[Seren]

firstly i'm glad i've found a forum relevant to a rant i've wanted to have or a long time.

what is bugging me is peoples attitudes towards microsoft.  it stems from using their os' and now being fanatical about their first console.  to ilustrate this heres a bit of a conversation i had with a friend who hates microsoft.

friend: 'i'll never buy an xbox.'

me: 'why? you must want ninja gaiden at least.'

friend: 'i have a ps2. i'm not saying the xbox games aren't good, i just don't want to buy a console from a big, controling company like ms'

me: 'so you bought a console form a big, controling company like sony?  which can't do half the stuff the xbox does.'

now we all know why he is being obstinate in face of evidence.  even if you do have the glorified tivo that is the psx....can you play demoscene sid or mod files on it?  or the broad range of video and audio codecs that xbmc is capable of playing?

while there is little official information on microsofts opinions on what homebrew xbox apps are doing, i know it were me i would be very pleased that, although it may lose me money, it proves the concepts concerning centralised home media the microsoft is pioneering.

but you aren't allowed to like microsoft right?  they are the evil, money grabbing company that charge too much for 'badly wirtten operating systems' right?  everybody should just use linux right?

ok linux is free, but seriously i know two people who actually paid for windows xp, and then only because they use it for business purposes.  also while i can use linux, my mum and dad can't, nor will they ever learn.  so they are denied easy use of pcs they enjoy using for the sake of a rediculous 'linux-utopian' ideal.

so what do you want?  do you want sony to dictate to you exactly where and how you store and watch you digital media, and in what format it is in?  do you want digital media set ups to be based on linux which your dad can't use.  resulting in your dad calling you every week to come round and fix his home network each week as his video file server won't talk to his xbox/tivo downstairs?  or do you want to do things the way microsoft has planned?  where you set up networks with equipment you can specify if you want, using any file types you want, with a network tailored to your needs, not the needs of the average consumer as decided by marketing departments.

yeah ms aren't perfect, but they designed operating systems stable enough that i can use them in a pc for live music performace purposes (theroeticaly you could use an xbox in live situations doing the job of very expensive hdd recording set ups).  they designed a console that does a hell of a lot more than run the most advanced console games on the planet and they only ever really chase down businesses pirating their software.

thanks to microsoft, the xbmc team, the evox team and various mod-chip designers, i can acess the digital media in a way that most people won't experience for a few years.

i rest assured that due to these people my living room is way cooler than any living room with any amount sony equipment in.  so what if it is bigger and heavier than a ps2?

try this out:

gaffer tape a ps2, psx(remember it's one player only), dvd player, tivo and cd player together, now measure it and pop it on the scales. then show it to a japanese person and ask them how happy they would be to have that under their tv rather than an xbox.

so thanks ms and xbmc...my house is cooler and tidyer and my gaffer tape stays in my gig bag where it belongs thanks to you!

[Hullebulle]

lol. nice statement.

[Seren]

rather heavy for only my third post perhaps, but credit where it's due in my opinion.

i know i may be preaching to the choir here, but i'm sure we all have at least one friend who will never tire of telling us how much better playstation is, claiming their opinion is based on the fact it gets the metal gear games first and has square-enix under it's thumb. when really they are just caught up in eliteist pretentiousness, perpetuated by nothing more than sonys almost fascist attitude towards the means it will take to maintain their market share, plus they have nausiatingly bias publications that masquerade as being neutral *ahem* edge *ahem* to back them up and lul them into believing they are making an objective, educated decision rather than just going with the flow. the fact is playstation doesn't have many more great games than the xbox, just more japanese games which have the potential to be equaly as crap. the thing is that japanese publishers/developers are much better at selling to the west than the other way around. yet you don't get the kind of homebrew phenomenon that surrounds the xbox now (which is carrying a torch passed to it by the dreamcast....another console i prefered to the ps2) being as big in japan. this stems from one point in my opinion.

in the west, specificaly the uk (where i live) home gaming was not almost exclusivly 'licensed console games' like japan. people coded in their bedrooms for the likes of the zx81, c64 and later the amiga and to a lesser extent atari, which, of course, lead to pc games. they could release products that were homebrew in a style akin to indie record lables without having to 'kiss the ring' of the hardware manufacturer and give them a cut of their profits. hence games that would be deemed 'commercialy unviable' or 'risky' now got released then, and without this great designers like peter moleneux for example would, potentially, not have suceeded. this is of course true of all europe and to a lesser extent the usa, who, as is their custom, only really got into the market when there was large sums of cash to be made. i'm not 'america bashing' btw, i like large sums of cash as much as the next guy, and my recollection of gaming history is probbably biased.

