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Games Entertainment

NUON As Open Source Gaming Platform 91

Posted by timothy from the a-shipping-product-is-worth-two-in-development- dept.
jjustice writes: "About a month ago, Richard Miller, CEO of VM Labs, announced that "In the near future (I don't want to commit to a date until we are sure of it), we will release to the open development community the tools and documentation that were used to develop these titles - both the games and the movie enhancements. We will also release a few sample applications that can be freely downloaded from the Internet, burned onto CD-R discs, and run on NUON DVD players that can read CD-Rs. Currently only the N501 has this capability, but we anticipate that all future NUON based DVD players will read CD-R and DVD-R media." It's not Linux, but unlike Indrema, the boxes are available. And the technology may not rival PS2 or XBox, but he also says the latest version of the chip is 2-3 times the power of the existing model and cheaper to produce. Besides, I'll support any platform with games from Jeff Minter." No use for all those electronics going to waste, eh?
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NUON As Open Source Gaming Platform More

NUON As Open Source Gaming Platform

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  • Availability of a Nuon player (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It's not Linux, but unlike Indrema, the boxes are available.
    Not everywhere. I can't get one in Europe, and it seems I will never be able to get one here.
    Anyway, I think I can do without Tempest 4000, or whatever version Jeff Minter is developing now.
    • The latest and best date we know for a european release of NUON is end of november this year for the Samsung N505. The N705 is to follow in spring next year.

      Although please note that these dates are not official yet - samsung are unusually secretive about their new releases. There is a spec sheet for the N705 at Samsung [samsungelectronics.com][Samsungelectronics.com].

      Cheers
      Chris

  • Nuon to play DVD movies (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Spootnik ( 518145 ) on Monday October 22, 2001 @07:51AM (#2459119)
    I had an opportunity to play T3K on a DVD player with the nuon chip at the last E3 in LA with none other than Jeff Minter. T3K didn't seem too hot though but it wasn't really finished yet. I still prefer the Jag version myself. As for nuon, the other titles I saw on it weren't that impressive but I don't think it's targeted as being a killer gaming platform but rather an inexpensive add-on to DVD players and the like that can support some cool graphics and multimedia.

    The N501 sounds like a nice enough deck. It has the new "expanded" VLM and supports MP3 CD-R/RW. I will probably pick one up as an "extra" DVD deck and for T3K of course. I was in Best Buy last week, and they DID have some retail NUON presence as promoted months back. On impulse, I got a Logitech pad and T3K "while I still could", planning to pick up the N501 at its EOL pricecut.
  • This is at once the coolest and saddest of guys. I've been a fan of his for longer than I care to mention - his games were the only good thing about my Atari Falcon030 (I went all out and got the 56Mb HD version!!!).
    But, thats the problem, he only ever develops for crappy hardware no one actually owns! Anyone know why!!!
    • I hadn't seen that name for years. I'd completely forgotten about him. Great game developer, but is he still developing? Anyone know if he has released any games in the last few years.
      • Oh, absolutely. Although a lot more of his life is filled up with his extending managerie (Watch out for that axe Eugene!).

        Check him out on The Grunting Ox [magicnet.net].

      • One of the posts linked in the original story also has Mr. Miller saying "Jeff Minter is still working [for] us on a variety of new game titles. He intends to release a new title roughly every 6-9 months." Not to mention that he (Minter, not Miller) also worked on the development tools for the NUON. Anyone know if that's what they're releasing?
    • Right, like that no-hoper C64 and Atari ST. Backwater hardware. OK, so the Jaguar and more recent stuff is a bit fringey.

      (still play Iridis Alpha from time to time when I dust off my C64, and Llamatron on my ST)

      You need to check your keyboard setup, by the way - your exclamation point has a twitchy auto-repeat, and your question mark is mapped to exclamation point, too ;-)
    • I've been a fan of his for longer than I care to mention - his games were the only good thing about my Atari Falcon030


      Which immediately shows you to not have been a fan of his work for as long as you might think. Real Minter fans look back with fondness on Gridrunner on the Vic 20 and Mutant Camels on the C64...

      • Which immediately shows you to not have been a fan of his work for as long as you might think

        No Need!

