XBox 360 not quite Amiga I know

[koaftder]

harima_kun wrote:
So the XBox 360 is coming out next month, what do you guys think is this a system worth investing in? I must admit I am quite interested plus I can get it from Japan for 80 quid less than the Uk

Wait until your neighbor gets one... Then steal it.

[koaftder]

I'm not willing to pay 200-300 bucks for a console and then 50-60 bucks a game for it. Thats why i usually stay one system behind. I recently got a game cube for 50 dollars, with 2 controllers and 2 games + extension cords. I can get games for like 10 bucks at k-mart. Before that i had a dream cast i bought at a thrift store for 20 bucks, and i could get games for it at like 2 dollars a piece.

The only difference between older consoles and the new ones is the level of detial in graphics. Most games suck really bad anyway, only a handful are really worth playing. I'd say theres probably on average only a dozen really good games per each generation of console.

I'll pick up an xbox 360 4 or 5 years from now.

[koaftder]

coldfish wrote:
@ SamuraiCrow

Open-source and Sony dont go in the same sentence.  See the recent PSP firmware lockouts for one example.
 
Sure, there will probably be a poorly supported and extremely rare official linux port, but if PS2 is any example it will be expensive and next to useless.

Using a console to run general computer tasks is like using a motorbike to tow a trailer; possible, but ultimately it's missing the point.

The lockout stuff they put into consoles is interesting, but whats the point of it? Homebrew games on the consoles are usually very sub standard, and almost nobody playes them. ( Take a look at some of the dream cast home brews). Almost nobody buys a console just for running linux/net bsd, and thoes who do usually end up buying a few games anyway, so no skin off the manufacturers back. If a company tried to make a game for a console and market it without going through the proper legal crap and contracts with nintendo/ms/sony etc, they would be sued to obilivion.

The only reasons i can think of for putting these mesaures in the devices is for region limiting and antipiracy stuff. Also probably so they get more legal leverage with the new freedom limiting laws that seem to keep getting railed through government, like the DMCA.

Do they really give a rats ass if a few geeks turn their video game hardware into useless *nix boxes?

[koaftder]

If you listen to some developers, there is no good compilers to take advantage of the second and third cores on the 360.  That means that first gen 360 titles will used about twice the processing power of the original Xbox.  Same goes for the PS3 and their SPU's.  Nobody's going to use all 7 for a very very long time.

I'm going to take a wild guess here, but i bet they will be wiritng their games in c++. C++ obviously wasnt designed with concurrency in mind, so the compilers dont inheriently make use of multiple cores, but hey, thats what a threading library is for. Create your thread, assign it to a core, or just let the kernel take care of spreading your threads accross the cores. I am sure you are familiar with this, having used the windows threading library, or maybe even pthreads.

Or they could just use something like occam, but then you would have a high rate of suicide in the game programmer community.

[koaftder]

How so? Nintendo's GC was the least expensive this gen as 'Revolution' will be next gen. Apple chooses to charge a premium for their hardware. They sell enough products as much as any $40 x86 individual motherboard manufacturer and yet you are going to tell me that OS X should be more expensive than Windows when it has less built-in functionality and is based on BSD to begin with?

OSX is not based on BSD. OSX is a NeXT system with a BSD compatability layer. To say that OSX has less built in functionality than a windows install indicates that you dont know much about OSX.