NVIDIA Takes on Portable Gaming with Project SHIELD

[danrok]

Portable gaming device from Nvidia:
http://www.aoaforums.com/frontpage/g...ct-shield.html

Comments?

[Daniel ~]

Do we need to be able to play games at any time and any place?

I try to save at lest some of my attention for the world around me. It's still in spin ya know! ":O}

[booman]

Yes and again I say YES!
Apparently we need movies and social internet everywhere we go, so might as well include gaming.
Not to mention iPhone and iPods already have a huge number of games to play....
This is a decent alternative because iPhone & iPod does not support flash player.
A LOT of games on Google Play are flash based.

I hope there is a mini-HDMI output for your big-screen TV

[danrok]

I think this mainly intended to be mobile around the home, so you can sit on your sofa in the lounge and play PC games on your TV.

[Aedan]

Originally Posted by booman

This is a decent alternative because iPhone & iPod does not support flash player.
A LOT of games on Google Play are flash based.

Be careful, as I suspect you'll find that the games you're thinking are written in flash are actually written using AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime). They're not the same thing!

Incidentally the BlackBerry Playbook and Playbook 4G do support both flash and AIR.

[booman]

yeah, its hard to tell sometimes which plugin is running the game.
Usuall a flash game has a specific interface when you right-click it.
Sometimes its disabled too.
There is also the unity player too.
Java can do some awesome game rendering also.
I have heard of AIR but didn't realize it was for gaming.
Is AIR for phones specifically or does it run on PC browsers too?

[danrok]

I think Adobe have been gradually bringing an end to Flash.

AIR is intended for all platforms, desktop and mobile. But they've dropped Linux support.

It can be used for games or applications such as online banking without a browser.

[Daniel ~]

Originally Posted by booman

Yes and again I say YES!
Apparently we need movies and social internet everywhere we go, so might as well include gaming.
Not to mention iPhone and iPods already have a huge number of games to play....
This is a decent alternative because iPhone & iPod does not support flash player.
A LOT of games on Google Play are flash based.

I hope there is a mini-HDMI output for your big-screen TV

Sorry, I forgot who I was talking to! ":O}

[booman]

Uh yeah...
Honestly I don't play games very much. About once or twice a day.
I also play games with my wife and kids too. So its not all about "me"

But I have a small Netbook that can play a few games too. Specially those old DOS games!
That is my portable system and it can still play a LOT of games.

[Aedan]

Originally Posted by booman

I have heard of AIR but didn't realize it was for gaming.
Is AIR for phones specifically or does it run on PC browsers too?

It's a general purpose runtime - think like .NET. Thus it doesn't need a browser to operate. It runs happily on phones, tablets and PCs, although Adobe's current target is mobile devices (phones and tablets).

[booman]

Hmm, I wonder when Wine will get savy on this and start building a layer to run iPhone apps in Linux?

[Aedan]

For AIR apps, there's nothing really to be done, as AIR is already sort of supported under Linux (even if it is an old version).

Wine doesn't emulate the hardware, so it doesn't need implement a virtual machine. Instead, it provides a wrapper around the Windows binary and runs it as a real Linux process.

For iPhone apps, the processor is completely different (ARM), so it'd need a virtual machine (something like QEMU) to make things work. That's not impossible, but needs a different method of dealing with things.

[booman]

That right, I keep forgetting about Arm vs x86 7 i386 processors.
Apple has done it in the past when the moved from Power PC Processors to Intel. They had a virtualization layer so you could still run some of your old programs from the Power PC days.
I'm sure someone could do it with Arm in x86 enviornment. Of course it would be slow...

[Aedan]

Apple called their stuff Rosetta, and it did have a performance impact. Running tasks on a dual core G5@2.5Ghz would still outrun an Intel quad core processor @2.66GHz for PowerPC binaries.

Yup, QEMU already does ARM. You're not looking to emulate the hardware, only the API layer, so the native OS would take on the background stuff. All entirely possible.

Be easier on an ARM platform though.

[booman]

Ooh, now this I like!
Thanks for the tip...
QEMU
How do you pronounce that?

Runs in Linux too. So maybe I can run iOS in my Linux box?

[Aedan]

You don't want to run iOS per se, unless you want to have to emulate all the hardware. You want enough that an application thinks it is running on iOS, but at the API layer, it passes from QEMU through to the native OS.

[Aedan]

Mind you, Tegra is ARM based, so it should be easier to do on project shield.