        I was just showing off that I had a Falcon! I too remember the old Grid Runner - my mate Paul had a Vic 20 - but I had to wait until my C64 to own my own Minter games. He was the reason I bought an ST instead of an Amiga as revenge of the mutant camels was .. well.. great!
      • And who can forget Llamatron? I loved that game. :)

        ...gonna have to dust off the 'ol ST one of these days and see if it still works.
        • And who can forget Llamatron? I loved that game. :)

          ...gonna have to dust off the 'ol ST one of these days and see if it still works


          The PC version worked fine under DOSEMU last time I tried...

    • Visit the mighty Yak here:
      http://myweb.magicnet.net/~yak/

      Sample quote:
      Trawling my drive C yielded a total of 143 instances of file or folder names containing the string "sheep", and my HD is approximately 16 gigs, of which 11.8 gigs are currently in use. So my Total Sheep Index is 143, and my Sheepiness Quotient is 143/11.8 = approximately 12.12 sheepies per gigabyte.

  • Last Caress? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Schnapple ( 262314 ) <tomkidd.gmail@com> on Monday October 22, 2001 @08:24AM (#2459185) Homepage
    Well, the deal with Indrema was it was a titanic notion from day one. Recall that console companies lose money on the hardware, so the notion of an "open source" console was specious at best - if you don't make money on the software and don't make that much (if anything) on the hardware, then where is your money made? Sure, Indrema's plan was to allow people to "license" their software, but come on..

    However, NUON is mainly a DVD enhancement technology that "happens to" play games (as opposed to PS2, a game console that "happens to" play movies). There are few NUON titles other than Atari Jaguar sequels and the occasional CD-ROM shovelware (Myst). Therefore they can't convince DVD player manufacturers to place NUON chips in their systems. However if they make it an "open" console technology, then they can convince hobbyists and the like to make software for it. Then the increased demand makes for more of a push to put the NUON technology in DVD players, and NUON then has a more viable platform to encourage development for.

    On the other hand, it could just be that NUON is on its way out the door and his handing off its source to people so that something can become of the technology eventually. They release the tools and such, then go out of business. Like DIVX players, NUON players become cheap and get snatched up by /.-ers.

  • What are we gonna make for that platform? anyone have any ideas?
    I was thinking about a pingus [seul.org] port or make interactive movies out of ordianry ones (however that would be pretty much impossible)
    I think it is going to be very hard to make useful games/apps for this thing...

    disclaimer: this is not a flamebait ;-)
  • Every once in a blue moon, I come across a Slashdot story like this. It assumes that I understand a particular frame of reference which, unfortunately, I don't. For those of us who aren't in the know, can someone back up a step or two and explain what a NUON is? A processor? Media storage standrd?
    • NUON is a media processor that replaces the MPEG2 decoder in DVD players. Currently 3 are on the market, the Samsung DVD-N501, Samsung DVD-N2000 and the Toshiba SD2300.

      I've got the N501...I had the N2000 but I eBayed it in favor of the N501 because of it's CDR and MP3 capabilities, and improved VLM (a super-trippy on-screen light show when you play CD's). Easily the most feature-filled DVD player I've ever seen.
      • More feature-filled than the Apex units? While their onscreen features aren't much to write home about, it's hard to say no to flashable ROMs, CD-R/RW, MP3 and Video CD compatibility.

        A better menuing system and some MP3 feature enhancements would be cool, but what features am I missing?
        • The N501 has a flashable ROM (Samsung already issued an upgrade here [samsungelectronics.com] ), CD-R/RW, MP3 and VCD capabilities, along with a boatload of NUON special effects and features like the VLM (150+ effects of beat-sensitive graphics that accompany audio CD and MP3 playback), 15-20x zoom depending on the player which is filtered by the NUON processor for a high-quality image. On-the-fly changes to DVD player settings, frame-by-frame strobe of images, on-screen thumbnails of multiple angles, etc...not to mention the gaming aspect of NUON.

          Check out my URL above for a ton of info on NUON, if you're interested in further research.

