pouët.net

Bagdad Bob works at SONY now? :)

Piracy came to ps3 AFTER sony closed the development possibility (otherOS/linux stuff).

and I know coding on pc is less pain. You don't even have to optimize your code for it to run on the latest nvidia / core i7. The problem with pc demos is at the time they get released, they can only run on $1500 machines.

But we already discussed about that on another thread.

Thats what most do/did. It does allow for some neat tricks, but you'll have to go deeper for that.



Unless some kind of weird open source revolution takes place I never see this happening. Too many NDAs et cetera between console manufacturers, chip manufacturers, developers et cetera. Or we get another Yaroze, yay.

I think we all demand too much from the Jap's society.

Its something like a cultural clash. While we in europe released "gaming machines", a.k.a. Home computers, where everybody was encouraged to make software (games) for it, in japan, they decided to go a different reaction.

In japan, illegally copying games is serious business. While here its all fun and stuff, cracking copy protections, coding intros, etc., in Japan its only a handful people who do that and Bill's message of "Copying software is theft" was taken as something new at that time.
Also, all software, games for instance, that are not made by big companies are regarded as "Doujin-soft", which pretty much means "homebrew".

They never had a microcomputing "community" before the late 1960's. In that time they were not even allowed to build skyscrapers.

So the theory of "open source" software is rather new or at least unusual for them and we(Not Japanese) are all evil scumbags(Especially the Chinese) who want to steal their proftits.

When confronted with open source, most japanese will answer: "Ri_nu_ksu...? Koto wa nanidesu ka?"

And, despite the fact that most of the insides of "modern" consoles were not designed in japan, like the PowerPC CPU's that dominate all three big platforms and the Geforce/Radeon GFX, the consoles themselves are designed by themselves.

That the Xbox wasnt designed by japanese can be seen on many aspects: Established Hardware, SDK's like on PC....ofcourse, you cant expect much from a company that established the "closed source" software concept....

reaction->direction. Sorry. :P

Superplek: I completely agree that none of this open sourcing will ever fly in the real world. Sony tried to do it with the Yaroze, found out that nobody in their right mind would VOLUNTARILY spend any time with their ironic interpretation of a toolchain, and let it die a slow death (wrapped in some marketing).

Still, one can dream, if only for a moment. So wistful.

Exin: Could your provide a translation of that Japanese phrase, not everyone speaks Animu.

There should be some law where the company must provide online service manuals, 'root' style access etc. where possible, once the platform is no longer supported so we can support it ourselves. This way we'd get some use out of a lot of old stuff that currently gets binned.

sag: Was that stuff still loaded Jap comments / no documentation? Arguably it has gotten a *bit* better, but they still don't have shit on Microsoft when it comes to the toolchain indeed :) Allthough I haven't worked with the X360 much, just have fond memories of the XDK. GCN/WII/DC was just as bad b.t.w, Japs I guess :)

psonice: Make use of old stuff that gets binned? I don't wanna play the Devil's advocate here, but the majority of what gets binned today is relatively powerful computers which have a much more streamlined and compatible development environment. So why not just use those?

We can use those, we just don't want to ;)

Of course your argument holds, but using iOS as an example for situations in which support and development is easy is just ridiculous. iOS is *the* main symptom of how horribly awful it is to make and support smartphone apps these days. of course, if you're only going to support a single vendor then it's easy, but that holds for PCs too (yeah our app only runs on Dell PCs with Windows Vista 64bit SP2, why?). I don't know where you work, of course, but I can't imagine many business models that can afford holding up the "iPhone 4 only, please" craze that is going on right now. It's "this webpage was designed for Internet Explorer 5+" all over again, but worse.

Wow, amazing! Look guys, Exin knows Japanese!

If his Japanese is the same level as his argumentation, that sentence probably means "Poop? Can you put that in your ears?".

