On Saturday 21 April 2001 23:51, you wrote:
> Basically I think that making it 'MSX compatible' is a way to reach the by
> then older group (still large) of 'ex-MSX' users who would get MSX games to
> play on their new Palmtop for free with the actual computer..
I doubt "for free" will be true. ASCII will want to make some money using the
MSX Server and the company who made the game will probably not license it for
free either. It's not sure the MSX Player will accept ROM and DSK images from
arbitrary sources. Or if for example the games section on funet won't be
closed down after pressure from ASCII.
> As Nischi said he wants to have chips in his shoe.. Many laught but I found
> this a serious remark.
It's certainly possible to put chips there. Maybe even powered by energy from
the walking movement. But what useful function can it perform? I have no
interest to know how many steps I walked in a day. Maybe runners like to
know, but for the average person this is nothing more than a gimmick and the
chip will soon suffer from boredom when the user no longer cares about the
information it provides.
Red Dwarf fans will know the AI Toaster, which is an excellent example of
useless embedded technology. A small quote:
The toaster is persistent, is apt to remind crewmembers of the last time they
had toast, and when you objected (and you surely would), it would become
defensive and say, "What's the point of buying a toaster with artificial
intelligence if you never want any toast?! I toast therefore I am."
(from http://www.sadgeezer.com/RedDwarf/toaster.htm)
Sure it will be possible to build a toaster with AI some time in the future.
But the whole point is that the AI functionality doesn't make it a better
toaster, in fact it makes it quite annoying.
In the anecdote about his grandmother using ballpen, calculator, tv and phone
instead of a computer, Nishi wondered how he could get her to use a computer.
That's a very technologically driven approach: I can create this wonderful
device, now how can I get people to use it? One might get better results by
doing to opposite: I have this situation, how can I improve it? For example,
the TiVo and similar harddisk video recorders solve problems like "I am too
lazy to program my VCR" and "I want to see this movie without commercials".
> What would be better then giving
> much of these devices a display with interface with basic capabillities all
> offered by a (in say 2008) a simple but standardized and cheap massproduced
> chip ? Exactly.
eZ80 or similar chips suffice for most IP enables devices. The one-chip "MSX"
is unique because of it's FPGA, but that also makes it more expensive and
programming the FPGA is more difficult than programming an ordinary
processor. So manufacturers will only use it if they can actually do
something useful with the FPGA, like signal processing or emulation or
anything else that performs poor on CPUs.
> The idea of reconfiguring a chip to act as another chip is great though.
The Atari Jaguar was highly programmable, I think it included a user
programmable DSP. Although powerful, it was also more complex than the other
systems around and therefore wasn't popular among programmers. (I read this
in a FAQ.)
The PlayStation 2 is also highly programmable (vector units and the general
architecture), but programmers are complaining.
So I think a few competent programmers (like Tsujikawa) will create FPGA
programs, for MSX emulation, for MP3 decoding etc and most applications will
use those through a kind of library. I don't expect an average application to
reprogram the FPGA.
Bye,
Maarten
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