From: Twomey_Mark at domain emc.com
Date: Fri 03 Sep 1999 - 19:08:58 IST
Ohh just when you think they cant be really as dumb as you think, they go
and prove that you were right the first time around.
The brain-trust at MS have decided that they want to get into the home game
console market.
Rumour has it that they have a "X-box" in the works that will be built with
a X86 based chipset and graphics technology from Nvidia (Sp?), all singing
together under WinCE.
Now here one or two problems with that strategy...
Firstly X86 is a really shitty chipset to use for consumer electronic
devices. It eats power and generates far too much heat. (Hence the reason
that the current generation consoles (and future) use RISC based chipsets.
These being more energy efficient and faster than their X86 equivalent)
Microsoft in order to force market adoption are probably going to open up
the specification to anyone who'll build one of these machines. We are
talking about what has happened in the PC gaming industry. There is a
multitude of hardware software configs out there, gamers will end up getting
patches for games or labouring for hours just to try and get things running
just to find out that the should be using DirectX <whatever>.000001 instead
of DirectX <whatever>. Or that their processor/videocard just ain't got what
it takes to run the blasted game.
There are many more problems but I cant even be bothered writing them down.
Just think of every crappy thing that's ever happened to you while trying to
get games to run under Windows on a PC.
With both Nintendo and Sony having a long hard stare at Linux based
technologies for use as the OS for their Next Generation consoles, lets hope
we get to watch Microsoft fail in console games the same way they failed in
the ISP business.
Mark.
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