn't even bother to create their own hardware 100% from the ground up and yet they're coming out with an uber piece of technology? That was my point, you're expecting us to believe that Nintendo, a company that doesn't even come close to any of the big engineering companies with millions spent on R&D (the aforementioned, Qual, Motorola, etc.) to invent a technology in some ways light years beyond what they have. If so, best start investing in Nintendo stock cuz you'll be wealthy in a few months.
Now if this uber-tech was originally created by another company they'd be limiting themselves by tying it into such a niche market when really it could have (per Teasy's rumor) world changing impact. All imho naturally.
Tang (sic) you silly girl, do you consider it a fact that Nintendo designed the GCN by themselves?
If so, best start investing in Nintendo stock cuz you'll be wealthy in a few months.Now if this uber-tech was originally created by another company they'd be limiting themselves by tying it into such a niche market when really it could have (per Teasy's rumor) world changing impact. All imho naturally.
Tang (sic) you silly girl, do you consider it a fact that Nintendo designed the GCN by themselves?
Peppermonkey
Newcomer
Magnum PI said:
Dude, it WAS ATI for part of it
ARTX I believe was bought by ATI...
randycat99
Veteran
Any way you slice it, ATI was "late for the party" to have anything to do with GC, even though they now own ArtX.
RaolinDarksbane
Newcomer
I think it's really hard to connect GC via P2P, but how about using a satellite(or more specifically several satellites)? It work much like a cellphone, but with GC.
Peppermonkey said:
artx designed a part used in the gamecube.
but the question was:
who designed the gamecube ?
the console.. as a whole..
every console i can recall off contained vital chips (at least the CPU) that weren't designed by the console manufacturer.
the gamecube was designed by nintendo, like the xbox was designed by microsoft (despite nvidia gpu, intel cpu..), the PS2 was designed sony..
RaolinDarksbane said:
Um, latency... that whole speed of light thing. Even going to LEO would have latency thats well beyond that XBox live is acheieving using much more realistic and conventional technology.
HA! Your kidding me right. And people bitch at the DC & PS2 using 56K and how it's holding back advancement!!
OMG!! Thats it, teh breakthough is because Nintendo has recovered teh alien artifactz from Roswell and has spoken to teh Alienz who have taught Yamato..er.. Miramoto teh secrtez of Entanglments!! cause teh aleins wants the kiddies to kill nefarious warshippers of teh Xbox and PS2. No lag on the Cube!!
Kill a Playstation owner for Jesus!!
Tagrineth said:
OMG!! The /\/\egaton is that Sony is going to collect all profits of the NES!!! Nintendo is doomed... well, without the aliens.
These rumors are killing me... actually, I'm enjoying acting like an ass to show off just how dumb they are. But thats just me. <shrug>
RaolinDarksbane said:
But the rumor sounds like this 'GCN net' is DEPENDENT upon the number of GCNs in the area, "Allowing you to play everyone in your area and potentially accross an entire country depending on how many users are connected at the time". Note that over the internet you can play a game across an entire country with only 2 people. One on the West and the other on the East side. Your geograhical coverage is NOT dependent upon the amount of users. Using satellites also frees you from the dependency of GCN Hubs which again, it sounds like there is. So if you're trying to tie-in satellite usage with this rumor, I don't think they dovetail very well.
In addition the rumor stated that no ISP would be needed thus making it sound like it would be free to transfer this data. There is NO way Nintendo would be able to piggy back data for free across satellites. What does it cost to put a satellite in orbit these days? A few hundred million dollars for the satellite itself the placement launch? And Nintendo is going to be able to use it for free?
I think the chances of Saddam getting the Nobel Peace Prize are far higher.
Anyhow, I'll say it again, if true it would be awesome but I'm not going to hold my breath.
megadrive0088
Regular
Gamecube was developed by Nintendo and ArtX.
(ArtX was the first major partner with Nintendo when Project Dolphin was started. ArtX worked on a graphics processor that could work with either MIPS or PPC CPUs, unlike the 3DO/CagEnt MX technology that Nintendo almost bought which was PPC based)
IBM provided the CPU
Matsushita/Panasonic provided the optical drive and media
(might have also provided some networking solutions)
MoSys provided the main memory and Flipper memory
NEC manufactured the ArtX designed LSI/GPU
NEC implimented the MoSys memory onto Flipper
S3 provided the texture compression
some company with that startes with M provided the sound hardware
Factor 5 worked on the sound hardware/software
ATi bought ArtX and stuck the ATi lable on Gamecube
(no doubt I'm forgetting some things, like the modems)
(ArtX was the first major partner with Nintendo when Project Dolphin was started. ArtX worked on a graphics processor that could work with either MIPS or PPC CPUs, unlike the 3DO/CagEnt MX technology that Nintendo almost bought which was PPC based)
IBM provided the CPU
Matsushita/Panasonic provided the optical drive and media
(might have also provided some networking solutions)
MoSys provided the main memory and Flipper memory
NEC manufactured the ArtX designed LSI/GPU
NEC implimented the MoSys memory onto Flipper
S3 provided the texture compression
some company with that startes with M provided the sound hardware
Factor 5 worked on the sound hardware/software
ATi bought ArtX and stuck the ATi lable on Gamecube
(no doubt I'm forgetting some things, like the modems)
BenSkywalker
Regular
Been doing a bitof research in terms of viability for something like this at some point, turns out it isn't unrealistic even now(although still extremely unlikely Nintendo is doing it- the cost is very high at the moment).