still it's surprising how many 'real gamers' there are in the uk now. it's strange, as i remember being the only one who got the piss taken out him for using computers at school. you know the type of people, the only console they own is a ps2 (as they traded their ps1 in for games) they swear that ff vii is the best game ever made (probbably based on the high end cg cutscenes more than anything else) and insist that they bought chronno trigger the first time around on their 'trusty old snes' that the sold at a car boot sale for a fiver, and don't realise that the reason you are smiling is because you know something they don't.....it didn't get released in the uk for the snes, i don't know if the ps1 re-release was released here.

still it's always going to be true that they could have made more effort to get more japanese developers involved in xbox as there is a shocking lack of titles for the japanese audience (although ninja gaiden rocks your ass and you know it). it's odd because i now find myself actually caring about xbox sales in japan....sad isn't it?

hmm i've done it again havn't i. ah well meybe i should just behave like nearly everybody else does online....here goes.

ps2 suxx0rz!!!!!! t3h l33t x-bo>< r001z!!!!!!!

hmm most effective...says what i needed to and in only six, albeit nonsensical, 'words'.

ttfn

[uberbang]

y'see...

you, my friend, need to stop talking to idiots. it's the incontrovertible truth that microsoft are universally reviled by the arrogant pseudo-elite (spanning 'i'm capable of typing things in command.com' all the way to 'i'm a qualified cisco routing administrator yet spend lonely days monitoring corporate security for firms that nobody cares about') and we need to remind ourselves why. or rather we *don't* need to remind ourselves why.
i had an impressive filigree webbing of meandering veritabilities to air here but on reflection, i realise that they're entirely pointless since one glance at the sort of person we're dealing with really brings us round full circle. as well you know, it pays to make the distinction between legitimate industry observers (those who are concerned with comparable instances and precedents of moral rectitude and their imbalances with regard to a company who endeavour to project an honest public image yet fight remarkably trivial and underhand legal battles most normally driven by spite - see http://www.theregister.co.uk, every day despite the horrendous lexicographical and grammatical errata) and little fucking kids who betray the ostensibly faceless (lest we forget) yet facilitating corporation who first gave them directx to save the little bastards from having to, god forbid, change directory in dos!
of course we're civilised gentlemen here and we each of us have our own tale of induction to recount... my own df0-tastic entree into using a computer (not to be confused with just 'using a computer', of course) stemmed from early versions of the amiga workbench shell (the world's first successful multitasking operating system, mr. gates ) and the fact that running shell commands was a lot easier than trying to get that crappy fucking mouse to work!
gone are the days when choice meant 'choice' rather than 'market share and our misplaced, artificially inseminated conceptions of brand loyalty come hell or high edge magazine'...sorry - did i say that out loud?
[on the tangential subject of edge, it would be nice to see them use accurate-quality screenshots of xbox games - i'm sure ps2 fanatics could behold them without collapsing to the floor in traumatically-induced fits...]
but my final warning to you, stranger, is that you should continue to live as you evidently have so far - by taking pleasure in the fact that even though you explain it to them at length, as i find, people *still* won't manage to make their xboxes as cool as yours! or, indeed as cool as that of anyone with a chipped box and a hdd... by taking pleasure in the fact that you'll always be able to gravitate towards the effective produce of the homebrew dev community with as much an air of self-satisfaction as we all did back when we were laughing at the americans for their nin-tunnel-do vision in the early nineties while sitting down for a good old play of beneath a steel sky or turrican. or amosteroids, for feck's sake - that's how easy it was!
remember that the internet is the greatest resource that certain of us more enlightened folks could hope for...as well as our most terrible enemy. the video games industry marks the age-bands of 18-32 (approximately - it seems to vary depending upon which particular bias various members of the illustrious gaming press decide to swing with on a particular week) as being the target customer-base for their games... yet, somehow, it's only the fucking kids, n00bs, criminally immature and the sociopathically institutionable who actually come on the internet to post their ill-informed, tedious and grossly inflammatory remarks about games that they haven't played and platforms they don't even own!
so i suppose that despite the blood-pressure tickling mad-ass waveform that has been this post, i really just want to paradoxically denounce both the excessive proliferation of thousands of fool-filled 'opinion' boards and the dangerous levels to which the innocentia can be strayed from their noble task in this world... the task of modding the shit out of their favourite platforms, revelling in their relative inacessibility and laughing at not necessarily those who hate microsoft, but at those who hate microsoft for all the wrong reasons.

ps
     dear bill,
            you've been a bit of a bastard, on and off. you've never reached the intellectual and manipulative heights of even the most basic of nicollo machiavelli's principles and guidelines, but like most good ol' cash-grabbing yanks, you've given it a mighty good shot. you employ a fantastic old goat, steve ballmer, who i'd hate if he didn't have such a magnificent and hilarious proficiency in embodying so many of microsoft's business tenets ie shouting and shouting and shouting until people lose interest and back down.
 most importantly, though, you realised that there was a healthy wadge of green to be made by making a games console and we know that you don't really care about our innovative homebrew dev scene, since it only raises your console's profile, narks the tits off sony and really pisses off those particular linux freaks who can't let go of the fact that their cooler friends are using a piece of 'the enemy's'  hardware to run their latest 1337 k3rn31 on.
 and we love the xbox, so cheers! keep up the sometimes-competent work...

