Path: chuka.playstation.co.uk!news From: Scott Cartier Newsgroups: scee.yaroze.freetalk.english Subject: Re: What platform Date: Wed, 17 Mar 2004 17:11:45 -0800 Organization: PlayStation Net Yaroze (SCEE) Lines: 46 Message-ID: References: NNTP-Posting-Host: z06.nvidia.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031013 Thunderbird/0.3 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en In-Reply-To: I'll take a stab at rating NUON since that's what I'm most familiar with. FOLKS: 10% Not many people are likely to have a NUON DVD player, and only a subset of the ones out there can play homebrew games. However, taking the player with you for demo purposes is pretty easy. Just burn a disc with your game and bring the player. No messy PC interface (oh how we'd love to have a PC interface so we don't need to burn just to try changes). GROUP: 80% The NUON-Dome forum is ideal for this kind of support. We only get the occasional troll, but that's probably because there aren't many aware of NUON in the first place. STD: 95% The last players to come out used a new version of the chip that could operate at double the clock speed. As long as you code for the slower rate then you'll have no compatability problems. JOBINT: 75% The employer is unlikely to have a player, but you can bring your own easily enough. SKILL: 10% The only standard API supported is a subset of OpenGL, but the implementation of that is not very robust. The other 3D libraries and the sprite library are unique to NUON, although I'm sure the skills would translate well into a "proper" environment. PUBLIC: 10% You're likely to only get a handful of people to try it out. There are maybe 10 regulars on the forum. Add the Llamasofties and you might get 10 more. You might also get random stray people to try it, but the chances of someone stumbling on your game, *and* having a NUON player, *and* be willing to burn the disc to run it are rather small. Someone tell me why the hell am I developing for this thing? COST: 80% You can grab an N501 off of ebay for under US$100. If you're in the UK then your options are more limited. The N504 is highly sought-after, but very scarce. The N505 is the alternative, but does not have controller ports. There is a hack to add ports if you're so inclined. Someone is coding an emulator, but at the moment it isn't fast enough to be useful for development. QSTART: 25% The sprite library is pretty easy to get your head around. There's lots of sample code included in the SDK. 3D might be more difficult. I'd say it's a tad easier than the Yaroze simply because you don't need to do VRAM management. I rated this poorly since you currently have to burn a disc every time you want to try your game. Not ideal.