What does the Nintendo Revolution controller look like? I don’t know any more than the average person, but I have a guess.
Based on some comments made by Nintendo VP Reggie Fils-Amie in an article on gameindustry.biz and seeing something interesting recently on ThinkGeek, I have a guess.
First, to quote Reggie,
“If you just think about it, we’re going to have the ability through wireless internet to download all your great games from NES, SNES, N64,” he said.
“Think about it – each of those controllers are different. How are you gonna play? That captured some of the imagination of what our controller needs to be able to do, and certainly as you get into the meat of that type of innovation with the developers, their eyes truly light up because they start to imagine what’s possible with that kind of configuration, which is vastly different than a sheer horsepower kind of game.”
So the controller should be configurable? How’s this for configurable? It’s a keyboard you can get at ThinkGeek.
Yeah, I know, it’s a stretch, but something like this would match the touch screen rumors that people have claimed. Imagine setting the buttons the way you want and allowing extra attachments for specialized games. The possibilities are pretty cool, if I’m right.
Knowing Nintendo, it’ll be cool no matter what they do.
If you develop software and you don’t read Joel on Software, you should. His most recent, and revelatory, essay is about the much maligned Hungarian Notation. I can see the shivers going down any Win32 C programmer’s spine. Early 90′s nightmares those were.
It turns out the Microsoft SDK people got it all wrong. Hungarian notation is good. It makes code safe and more readable. dwVariable is not Hungarian notation.
I’ll let you read it and see for yourself.
I worked at WordPerfect years and years ago. I remember using NeXTSTEP running on Intel x86 (486 to be exact). It was a great OS and I was genuinely excited to be using it and porting WordPerfect to it. Then the whole Novell buys WordPerfect debacle took place and I left.
That much said, the fundamentals of OSX (NeXTSTEP) have been running on Intel for well over a decade. I believe it when Steve says that OSX on Intel has been in existence for years. I also believe the transition will be nearly painless for most developers. Ironically it will probably be the most painful for cross platform developers, those who have all the code lying around to deal with endian issues so their files work on PC and Mac.
Intriguing enough, I recently blurbed on something Chris Hecker said about out of order code and the speed decrease we will see from using in order processors on high end consoles. Does that work in reverse? Does this mean that Apple, going from PowerPC in-order (I’m assuming that their core doesn’t reorder) to Intel out-of-order mean that we’ll see speedups in Mac apps?
I don’t recall seeing anything about Mac and PC products having that big of a speed difference. Also, there’s a variety of factors such as bus speeds, OS inefficiencies, etc. that determine app speed as much as processor speed, but it would be entertaining to see the Mac as a platform have a speed boost such as that.
This is what it gave me. Meh.
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Tenderheart Bear
You are thinker, organizer, peacekeeper, and leader all in one. You have a power to command attention and people listen to you. However, you are often so concerned about not hurting others’ feelings that you don’t tell them what they need to hear and this gets you both into trouble. But you always have loyal friends to help you out.
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Man, oh man. What a slow month on the blog front. Which means it’s been a hectic month on the Real Life(tm) front.
Still working on the lock free algorithms paper, which will include a lock free smart pointer. That’s about the smallest thing I could think of that is still useable. I also still plan on developing a lock free allocator and some STL compatible data structures.
The game is making progress. The tools are getting closer (say 60% done). I’ve finished the exporter for main models and am working on the level tool. It’s not an editor per se, but takes easy to make representations and assembles the octree scene. Or, it will when it’s done.
Edit: The carebears quiz link wasn’t working. I’ve updated the URL for all those people who notified me. 