[Butcher]

um i think you'll find multitasking oses predate the amiga by about 20 years actually.

[uberbang]

not for the man on the clapham omnibus buying a family computer, which is where the issue most obviously lies when discussing microsoft and her early nineties rivals in the context of gaming and popular consumption. if the idea is to descent into the tedium of pedantry, then i'll be once more reassured that fora such as these are self-defeating and argumentative for the sake of it.

[uberbang]

if i'd dispensed with whimsy in favour of brutal, unnecessary accuracy, i might more correctly have remarked that it was the first multitasking graphical user interface in colour for the mass market. but if that was the only issue you took with my disparate and rambling collection of mini-rants and idle postulations, then i suppose i should be satisfied

that was a sort of '10-minute later "and another thing!"' response by the way, in case you look at the timestamps and fancy accusing me of googling my addendum or something... which, of course, is the one internet resource that makes all of this so futile... ah well... a moment's silence for hands-on-learning, everyone...

[budwizer]

now we all know why he is being obstinate in face of evidence.  even if you do have the glorified tivo that is the psx....can you play demoscene sid or mod files on it?  or the broad range of video and audio codecs that xbmc is capable of playing?

seren,

sorry to be offtopic here but could you point me in the direction of the demoscene mod and sid locations?  i haven't looked at those since my days years and years ago (pre-internet) running a 4 node pcboard site.

reading that brought back fond memories of the older days back when i used to have more fun and do less work!

thanks!

[uberbang]

assuming i've got the right gist of your post, try pouet or ojuice to begin with... remember that as with all demoscene stuff, there's a lot of pretentious, self-important bollocks to wade through but without that, what'd be the fun?

edit: (sorry - just noticed that it wasn't me being asked!

[uberbang]

oh yeah - i haven't tried xbmc yet, but does it support .it, .s3m, .mtm and .xm module formats as well as .mod?

[budwizer]

thanks! i found scene.org and have found some stuff there but most seems to be pc based.

what i am really interested in is finding some that will run on the xbox. think it might be interesting to see some on the new hdtv i bought along with some nice 5.1.

thanks again!

[Seren]

and so to continue a post that will soon have people screaming 'n00b attack'.

really finding fault there is a matter of nit picking. of course i wouldn't have worded things in such an inflamatory manner, yet the abridged version being 'people are morons true. get over it.' is either missing, or too close to the point.

before i get to replying proper i would like to point something out concerning direct x. with my amateur and somewhat lacking knowledge of 3d programming i can't be 100% sure of this but direct x is more than a nice translator that negates tircky driver settings in a config.sys, or capability to use command line based operating systems that are as impractical as they are outdated for home application. they way i understand it without direct x programming for the broad range of 3d hardware available now would be an enormous task. every 3d engine would have to take each gpu and the instructions it understands into account, this would also mean that future proofing an engine would be impossible. direct x ensures that (unlike running old dos games now) backward compatability can be attained alongside support for future products that are within a gpus capability. microsoft have put together a library that acts as a perfectly decent middle man to translate game engine speak into 3d card speak, without this it would have been impossible to make games with such wide support in a plausible development cycle. this, however is irrelevant to this forum so i'll leave it there. also if multitasking was all people wanted out of a home os whay did os2 warp fail? it had tyrian...and that rocked!!

my views are somewhat paradoxical. on one hand i am happy that software has progressed far enough to allow almost anybody to use it. while it's true almost anybody could learn dos or linux, for them the pay off in what they want to do with their pc would hardly be the effort. this has naturally brought more people into console gaming also, and it is the rise in popularity of gaming that both pleases and saddens me in equal measures. so on the other hand i'm unhappy so many people are into games now as the boundries between average and hardcore gamer are drifiting yet further apart with little middle ground due to being separated by diffrernt platforms.

edge recently has a bit of a whinge about games becoming 'mainstream' and the effect it would have on products. being the doomsasyers they are this will of course herald the end of good, well thought out games in favour of millions of eye toy and dance mat games. which of course we all know is utter shite. edge of course use the japanese games market as a depiciton of a 'gaming culture utopia', but hang on aren't games more mainstream in japan?