          -Kevin

  • Games are nice, but what I really want is a nice screen saver/visualizer on the order of G-Force to dance across the TV screen while I listen to the stereo.
    • It already there, built into NUON DVD Players. It was written by Jeff Minter and called VLM(Video Light Machine) [qwest.net]. A hundred+ effects, synced to the music(and not just the beats). 'Trippy' doesnt even begin to describe it.
      D
    • I was actually thinking about working something like this out, but the problem being that the only money I have right now... nevermind. I can't afford a geforce3 to test out software like this if I wrote it. If someone has it, I might consider writing it.
    • That's what I was working on for the Indrema before it went down (visualization stuff), and I definitely plan to do it for the NUON if they indeed do release the tools, and I can get my hands on a NUON-enabled DVD player (maybe I can finally convince my parents to ditch the VCR..).

      --
      I should live at home. I'm 17.
  • NUON and VM Labs are hopelessly behind and will never catch up. They have technology that's supposed to be amazing, but it goes off in a different direction than hardware for rendering millions of triangles per second. So there's no way NUON games are going to compete with Sony or Nintendo in terms of content.

    That said, the NUON hardware has been described in some intriguing ways, like "non-von Neumann" and "non-traditional" which certain piques my interest." Even though I think learning the NUON system at this time is best left to those few die-hard Atari fans who never know when to drop something, it will still be interesting to see how it works.
    • I attended the Nuon developer conference back in 1998 (I think, might've been 97 or 99 - whichever one was the first one, in Redwood Shores). Their hardware is focused around the pixel rather than the polygon. It's versatile enough that it can do passable polygon rendering (with bilinear filtering), realtime raytracing (for simple scenes, not too much glass or mirrored surfaces) and so on.

      It's moderately non-traditional, being a VLIW architecture with 5 functional units and 4 cores on the die in SMP, but it's certainly not non-von Neumann. You can develop in C (they ported GCC) or assembler. The low (for VLIW) number of functional units makes this eminently feasible. You'd probably only want to do that for your innermost rendering loops though. The only other significant oddness is the colour space is YCrCb native instead of RGB.

      All in all I thought it was a fun piece of hardware, with a lot of potential. Get 16 cores on the die, with more cache each, a better memory controller and a decent process to bring the clockspeed up and you could probably rival PS2 for overall graphical appearance, more or less. No idea what the price-performance tradeoff would be like, however.
    • Actually, the NUON processor is quite fast. I blame Intel for everybody thinking that MHz/GHz is everything. The NUON processor is extremely superscalar, so much so that it is capable of real-time raytracing. There is a raytracing demo on the NUON page. NUON doesn't need "hardware for rendering millions of triangles per second" because it's got all those features built in, although there's nothing stopping anyone from adding a GeForce3 and 3D sound chip to the PCB as far as I can see. They aren't behind... They are pioneers.

  • A quick introduction to NUON (Score:5, Informative)

    by Ahchay ( 91408 ) on Monday October 22, 2001 @09:50AM (#2459481) Homepage
    This has been a bit of an open-secret for a while but, unfortunately, it's not actually available _yet_

    NUON, for those who don't know, is an integrated DVD processor produced by VMLabs, currently available in the US in three consumer models Toshiba SD2300, Samsung Extiva and Samsung N501. There are european models due RSN. It provides advanced processing capable of at least N64 level games as well as enhanced DVD playback (>20x digital zoom, advanced frame management) and NUON specific DVD content. It also features Jeff Minter's VLM2 which is an update to the Jag VLM and, were VMLabs to realise it, is about the coolest thing on the planet at the moment.

    The NUON open SDK does exist, and _will_ be made available to the public RSN. But, it hasn't been released yet. There is a FAQ available at NuonDev.com [nuondev.com] which, although not official, does show the currently known state of open-NUON.

    Cheers
    Chris
    • I am an investor in VM Labs. I am also a 20 year veteran of the PC industry. Was in senior management at Gateway.

      The reason that I invested in VM Labs and Nuon was the potential to have an open computing platform for the living room. Just like a PC. Open like a PC, and software availability like a PC. Don't compare Nuon to a Playstation or a Nintendo, compare it to a PC.

      Although games are an interesting application of the Nuon, I honestly don't think it is the primary one. And it is certainly not the reason that I invested in this technology. Much more relevant and interesting are codec's such as JPEG, Quicktime, Divx;) etc. Basically, any digital file format will now be able to be displayed in your living room.

