Hellbinder
Banned
Check out the home page of the N-Gage
http://www.n-gage.com/n-gage/home.html
What Graphics core does it use??? from who??
http://www.n-gage.com/n-gage/home.html
What Graphics core does it use??? from who??
What about the new Nokia N-Gage?
- Thread starter Hellbinder
- Start date
Its barely comparble to a GBA.....
but from a previous link:
http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4496&highlight=nokia+ngage
Code:
GBA SP N-GAGE
Pixels: 240x160 176x208
Colors: 511(Char)32000(BitMap) 4096
Battery: 10/18 hours 3-6 hours
extras: vast library of games some nifty featuresbut from a previous link:
http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4496&highlight=nokia+ngage
I think it's safe to say that N-Gage follows in the fine tradition of GB competitors that are complete jokes. Under-powered, poorly designed chipsets, weakly supported (even by the manufacturer), horrible battery life, and worst of all insanely overpriced. The fact that it rasters it's graphics by pumping the speed of its CPU to insane levels rather than using an elegant dedicated graphics blitter (and thus consuming massive amounts of power) shows Nokia's utter lack of design ability (for these types of devices).
Things just might be changing though. Outside of its absolutely horrible controller layout the WonderSwan Color was actually pretty good. It had a good color screen, great power consumption, a good graphics core, and a competitive price. Of course it was never released here though.
I hope PSP does well but large concerns at this point are the physical size of the device and the unit's price.
Edit: Clarity.
Things just might be changing though. Outside of its absolutely horrible controller layout the WonderSwan Color was actually pretty good. It had a good color screen, great power consumption, a good graphics core, and a competitive price. Of course it was never released here though.
I hope PSP does well but large concerns at this point are the physical size of the device and the unit's price.Edit: Clarity.
Elegance
Although I would never expect the Nokia to dominate the Gameboy ( though it is a phone as well - so that may help explain some of the extra costs ) it is unfair to dismiss it as inelegant..
The gameboy doesn't possess a blitter - instead follows the extremely old fashioned arcade / console architecture of scroll planes and hardware sprites.
I'd probally suggest that the software architecture is more flexible and elegant in some cases.
( Think of it as almost the same as a 486dx100 against a SNES - people laughed at the VGA graphics, compared to console games with scrolling etc - and then Doom and the 3D engines came and showed the advantages of the more open architecture )
Although I would never expect the Nokia to dominate the Gameboy ( though it is a phone as well - so that may help explain some of the extra costs ) it is unfair to dismiss it as inelegant..
The gameboy doesn't possess a blitter - instead follows the extremely old fashioned arcade / console architecture of scroll planes and hardware sprites.
I'd probally suggest that the software architecture is more flexible and elegant in some cases.
( Think of it as almost the same as a 486dx100 against a SNES - people laughed at the VGA graphics, compared to console games with scrolling etc - and then Doom and the 3D engines came and showed the advantages of the more open architecture )
Sheesh, couldn't you have picked something "bigger"? After all P90 was already out at the time of DX100 too...
Either way I was under impression (GBA programmers feel free to correct me) GBA sprites are flexible enough to substitute affine transforms instead of CPU, which would make it pretty damn effective even for 3d (or it would make it if CPU had a divide unit).
Hi Faf,
GBA sprites are similar to NeoGeo sprites, they are fixed bitmaps ( Up to 64x64 ) with zoom and rotate and shear - effectively microcosms of the Mode
7 background effects.
The trouble with using them for poly's is that there are limited numbers - OK if you only want 256 trapezoids on screen at once.... If you then try to implement multiplexing you are starting to use as many CPU cycles as you would in software rasterisation.
They aren't 'blitted' sprites as you would have found on the Atari Lynx or Sega Saturn - both of those systems did use the sprite systems for polygon use successfully.
GBA sprites are similar to NeoGeo sprites, they are fixed bitmaps ( Up to 64x64 ) with zoom and rotate and shear - effectively microcosms of the Mode
7 background effects.
The trouble with using them for poly's is that there are limited numbers - OK if you only want 256 trapezoids on screen at once.... If you then try to implement multiplexing you are starting to use as many CPU cycles as you would in software rasterisation.
They aren't 'blitted' sprites as you would have found on the Atari Lynx or Sega Saturn - both of those systems did use the sprite systems for polygon use successfully.
