Proprietary Video Cards ala XBox/Playstation/Nintendo

Would there be any advantage to a company coming out with a proprietary
video card? Like suppose Sony came out with a PS2 video card, or
Microsoft had an XBox video card. Nintendo could have one, too. Hell,
maybe even Atari would come out with one, or some other company. It
would allow you to play PS2 games on your PC, but not if you have an XBox
card.

But if sensible, imagine the coolness of building a PC with game cards
from PS2, Xbox and Nintendo, along with your ATI or nVidia card. Talk
about the best of all worlds. To me, that would be an ultimate gaming
machine.

Damaeus

XBOX video card is based on Geforce 3 cards... and sony did the same I think

"Damaeus" a écrit dans le message de
...
Would there be any advantage to a company coming out with a proprietary
video card? Like suppose Sony came out with a PS2 video card, or
Microsoft had an XBox video card. Nintendo could have one, too. Hell,
maybe even Atari would come out with one, or some other company. It
would allow you to play PS2 games on your PC, but not if you have an XBox
card.

But if sensible, imagine the coolness of building a PC with game cards
from PS2, Xbox and Nintendo, along with your ATI or nVidia card. Talk
about the best of all worlds. To me, that would be an ultimate gaming
machine.

Damaeus

In alt.comp.periphs.videocards.nvidia, Damaeus ordered an army of hamsters
to type:

Would there be any advantage to a company coming out with a proprietary
video card? Like suppose Sony came out with a PS2 video card, or
Microsoft had an XBox video card. Nintendo could have one, too. Hell,
maybe even Atari would come out with one, or some other company. It
would allow you to play PS2 games on your PC, but not if you have an XBox
card.

But if sensible, imagine the coolness of building a PC with game cards
from PS2, Xbox and Nintendo, along with your ATI or nVidia card. Talk
about the best of all worlds. To me, that would be an ultimate gaming
machine.

Damaeus



Similar to what has been done before. Amstrad once built a machine based
on its 386 boxes that had a card in an isa slot that extended through a
remoulded frount bezel. Into which Sega Megadrive/Genesis cartridges could
be plugged. I have one, albeit a non working one in pieces on my shelf.
The MegaPC was great, could play megadrive and pc games at the same time on
the same machine!

Well I play Genisis, NES, SNES, N64 and PS1 games using an emulator on my pc
now. Just a matter of time and we'll be able to add both PS2 and XBox to
that list.

"Kokoro" wrote in message
...
In alt.comp.periphs.videocards.nvidia, Damaeus ordered an army of hamsters
to type:

Would there be any advantage to a company coming out with a proprietary
video card? Like suppose Sony came out with a PS2 video card, or
Microsoft had an XBox video card. Nintendo could have one, too. Hell,
maybe even Atari would come out with one, or some other company. It
would allow you to play PS2 games on your PC, but not if you have an
XBox
card.

But if sensible, imagine the coolness of building a PC with game cards
from PS2, Xbox and Nintendo, along with your ATI or nVidia card. Talk
about the best of all worlds. To me, that would be an ultimate gaming
machine.

Damaeus



Similar to what has been done before. Amstrad once built a machine based
on its 386 boxes that had a card in an isa slot that extended through a
remoulded frount bezel. Into which Sega Megadrive/Genesis cartridges
could
be plugged. I have one, albeit a non working one in pieces on my shelf.
The MegaPC was great, could play megadrive and pc games at the same time
on
the same machine!

Nvidia tried that with their first card that could play Sega games, didn't
turn out so well. The companies you mention make money on games not hardware
which they take a bath on

"Damaeus" wrote in message
...
Would there be any advantage to a company coming out with a proprietary
video card? Like suppose Sony came out with a PS2 video card, or
Microsoft had an XBox video card. Nintendo could have one, too. Hell,
maybe even Atari would come out with one, or some other company. It
would allow you to play PS2 games on your PC, but not if you have an XBox
card.

But if sensible, imagine the coolness of building a PC with game cards
from PS2, Xbox and Nintendo, along with your ATI or nVidia card. Talk
about the best of all worlds. To me, that would be an ultimate gaming
machine.

Damaeus

Xbox doesn't have a video card. it's GPU is right on the motherboard
with everything else. the XGPU is based on GeForce3 but is fairly
customized. it's closer to a GeForce 4 Ti4200.

the PS2 graphics chip, Graphics Synthesizer, is a *completely* custom
rasterizer made in-house by Sony. it is not based on any PC GPU
whatsoever.


