8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit, 64-bit, 128-bit.......256-bit?????

Retr0gamer

The cartridge on the front could be replaced with an expansion pak of 4MB of Ram which was required by some games and increased resolution and made more modes available in other.

A disk drive attachment was released for the N64 in japan. It used disks quite like zip disks. It was really unpopular and didn't make it to the western markets. I've heard the F-zero game for it was fantastic. It had a track editor as well. Most games in development moved to the N64 again or the Gamecube.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_64DD
http://www.planetnintendo.com/nindb/nus/nus_can.shtml

Bit of linkage for you.

Cuddlesworth

Thanks, i remember going out of my way to buy that for perfect dark.

Pretor

krazy_8s wrote:

Thanks, i remember going out of my way to buy that for perfect dark.

Yeah i remember looking at the back of the game box and then rushing out to buy the expansion pack before Smyths closed..... Good Times.....:rolleyes:

djmarkus

So, was the mega CD add on for a mega drive still 16 bit then? there where some good games for that...

madrab

[nerd]the sega cd fmv games (night trap & sewer shark) were originally created for hasbros ill-fated vhs gaming system the NEMO which i think was scrapped as it was way too big & expensive[/nerd]

po0k

ADuC812 >> *

Who said the 'bits' meant the width of the memory bus? And said it rather 'matter-of-factly'?

Because you weren't entirely correct, and looked rather the fool as the person you were trying to correct was as much on the button as you were.

Dabh, shush like a good sugar-filled young lad , Tom is right. Bits are an anachronistic performance metric, more to do with marketing than anything else. Today systems have gained chunkier, more discrete function blocks.
Memory data channel width, addressing space, issue size etc. all mean very different things, yet still use bits as a descriptor. Things get even more complicated when you've got multiple multi-issue cpu cores and a discrete GPU (and perhaps soon PPU).

Besides, my money's on the Revolution.

BlitzKrieg

Yep. Called chaotixs. Not great at all either. Feels like a tech demo idea that didn't work tacked on to a full game.

not great is an understatement, it is without a doubt the worse sonic franchise game in history. People can scream bloody murder about sonic heroes, shadow the hedgehog and the advance games. They can even drag up sonic drift and spinball.


Chaotix makes 3 mistakes

1. its mind numblingly boring (every level feels the same no heart at all)
2. Its mind numblingly long (5 acts to each level which all look and play the same)
3. Its mind numblingly easy. (Last Boss is a joke that can be killed with eyes closed.)



Doom may have sucked on the saturn. But the saturn version of quake is the best conversation of the single player i have played outside the PC. Dunno about the mutliplayer didnt know anyone else with a saturn (dadum dshh!) Same with the Saturn version of Duke Nukem.

gamer

Basically in theory the ps3 should be more powerful than xbox 360,but i think the games will be better on the 360 cos it it has 3 pc processors multithreading,but designed from standard pc architecture,the ps3 is a completed new design,using new cell cpu processors,needing a completely new programming language and tools,so it will be harder to program cos all prammers will have to start from scratch,any good pc designer will be able to program for 360 without too much difficulty.its like the apple pc,for every apple programmer theres 50 ibm pc programmers.so in this case i think the no of bits is irrevalant,although i think both systems are 64bit compatible.john carmack said the ps3 will be extremely dificult to program for.64 bit cpu means it can adress gigabytes of memory and run many threads or programs simultaenously,more than a 32bit cpu.i dont care if ps3 has 128bit core if its a dog to program for.

Dont be at yourself

Yawn.

sprinkles

Retr0gamer wrote:

However the Dreamcast really didn't deserve to fail.

Never a truer word spoken.....they did nearly everything right...except sponsoring Arsenal

gamer wrote:

Basically in theory the ps3 should be more powerful than xbox 360,but i think the games will be better on the 360 cos it it has 3 pc processors multithreading,but designed from standard pc architecture,the ps3 is a completed new design,using new cell cpu processors,needing a completely new programming language and tools,so it will be harder to program cos all prammers will have to start from scratch,any good pc designer will be able to program for 360 without too much difficulty.its like the apple pc,for every apple programmer theres 50 ibm pc programmers.so in this case i think the no of bits is irrevalant,although i think both systems are 64bit compatible.john carmack said the ps3 will be extremely dificult to program for.64 bit cpu means it can adress gigabytes of memory and run many threads or programs simultaenously,more than a 32bit cpu.i dont care if ps3 has 128bit core if its a dog to program for.

