Welcome to the Panasonic Jungle, a portable handheld

WINE is a translator... Does it have a high performance hit?

I've never used it, you see.

 

It isn't. It is a native implementation of all the windows APIs. The apps link to it at runtime and run at at native speeds.

 

Ah, OK. Thanks for the info.

 

That's correct... unless people think that "at native speeds" means "at Windows speed"

 

Yeah, and there's potential for overhead when servicing these calls, particularly when it involves converting from one abstraction to a substantially different one. Chances are the real killer is in going from Direct3D to OpenGL. I don't know the first thing about Direct3D, maybe someone else can give an insight into this, but if somehow every vertex has to be transformed it's going to be painful, or if substantially more draw calls have to be inserted, or if something is being done that's relatively light on D3D and not on OGL.

Glide wrappers have a lot of overhead too.

 

Indeed. For instance, all semaphores go through the wineserver which is a different process.

 

aren't all blizzard games running on macosx as well? from there to linux is just a business decision IMO.
If it got an AtomZ with GMA500, it could be quite a nice device to develop for (as long as img contributes the drivers).

 

I doubt they'd pick up the older Atom Z500.

If it's using any x86 at all (which I highly doubt), it's a Moorestown.

Ideally, it would be a Zacate or Ontario.. but that's another story.

 

Ontario probably consumes too much power on a device of this form factor. At most it'll have a ~4.5Ah @ 3.7V battery. Ontario consumes 9W full tilt, add at least another W for the display, RAM, and whatever other peripherals and you're looking at well under 2 hours at full tilt. Chances are that it'll have a much smaller battery, more likely something on the order of < 2Ah like most other handhelds.

 

I'm tempted to make a joke about how the entire province of Ontario uses a lot more power than that.

But I doubt I could make it funny.

 

I appreciate the sentiment anyway ;D

 

But can they run crysis...?

There is a patch question bout how successful the Jungle will be
http://www.gametrailers.com/video/episode-136-pach-attack/706153

he pretty much says what I think, against the current competition it will die early.

My opinion is also, that it needs some niche with no competition to survive, and x86 + just for MMO games could have a chance.

 

Unless it has a 3G connection, how would a portable work only catering to MMOs?

It pretty much NEEDS homebrew


And I'm sure at least 1 PC in Ontario can run Crysis. Right?

 

I would like to say that artificially limiting what the device is capable of without somehow catering advantageously to that niche isn't going to make a platform successful.

But I guess we both know better how the market really works.

 

I don't really see a "limiting".

compared to other gaming-only devices (yeah, they can play UMD and go online, but are mainly made for games), it would need to be always online, even with some slow 2G/GPRS (which would make it cheap for AT&T etc. from the traffic/network usage point of view), it would be enough to maintain some RPG gameplay, I don't have that with NDS nor PSP, although both offer wifi and the NDS even free online gameplay if you're in range of some hotspots.
compared to mobile phones (and iPod) it would would have some input (analog stick+keyboard ?) that are made for gaming and hopefully it would be way cheaper (I've paid 170euro for my netbook -> atom+8GBflash+9inch, so I guess 150euro for for a smaller mass market device is a reasonable price)

To sum up, I think it would be successful if:
- easy to program/homebrew (linux+x86+stable ogl)
- always&cheap online (even if kind of slow)
- gaming input
- cheap

for <=150 and those features I'd buy a jungle, even if just for the sake of homebrew fun.

 

I can't see the relation between easy to program and x86.

 

I think he probably means not having to cross-compile and work with non-x86 toolchains on a dev system, which is a typical problem for casual homebrew.

 

And how many non-browser based MMOs are available for Linux?

 

Heh. I do.

And the lag? Instability? Monthly fees on top of the fees for the MMOs? Problems upon problems. A portable doesnt lend itself well to MMOs. People complained PSPs games were too big.

 

Hmm definitely a good reason, which I overlooked, I'm so used to cross-compiling

OTOH I guess developing on the device itself would be a pain for real projects; hence the OP would need an environment on his bigger PC that would be close enough to the targeted device and we all know this can be a problem. Just as an example, having OpenGL ES 2 on a desktop PC that behaves exactly as the real thing is not yet here; IIRC the OGL ES 2 simulation environment of Imagination has issues like that. Anyway no matter what you do, not developing on the targeted device itself will always create problems.