Currently all of the typical devices we have are limited to the UHF range(300MHZ to 3GHZ) which wouldn't be practical for this type of device, however SHF(3GHZ-30GHZ) is capable of ranges of ~40Miles with transfer rates in the 250Kbps(that is devices already built in a reasonably sized/powered device). EHF(30GHZ-300GHZ) ups it even further allowing a 100Mbps transfer rate. In these devices more power doesn't matter as they won't stay near the Earth's surface anyway. Latency for anyone within a couple hundred miles should actually be better then it is even on BB. Current costs based on what I can find is in the several thousand dollar range and up. There are some devices that have ISDN type transfer ranges with comparitively limited range(a couple kilometers) for much less money, although they work on frequencies low enough that additional power would aid their range considerably(these are hand held devices, it should be fairly simple to increase their range ten fold for a stationary device).
Currently all of the typical devices we have are limited to the UHF range(300MHZ to 3GHZ) which wouldn't be practical for this type of device, however SHF(3GHZ-30GHZ) is capable of ranges of ~40Miles with transfer rates in the 250Kbps(that is devices already built in a reasonably sized/powered device). EHF(30GHZ-300GHZ) ups it even further allowing a 100Mbps transfer rate. In these devices more power doesn't matter as they won't stay near the Earth's surface anyway. Latency for anyone within a couple hundred miles should actually be better then it is even on BB. Current costs based on what I can find is in the several thousand dollar range and up. There are some devices that have ISDN type transfer ranges with comparitively limited range(a couple kilometers) for much less money, although they work on frequencies low enough that additional power would aid their range considerably(these are hand held devices, it should be fairly simple to increase their range ten fold for a stationary device).
First off Ben, props for doing the research. Very interesting.
Ben, see the problem is that even if we grossly overestimate the range attainable and say it's 1mile - we're still limited by this whole "No ISP" type thing thats limiting the networking fabric to some sort of p2p type transfer AFAIK. Perhaps they have a true breakthrough, but then it's beyond any linear advance and I can't see it.
So, with a rangle (radius) of 1mile, this would yeilding a rough coverage area 2 miles across. The continential United States is what, I keep thinking 2000 miles, so, correct me if I'm wrong, but I'll use it for now.
Thus, for someone to do something which is routine in XBox Live! - play a friend on the other coast - this system would need 1,000 hops between gamecube in the fabric.
I think this is... um... pretty hard to do. The RT routing and associated network maintenence would seem to quite an obsticle thats only dwarfed by the early "Grid/Cell" speculation here thanks to me mis-understanding a few things..
BenSkywalker said:
Ben, see the problem is that even if we grossly overestimate the range attainable and say it's 1mile - we're still limited by this whole "No ISP" type thing thats limiting the networking fabric to some sort of p2p type transfer AFAIK. Perhaps they have a true breakthrough, but then it's beyond any linear advance and I can't see it.
So, with a rangle (radius) of 1mile, this would yeilding a rough coverage area 2 miles across. The continential United States is what, I keep thinking 2000 miles, so, correct me if I'm wrong, but I'll use it for now.
Thus, for someone to do something which is routine in XBox Live! - play a friend on the other coast - this system would need 1,000 hops between gamecube in the fabric.
I think this is... um... pretty hard to do. The RT routing and associated network maintenence would seem to quite an obsticle thats only dwarfed by the early "Grid/Cell" speculation here thanks to me mis-understanding a few things..
BenSkywalker
Regular
Vince-
You mean grossly underestimate? I'm not talking about theoretical limits here, these are existing products and for that matter all of them that I found came out at least a year ago. Cell phones operate in the 800MHZ-849MHZ range and have a distance considerably further then one mile, and do it using extremely low wattage.
For the VHF range(30-300MHZ) you can hit ranges of 50 miles and tranfer rates of up to 115.2Kbps only utilizing 120 watts, however they are quite large in terms of physical dimmensions(not viable for the useage we are talking about). Both of those examples are, comparitively speaking, quite low on the frequency spectrum and not even comparable to normal household devices.
