Carmack, Iphone, Pandora And Midori

[danboid]

You have 3s to name the worlds most famous Linux / FOSS game developer. Thats right, you don't need 3s as theres only one guy/ major games company who have been in on the open source gaming scene since Linux was strictly geeks only and that is of course John Carmack of iD. For years and years, Doom and Quake were the only good, commercial games available for Linux and hence iD have done more for LInux gaming than anyone ever- FACT!

What I find oh-so-slightly irksome then is having to read these articles that keep cropping up with John raving on about how the iPhone is the greatest portable gaming device eVAr eva and how much he can't wait to get a game released for it. I've played around with the iPhone and it is a slick bit of kit but I'd never consider buying one as it doesn't do what I want far as a portable computing appliance is concerned and I know just how unfriendly Apple are being towards the free software community and homebrew developers. Its design innovations are overpowered by the reek of Apples extreme corporate, fascist, money grabbing tactics for me.

Anyway, I was wondering if Mr Carmack has been sent a dev board? If not he should be one of the first guys to receive a finished Pandora so that he can develop something especially for it and tell everyone how much better it is than the iPhone, what seeing as P actually lets you do what you want to do, instead being a portable amplifier of Jobs money-extracting "Hey look at me" reality distortion field. Seriously though, I'm sure Carmack would very much dig Pandora and he could potentially be its biggest and best publicist.

I'm sure some of you would have read the many articles that have been appearing in the tech press recently discussing Microsofts Windows successor Midori? I don't know if Midori will be open source, probably not, but it is based upon Singularity which is MS's open source (under a restrictive, MS license natch) research OS and the most interesting Midori feature as far as Pandora users are concerned is that ARM will be one of the supported architectures alongside x86 and x86-64. If they are supporting ARM it makes me think they'll have to put some serious effort into making this new OS run on memory-light devices such as the Pandora, which would be a refreshing change after the massive memory hog that is Vista.

So, in a few years time we could have a wide selection of operating systems we coud be running on Pandora- Linux, the BSDs, Haiku, open RiscOS or even Midori? 5-way multiboot Pandora anyone?

 

[juanvvc]

QUOTE

[John Carmack] should be one of the first guys to receive a finished Pandora so that he can develop something especially for it and tell everyone how much better it is than the iPhone



Is this a religion, or something? I'm sure that Mr. Carmack is a good professional that knows about the Pandora and still says that the iPhone is a better gaming device. I do not know his reasons: portability, wow factor, interface, easy to use, existence... The Pandora may be the best choice for retro gaming, but not every user out there likes traditional games. The Wii is the best selling console, isn't it?

QUOTE

So, in a few years time we could have a wide selection of operating systems we coud be running on Pandora- Linux, the BSDs, Haiku, open RiscOS or even Midori? 5-way multiboot Pandora anyone?



I can't see any reason to have BSD and Linux in the same portable machine. I doubt that Microsoft will create drivers for the Pandora, even if Midori can run on it. The same about RiscOS. Besides, the Pandora won't last much more than "a few years". Four if really lucky, as any other device. And being the first of a new generation, it will face competition against younger portable devices within these four years.

 

[CyruzDraxs]

I'd like to see these articles you speak of--in all the one's I've seen he's endlessly complaining about how sandboxed iPod development is. Plus, with his not-so-friendly history with Steve Jobs, I can't imagine him actually liking an Apple product.

I doubt that Microsoft will create drivers for the Pandora, even if Midori can run on it.

If what has been said about Midori so far is true; it's highly likely that it will have drivers for the hardware used in the Pandora, as they are common mobile-market components (or will be in a year or two). If their commitment to Windows CE driver support is any indication, I think it probably already has OMAP3 support in the kernel.

 

[danboid]

If we presume that Carmack is aware of the Pandora (I'd imagine he is but I've not checked have you?) then the only real reason he could have for saying that the iphone is better than Pandora is that Pandora isn't available or even finished yet. The Pandora undeniably whips seven shades out of the iPhone in every single respect as a gaming device, which is what Carmack is probably most interested in.

Pandora has a joypad built it. I know about the icontrolpad but thats obviously not comparable- its a poor add-on. In-built controls which get protected by the clamshell is a massive win for Pandora gamers

Pandoras CPU is almost TWICE as fast as the iPhone 3Gs

Pandora has a later generation, superior PowerVR chipset

Pandora has a much higher resolution screen

If that wasn't enough Pandora users won't have to continually crack stupid corporate protection schemes in order to use their device as they please.

Additionally, seeing as the iPhone has a OSX (hence BSD) ARM based OS base, any games that do get wrote for the iPhone should be quite easy to port to the Pandora but there potentially will be games wrote for Pandora that the iPhone will not be able to handle. There is no reason at all why Capcom, Konami, SEGA et al will not release games for Pandora if it sells well enough.

Go on- seriously tell me the iPhone is a better gaming device!

As for running many crazy OSs on the Pandora- BSD and Linux- why not? This is the beauty of Pandora, in that we can do what we want with it and there are so many choices and possibilities. However, you're right in saying that we will likely never see full support for the Pandora's hardware- esp. the GPU- in many of those operating systems but I believe the Pandora will eventually be well supported under Haiku (and the BSDs) as Haiku on Pandora seems like a match made in heaven to an alt computing geek like me! :lol:

 

[Exophase]

I've heard various reports that Carmack believes that iPhone is more powerful than PSP and DS put together. Unfortunately, I could not find any of them sourcing an actual quote of him saying this, so I find it pretty suspect (maybe someone can point me in this direction).

