Guess what other obscure old system used rectangular pixels? The IBM PC.
CGA and EGA used resolution modes that were multiples of 320x200 (PAR 6:5). VGA’s 16-color hi-res mode was the first to support square pixels at 640x480, and it would become a standard for years to come because TempleOS and Windows used it (you can even force Windows 7 to run in this mode!)
The NES and SNES had PAR 16:15 8:7 (oops) (which is often ignored in emulation), and so did the most common NTSC DVD-Video mode (none of the commonly used ones had square pixels but you only really notice it with subtitles - you cannot correctly display them at native resolution on an LCD).
And that’s just the successful systems I know off the top of my head.
Soviet personal computers failed for other, obvious reasons. They struggled to copy the latest chips, and the economic incentive was minuscule despite the government’s investment - very few people could afford a computer in the Eastern Bloc, and they could not be exported due to patent infringement and being years behind. The economy collapsed after USSR broke up and nobody wanted to invest to rebuild the industry.
That being said, people in the Eastern Bloc were very resourceful with what they had (mostly clones of Atari’s 8-bit home computers and IBM PCs). A blind person from Czechoslovakia made a speech synthesis sound card for an IBM-compatible PC, which functioned well enough to allow him to be employed as a full-time programmer. At least one of the three exemplars works to this day.
The story is way more interesting. Cannot dig the article, but dropping soviet originated hardware had to do also with programming languages. Western entities started with heavy lobbing, often dressed as grass root movement, for languages that for western based systems. Not sure how well supported this thesis was, but it was interesting that preferences of engineers got used for market absorption.
Not a new thing by today’s standards.
Russia has own computers on own processors produced on Micron(not to be confused with Micron Technology). But they are expensive as cast iron bridge and hard to get.
Didn’t the NES produce non-square pixels? Like pure data wise the screen was square but at some point in making it NTSC it gets stretched horizontally to 4:3?
Data-wise, the screen is 32x30 tiles, which is 256x240 pixels, or 280x240 including the border. (The height is set by the modified NTSC standard at 240p60, and the width of 256 was chosen to simplify 8-bit arithmetic, plus 24 pixels for a border.) With square pixels, the aspect ratio would be 16:15, or 7:6 including border. The video timing was chosen so that this fills the entire TV screen, which is 4:3. As a result, the pixels have an aspect ratio of (4:3)/(7:6)=8:7 (varies a little between TVs). However, the NES could only flip sprites and not rotate them 90°, so this could be taken into account when creating the rotated versions.
Another successful system with non-square pixels was the IBM PC, whose CGA and EGA cards had a 320x200 resolution (or multiples thereof in other modes), which resulted in PAR (4:3)/(8:5)=6:5. Square pixels first became available with VGA’s hi-res mode (16 colors at 640x480), adopted by systems such as Windows 3.1 and TempleOS.
On one hand even the Nintendo Switch is just a modified Nvidia shield so this task would be a simple one for most states. On the other hand: Sanctions and insane corruption. I‘d be surprised if they manage to release anything that could keep up with Consoles from 2 generations ago.
Sorry guys, we’re under dictator rule now. We should be getting some food coupons next week, otherwise we’ll starve. If only xxx_Epicl33tGamer69_xxx didn’t let us down in the big game last night. Oh well, such is life.
This is what I was thinking. For a first iteration to get out the door immediately it could just be windows with a “game browser” that launches full screen when you turn it on 😂
I mean, that’s what all Steam Deck competitors really are. They’re Windows 11 with atrocious launchers on top, some of which acceptable and some very buggy, plus a literal standard AMD APU that AMD is selling by the bucket, and half of them share board designs sold by Chinese suppliers pretty much ready made.
It would have to run steamos or something the complexity of all the always-online launchers that modern triple a games has is something that steam handles well, and likely a huge trip up point on any frontend slapped on a windows pc
That is literally what the first Xbox was. It’s internals was a custom mboard running a Celeron 700 and 3.5" HDD (can’t remember what the graphics was based on, maybe a GeForce MX?) with a customised Win2k OS.
All approx. It’s early and I can’t be bothered confirming those specs are 100% accurate :p
Every time I see an original Xbox I’m always amazed because in my memory it was a lot smaller. I used to carry that thing to and from school I have no idea how I managed that.
There’s a guy on youtube called CNCDan who did exactly that. SFF pc in a very nice 3d printed case with custom PCBs for the controller boards. If you’re at all interested in that sort of thing I think he has a 9 part series on how he built it.
techdirt.com
Najnowsze