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Are you referring to the work of Benjamin J. Heckendorn (aka Ben Heck), who built all of the portable consoles I posted earlier?
http://benheck.com/Games/Xbox360/eli...e_360_hero.jpg http://www.benheck.com/Games/Xbox360...jones_left.jpg |
Originally Posted by Joe Perez
(Post 750985)
Are you referring to the work of Benjamin J. Heckendorn (aka Ben Heck)
Here are some more options/designs. The first one is done so well it could be sold as a commercial product. Not the same, but it's cool idea. |
Originally Posted by Joe Perez
(Post 750858)
You're quite right. I never owned a Saturn (they were after my time) but I'd thought that it only supported bitmap graphics. Did a little research and found out that its graphics engine supported both bitmapped sprites and shaded polygons.
Rather interestingly, the background renderer was its own discrete engine, so this seems to have been sort of a crossover design, where polygons were used, but were conceptually treated as though they were sprites, in that they were separate from the playfield itself. But it has a 3D rendering engine, so it falls into the Modern Era. (It did not, however, have a gerbil-penis controller as standard equipment- that was optional.) Post corrected. From what I've read it died out as it was harder to write for then the PS1, though in some respects it was superior (you definitely see FAR more beautiful 2D games on the saturn). |
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There have been some real oddball CPU and GPU designs over the years.
A neighbor of mine was, until recently, a lead developer for Rockstar Games. So I hear some interesting stories. For instance, that the original developer's platform for the XBOX 360, provided to them by Microsoft, was a Mac? Yup. They needed something with a PowerPC processor in it, and the 360 hardware was nowhere close to being ready for the developers, so they bought a bunch of PowerMacs, had ATI spin a modified graphics card for them, wrote some custom firmware, and shipped 'em to the developers. The poor thing doesn't have a fixed-to-float operand, either. Programmers will understand what a bitch that is. And coding for the PS3 is apparently just utter hell. The problem comes from having to manage shared resources amongst a seven-core processor. Obviously the opportunities for memory conflicts, stalls, race conditions and whatnot abound. On the plus side, the GPU is apparently so underutilized that they offload most of the game physics onto it. Of course, the original VCS (Atari 2600) was the grandaddy of weird hardware. I've spent a lot of time studying that machine, as it's quite fascinating. In particular, the book is an excellent volume, though if you're into that sort of thing, I recommend that you start by simply downloading the schematics and looking over them. They're available here: http://www.atariage.com/2600/archive..._2600_Low.html The schematics for the actual TIA chip itself are laughably simple by modern standards. You could build one out of discrete parts: http://www.atariage.com/2600/archive...tia/index.html There's also a good design history here: http://www.atariage.com/2600/archive...?SystemID=2600 Did you know that the 2600 had no framebuffer, and for that matter, no video memory of any kind? Today, we take this sort of thing for granted. Just write some data into some location in RAM, and the video hardware will take care of putting it on the screen for you. Not the VCS. Only 128 bytes (not k, but bytes) of RAM, and that was all for the game logic. The CPU itself actually had to draw the screen in real time as the beam moved. That's why those huge borders are there all around the active display- they provide the CPU with some extra time in which to do all of the actual game logic (fetching input, doing collision detection, updating the sprite table, generating sound, keeping score, reading and writing to memory, etc.) It's also why, if you dig back in your memory, some games occasionally had little black, horizontal lines which encroached into the left edge of the playfield from time to time- lazy programmers put those there as needed to give the CPU just a few extra cycles to finish whatever it was doing: Attachment 240862 Attachment 240863 Attachment 240864 (You'll also notice that no Activision game ever had "the lines." The programmers there were absolutely fanatical about that.) Since the timing of the horizontal and vertical intervals is an absolute, dictated by the NTSC television standard, there's just no getting around it. The timing of the deflection coils is fixed in stone, and they dictated everything else in the system. When it came time for the beam to turn on and actually start drawing a line on the screen, the CPU had to be done with everything else and ready for it come hell or high water. Hence the term "Racing the Beam" as used in the title of the book I mentioned earlier. |
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I wonder if you portable console enviers are familiar with the GP32, and its derivative, the GP2X?
Attachment 240855 http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...px-GP2X_01.JPG These are a rather interesting family of open-source handheld videogame systems. And while there are some games that have been coded directly for them, and numerous popular game engines have been ported to them, their most popular applications are emulators. With all of the different EMUs which are available for them, you can run just about any classic videogame ever written. MAME is available, for starters, as is just about every console and home computer ever created up through the mid 90s. You can emulate the Atari 2600, the C64/128, the Amiga, the Genesis, the NES, the Apple II, the original Playstation, a PC running DOS, and dozens more. Here's a list taken from the DeveloperWiki: Acorn
(Did you catch the second-to-last one in the list? This fucker can emulate the EDSAC! The very first stored-program, general-purpose computer ever greated! Read about it here.) The company that originally made them is sort of bankrupt-ish, however the hardware still seems to be available, as it appears that another company has taken over production: http://www.thinkgeek.com/electronics/retro-gaming/bfc7/ http://www.thinkgeek.com/electronics/retro-gaming/e5ef/ Attachment 240856 Attachment 240857 Attachment 240858 |
smart phone + emulator = you all fail.
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Originally Posted by Braineack
(Post 751181)
smart phone + emulator = you all fail.
I've tried it. Even Super Mario Brothers is utterly unplayable. I don't even know why the guy bothered to port it. Shoving shards of broken glass up his asshole would have been more productive. |
^this. I was all excited when I saw EMU's for my phone. Touchscreen control SUCKS.
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I played FF3 on my phone. I have a real key pad, but i agree not as good as a real game pad.
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Can you get a ps3 controller to pair over bluetooth to an android device?
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Originally Posted by Braineack
(Post 751254)
I played FF3 on my phone. I have a real key pad, but i agree not as good as a real game pad.
This is mine: Attachment 240854 From what I have seen, I have a better keyboard than about 90% of smartphone users. And for gaming, it's not even one-fourtieth as user-friendly as an actual D-pad. (Or even a gerbil-penis, for that matter.) Realistically speaking, the majority of non-hackberry smartphones (including what is considered by many to be "The" smartphone) do not have keyboards at all.
Originally Posted by shuiend
(Post 751257)
Can you get a ps3 controller to pair over bluetooth to an android device?
Kind of defeats the whole "portability" thing, too, if I need two hands to hold and operate the joystick, and a third hand to hold the phone. Granted, you and I have never met in person, so your anatomy may differ from mine. |
this is my phone:
http://i1-news.softpedia-static.com/...d-at-299-2.jpg I'm almost positive I've heard of bluetooth game cube controllers working with it. |
I tried to bluetooth a PS3 controller to my PC and it was a nightmare. I gave up, though my phone has a kick-stand so the idea would work.
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This is getting interestinger and interestinger....
I have no interest in lugging around a PS3 joystick so that I can run emulators that don't exist on my phone with crappy battery life. On the other hand, the GP2x "Cannoo" (the latest version, built by a company that actually exists) seems to garner high praise: Attachment 240851 And then I stumbled across the Pandora: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...ndoraFront.JPG Now, on the one hand, it's slightly too large to be called a handheld game. On the other hand, it's an actual computer. |
Originally Posted by Cococarbine
(Post 750732)
(Pong video)
Seriously funny shit. :D |
I use a Nintendo Wii remote to play NES and Genesis emulators on my iPhone. Works pretty well. Small enough to carry around with you if you wanted to as well.
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