GameCube/PowerPC

Snyper M

Registered
OK I'm sure others have seen this but the Gamecube from Nintendo is powered by and IBM PowerPC Chip( http://gamespot.com/gamespot/features/video/gamecube_dossier/ ) Codenamed Gekko this is apparently the same or obviously very similar to the G3s.

My question is does this mean that developers for the Gamecube will be writing programs that are very similar to what would be needed to run on a Mac? I'm not expecting ot get Gamecube Games ported to us, I'm not sure I'd want to truthfully as I'm not a big fan of Nintendo after pokemon, but this could mean more exposure of PowerPC architecture to deveolopers right?

Could this be a sign of things to come?! Or am I just overreacting?
 
No.

The GameCube uses a powerPC chip in conjuction with a GPU specially made by ATI.

In short, the more important aspect of this is the graphics code. How easy would it be to write code that can compile for the ATI chip and other chips?(geforce, etc)

While most of the PC chips and games are geared towards crunching OpenGL code, I do not know if the ATI chip in the game cube or if the games utilize OpenGL for their algorithms.

However, it does seem likely that this would pave the way for a very effective GC Emulator.

FaRuvius
--------------
"Games Rock"
 
Should be even easier to make a PC emulator for the xbox, since it is also a PC. Betcha MS wouldn't like that!
 
Originally posted by Jadey
Should be even easier to make a PC emulator for the xbox, since it is also a PC. Betcha MS wouldn't like that!

:rolleyes: no offense, but if they did care, which i think that they would, but i hiley doubt it would make a tear in one of their 3 thousand pockets and put a dent in their in their christmas bonus's. :rolleyes:
 
I disagree. When Sony's PSX was the biggest game console seller in the world, they sent their lawyers after Connectix full force - even though their emulator ran initially only on MacOS, a small small market share that shouldn't have hurt playstation. Connectix won that suit in the end...
 
sony is stupid, microsoft is smart.

if everybody pirates microsoft products (which they do) then everybody uses microsoft products.

if everybody uses microsoft products, microsoft makes a activation/antipiracy feature in the os, everyone that uses microsoft products will now have to pay for microsoft products, and since everybody pirates microsoft producs, everybody uses microsoft producs and everyone will pay for microsoft products.

if nobody pirates sony games/uses them on othr platforms, nobody exept those that actually bought the console will be familiar with the games and will not be compelled to buy one in the future.

shortly:

piracy = the strongest advertising campaign anybody could have thought of. free.
 
Since developers will probably be writing in a high level language anyway, they won't likely get much exposure to the chip as such. It will mean one more PPC compiler will get written, but that's about it.

As was mentioned, it might mean a shortcut to a nice Gamecube emulator for OSX.

I wonder if someone could port Darwin to Gamecube... That would be interesting - and from there it's only a short step to hacking OS X to install on it. And then those of us who are broken up over the death of the G4 cube can have a cubic Mac again :)
 
Originally posted by vic
sony is stupid, microsoft is smart.

piracy = the strongest advertising campaign anybody could have thought of. free.

I guarantee you that's not the way MS sees it. Furthermore, there is not product activation on an xbox, which is what the discussion is about here, so the point is moot.
 
For many years M$ allowed, even tacitly encouraged students to pirate their software. (This was back in the day when, eg. Corel WordPerfect was a serious contender against MS Word)

The idea was that then these strudents would graduate and get jobs. The idea was, having pirated MS products, they would a) be familiar with them, and b) feel they 'owed' MS, by the time they were in a position to pay for expensive software. At the very least, they start buying for themeselves, and possibly, they would get to make decisions for whole companies, and swing many-thousand-dollar budgets.

Now MS seems to think (possibly rightly) that they are in a position to stop playing the nice guy, and start pushing people around.
 
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