If he did say it then I think he's just wrong, unless there's something about iPhone hardware that I'm unaware of. If you naively add MHz then you might have a boost in CPU power, although not an awful lot, in fact you're quite a bit behind if you consider the assets of the probably underutilized second CPUs on both - and this is for alleged full clock speed of the iPhone (which isn't really verifiable anywhere), which is not accessible in firmware (at the moment, not even close). When it comes to 3D game performance both DS and PSP have dedicated geometry acceleration in the render pipeline that iPhone simply does not, and PSP has a very powerful VFPU on top of that. The only thing that I'm aware of iPhone having to facilitate this is VFP. Despite its name I don't consider it to be in the same class as other vector coprocessors because its arithmetic pipelines can only perform one scalar operation per cycle.

I think Apple is letting their success in overtaking another industry get to their heads again. They've been hyping gaming on iPhone like mad all of a sudden even though they have next to nothing to show for it, and the developer enthusiasm is probably highly exaggerated. Or maybe it's more like, various big companies would love to get of the hype machine results but will fall flat on their faces when they actually try to make many good games for it.

Oh, and I don't think Carmack is going to say good things about Pandora because no one would be willing to pay him a huge sum of money to do so. Just saying.

 

[greendots]

Microsoft's Midori is pretty much what dragonfly BSD has been trying to do for the last couple years. Even if Midori was to be released source code there will be nothing free about it in any sense of the word.

I think the pandora is already known in the OS community. It would be better to advertise to a larger audience.

 

[Julius]

Carmack is exited about the iPhone because it is a good business platform for mobile games:

1. Lots of people have it
2. iTunes offers a good way to actually sell stuff
3. You can (have to) make innovative games with the touchscreen and motion sensor
4. Because of 3. there is no competition from cheap ports, or homebrew emulators (they exists but are no fun to play)
5. It is quite capable in 3D graphics

Out of this only 5. (and to a much more limited amout 3.) applys to the Pandora, which make it simply not a very good business platform for game developers (other than easy ports from games that have a linux port anyways).

 

[Toffeeman]

John Carmack has just made his Keynote speech (Last Thursday I think) at the QuakeCon show in the States.

Here are some quotes from it:-

http://www.1up.com/do/blogEntry?bId=882649...cUserId=4551247

6:57: "iPhone is more powerful than the DS and PSP put together. Power isn't everything, as Nintendo dominates the handheld market with a device that is in many ways inferior to Sony's PSP." As Carmack continues to talk up mobile gaming, someone's cell starts up with a 50 Cent ringtone. Welp.

 

[Exophase]

6:57: "iPhone is more powerful than the DS and PSP put together. Power isn't everything, as Nintendo dominates the handheld market with a device that is in many ways inferior to Sony's PSP." As Carmack continues to talk up mobile gaming, someone's cell starts up with a 50 Cent ringtone. Welp.

Nice, the Apple fansites took that to be praise.

I still think he's wrong though.

 

[quadomatic]

Carmack isn't going to make a game for Pandora, simply because there's no money in it.

Everyone's gotta pay a mortgage.

 

[Firefox]

Carmack isn't going to make a game for Pandora, simply because there's no money in it.

Everyone's gotta pay a mortgage.

Carmack doesn't! He's minted! Doesn't have to work another day of his life if he doesn't want to.

 

[Exophase]

Carmack doesn't! He's minted! Doesn't have to work another day of his life if he doesn't want to.

Doesn't mean that he's going to bankroll a dev team for it. Carmack is hardly capable of making a modern game all by himself.

Not that I think he'd do a freeware game to begin with.

 

[WizardStan]

It wouldn't have to be freeware, or written from scratch.
I can imagine it being theoretically possible for a game written for the iPhone to be marginally tweaked and recompiled for the Pandora. If that's the case, he might be convinced to put one guy on it for a day or two to produce a commercial game for the Pandora.
As I understand it (which I honestly don't, since I did about 10 minutes of research on the iPhone before deciding it wasn't for me) the CPUs and GPUs should be similar enough for this to be possible, it just falls to the specific API used, and if needed, a wrapper could possibly be written around whichever they use if it's not directly available on Pandora.

 

[fusion_power]

+1 for sending Carmack a Pandora. I'm sure he would be interested to explore this Handheld and maybe he has a good day and code some Engines for his own pleasure? Maybe he doesn't make a Game for free (AFAIK Carmack never made a Game, he usualy made ENGINES) but I doub't that a Hardcore Coder like him could resist to take a deeper look ontothe Pandora?

 

[ashdjones]

I'm bored of hearing about Carmack - come on people, Doom was a long time ago and isn't everyone using the Unreal engine now anyway?

 

[TaG]

I'm bored of hearing about Carmack
+1

If there are any dev units available they should go to people who are definitely going to code for it, and there seems to be a number of people that fall into that category. Those units are expensive and scarce.

It would also seem strange to give him a Pandora in the hope that he will write a game / engine that he would profit from.

 

[Firefox]

Carmack doesn't! He's minted! Doesn't have to work another day of his life if he doesn't want to.

Doesn't mean that he's going to bankroll a dev team for it. Carmack is hardly capable of making a modern game all by himself.

I didn't mean anything other than that Mr Carmack doesn't have to worry about paying the bills ever again.

 

[Kyo]

I hope and doubt that any of the big guys will ever be interested in the pandora

 

[AireTamStorm]

I for one, am curious as to when iD will open up the source for the Doom 3 engine.

 

[plopperz]

I hope and doubt that any of the big guys will ever be interested in the pandora

Why?
I'd like to see the Pandora become more than just a homebrew console.
I, for one, wouldn't mind paying for software that takes full advantage of the hardware.

I don't know about Carmack, but get it to somebody.