Wow..got to line 2....

madrab

sprinkles wrote:

Never a truer word spoken.....they did nearly everything right...except sponsoring Arsenal




Wow..got to line 2....

your bro got there first

Retr0gamer

BlitzKrieg wrote:

the saturn version of quake is the best conversation of the single player i have played outside the PC. Dunno about the mutliplayer didnt know anyone else with a saturn (dadum dshh!) Same with the Saturn version of Duke Nukem.

Too bloody right. Lobotamy were programming genii. They were probably the only company other than Sega themselves that got near the full potential of the saturn. Quake even had coloured lighting and other effects that were better than even in the OpenGL version. It was also playable online using the net adapter. There was no PS1 version of Quake 1 and no fps game playable online. Also it looks almost as good as Q2 on the PS1. Lobotamy may be no more but I think most of them were on the team that gave us Metroid Prime 1+2.

Zombrex

THe "Bits" referrs to the size of the CPUs internal registers. A 16 bit machine can hold in each register (there are normally about 8 general purpose registers) twice as much bits as a 8 bit machine. It doesn't mean its twice as fast, but it means some functions can be performed faster. For example if an 8bit CPU has to add two numbers larger than 256 it has to do a number of tasks, where as a 16 bit CPU can do it in one.

The larger the registery size the larger the amount of memory the machine can contain as well, as the addresses for memory locations are also stored in the internal registers. But this was more important in PCs than consoles, as consoles tend to have far less RAM than PCs.

But really the "Bits" of the CPU was just a marketing ploy when the SNES and MegaDrive came out. The ad boys needed something that sounded like it was a lot better, and both the Nintendo and Sega happened to have put 16 bit CPUs in their new machines.

16bit = twice as many as 8 bits = twice as fast/powerful/cool/better games

In reality the CPUs were faster, but the increase in bit size used in their registry was only a bit to a part of that. The CPUs would have probably been faster anyway. Your Intel Pentium 4 sitting in your games PC is 32bit. And that is a bit more powerful than your 1995 Playstation CPU

It was also more important when the CPU did most of the work. Things started getting blurry when consoles started introducing dedicated 3D processors into the mix (and yes before anyone says it, I know consoles have always had dedicated graphics processor), and the CPU got less important. Also consumers got more aware that the "bits" meant f**k all, so the marketting has moved to new buzz words. Currently "Cell Processors" is the NEXT BIG THING (tm), even if, just like back in the day, consumers don't really knows what that actually means

sprinkles

madrab wrote:

your bro got there first

Huh...must have him on ignore

BlitzKrieg

It was also playable online using the net adapter.

that i didnt know. Goddamnit the more i look at it the more it feels like everything microsoft did right (xbox live, internal hard drive etc) Sega 'tried' and fecked up. IF only Sega had more money behind them.

byte

Marts wrote:

byte me!

You have been byte'd

stevenmu

As a practical matter the number of bits has more to do with precision than speed or power. For most cases 32 bits provide more than enough precision, so it's far better to have a CPU that can churn out many 32 bit instructions than one that can churn out less 64 bit ones.

gamer wrote:

Basically in theory the ps3 should be more powerful than xbox 360,but i think the games will be better on the 360 cos it it has 3 pc processors multithreading,but designed from standard pc architecture,the ps3 is a completed new design,using new cell cpu processors,needing a completely new programming language and tools,so it will be harder to program cos all prammers will have to start from scratch,any good pc designer will be able to program for 360 without too much difficulty.its like the apple pc,for every apple programmer theres 50 ibm pc programmers.so in this case i think the no of bits is irrevalant,although i think both systems are 64bit compatible.john carmack said the ps3 will be extremely dificult to program for.64 bit cpu means it can adress gigabytes of memory and run many threads or programs simultaenously,more than a 32bit cpu.i dont care if ps3 has 128bit core if its a dog to program for.

