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May 25, 2005
E3 and recent announcements
A good friend of mine went to E3 to cover it for the local newspaper recently, so I got to hear about all the exciting video games that are going to be coming out soon. That was my big excitement for the past couple weeks, that, and hearing the final specs for the Cell processor in the PS3.
ArsTechnica did a good article covering the Xenon, the new IBM-made processor inside Xbox2. I'm still much more of a Cell fan than a Xenon fan, but my interest lies more in the video and audio stream capabilities of the Cell than its video game capabiltiies. And I'm getting moderately excited for the Xbox2, although the odds are very low I'd buy one, simply because one, I've bought into the PlayStation franchise since the PS1, and two, I don't really feel like rewarding Microsoft for their bad behavior, even if Xbox is a separate unit in the company.
I almost bought an Xbox because of Splinter Cell, though. Luckily, the second and third installments in that series came out for PS2. SC3 has reworked the controls and features, it's much more fun than Metal Gear 3 was (I know, sacrilege!).
Recently, Slashdot linked to an EE Times article on IBM opening up the Cell architecture, presumably to entice open source involvement. I was pretty excited to read that. I just hope that the hardware options don't suck the way the PS2 linux kits did. Yes, they booted linux, but you had to have a special boot cd to run software you wrote (i.e. you couldn't make dvds that held linux images and give them to friends who didn't have linux kits), and most of the interesting bits of the hardware weren't documented.
Now if you can afford the development box (and a Sony license), you can develop games for the PS2. The outlay there is something like $10k for the hardware, and substantially more for the license to distribute, but I forget the exact numbers. The PS3's hardware specs are great, so I'm hoping that Sony relaxes their stance a bit and gives the open source tinkerers more access to the hardware. Imagine MythTV running on a PS3, that would be great.
Hmmm, what else... The local Ruby group is having a hack fest this weekend, so I'm going to take some time and show up for the hacking and socializing. I haven't done a lot of Ruby the past six months, just the RubyCocoa work I did. I really miss it, but with the Java and HTTP stuff I've been doing, I haven't had a lot of extra time.
Posted by djb at May 25, 2005 11:42 PM