Path: chuka.playstation.co.uk!news From: "Shawn B." Newsgroups: scee.yaroze.freetalk.english Subject: Re: XGamesStation out Date: Sat, 4 Dec 2004 11:24:23 -0800 Organization: PlayStation Net Yaroze (SCEE) Lines: 52 Message-ID: References: NNTP-Posting-Host: adsl-64-170-54-126.dsl.lsan03.pacbell.net X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Newsreader: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2800.1437 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2800.1441 (Tried to post earlier but the server wouldn't allow me to for some reason, but now seems to be okay according to the new posts discussing the out of space issue on the server being resolved). Yes, I purchased one the first hour they made them available and I received it last week. All I can say is wow. The CD has many ebooks and it comes with a physical 'programming the SK microcontroller' book, without which you'd be hopelessly lost. There are no API's, so even programming a pixel on the screen and making it animate, such as Pong, is a task; because you have to deal with the video timings yourself and such and if you change your program, you'll need to adjust it for the clock cycles to "keep" your timing. Alot like the old Atari days but not like the Nintendo and PS days where you just need to worry about the video refreshing automatically so many times a second. There is an incomplete ebook, Chapter 11, about making the system yourself and that one chapter to me is like reading a whole book on video controlls and oscillators and timing and so on. Anyway, seems wierd to me, an 80MHz 8-bit CPU, but hey, hopefully he'll get onto the ARM version with FPGA next. Anyway, I haven't tinkered with it much yet but I'm deeply interested in absorbing it. He mainly made this thing to target the hardward engineer crowd, but I got it mainly to satisfy my programming side, not so much to learn how to make a video game system, but that would be cool. I might start making a sprite library and frame buffer API for myself only to make it more fun, but there is only 4k to work with, again, it seems weird, 80MHz, 8-bit CPU, 4k RAM, but, he also wants people to be "creative". Thanks, Shawn "ncritten" wrote in message news:coasj4$ile4@www.netyaroze-europe.com... > So has anyone gone for one of these yet, I'm seriously > tempted.http://www.xgamestation.com/index.php > > Nigel > >