Using available existing technology, over a year old for this particular example, we can see a 40 mile range and transfer rates of 250Kbps.
The US is 3,000 miles, but we are talking about a radius of ~80 miles or better using existing technology. That gives you 38 hops if you were playing someone on the other side of the country. If I were to play against my brother in law it would be one hop, and he lives forty five minutes from my house. I could play my sister in law directly, and she lives twenty five minutes from my house. One of my other sister in laws lives in Michigan, about 800 miles away from me and I would need 10 hops to play her. I average fourteen hops connecting with my sister in law who lives twenty minutes down the road on my PC.
I'm not talking about Cube networks, the shit is way too expensive right now for viable mass market use, not to mention you would have to get around the FCC which if they started today they might be done with by 2020 I'm talking about it being viable at any point. Cost no object it is now, easily. Bringing the price down is the major hurdle.
It wouldn't work how you are thinking of it. Think of it more like a microphone hooked up to speakers. The system would hear signals and rebroadcast them much louder and then setting up a line of them. Each different sound(carried on different frequncies) would be reboadcast through the speaker so the next microphone could rebroadcast it again. This would be done for an extensive quantity of frequencies within a, comparitively speaking, narrow range(the FCC would be required here actually as they would need assurance to eliminate 'noise'). You would then 'tune in' to the particular frequency you want to play on. EHF, as an example, has 270 Million frequncies if we were only looking at whole Hz(which everyone who has a radio knows a single Hz can hold quite a bit of information).
The problem you run into with the above system is if the amount of data exceeds the transfer rate in to and out of a given link in the system. The only way in which this would happen as far as gaming is concerned is a very active community which could be handled by designating systems to focus on certain frequencies under such situations.
Looking at this for a Grid type useage doesn't change the problems they have now. Incredibly low ping rates for gaming are eons for computationaly intensive needs, not to mention the transfer rates are still far too low(latency we will never get around unless we figure out how to surpass the speed of light ) although there is hope for bandwith within the next twenty or thirty years if it is pursued.
Ty-
See above.
You mean grossly underestimate? I'm not talking about theoretical limits here, these are existing products and for that matter all of them that I found came out at least a year ago. Cell phones operate in the 800MHZ-849MHZ range and have a distance considerably further then one mile, and do it using extremely low wattage.
For the VHF range(30-300MHZ) you can hit ranges of 50 miles and tranfer rates of up to 115.2Kbps only utilizing 120 watts, however they are quite large in terms of physical dimmensions(not viable for the useage we are talking about). Both of those examples are, comparitively speaking, quite low on the frequency spectrum and not even comparable to normal household devices.
Using available existing technology, over a year old for this particular example, we can see a 40 mile range and transfer rates of 250Kbps.
The US is 3,000 miles, but we are talking about a radius of ~80 miles or better using existing technology. That gives you 38 hops if you were playing someone on the other side of the country. If I were to play against my brother in law it would be one hop, and he lives forty five minutes from my house. I could play my sister in law directly, and she lives twenty five minutes from my house. One of my other sister in laws lives in Michigan, about 800 miles away from me and I would need 10 hops to play her. I average fourteen hops connecting with my sister in law who lives twenty minutes down the road on my PC.
I'm not talking about Cube networks, the shit is way too expensive right now for viable mass market use, not to mention you would have to get around the FCC which if they started today they might be done with by 2020
I'm talking about it being viable at any point. Cost no object it is now, easily. Bringing the price down is the major hurdle.It wouldn't work how you are thinking of it. Think of it more like a microphone hooked up to speakers. The system would hear signals and rebroadcast them much louder and then setting up a line of them. Each different sound(carried on different frequncies) would be reboadcast through the speaker so the next microphone could rebroadcast it again. This would be done for an extensive quantity of frequencies within a, comparitively speaking, narrow range(the FCC would be required here actually as they would need assurance to eliminate 'noise'). You would then 'tune in' to the particular frequency you want to play on. EHF, as an example, has 270 Million frequncies if we were only looking at whole Hz(which everyone who has a radio knows a single Hz can hold quite a bit of information).
The problem you run into with the above system is if the amount of data exceeds the transfer rate in to and out of a given link in the system. The only way in which this would happen as far as gaming is concerned is a very active community which could be handled by designating systems to focus on certain frequencies under such situations.
Looking at this for a Grid type useage doesn't change the problems they have now. Incredibly low ping rates for gaming are eons for computationaly intensive needs, not to mention the transfer rates are still far too low(latency we will never get around unless we figure out how to surpass the speed of light
) although there is hope for bandwith within the next twenty or thirty years if it is pursued.Ty-
See above.
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