I'm getting pretty sick or hearing this kind of uneducated uninformed crap. I don't care which system is 'better' or which has the better games but I'd at least like the arguments to make some kind of sense.

First of all, in most main stream games the biggest factor in their production is the resources i.e. the models, textures, sounds etc. All are almost completely irrelevant to the type of machine they're being run on, the only thing that makes a difference is making sure that the machine in question is capable of handling them.

Secondly, when it comes to the actual programming, again most mainstream games are made by teams of developers. This means that there is a lead developer(s)/architect(s)/designer(s) and then there are the dev team. The dev team are assigned tasks to do, such as write an AI routine. To do this they need to have very little idea of the overall system they're writing it for, they don't care if it's one x86 CPU, 3 powerpc CPUs or 8 of whatever the cell thingys are called. All they need to know is what goes in one end and what's expected out the other end, and from that they figure out the bit of code in the middle to do that. The only real difference to them is the language it's coded in, from what I've heard both platforms are mainly using C++ variants so no problems there. Any language difficulties after that are going to be down to the development teams themselves, not the platform/console.

Thirdly, the problems which do come with multi-core/muli-CPU systems are inherent to all multi-core/muli-CPU systems. It doesn't really matter if you have 2, 3 or 8 cores to worry about, the design problem is still the same. Altough really I should put the word 'problem' in inverted commas because it's not that big a problem, the solutions are well known, and it even solves other problems that they've had to work around all this time.

Fourthly, no one writes code for particular CPUs any more, it's all written for particular APIs and engines. Both systems actually share a lot of the same APIs and engines, for e.g. the AGEIA (sp?) physics API is available on both as is the Unreal 3 engine. The only slight edge the X360 has here is that it uses a new version of the DirectX API which'll already be familiar to PC devs, but all graphics APIs tend to be fairly similar because they're all based on the same principals. It's not very hard to switch from one graphics API to another, in fact remember when PC games used to give the option DirectX/OpenGL/Glide ? Game companys wouldn't have put that in if it was very hard to do.

I can't remember what John Carmack actually said, but iirc it was at the same time as announcing some MS exclusive deal and I think what he said was pretty vague and has been taken out of context and had way too much read into it ever since. ?

SouperComputer

back to the MegaDrive being 16 or 32 bit, the answer is that it was both!

As were many 68k machines, namely:

Commmodore Amiga
Atari ST
Certain Early Macs

The chip basically handles "internal" stuff in 32bit blocks and "external" stuff in 16bit blocks.

Motorola 680000

CiDeRmAn

I am lucky enough to own copies of both Quake and Duke Nukem on the Saturn and they are very very good, although my heart will always be with my copy of quake that ran on my old 200mhz PC with a rendition graphics card, a great patch made the game super scary, while most people were still playing it on software.

DEATH TANK FOREVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I guess in this day and age its a description that no longer has any resonance with todays gamers, the whole 8/16/32 bit means nothing to them, given that they were still in nappies when the Snes was launched, figure it never really mattered anyway, the games were what it was all about, although, it has to be said, the console or computer you owned did seem to create a certain tribalism, akin to football team devotion amongst everyone. Are people putting this type of childish view aside, they are around here, but only because fanboys are reported and banned, as they should be!

SouperComputer

funny that doom/quake come into the conversation.

Only last night I installed Jdoom to bring back some memories. Doom + Megedeth, Im a happy bunny.

[edit] I then installed doom on my PDA, only for it now refuse to boot up, crapfork. [/edit]

LookingFor

gamer wrote:

Basically in theory the ps3 should be more powerful than xbox 360,but i think the games will be better on the 360 cos it it has 3 pc processors multithreading,but designed from standard pc architecture

They're not actually traditional desktop cores. In fact, they're very similar to the PPE in Cell (in-order execution, poor-ish branch prediction etc.).

gamer wrote:

the ps3 is a completed new design,using new cell cpu processors,needing a completely new programming language and tools

You program Cell with C/C++ or Assembler if you really want. Most of the tools and APIs devs are familiar with have been ported to Cell/PS3. The tools pipeline for the GPU is an OpenGL variant, with a Cg-based shading language they're calling PSGL, which is basically the exact same as Cg, but with some extensions.

gamer wrote:

john carmack said the ps3 will be extremely dificult to program for.64 bit cpu means it can adress gigabytes of memory and run many threads or programs simultaenously,more than a 32bit cpu.i dont care if ps3 has 128bit core if its a dog to program for.

