>Wouldn't this make a neat wearable? If only you could swap the game Had a demo of the Dreamcast a little while ago. Its basically a 200MHz SH4 with texture support. All the rest is in software. The machine is a little on the power hungry side for a wearable as is. Needs an internal fan, actually. Sonic 3D is pretty cool and what I'd expect from a next gen machine. Wasn't impressed with VF3 graphics, but I'm sure the game play is up to par. Saw a demo of real time environment mapping though, and some VERY nice touches on the machine's concepts. In particular, memory cards with displays that mount in the controllers. These things act like PDAs themselves and provide private screens for strategy games. The 4 controller ports are 2Mbps packet based serial lines. NOT USB however due to lag issues. Watch for some really cool stuff using these features. Was tempted to pick one up in Japan. As an aside - an interesting note for Windows CE folks: the Dreamcast's official OS is, uh, Windows CE - for purely political/advertising reasons it seems - no one actually USES it. :-) To explain this let me pass along an approximation of the conversation I had. "So what framework are you providing for developers? I remember the Saturn is actually gcc (Gnu's freeware C compiler)" "Well we have two choices: Windows CE and no operating systems, just graphics library calls." "Uh...hold it, you were just talking about lag problems in the peripherals keeping you from using USB - Windows CE, even the new 3.0, doesn't have fine enough real time control for what you are talking about." "Uh...yeah its a problem." "And CE isn't really compatible with 95/98/NT for development so there is no real benefit to use it there" "well, people have been having problems in that department as well" "So why use it?" <silence> "Let me rephrase that. Of the 8 initial releases, how many use WinCE as a base?" "None" "OK. How many game developers are currently planning to use WinCE in their future game development?" "None." "OK. You said folks were trying to port the game libraries to WinCE. What is the speed ratio?" "You mean raw versus through CE? About 3-5X slower...they're working on it." "Gotcha." SOOOO, putting on my prognositicator hat. I predict that despite the above: Microsoft will point to the Dreamcast as an example of how Windows CE is small, robust, real-time, and fast enough to run embedded. Gotta LOVE the computer industry. The good news is, game machines have to be pretty robust, so if Microsoft ever gets CE to behave itself enough to actually be used on a Dreamcast, we'll know that CE is relatively stable in a single user, single process environment on a SH4 with 16M RAM. ...provided they release the Dreamcast's patches to the rest of the world. ...provided they actually regression test. Ahem. Hmm, wasn't Linux ported to the Hitachi SH series a while ago... Thad -- Subcription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with subject of "subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" toWear-Hard Mailing List Archive (searchable): http://wearables.ml.org
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