"chris" wrote in message ...
XBOX video card is based on Geforce 3 cards... and sony did the same I think

"Damaeus" a écrit dans le message de
...
Would there be any advantage to a company coming out with a proprietary
video card? Like suppose Sony came out with a PS2 video card, or
Microsoft had an XBox video card. Nintendo could have one, too. Hell,
maybe even Atari would come out with one, or some other company. It
would allow you to play PS2 games on your PC, but not if you have an XBox
card.

But if sensible, imagine the coolness of building a PC with game cards
from PS2, Xbox and Nintendo, along with your ATI or nVidia card. Talk
about the best of all worlds. To me, that would be an ultimate gaming
machine.

Damaeus

In news:alt.comp.periphs.videocards.nvidia, "chris"
posted on Sat, 10 Apr 2004 13:11:52 +0200:

XBOX video card is based on Geforce 3 cards... and sony did the same I think

Based on, yes. But you can't play an XBox game on your computer.

Damaeus

Mark Leuck wrote:

Nvidia tried that with their first card that could play Sega games,
didn't turn out so well. The companies you mention make money on
games not hardware which they take a bath on

"Damaeus" wrote in message
...
Would there be any advantage to a company coming out with a
proprietary video card? Like suppose Sony came out with a PS2
video card, or Microsoft had an XBox video card. Nintendo could
have one, too. Hell, maybe even Atari would come out with one, or
some other company. It would allow you to play PS2 games on your
PC, but not if you have an XBox card.

But if sensible, imagine the coolness of building a PC with game
cards from PS2, Xbox and Nintendo, along with your ATI or nVidia
card. Talk about the best of all worlds. To me, that would be an
ultimate gaming machine.

Damaeus





Game consoles work on a totally different technology than computers.



Although the components are similar, the placement and design is a lot
different.


The following is partially speculation, since I'm too lazy to re-read
the specs in order to back my ass up. I believe I'm right, but any
disputes will be welcome:


The GameCube doesn't require a southbridge, because it doesn't have a
USB controller or PIO/DMA controller for the dvdrom drive. Everything
is directed straight to the main processor, the ATI Radeon 8500 GPU
being the only component besides the memory that is not built in to the
CPU.



The XBOX has an Nvidia GPU, Intel PIII processor(although it's still
questionable if they didn't use Celerons), and a northbridge.

The southbridge controls the controllers, modem, hard drive, DVDROM,
but isn't considered a southbridge since it directly interfaces with
the CPU.



The PS2, I believe, is the only console that has a northbridge and a
southbridge which function exactly like a computer.


It has the Emotion Engine, which controls all of the graphics and audio
processing.

Then it has a CPU to handle everything else.


The northbridge interfaces the memory with the Emotion Engine and the
CPU.

The southbridge handles the network adapter, DVDROM drive, hard drive,
IEEE and USB ports, and controllers.








As far has manufacturing a proprietary video card for a computer, it
isn't possible and it would arise legal issues.


Piracy would become rampant, all someone would have to do would be make
an ISO2 out of a disk, use Nero Image Drive or a similar drive
emulation program... and there you go, free games for all.




It isn't a possibility unless the proprietary operating system used for
each console was sold, which means it would be cracked and duplicated,
creating free consoles for everyone.


Not to mention, the operating systems they use are not 32bit x86, so
you'd have to have a special processor.





I think in order to be productive if they sold a card, they'd have to
sell it at least 5% more expensive than the console itself, or else
people would just buy the card.

My P4 runs at 3.6Ghz.... my PS2 runs at 300mhz... take your pick =P.

In news:alt.comp.periphs.videocards.nvidia, "pjp"
posted on Sat, 10 Apr 2004 18:28:55
GMT:

Well I play Genisis, NES, SNES, N64 and PS1 games using an emulator on my pc
now. Just a matter of time and we'll be able to add both PS2 and XBox to
that list.

I've tinkered with emulators before. My favorite one is MAME32. I
played with the N64 emulator UltraHLE for a while when I had a 3dfx
graphics card, but my CPU was so slow (Pentium 150) that playing N64
games was so slow as to make them...unplayable. And then there's the
issue of distorted text on Quest 64, which looked like it would be a lot
of fun.

Did they ever come out with unified drivers for UltraHLE? They were
going to try to make it playable on newer video cards.

Damaeus