Full Nuon Dev System

varelse

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Going through my closet, I came upon my ancient Nuon development system from my days as a programmer for VM Labs. In an ideal world (and after the fiasco of day one BattleSphere purchasers screwing us over and immediately turning around and reselling their carts on EBAY I know that we don't live in one and if you feel like pointing fingers over what I'm about to say, you now know where to point them).

Because I would *love* to give this away to the right home, but see above. But fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice.

Therefore, it's up for private auction. It's not going on to EBay, and I'd rather see it destroyed at an electronics recycling center than auctioned off by some scalper who invested zero zip nada of their blood and sweat into trying to make VM Labs a success so many years ago in order to make some quick bucks and nothing more.

PM me with bids...
 

skip

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Do you have any photos of said dev system? What does it consist of? I'm interested but I imagine shipping to AU would be the 'interesting' price range.

If I may ask, what sort of programming work did you do for VM Labs? Any interesting stories you could (or would be willing to) share?

FWIW, I still have my copy of BS, and my second copy was bought at cost from a good mate (whom I know still has it here in AU even after travelling the world for a few years where selling it could've easily funded some of his interesting 'adventures').
 

varelse

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I wrote the OpenGL library (mGL). It was used in Freefall and several other games.

The Nuon (god how I hated that name, especially given that they dismissed my suggestion of "DVDeus") was a promising but hard to program technology: a guy from AutoDesk described us as a "cult of weird British assembler programmers." And I'm not even British.

But even so, IMO VM Labs made a tactical blunder that cost them the company - they tried to cram MPEG-2 decoding into 20K (because they promised their OEMs that they could do so). They eventually succeeded because there were some seriously brilliant people working there, but in the meantime, Moore's Law made that a Pyrrhic victory and as soon as the PS2 was announced, I was convinced they were doomed. That said, they went down fighting to the last man...
 

skip

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Why the need to keep it under 20K? To minimise cost in silicon? And did it seriously take that long to do it that it negated any potential benefits in lead up time on the competition? Seems crazy/myopic/foolhardy...

I still to this day really want to know why such a terribly low number of games were released. When one hears that Doom was 'ported in a weekend' (yes it's buggy and slow, but I can't imagine it would've taken too much longer to get it up and running well, along with all the other Doom 2 et al. WADs), I wonder whether:
- they had a particular bent toward casual-ish games for the lounge room (not that you'd know by IS III, T3K and FF)
- they had another strategy toward game releases that they were never able to implement properly
- they had no cash to entice game companies over (chicken / egg)
- it was actually hard to program beyond the common libraries
- all of the above

While I'm on the 'I wonder why' track, why on earth didn't they release a standard controller with analogue and memory support from day one??? Or at least have built in flash RAM for game saves? Whilst neither of these were a 'system killer' (not really possible in this case), it couldn't have hurt to get these two things right from the get go.
 

varelse

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It's easy to look back in hindsight at decisions like that but like so many things, it seemed like a good idea at the time I suspect. The Nuon was significantly harder to program than even the Atari Jaguar - at least the latter had a blitter. In contrast, all graphics operations on the Nuon had to be done manually with a DMA engine using a crazy video-oriented color model. This limited one to either 8 or 16 pixels per operation depending on whether or not Z-buffering was turned on. On top of that, multi-core programming is hard. Most people can't do it, period. Even today.

Add in the dominance of Nintendo and Sony at the time and why would anyone bother?

Oh yeah did I mention the debugger was intentionally written in lisp and required lisp syntax input? Sigh...
 

skip

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Everything I've read over the last decade has suggested that it was difficult to program when aiming to get the most out of the system...in direct contrast to the public statements made in various gaming mags at the time. You'd think given many of the people involved were involved in the design and management etc of the Jaguar, they'd have aimed to get this right.

I'm sure there's a book in this. Maybe not a huge book, but perhaps more than the footnote it currently is. Especially given the initial lofty aims (shown in no small part by the X crushing Mario's hat).

On a related note, the Battlesphere / 4Play story would make a great coffee table book (Kickstarter...?) ;)
 

varelse

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In fairness to the Nuon, the PS2 was even harder to program in exchange for having a half-assed 3D accelerator in it. The difference was that there was serious money behind the PS2 while VM Labs was a struggling dotcom. If there had been big money to be made writing Nuon software, it would have been written. But that would have involved the Nuon chip achieving much much larger adoption. Basically chicken and the egg...
 

gamemaster

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I have a question for you. Was the ps2 really more powerful than the dreamcast? What about the saturn vs ps?
 

varelse

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Nuon's rendering power was on par with an N64 if not a little better. But like the Jaguar, while it had a lot of computational firepower (BattleSphere was doing AI calculations IMO that were not truly beaten until Halo on the XBox), it was challenging to make full use of that firepower because it lacked 3D hardware so software rendering sucked up a lot of it, and it was a strange VLIW architecture that only bitheads could wrap their minds around.