so it seems that edge, just like me, want games to be more sucessfull, but not have to deal with what i suppose are the gaming equivalent of weekend warriors.

theres no doubt that playstation is a mainstream phenomenon. for me though consoles like xbox and dreamcast are things that coax pc gamers like myself back into the console world (i personaly had abstained from consoles since the mega drive/genesis) due to having enough of the kind of content, homebrew or official, to satisfy our needs. this gives rise to the situation that i have been complaining about. there are people out there who know crap all about gaming, they may have come into it recently and good for them. what i object to is the hordes of people who follow playstation like a religion. it is the 'one true console faith' and contravening that will have you branded as an xbox heretic, and you will most likely be burned as a witch outside your local pub. to these people only *their* platform of choice is any good, like somehow by virtue of being coded for the playstation games are somehow better. they don't seem to realise that most people with an ounce of sense think platform independant, that good games rarely testify to the quality of the hardware other than in the area of technological advancement, which by the very nature of consoles, is set in stone for that generation, and therefore irrelevant. never the less they smile smugly throughout this bombardment of valid information and whats the best answer thay can come up with?

'well how do you explain thew fact the playstation has always outsold the xbox? if the xbox was better than the ps2 it would sell more units.'

in these situations it is a waste of time to point out to such people that by their logic they have just proclaimed the spice girls to be the best musical act of the last 15 years. now regardless of your opinion for or against said spicy ladies (ladies used very loosley here...as well as spicey for that matter) i'm sure that sales figures would be your last port of call for justifying your opinions, but apparently it's the last word in the console games market. since when did all 'casual gamers' become marketing executives to think that way?

i bought a gamecube for....well my girlfriend...but also viewtiful joe, mgs:tts and zelda. i have no doubt these games would be comparably as good on ps2 or xbox. to my shame i don't own a ps2, yet owning one has become inevitable since watching .hack//sign. so i have fallen pray to a commercial mass media marketing ploy involving anime and games....oh well at least i can, almost ironicly, watch the anime on my xbox. curses!! i'm such a sucker for both anime and games!!

the final point, that i was originaly making, was that while game opinions should not involve their platform to the extent they seem to, the opinions on the platform itself are actually thin on the ground. it is in this area of pure platform comparison that the dreamcast and xbox excel above all others purely by doing things they weren't supposed to. while i suppose it would be possible to mod a psx in the same way, it lacks the ibm pc architecture that has made a lot of the features in apps like xbmc or emulators much easier to program, install and use.

lets face it programming a psx to do stuff like xbmc would be a headache, and utterly pointless, as the xbox does it so well. besides for those of us who are just modding our consoles and using the apps xbox is cheaper and easier. hell i dropped solder on my ram the first time i tried to mod my xbox resulting in the purchace of a replacement board and hdd....and it's still cheaper than doing the same to a psx would be in theory.

so somebody please give me one reason why the ps2 is better than the xbox. bear in mind though that if you say...

'you can't get the final fantasy games for the xbox.'

or

'it shifts more units.'

i'm liable to slap you silly

ttfn

[Seren]

budweiser...if you are looking for something to play mod and sid then i think i'm right in saying that xbmc will play them. no visulisations though (i think) which makes sense as there is no digital audio data per-se. as you will probbably know mods are a series of triggers for digital samples and sid is an emulation of a very simple (but very nice) digital synthesis engine. generating visulisations on the fly for these would probbably involve some kind of real time output sampling to loop back into any visulisation routine used on other sound files...which are all some kind of compressed linear digital audio, this would save writing a new vis. routine for the two very different formats.....but probbably isn't worth the effort...and would probbably be subject to a lot of latancy, but this comes from my standpoint of knowing way more about digital recording than how codecs decode and playback and more about synthesiser programming than computer programming. actually i think this visulisation issue is covered in the readme of the latest cvs build somewhere. i'm sure the devs have more important issues than supporting visulisations for two rather specialist audio types.

as for demoscene i should have been more clear. demoscene music as in just the tracker or sid files....not any nice executables with visuals running 'greetz' at the bottom in a terminator 2 font, while some sankes of purple and green gouraud shaded balls fly around the screen showered in pixel particle effects......ahh takes me back!!

anyway if you don't have the latest build i suggest you get it. i held off upgrading for a long time and am surprised at the degree of functionality i've been missing out on.

actually....hmmm...back on the demoscene stuff. if there is no visulisations for mod and sid why not make a few 'crackz' and 'appz' style screens for use with these filetypes instead. i'm sure most people plying back these filetypes would like that more than any visulisation anyway....more authentic. it would be a nice way of doing a sneaky credits section for xbmc anyway. you've got your swirly balls mainscreen....and your list of contributors scroling along the bottom....the way things used to be ahhhh.

ttfn