Re: Elegance
Very true. However, on a portable unit that depends on a battery for its sole supply of power this openness comes at the price of relatively tremendous power consumption by the CPU. In this case it's better to optimize the HW to run 95 percent of likely titles (2D games) and reduce the wattage rating of the unit tremendously.
And does anyone know why the GBA lacks a memory mapped Frame Buffer? The tiling system is getting a little long in the tooth...
Crazyace said:
Very true. However, on a portable unit that depends on a battery for its sole supply of power this openness comes at the price of relatively tremendous power consumption by the CPU. In this case it's better to optimize the HW to run 95 percent of likely titles (2D games) and reduce the wattage rating of the unit tremendously.
And does anyone know why the GBA lacks a memory mapped Frame Buffer? The tiling system is getting a little long in the tooth...
Isn't the N-Gage opensource? If so, it could be quite a fun for fans if many people code games for it. If it's easy to download games and such, it could well become a little market in its own... Heck, I know many who enjoy programming little games for the Ti-92 calculator...
*thinks of PS Yaroze / PS2 Linux kit and various PPC games
*thinks of PS Yaroze / PS2 Linux kit and various PPC games
from reading this thread one can get the impression that people tend to judge/bash an upcoming platform not for its merits/demerits but just because they know next to nothing about it.
the ngage is not an ordinary handheld console, just as a pc used for games is not a home game console. the ngage is quite a capable (by today's standards) GSM unit (has GPRS support, bluethooth), and being such it has to have a rather powerful cpu (by handheld standards, anyway). seeking GBA-like engineering solutions in the ngage is like looking for home-console-like engineering solutions in a PC - you won't find much of those in a PC, would you? now, given ngage already has a powerful enough cpu, why stuff it with additional dedicated hw? given ngage was compared hw-wise to the 7650, you may first want to check what the latter unit is capable of, before declaring the ngage chipset as "under-powered". here's a hint:
http://www.softwaremarket.nokia.com...650&productID=7277600&categoryID=7915
now, the battery life and pricing concerns may pretty much be valid - but not from a GBA perspective -- last time i checked a GBA did not have GSM services, internet connectivity, a web browser, multiplayer-over-bluetooth, all kind of applications (there are no reasons to believe the ngage won't be able to run anything a symbian-based nokia runs)
[ed.]
the symbian platform is open, and a developer does not have to pay stellar licensing fees to be able to develop for it. of course, we're yet to see what nokia's policy on the ngage "official" titles will be.
akira888 said:
the ngage is not an ordinary handheld console, just as a pc used for games is not a home game console. the ngage is quite a capable (by today's standards) GSM unit (has GPRS support, bluethooth), and being such it has to have a rather powerful cpu (by handheld standards, anyway). seeking GBA-like engineering solutions in the ngage is like looking for home-console-like engineering solutions in a PC - you won't find much of those in a PC, would you? now, given ngage already has a powerful enough cpu, why stuff it with additional dedicated hw? given ngage was compared hw-wise to the 7650, you may first want to check what the latter unit is capable of, before declaring the ngage chipset as "under-powered". here's a hint:
http://www.softwaremarket.nokia.com...650&productID=7277600&categoryID=7915
now, the battery life and pricing concerns may pretty much be valid - but not from a GBA perspective -- last time i checked a GBA did not have GSM services, internet connectivity, a web browser, multiplayer-over-bluetooth, all kind of applications (there are no reasons to believe the ngage won't be able to run anything a symbian-based nokia runs)
[ed.]
Phil said:
the symbian platform is open, and a developer does not have to pay stellar licensing fees to be able to develop for it. of course, we're yet to see what nokia's policy on the ngage "official" titles will be.
Darkblu:
That GBA lacks GSM, web browser and whatever compared to Ngage really is totally irrelevant, since GBA is a pure gaming platform. You might as well slag off Ngage for lacking chopping and mixing capabilities compared to a food processor; it just wasn't built for those tasks! Multiplayer over bluetooth is just a waste of precious power, a link cable takes care of that much better.
Ngage may be a cool platform in of itself in a way considering what knowledgeable people can do with it, but it's too little, too expensive and quite frankly too limited to ever hit the mainstream.
*G*
That GBA lacks GSM, web browser and whatever compared to Ngage really is totally irrelevant, since GBA is a pure gaming platform. You might as well slag off Ngage for lacking chopping and mixing capabilities compared to a food processor; it just wasn't built for those tasks! Multiplayer over bluetooth is just a waste of precious power, a link cable takes care of that much better.