      This is one of the key reasons why the source is being opened up. Because it's not just for games, but to get as broad and diverse a development community as possible. That not just develops games, but all kinds of awesome applications that are better suited for viewing and use in the living room from 10 feet away, as opposed to a PC that is 2 feet away.

      Imagine subsequent generations of these products that include USB and a hard drive. The possibilities very quickly become very interesting. Now imagine the same system with an MPEG2 encoder, and a CD-RW, or a DVD-R. I think you get the idea.

      Rob

      • Agreed, I'm as interested in games as the next guy, and it will be great to have homebrew games available on NUON (and ports of open-source stuff, etc), but the potential for other applications is just as great.

        I've heard things as simple as a slideshow JPG viewer, but CODECs like DIVX/MPEG4 and such would be an excellent option to have available in the living room, rather than just on the PC.

        -Kevin

      • Ok... I can try to think of it as more of a PC then a console.

        I'm just trying to imagine how this won't get plowed under by what the Xbox and PS2 will eventually become over the next few years.

        I just don't see whats compelling to the consumer here.

        • This box plays DVD's very well, as well as MP3's. You can download free software from the internet, and if you are a developer, then you will be able to make it do all sorts of interesting things. You can't do that on an XBox or Nintendo. All they do is play games.

          • You can download free software from the internet, and if you are a developer, then you will be able to make it do all sorts of interesting things.

            Ok... being a developer... I'm thinking 'why bother'. There's no critical mass of demand here. What the heck would people want to do on their DVD player they can't do elsewhere? Just because we can do it for 'free' now, it doesn't mean that there's a need to do so. The "make-it-free-and-apps-will-come" approach has been proven to be .... unoptimal.

  • I want a original classic Arcade games on my TV, Moon Patrol anyone?

    • Just get MAME for Dreamcast...and if you don't have a Dreamcast, what's wrong with you? It's a neat system, cheap as dirt, you can put NetBSD on it, etc.

      • cheap as dirt

        Where? WalMart doesn't sell it anymore, BestBuy has it for full price (US$100 for Sports2K pak or whatever it's called) and all the e-bay auctions for working models are commanding at least $50 for a basic system. That's not too cheap in my book, especially for a system that has been officially end-of-lifed by Sega.

        I'd love to get my hands on one of these for a MAME host or simple Linux box. So, what's a souce for cheap ones??
    • How about Space Invaders? [nuon-tech.com]

      I own the new Samsung, and the VLM lightshow is worth the price of admission. Not to mention pan-and-zoom, P-strobe, etc, etc. There's a NUON dev discussion group here [nuontalk.tv]. We're all anxiously awaiting the dev kit. Go buy one ($188 at Best Buy). Don't forget to buy a controller too, since they don't come packed with one.

  • Maybe a reason to use that damn controller! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jerkychew ( 80913 ) on Monday October 22, 2001 @10:28AM (#2459646) Homepage
    I've got a Samsung N2000 DVD player. The deck is great - user friendly controls, nice quality, and it only cost in the range of $200 US. It came with a game controller and some sample games, as well. I actually wanted the Nuon proc because if its enhanced DVD capabilities (viewing a DVD at 2x is much smoother than my expensive Sony deck that broke after 8 months), but I thought the games were a nice bonus. That is, until I played them. The included sample games are horrible - gaudy colors, and terrible gameplay - but maybe with this development that will all change. It would be nice to see somebody port a NES or SNES emulator to this platform. I could conceivably stick in a CD with every NES game known to man on it and play Excitebike till my thumbs fall off!
    One other warning - the N2000 is a successor to the N501 player. Since the N501 could handle CD-Rs, I assumed that the N2000 could as well. I was wrong. CD-Rs aren't recognized at all, and VCDs burned onto CD-RWs will display "VCD" on the display, but they won't play. Buyer beware.

    -JC
    • Actually, the Extiva N2000 predates the N501 by nearly a year, if you were sold one as being the successor then you woz robbed - the N501 is a much more advanced machine featuring >150 vlm effects, full VCD and CDR support (including MP3) - although the N2000 should play VCD's AFAIK.

