Electron Hut: Kyle Bedell’s Blog

With the conclusion of my studies in Bentley University’s HFID program, I’ve posted my final papers in the academic research section. If you’re in to gaming at all, take a look at a virtual ethnographic study I conducted in World of Warcraft!

Commencement’s in two weeks; I can’t wait!

This is huge. For many years now, I’ve been thinking about how we could leverage parallel processing and cloud computing to do intensive video processing, then send the rendered output back to a dumb terminal for things like high-definition video playback. My dreams have come true: OnLive appears to have perfected the idea in relation to games. Their architecture takes input from a keyboard/mouse/controller, which then arrives at a server. All of the video related to your inputs is then rendered and sent back to the client, all well-within (apparently) acceptable bounds for latency. Effectively, your PC becomes a dumb terminal that just sends controller commands and receives a video stream from a cluster of machines. Instead of playing a game running on your local machine, you’re playing it on a cluster of machines somewhere out on the internet.

The bandwidth requirements aren’t bad; you need a 1.5 megabit connection for 480i resolution (~640×480), and a 5 megabit connection to do 720p (~1280×720). The company also plans to release a set top box with HDMI, Ethernet, a few USB ports, and optical audio so that you can play titles on your television. The content model looks to be subscription-based (everyone seems to love annually recurring revenue these days), but few details are avaialble other than to expect the service in “Q4 2009.” If this works, the console as we know it is effectively obsolete, as is spending large amounts of money to keep a gaming PC up-to-date. We’ll see how it all plays out!

Katt gave me an early Christmas present this year: an import Nintendo DSi! I haven’t had too much time to tinker with it, and the menus are all in Japanese (no language selection in this firmware; more on that in a second), but here’s a breakdown of what’s new.

• The unit is covered in a matte finish, as opposed to being glossy
• It’s a little wider and a little thinner than the DS Lite. The build quality is also better.
• It comes with two cameras, a 0.3MP one on the center of the hinge and a 1.3MP one on the top cover
• It has an SD card slot and upgradable firmware!
• Opera is preinstalled
• The screens are larger (3.25 inches as opposed to 3.0 inches), but they run at the same resolution as the older DS models
• It comes with a “DS Shop” application (much like the Wii’s)

So far, the build quality has been fantastic, and the screens are definitely better in terms of color and contrast. My only complaint is that unlike the other DS models, there’s no way to switch the firmware language to English. I’m hoping the homebrew community finds some way to convert Japanese units to north American ones at some point…

With that, here’s a bunch of pictures!

I’ve found that over the course of my videogaming history (which, as some of my older readers may chuckle at, has not been that long), I keep coming back to a lot of the older titles in my library. It seems that I’m not alone in my preferences; a new start-up company called Good Old Games has taken to selling old Interplay (that means Black Isle Studios folks, which means games like Fallout!) and Codemasters titles for $5.99 a pop. No DRM, all sorts of cool extras, infinite redownloads, and an extremely snazzy account interface (pictured below):

(or, just look at the native resolution version)

I’m especially fond of the small extras (the complete soundtrack, the high-res wallpapers, etc.) that come with most of the titles on the service. Plus, the installers are all nicely repackaged and the games have been modified to support XP and Vista (where applicable). I’m extremely satisfied with my purchasing experience! All in all, GOG is a worthy entrant into the field! The site is in beta right now, but you’re likely to get an access key pretty quickly if you sign up on the front page of the site. Enjoy your semi-retro gaming!