N-Sider Q&A
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March 14th, 2001
Nsider & Co.,
Putting two and two together - the fact that Nintendo asked Sony to make a CD-ROM add on for the SNES then dropped the idea, and Miyamoto's recent statements that he hates load times... Do I dare speak the heresy that our beloved Miyamoto may actually be solely responsible for the fall of the N64, and the travesty of the Sony powerhouse (whom we now see foisting terrible games on an unsuspecting public and causing software developers to lose millions trying to program for the flawed PS2) by forcing Nintendo to abandon the CD-ROM idea for the SNES and N64??? Arrrrgh! The present could have been so different! Say it ain't so!
- Aesop
Pete: Actually there's a lot more back story to the Sony/Nintendo CD-ROM saga. If my memory serves me correctly, Nintendo initially contracted Sony to work with them on a CD-ROM add-on for the Super Famicom/SNES in 1992. Eventually, Nintendo came to realize that working with Sony meant that Sony would get a bulk of the software CD-ROM royalties. Nintendo backed out and decided to ally themselves with Philips' cd-i standard.
Sony was obviously miffed at this point, and because they were supplying the SNES sound processor, Nintendo had to patch things up quickly. So eventually Philips and Sony were supposed to work on a joint Nintendo CD add-on, but that fell through as well. All through this, Nintendo was internally having problems reducing loading times as well. Seeing as how the Sega CD totally flopped, Nintendo decided to just move on from the whole mess and start over with Project: Reality (Ultra 64/N64). Of course from the ashes of this fall-out came the Sony Playstation and the rest is history.
Hello guys,
Is it true that sony is working on a PS3? Is it possible for a company to do another console with not even a year from the launch of the first? Why they do that, is it because they know that there is too many flaws on the PS2? Could it be a menace to the cube or it si just a big rumor? Anyway if sony is really doing that, they really take their customers for idiot. How could people buy a system 400$ and buy an another at the same price just two years after the first one? If sony do that, they contribute to kill the video game market. I don't want to have to buy a new hardware every two year. It's totally insane. Maybe gamers will be able to kept the pace but not the game developpers. Thanks for reading.
-Dagobert
Pete: Well, Sony is working on a chipset codenamed the "Cell" in conjunction with Toshiba and IBM. It's supposed to parallel IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer technology on a small chip. Some form of this "Cell" technology will probably find its way into the Playstation 3, but this is pretty far reaching.
Sony is moving into creating processors that are extremely powerful, not only for game devices but for other purposes. One might even suspect they are taking aim at Intel/AMD's grip on the PC CPU market. Research and development of new products is also always ongoing at all big technology driven companies. Nintendo infact has already begun working on the successor to the Game Boy Advance according to NCL's Hiroshi Imanishi. New technology takes years of planning in many cases.
I was wondering if you could turn the control so that you could lay down on a couch or something and have the controller be about 90 degrees from the console.
-Dan B.
Pete: I can almost gauruntee you'll be able to do that. While Nintendo won't say officially, the technology they're using in the Wavebird controller is either Bluetooth or something very similar, and Bluetooth signals can go through walls without too much of a fuss.
Would you be able to hook up two or maybe more GameCubes together using the cable modem or broadband modem? and then hook each game cube to a differenet TV that will be amazing!.......JUST IMAGINE Perfect Dark 8 Player!!!!!
-K. Singh
Pete: It would be cool to have a little GameCube LAN party wouldn't it? I don't see why it wouldn't be possible, although hooking everything up and getting it all set up might be a tad tricky.
I want to know how the GCN will work for fighting titles with how the buttons are lade out? And with Dinosour planet coming to GCN will any other titles that were in development for N64 go to GCN like Enternal Darkness?
-Clinton
Pete: If you're asking me how something like Street Fighter III would work on the GameCube pad, I have no idea honestly. They're just buttons and pushing them triggers a command, so as long as the buttons are there, technically any fighter is possible on the current button scheme. It might feel a bit strange however. Certain fighting games that require you to be able to push any two buttons together at the same time, like Tekken might be a problem as well.
The flipside is that fighting games that have a block/evade button like Dead or Alive might actually work better with the button layout, because the block/evade would be the central A-button and the surrounding buttons could be punch/kick attacks. We have heard rumblings that Nintendo is still modifying the button layout, so things might be different by E3 as well.
I would just like to tell you that Microsoft's so called video game system will die before it even hits the shelf. What I mean is that the GeForce 3 will cost Microsoft more than the Gamecube along with a couple of games. If this GPU costs consumers $500 then it most likely will cost NVadia around $300 at the lowest to make. Also the computer version is only 200 MHz while the Xbox will supposedly be 250 Mhz. Also the computer version only has 57 million transistors while Xbox supposedly has 62 million transistors. What I'm trying to say is that the Xbox most likely will have a sup up version of the GeForce 3 which will cost even more money. For the complete article about the GeForce 3 go to PC World. -Matthew K.
Pete: I think you're overstating the price there. PC graphics cards are marked up big time and there's also a lot of middle men involved. The Nvidia GPU in the XBox is also just the chip, and not a full motherboard. Also of course, a giant like Microsoft is bound to get quite a sharp cut on all the components, especially when you factor in mass production. I don't expect the XBox to retail for more than $300 total this fall.
Nsider & Crew,
I've been searching the web for any reporting of the Gekko's transistor count. But I couldn't find anything on it. Do you guys have any official statement as to how many transistors will be on the Gekko CPU?
The closest I could get was to look up the transistor count on the PowerPC 750 series processor which the Gekko is based on. It was 20 million transistors! So, I made this little apples-to-apples comparison of the GC and the PS2:
GC
CPU = 20 mill. transistors (assumed) @ 405 mhz = 8100 mhz x trans
GPU = 51 mill. transistors @ 202.5 mhz = 10327.5 mhz x trans
CPU-total x GPU-total = 83,652,750 PS2
CPU = 10 mill. transistors @ 296 mhz = 2960 mhz x trans
GPU = 43 mill. transistors @ 100 mhz = 4300 mhz x trans
CPU-total x GPU-total = 12,728,000 ...
Conclusion = GC is 6.6 times more powerful than PS2 when comparing adjusted transistor and megahertz ratio
Pete: Well it's not that simple, unfortunately. A big chunk of the transistors on both the GameCube and PS2 chips are eaten up by all that embedded RAM. The GameCube has 3MB of embedded 1T-SRAM so that drops its logic transistor count to about 27 million transistors, give or take.
I'm not sure about the Playstation 2, but I've heard after the 4MB of embedded Rambus eDRAM, it has about 10-12 million transistors left over for logic. The GameCube LSI also has the sound processor on it, and that might eat up some more of its transistors available for logic. Either way you really can't go by transistors alone as to which system is more powerful (or more importantly) better designed.
Just thought I might make a small correction to your Q/A site ... Sega did indeed have games on the NES, namely Alien Syndrome, After Burner, and Shinobi. They are all original Sega games, except on the NES they were published under the Tengen name.
-J.R.
Pete: I do remember seeing some Tengen games for the NES (which were unlicensed by Nintendo of course). I think you might be right about Shinobi and the others. I'm not sure if Sega themselves developed those internally, although it would be cool if they did.
Hope this update satisified your Q&A cravings. Keep those qs coming in.