      As for emulation on the NUON? I'm sure that will happen as soon as the SDK is publicly available...

      Oh yeah, and try Tempest 3000!

      Cheers
      Chris
    • It would be nice to see somebody port a NES or SNES emulator to this platform. I could conceivably stick in a CD with every NES game known to man on it and play Excitebike till my thumbs fall off!

      This is exactly what we all want - a decent games machine, with a stack of games, coming along with a bit of kit as standard. Even if Nuon came with a handful of b&w GAMEBOY games as demos it would excite people more than the dross thats there just now.

      Sony should bundle the original PS with all their kit, DVD players, TiVos, anything that points at a TV. Put a handful of PS games on a few DVDs and away you go!

      Or they should licence the old SNES and Genesis from Nintendo (yeah right!) and SEGA and put EVERY GAME EVER on a CD. That would be a neat little freebie with your new $300 DVD wouldn't it?

      Certainly more fun that NUON!

  • Save me from NUON (Score:2, Informative)

    by DumbSwede ( 521261 )
    My father has a nuon enhanced DVD player (which I tried advising him not to get).

    It is a piece of crap, that takes forever to start up movies, and has a tendency to stall for seconds at a time between tracks (like its catching up on some computations of some sort).

    Now they want to release enhanced-nuon-boxes, so buying the original nuon is even more of a joke.

    This thing has been out for 2 or so years now, and it has less than 10 titles for it. Shut up and sit down, this thing is dead.

  • If my Toshiba SD2300 cannot read CD-Rs, how can I test apps created with the SDK?
  • XMAME, XMESS, ZSNES, .. all definitely need to be ported to this thing.

    Please? :)

    Jason
  • There is clearly quite a bit of history about this. Reading about this chain, in a way, is like arriving on earth and being told by Palistinians and Israelies that both sides are evil, each trying to convince you they are right.

    What does Jeff Minter and Atari have to do with it? Why is this guy an assembly programming genius or a smelly hippy?

    There really isn't much software for it, is there? That is, no real compelling reason to run out and get one, aside from the upcoming open sourcing?

    How good is the processor on this? Is it completely custom and doesn't fit anything out there? Need a special compiler? How much memory?
  • "Tempest 3000, Freefall, Merlin Racing, Ballistic, Tetris, Space Invaders XL...Bedazzled, Dr. Doolittle 2, Buckaroo Banzai and Planet of the Apes."

    With games like these, who needs Viagra!

    • Re:Wow! (Score:1)

      by K3V ( 530047 )
      You do realize that Bedazzled, Dr. Doolittle 2, Buckaroo Banzai and Planet of the Apes are DVD movies, right?

      -Kevin

  • everyone loves jeff minter =) we all wish that he would come over here and think about developing for Dreamcast/PS2/Xbox/GameCube or the PC/MAC/Linux!!! =) we want THE YAK! we want THE YAK! =) we should all chant this together another thing, i don't know why people dislike the nuon, did it do anything to you? are you angry because you think you wasted your money? i think you wasted your money by being on the interent, conserve power and the enviornment, not you money =) nuon is a nice comfy system , i love my atari jaguar better, but i'd rather play those games on my computer or dreamcast, especially if there were some jeff minter games there =) the king of assembler? we should petition this (k3v) to get him to produce games for a syster we could actuallly by games for at a store =) i really think tempest 3000 looks nice, why bad mouth tempest 4k? when its not even out yet? i was never hooked to tempest(the original) because i wasn't really "alive" yet =) im 14, and i got hooked to atari jaguar, in 1998, 2 years after the demise of atari, i had a dreamcast and n64 but still was interested in the lost system, because of my love for games, i even thought about buying a saturn once just for the game "nights" =) i would also really like to see nights 2 for Dreamcast. i never got into tempest, but tempest 2k was beautiful, eye candy and unresistable, i had to play hours and hours and hours on till i had to sleep and eat and do other bodily functions. its just plain old fun. tempest 3k is even MORE eye candy and even harder to resist. iron soldier was nice, even the psx version was fun to play, those kind of games get you hooked and you want to buy a system, just for that one game.

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