4 ms·

I've been following it and even done some development around 98-99. It was a bizarre system with tools that were not at the level even with the 5th/6th gen cons

I've been following it and even done some development around 98-99. It was a bizarre system with tools that were not at the level even with the 5th/6th gen consoles available at the time. You pretty much had just a gcc port with some serious bugs, an optimizing assembler (it's VLIW so the assembler had -O option and the bigger number you put there, the better it will optimize, at 6 though it was running out of memory on any non-trivial code) and a broken debugger, written in XLisp for some reason, which I never managed to use productively. The thing had 4 PUs, each with local memory and a DMA controller to access system and video memory. You could run one of them in a CPU emulation mode, where local memory was used as cache and it was the only target the C compiler supported. If you wanted local memory and/or more than 1 PUs - you wrote assembly and debugged by writing into the frame buffer. Even then I was wondering how it's going to compete with the DC/PS2 it was coming up against but my bosses told me it's fine because it's going to be in every DVD player and everybody is going to by a DVD player pretty soon so the game consoles are pretty much already dead.

jsnell 11y ago
Thanks for the reality check :-) It's really funny, because all throughout reading that article I was thinking "this thing never had a chance". A custom architecture based on principles that are notoriously difficult to write tools for (VLIW), probably adding 50% to the BOM of very price sensitive consumer electronics, and an attempt to create a gaming platform by a company with no capability of producing first party titles and no commitments from credible publishers to do third party games either. How could that not fail? But then the article ends with all of these people believing - even with 15 years of hindsight - that they genuinely were just on the verge of breaking through. Their technology was just too far ahead of its time and people didn't yet understand it!
- pandaman 11y ago
  To be fair, the game consoles were not a walk in the park either. PS2 VU programming was in some senses more complicated - on NUON you just had to stuff as many slots in a packet as possible e.g. you could write a jump to self and had like 20 slots for instructions in there (the jump packet itself and 2 delay packets, each was 6 or 7 instructions possible if memory serves) but on PS2 you had to be more clever with hiding latency between dual pipes. A loop on PS2 would be processing several items at once, eg stage 1 for the current idex, stage 2 for the previous index and the final stage for the current index - 2. Programmers at the time were okay with this and it was actually fun. The tools though were much better for the competition, on PS2 I could set break points anywhere (even on memory reads) and see the DMA streams in the debugger, on NUON it was pretty much debugging with prints except you had to write the print yourself :)
- soup10 11y ago
  Game developers go where the market is, regardless of the technical challenges, if they got their chips shipped with enough dvd players, people would start making games for them and it would snowball. Would it replace dedicated gaming hardware? Probably not, but it certainly could of eaten some of the casual market like the iphone did to the gameboy.
  - jsnell 11y ago
    Yes, non-gaming platforms will eventually get games just by being popular. But that requires millions of units at a minimum, and even that might not be enough (what was the state of desktop Linux gaming in 2012?). For this path to work, the platform needs to become popular first. For the PC the early value proposition was productivity applications. For the iPhone it was good mobile web browsing, maps, etc. A gaming system (which this was) can't wait for that popularity to happen through some other means. The games are the raison d'être of the system, the only reason for people to buy one. What was the end-user pitch here that'd get one of these to the hands of millions of consumers? "You can buy some other DVD player for $200, or this one that might some day play games for $300". Not very compelling, when both of them do an equally good job with the main task you're buying a DVD player for.
    - ethbro 11y ago
      > Yes, non-gaming platforms will eventually get games just by being popular. I wouldn't say this is an inevitability. Look at Nokia feature-phones. Sure, from what I've heard and read an incredibly poorly designed ecosystem and lack of carrier interest, but you can't tell me Snake was the best the market could come up with...
- frozenport 11y ago
  >>How could that not fail? The dev team got paid for ~7 years?
rasz_pl 11y ago
>Miller had been heavily involved in the creation of Atari's 64-bit Jaguar game console, which was already petering out after just a year on the market. "We were very proud of it," he said in a recent interview. "But it did not succeed because of the lack of content and a chicken and egg issue noo, Jaguar was TERRIBLE to program, and from what pandaman writes Nuon was just the same. > "I kind of hoped that it would be a real computing platform, much as the Atari ST had been a platform that was used for games as well," Atari ST was also pretty TERRIBLE, it was used for games _despite_ being terrible, not because it was a good computer. >He also brought in lawyer and this explains why it failed. 3DFX history was similar, they also toured Japan, but instead of lawyers they got a finance guy, they build hardware themselves, none of that 3DO CD-I licensing rubbish lawyers love so much.
- pandaman 11y ago
  From what I've heard from people who have seen both, hardware was similar to the Jaguar too.