First off, Carmack did indeed say Cell would be more difficult to program for, and he is correct. He said much the same about 360's CPU, though, just that Cell was harder still. That's mostly down to the relatively large scale of parallelism on offer, and Cell's memory model - not tools or languages. However, do take his background into consideration - he's mostly approaching these systems from the world of PCs and, till now, single-core CPUs.

Second, CPU bittage has nothing to do with how many threads you can run simultaneously.

um7y1h83ge06nx

SyxPak wrote:

ADuC812 >> *

Holy hell, this is getting nerdy!! :rolleyes:

Still, I beat you. I have a ADuC841 and a Cypress FX2 part on my desk!

Take that, nerdy guy!

andy1249

And just to stir up the pot a little bit more ,

All 3 major console manufacturers have the processors made by IBM Microelectronics ,

The 360 is a 3 core power pc processor ( not x86 at all )

The Cell is a 9 core processor based on power pc processor ,

Nintendo also have the processor made by IBM but not sure what type of processor , it may well be specified by Nintendo , IBM have the biggest custom ASIC business in the world.

So all 3 major consoles main processors come from the same manufacturer , which in essence , kind of makes all the above points moot ! Dont ya think.

Vegeta

andy1249 wrote:

And just to stir up the pot a little bit more ,

All 3 major console manufacturers have the processors made by IBM Microelectronics ,

The 360 is a 3 core power pc processor ( not x86 at all )

The Cell is a 9 core processor based on power pc processor ,

Nintendo also have the processor made by IBM but not sure what type of processor , it may well be specified by Nintendo , IBM have the biggest custom ASIC business in the world.

So all 3 major consoles main processors come from the same manufacturer , which in essence , kind of makes all the above points moot ! Dont ya think.

Good point, does someone work for IBM????

Winters

gamer wrote:

Basically in theory the ps3 should be more powerful than xbox 360,but i think the games will be better on the 360 cos it it has 3 pc processors multithreading,but designed from standard pc architecture,the ps3 is a completed new design,using new cell cpu processors,needing a completely new programming language and tools,so it will be harder to program cos all prammers will have to start from scratch,any good pc designer will be able to program for 360 without too much difficulty.its like the apple pc,for every apple programmer theres 50 ibm pc programmers.so in this case i think the no of bits is irrevalant,although i think both systems are 64bit compatible.john carmack said the ps3 will be extremely dificult to program for.64 bit cpu means it can adress gigabytes of memory and run many threads or programs simultaenously,more than a 32bit cpu.i dont care if ps3 has 128bit core if its a dog to program for.

Erm ... wrong tbh.

Soem developers have said its hard to code for ... although they are the vast minority. Majority of devlopers find it easy and not too much of a change from existing ps2 etc. consoles. The more difficult part of programming for the Cell processor is making it use its full 7 processing units to their full extent. Learning how to offload physics to one, ai to another etc. is where programmers are having to think. In the end it makes for a lot more interesting development. You have several processing units to play with that you can throw lots of data at. AI and Physics etc. can each work on their own without having to hogg the main processing unit.

I'd reccomend you read some of the whitepapers on Cell Arch. They make for some very nerdy reading.

Also, re games. The PS3 has a lot of VERY interesting titles in the works. Some of which were shown at the GDC. So far the only "interesting" thing the Xbox360 has in the works appears to be Halo (Which i dont like, fps are for keyboard & mouse tbh ).

All other titles that hold any interest to me on the Xbox360 are going to be cross-platform anyway and so shall be out on the PS3 (And possibly Revolution)

Dont be at yourself

Let old posts die.