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Hackmann

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  1. No, they haven't. Jimmy Page made a big stink a while back about how Led Zeppelin would never license any of their music out to rhythm games since they didn't trust the game companies enough to hand over their master tracks. (Insert wirecrack about how Harmonix can work around it by just licensing the original songs that Led Zeppelin plagiarized)
  2. And that'll get you as far as knowing there's probably some motion going on somewhere in the frame. Now tell me the 3D trajectories of specific objects in that frame and do facial and gesture recognition. 'cause that's what Microsoft is doing (or at least claiming they're doing).
  3. I think that line of thinking is wrong actually, most of that stuff has little or nothing to do with processing power That line of thinking is absolutely right. I've done some computer vision myself, and I work with people who do research in object tracking for a living*. It's a very hard problem that you need to throw a lot of computational power at. I'm curious to know how Microsoft is doing it -- they must either be cleverly simplifying the problem to an easier special-case (which is my guess) or using some really interesting custom hardware. Too bad that they probably won't give out many technical details, since they bought out a whole company specifically to get at this technology. * My coworkers aren't solving exactly the same problem, since they're usually dealing with tracking across multiple cameras or robots with stereoscopic equipment, but it's still really hard regardless. Yeah, a little more "efficient" programming will speed up any application by 8000x!
  4. MacBooks don't have HDMI ports. But they all have mini-DVI, DVI, or Mini DisplayPort ports, depending on the model and when it was manufactured, and you can get physical HDMI adapters for all three from Monoprice.com pretty cheaply.
  5. If someone could figure out a way to correlate the data between VG Chartz and Metacritic, it'd be interesting to see how sales numbers line up against review scores on the different platforms. The Wii has a reputation for selling lots of copies of poor-quality games, but I'd be curious to see if the raw data actually backs that up. (I did some quick number crunching on just the Metacritic scores, which tells us about the kinds of games that are being reviewed but not necessarily about those that are actually selling well. The most notable thing I found was that about 1 in 5 Wii games was rated 49 or below -- "generally negative reviews" in Metacritic's words -- compared to about 1 in 9 on the Xbox 360 and about 1 in 15 on the PS3.)
  6. http://hackmii.com/2009/01/dsibrew/ Also confirmed by an Opera rep here ("The DSi only has a 133 Mhz processor").
  7. The DSI's ARM9 is clocked twice as high as the DS's, it has four times as much RAM, and it has 256 MB of onboard flash compared to none on the DS. So it's safe to say that games designed for the DSi won't run on the DS.
  8. You're severely underestimating how hard that would be. At the very least, you'd have to trap all the memory accesses coming from the ARM7 and rewrite the ones going to the memory-mapped ROM. Edit: also, the GBA BIOS is inaccessible from DS mode, so you'd have to trap and rewrite all of the calls to that too.
  9. Feel confident all you like, but the DS shuts down the ARM 9 in GBA mode. Also, the Opera cartridge maps its RAM to a different region of memory than where GBA cartridges are mapped. I doubt this is an accident.
  10. Unless you're doing something like filling your hard drive to 99% capacity, modern filesystems aren't really susceptible to serious fragmentation.
  11. Ugh, I was typing on one of those new Mac laptop keyboards last night. Maybe they're an improvement on the original iBook keyboards: at least the keys stayed firmly attached. Everyone I knew who owned an original iBook had at least one key that just popped off the keyboard for no apparent reason... but then the only Mac-specific keyboard I've ever used that I didn't hate, was an old third-party ADB one. Apple really thinks nobody ever should type on their computers, I guess... and don't get me started on their mice. The absolute best typing experience you can get on a Mac is to use a PC keyboard (I recommend the IBM Model M!), possibly through a PS/2 => USB adaptor, and install some software to let you remap the keys so you don't lose the Apple/Option/whatever-it's-called key. While you're at it, get a decent PC mouse (Logitech, 3 button w/scroll wheel). Inconvenient for laptops, of course... Oddly enough, the keyboards on the PowerBooks and MacBook Pros are really nice. I'm not going to even try to defend 99% of the input devices that Apple makes (the Mighty Mouse makes me want to throw it against a wall every time I use it), but they really got the keyboard on their pro laptops right. It's the the only laptop keyboard that I've ever been able to code with.
  12. The Dreamcast video hardware has been accessible to homebrew developers for a long time; KallistiOS even supports a hardware-accelerated subset of OpenGL. There's no X driver for the onboard PowerVR 2 chip, but that seems to be due to a lack of interest rather than a lack of hardware information. The Dreamcast can be hacked very easily. Commercial games use proprietary discs, but it'll also boot off of CD-Rs without any modifications. Since the Dreamcast uses a lot of off-the-shelf hardware, the homebrew community has a very thorough third-party SDK at its disposal.
  13. Well, finding the CPU datasheet is a lot harder when the "developer" pages spell the CPU name wrong. And Sunplus advertises full GCC and GDB support, which is very good news. That said, making the CPU a known quantity defintely helps things a lot, but there's still other hardware that needs to be identified (audio and video hardware, controller interfaces, etc.). I still don't think that it's all that interesting as a homebrew platform, since the Dreamcast has better hardware, an existing homebrew community with a well-developed SDK, and a price tag in the same range. But I'm always curious to see what people can manage to run on random hardware anyway. Has someone checked that you can indeed run arbitrary code on it? If Mattel didn't care about casual piracy but wanted to lock out non-licensees, they could have programmed the firmware to require that all binaries be cryptographically signed.
  14. OpenGL can be implemented in software, too. SunPlus is a PowerVR licensee, so they could be using an onboard PowerVR variant; but those are generally targetted at low-power set-top boxes and mobile phones nowadays, so it's nothing to be bragging about. At 16 MB of RAM, it's extremely unlikely to be running Linux. (Did it ship with a written offer for the source code to the OS?) Ignoring the fact that it's running an unspecified CPU architecture that likely doesn't even have a public GCC port, the hardware's anemic compared even to the Dreamcast. I can't see any good reason for the homebrew community at large to be interested.
  15. I loved this game when I was a kid. I'd love to see a theoretical 2600 port, but I don't think it's very realistic. Pharaoh's Curse plays a lot like Montezuma's Revenge, but with some extra complications that could make it hard to port: The screen layouts are much more complex and highly asymmetric. In addition to the player and static enemies, there're arrows that fly in from the side of the screen, the pharaoh, a mummy, and a bird that will carry you to random rooms. All four of these things appear randomly, and any combination of these things can be on the screen at any given time. The pharaoh and mummy will try to follow and shoot the player, and they do some rudimentary path-finding. It's a great game, so I strongly encourage you to try it out for yourself. But I don't think a port is doable without being very heavily watered down.
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