Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 10th Dec 2012 23:24 UTC
Confirming the industry's worst-kept secret, Valve CEO Gabe Newell has confirmed Valve is working on its 'Steam Box', a Steam-powered HTPC geared towards console-like gaming. It'll most likely run Linux. "Well certainly our hardware will be a very controlled environment," he told Kotaku. "If you want more flexibility, you can always buy a more general purpose PC. For people who want a more turnkey solution, that's what some people are really gonna want for their living room." Steam has 50 million subscribers, so there's a market here. As a comparison: Xbox Live has 40 million subscribers.
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Member since:2005-07-06
All PS2 consoles are compatible with PS1 titles - the hardware is used for i/o and such secondary stuff in PS2 games.
OTOH, Xbox1 games were always emulated on X360 (supporting only a subset of Xbox1 games), no dedicated hw. And PAL PS3 consoles always emulated PS2 CPU, they included (for a time) only the GFX chip of PS2. Well, at least PS3 supports PS1 games via software emulation now, downloadable from Playstation appstore...
...speaking of appstores, I think the Apple one is also "actually loved by the Average Joe" - stealing some momentum at least from portable consoles.
And I've never heard of devs using Linux specifically for Windows game development...
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/13/13 14:35 UTC
The third and final WWDC product I want to talk about is - of course - OS X 10.9 Mavericks. While iOS 7 was clearly the focus of this year's WWDC, its venerable desktop counterpart certainly wasn't left behind. Apple announced OS X 10.9 Mavericks, the first OS X release not to carry the name of a big cat.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/11/13 17:07 UTC
We already talked about iOS 7 yesterday (after a night of sleep, it's only looking worse and worse - look at this, for Fiona's sake!), so now it's time to talk about the downright stunning and belly flutters-inducing new Mac Pro. As former owner and huge, huge, huge fan of the PowerMac G4 Cube - I haven't been this excited about an Apple product since, well, I would say the iMac G4. This is the Apple I used to love.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/10/13 23:13 UTC
Apple held its big keynote event thing at WWDC earlier this evening, but since I was away with friends I've had to read up on it later in the evening. The company announced iOS 7, OS X 10.9 Mavericks, and they gave a preview of the new Mac Pro. Especially the Mac Pro impressed me, and while iOS 7's new Holo/Metro-inspired theme looks messy and garish to me, I do commend Apple for finally breaking the mold. This news item will focus on iOS 7 - I'll dive into the Mac Pro and OS X 10.9 tomorrow (it's late here now).
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/08/13 14:57 UTC
And yes, the PRISM scandal is far, far from over. More and more information keeps leaking out, and the more gets out, the worse it gets. The companies involved have sent out official statements - often by mouth of their CEOs - and what's interesting is that not only are these official statements eerily similar to each other, using the same terms clearly designed by lawyers, they also directly contradict new reports from The New York Times. So, who is lying?
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/07/13 11:40 UTC
This story is getting bigger and bigger. Even though most Americans probably already knew, it is now official: the United States government, through its National Security Agency, is collecting the communications and data of all American citizens, and of non-Americans using American services, through a wide collaboration with the large companies in technology, like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and so on. Interestingly enough, the NSA itself, as well as the US government, have repeatedly and firmly denied this massive spying on Americans and non-Americans took place at all.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/04/13 12:45 UTC
Ah, patents - the never-ending scourge of the technology industry. Whether wielded by companies who don't actually make any products, or large corporations who abuse them because they can't compete in the market place or because they're simply jerks, they do the industry a huge disservice and are simply plain dangerous. According to The Wall Street Journal (circumvention link), president Obama is about to take several executive actions to address patent trolls - which may seem like a good idea, but I am very worried that all this will do is strengthen the positions of notorious patent system abusers such as Apple and Microsoft.
Linked by nfeske on 05/31/13 10:12 UTC
With version 13.05, the developers of the Genode OS Framework take measures to ensure that Genode continues to scale well with a growing number of users and the steadily broadening platform coverage. Further highlights are the improved SoC support for Exynos 5, OMAP4, Raspberry Pi, i.MX, and new components for realizing headless systems.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/29/13 16:59 UTC
At the D11 conference, Apple CEO Tim Cook once again took the stage to be interviewed by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. While most of the interview can be replicated by picking and reading 10 random Apple fanblog stories - there were still a number of very interesting things that warrant some closer scrutiny.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/24/13 17:26 UTC
So, the Xbox One disaster continues. Microsoft's policy for dealing with the used games market has reportedly leaked - and it's a clear and direct attack to destroy the used games market. Prices for used games will be set at the retail value of a new game, and retailers have to hook into Microsoft's computer systems and comply with Microsoft's terms and conditions.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/21/13 21:38 UTC
At an event earlier today, Microsoft unveiled the next Xbox - the third model, but confusingly named Xbox One. The big focus was TV, integrated Kinect, and all the other stuff we all expected to be forced down our throats. I think it took them 25 minutes to actually come to what should be the core of the story: gaming. Nothing groundbreaking in the gaming department, except for how Microsoft intends to handle the used games market and borrowing games from friends: pay up, buddy!More Features »
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2010-07-07
Why convince game dev companies to support yet another platform? Because they already have to do so with every console generation. Each iteration of the xbox or playstation have been incompatible with the previous generation for native software, sure they included specialized hardware to allow for emulation of the previous generation's hardware to help get more console sold but that hardware eventually gets dropped by later versions of the consoles to cut production costs.
Having a Linux based console is actually easier for many developers anyways since they use Linux internally for development of their Windows games.
Furthermore Valve is a massive force in the gaming industry specifically due to their Steam platform which seems to be the only "App Store" that is actually loved by the Average Joe.
Would you rather see the gaming industry taken over by Microsoft completely with their store and choke out all the cross platform games by saying you you want to sell your game through the Windows store you can't port to anything else but the XBox?
I don't like Steam either, but I do like competition in the market.