DAKARA NANI KANA!

skrebbel: Nah, i just used google translate. Hey, they do it all the time. :D

And i thought, my comment could be reversed with google translate.
Anyways, i was rather making crude "fun" at the japanese not knowing Linux at all.

I provide a little background.

Before Windows 95 hit the market in Japan, Most computers were not 100% PC/DOS compatible. And let us be honest, Atari and Amiga's were popular, but had no big marketshare whatsoever. The "Proffessional" Computer market was dominated by either PC's or at least proffessional workstations any time. Mostly because they were used for work, that allowed them to spread before they took over the "home computer" market.

In Japan, however it was a little bit different. Before the DOS/V machines by Fujitsu took over the mainstream market, there were many competitors in the field. Sharp, NEC, Toshiba and others. They all had their own closed source operating systems and were somewhat incompatible to each other, beside the fact that they all used x86 processors.

The "IBM PC" compatibles didnt have a market share before Windows 95. Why? Because japanese language and writing has much different requirements to a personal computer than plain single byte letters and the scancode hardware IBM PC's could provide. Imagine a PC with a spectrum keyboard. At least 5 kinds of letters on every key. Upper- and Lowercase letters, Hiragana and Katakana letters and Kanji from a basic set that were the most used ones. This applied to any key on the keyboard. I have a japanese keyboard, and not just for opne system.

While microsoft had no great solution, others had.

And this only changed when Windows 95 came along with advanced text services that can be used in any program, regardless its use.
Mind you guys, Apple didnt had any marketshare in Japan at all before they added japanese advanced text services at all.
What commodore had to offer to Japan was just a bunch of Crap. Like the Vic Chip in 1979. The Commodore Max Machine. And i don't blame them for denying commodore. :D


When suddenly someone waved over at them and told them "Hey yo! I have an alternative OS thats free!" they barely noticed since they never had a computing community that shares code. Everything in their videogame industry was closed source, licensed and had to be approved, from the beginning. Their computer "industry" was an industry from the beginning. And they are not interested in software from the outside very much.

Rowley Birkin: Better inform yourself about the japanese first or at least get some Japanese friends who can tell you about this.

An imperfect memory on my part seems to recall that when the Japanese hobbyist/computer buying public had access to the open home computer MSX standard in the mid-eighties, they were as keen on piracy as anyone else in the world.

This was a lesson which the games makers and console manufacturers took to heart, hence the keen emphasis on closed development consoles subsequently.

skrebbel: I'm working for myself on those things, so I get to decide what to support and write for.

But this is kind of irrelevant anyway, the devices are much easier to support than pc/windows, they're way more flexible and most of the software can run happily over the web.

Part of what I'm doing lately at my 'day job' is porting our windows-based IT systems over to php, so they're accessible anywhere on any device. A whole lot of the network management software we use is web based now too, we could probably ditch computers in another 6 months :) (Give me a phone with a pair of 24 inch screens first though ;)

Google's new chrome OS is interesting me at the moment. It'll run all our web based software, and it'll effectively have no OS, just a browser, so there's very little to support. It won't be good for most people yet, but for some that could be pretty perfect.

What's the purpose of Google Chrome? Having a "fixed function" like operating system, like a telephone? Where you can't touch it in a low level way?

i don't know if 'end users' will be allowed to mess with it. But the purpose of it is to boot directly into a web browser - there's no accessible filesystem, software etc. Just chrome. Any apps you want to run go through the browser, using html5 stuff for offline mode I think. Although they're allowing their native code plugin on it, so it won't be 'pure' web.

Absolutely not something I'd want myself, but for 90% of the people out there, it's probably all they need.

skrebbel: my job has untill this summer kept a strategy of "we only support internet explorer". this was a CEO-decision based on market shares that internet explorer had in 1996.

i hate it when CEOs think it's their job to decide stuff.

atleast when they dont consult the right peope, i.e. me :-)

Actually it infuriates me when managers decide on things which aren't at their appropriate level. The higher up in the chain, the more abstract your decisions should be.