Ngage may be a cool platform in of itself in a way considering what knowledgeable people can do with it, but it's too little, too expensive and quite frankly too limited to ever hit the mainstream.
*G*
Grall said:
you can't say "it wasn't build for those tasks" - it's a matter of target audience. apparently the audience targetted with ngage is not the same as GBA's. i, for one, don't mind having an ngage-type device, given it does well what it does -- i.e. has a variety of good enough games, has internet connectivity over GPRS, gives me bluetooth support, incl. multiplayer for the games, checks my email, and last but not least, serves me as a phone as well. moreover, if have to do an 'either-or' choice i would pick an ngage over a GBA w/o a second thought (despite the fact my present cellular is decent enough in itself, and runs java games smoothly). why? -- because of the device accessibility. yes, a cellular phone is something an adult always carries with him, it's not a matter 'shall i take my GBA w/ me today. will i have time to play, is it worth the effor? do i have big pockets where to put it?'. with a device that you carry with you anyhow, those questions just don't exist.
i'd like to see 3-5 people "cable-chained", having good fun. honestly, i would!
aren't sony trying to do the same with their PSP unit - a multy-purpose enterntainment device targetting the adult audience? btw, don't even dream that sony would make their PSP as open a platform as nokia have made their ngage -- those two companies just have different philosophies.
Darkblu:
I know this thing is going to cost 300 dollars. I know this thing gets at most 6 hours of battery life. I know still it has poor support this close to launch. Based on these data, I safely assume that this will simply not be able to compete with the GBA in the handheld market. Whether this device can do well in another market niche (high-end cell phone/PDA) I don't know, and do not imagine myself competent to judge.
I know this thing is going to cost 300 dollars. I know this thing gets at most 6 hours of battery life. I know still it has poor support this close to launch. Based on these data, I safely assume that this will simply not be able to compete with the GBA in the handheld market. Whether this device can do well in another market niche (high-end cell phone/PDA) I don't know, and do not imagine myself competent to judge.
akira888 said:
deja vu.
Wasn't that what Nintendo was thinking when Sony entered the console market? Or kept on saying in interviews before they launched GameCube?
"it's a different market, we're not competing directly"
For the sake of Nintendo, I sure hope they don't see things that narrow with their future products, that is, if they want to stay competitive. N-Gage is just the first one, PSP is coming too.
[Edit: I guess my post wasn't directly directed at akira888, but at Grall with the above post]
Interesting, I might have given the GBA cpu less credit then it deserves then, if the polygon using GBA games are indeed completely software rendered. Didn't think 16mhz cpu could pull it off that well, even at the target resolution they use.CrazyAce said:
And conversely any new PocketPC with built in phone does a better job then NGage at just about everything (including current game library), and you have double the reasons to always carry it with you.darkblu said:
Personally if I were buying this type of hybrid device right now, I wouldn't even be looking at NGage as an option.
It's pretty likely neither of our opinions is particularly reflective of the mass market though
Well they have UMD discs there making it a more attractive multimedia portable then all current pocket machines on the market combined. I doubt they will try to market it as PDA hybrid though. (it might not be a bad idea if they merge Clie line with UMD and do a "pro"-model or something with higher price).
Fafalada said:
it's questionable. if the PqPC was suitable enough for all those task we would be seeing everybody and his dog having one. unfortunately i (and seems like the majority of casual consumers) find the PqPC platform a "gadget" that still has to evolve to get to the point where it would be considerd as _the_ carry-everywhere-do-all digital tool.
why - it's a fine, practical smartphone (symbian is lightyears ahead in efficiecy compared to m$-based smartphones), it's a true consumer device - i don't have to worry it would stop functioning after getting a bit of rain upon, and if you like playing games - hey, it's well-designed as a handheld console as well. so why not?
It's pretty likely neither of our opinions is particularly reflective of the mass market though
the mass consumer in europe buys the lesser models of nokia like hot cakes. those same consumers would at least consider an ngage, especially the the younger part.
sony undoubtfully have their aces up their sleeves - UMD among those. yet sony are a bit stubborn on the 'openness' side of things (last time i had to buy a 64MB 'magic gate' memstick at the ridiculous price of 90 pounds, so i could use the ATRAC3 capabilites of my clie i was particularly upset about sony's stubborness). this may one day fire back badly at them.
How does this make them stubborn? Since when does charging a lot equate to stubborness? Why not bitch about the 450+ licensees who have bothered to license the technology yet produce so few devices with it that it's keeping the market segregated and expensive?