jsnell 11y ago

Thanks for the reality check :-) It's really funny, because all throughout reading that article I was thinking "this thing never had a chance". A custom architecture based on principles that are notoriously difficult to write tools for (VLIW), probably adding 50% to the BOM of very price sensitive consumer electronics, and an attempt to create a gaming platform by a company with no capability of producing first party titles and no commitments from credible publishers to do third party games either. How could that not fail? But then the article ends with all of these people believing - even with 15 years of hindsight - that they genuinely were just on the verge of breaking through. Their technology was just too far ahead of its time and people didn't yet understand it!

pandaman 11y ago
To be fair, the game consoles were not a walk in the park either. PS2 VU programming was in some senses more complicated - on NUON you just had to stuff as many slots in a packet as possible e.g. you could write a jump to self and had like 20 slots for instructions in there (the jump packet itself and 2 delay packets, each was 6 or 7 instructions possible if memory serves) but on PS2 you had to be more clever with hiding latency between dual pipes. A loop on PS2 would be processing several items at once, eg stage 1 for the current idex, stage 2 for the previous index and the final stage for the current index - 2. Programmers at the time were okay with this and it was actually fun. The tools though were much better for the competition, on PS2 I could set break points anywhere (even on memory reads) and see the DMA streams in the debugger, on NUON it was pretty much debugging with prints except you had to write the print yourself :)
soup10 11y ago
Game developers go where the market is, regardless of the technical challenges, if they got their chips shipped with enough dvd players, people would start making games for them and it would snowball. Would it replace dedicated gaming hardware? Probably not, but it certainly could of eaten some of the casual market like the iphone did to the gameboy.
- jsnell 11y ago
  Yes, non-gaming platforms will eventually get games just by being popular. But that requires millions of units at a minimum, and even that might not be enough (what was the state of desktop Linux gaming in 2012?). For this path to work, the platform needs to become popular first. For the PC the early value proposition was productivity applications. For the iPhone it was good mobile web browsing, maps, etc. A gaming system (which this was) can't wait for that popularity to happen through some other means. The games are the raison d'être of the system, the only reason for people to buy one. What was the end-user pitch here that'd get one of these to the hands of millions of consumers? "You can buy some other DVD player for $200, or this one that might some day play games for $300". Not very compelling, when both of them do an equally good job with the main task you're buying a DVD player for.
  - ethbro 11y ago
    > Yes, non-gaming platforms will eventually get games just by being popular. I wouldn't say this is an inevitability. Look at Nokia feature-phones. Sure, from what I've heard and read an incredibly poorly designed ecosystem and lack of carrier interest, but you can't tell me Snake was the best the market could come up with...
frozenport 11y ago
>>How could that not fail? The dev team got paid for ~7 years?

rasz_pl 11y ago

>Miller had been heavily involved in the creation of Atari's 64-bit Jaguar game console, which was already petering out after just a year on the market. "We were very proud of it," he said in a recent interview. "But it did not succeed because of the lack of content and a chicken and egg issue noo, Jaguar was TERRIBLE to program, and from what pandaman writes Nuon was just the same. > "I kind of hoped that it would be a real computing platform, much as the Atari ST had been a platform that was used for games as well," Atari ST was also pretty TERRIBLE, it was used for games _despite_ being terrible, not because it was a good computer. >He also brought in lawyer and this explains why it failed. 3DFX history was similar, they also toured Japan, but instead of lawyers they got a finance guy, they build hardware themselves, none of that 3DO CD-I licensing rubbish lawyers love so much.

pandaman 11y ago
From what I've heard from people who have seen both, hardware was similar to the Jaguar too.