But I don't want to be unfair. Even AMD and Intel build a lot of chips with great computational firepower and then hobble them with lousy data bandwidth (but they're great for bitcoin mining hint hint). NVIDIA IMO seems to be the only company that gets this issue. And not surprisingly, John Mathieson and Louis Cardillo both worked at NVIDIA for some time.
 

gamemaster

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Thanks. It is very interesting hearing this info from someone directly in the industry. Do you have any working knowledge of my question above in regards to the dreamcast and saturn?
Thanks again
 

skip

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Indeed, interesting...and oddly relevant to me as I've recently dug out and re-read a bunch of Nuon marketing guff and articles as I finally obtained my Nuon and an (almost) full set of games throughout the last year or so.

Merlin Racing and, to some extent Freefall, to my eyes show the 'N64-ness' (or ability to by N64 like) of Nuon, but my limited time noodling with these Nuon games seems somehow suggest slightly more than N64 'power'. Not sure why, maybe it's the general smoothness or decent framerate of the Nuon games...whenever the N64 gets fired up I'm often a bit shocked (ie. games are usually much more sluggish than I remember!) .

I know there's a PS1 version of IS3 (there once was a comparison video online, but I can't find it anymore), but despite the relatively low resolution (or is it my 60 inch TV?), I couldn't picture it being done exactly like the Nuon version on the N64.

I don't think T3K could've been done like that on any equivalent system, hehe. Then again, I still think Space Giraffe is an amazing piece of artistic work on the 360 even 4 or 5 years down the track.

So, still doing any game or computer type stuff? I just remembered, I never got me a ScatBox or two...d'oh!
 

varelse

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I liked both the Saturn and the Dreamcast, but I think the difficulty programming the Saturn versus the relative ease of the PS1 doomed it and the Dreamcast. But if you ask me (and you didn't) game consoles are gradually on their way out - tablets and mobile phones all leading to ubiquitous computing seem to be the future - just add a hub (something like the Nexus Q except that it doesn't suck and the tools in charge of it demo it with something like a massive bomberman LAN party instead of a roomful of useless hipsters fighting over the MP3 player) to your living room and a few wireless controllers and you've got an infinitely upgradable console for cheap - thank you Google and Apple (and coming soon Microsoft).

I bought my X360 in 2006 - love the music player BTW. They've done an amazing job keeping the games relatively current, but graphics and computation have advanced 4-5 iterations of Moore's law since then. So unless they've got something mind-blowing in the cards, mobile technology is already nipping at its heels. Another year or two and they'll be surpassed. Add in the far more democratic and free market nature of the app stores and the walled gardens of the consoles increasingly seem like yesterday's business model to me.
 

varelse

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Hey Kevin! Long time no anything!

I'm a CUDA guy these days (even got my name in lights as CUDA Fellow last year) and these days I'm doing crazy things with cloud computing and GPUs at Amazon Web Services.

And the funny thing: coding the jaguar and the nuon was the best preparation for coding GPUs I could ever have conceived of doing. Half the underlying algorithms within BattleSphere ended up the foundations for some career-making GPU code (most notably rewriting Folding@Home for NVIDIA GPUs from scratch which contained a scary amount of BattleSphere).
 

Stephen

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Hey Scott - long time fan. Still have my 3 BS (2 regular, 1 gold). I also have my N501. I wrote some code with it when the SDK went public. Hope you stick around for a while. It's a much smaller and much nicer crowd than the Jag scene here.
 

Stephen

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I coded the N501 for months, burning out several CD-RW discs in the process. The lack of a proper debugger and code transfer system unfortunately got the best of me and I just gave up.
 

Serblander

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I should check the forums more often, great discussion here! Thanks for stopping by.

Scott I presume? It's been a while.
Nice presumption Mr K3V - i got that too as soon as i read the Battlesphere to Halo comparison ;)

Good to hear from you Scott! It's been a very long time! Lost count at how many times i pissed myself laughing at your response posts on JSII. Ahh, the good old days...

Has the NUON Dev system found a new home yet? I am interested if its still available. I plan to use it (along with my Dev Jag gear: Alpine, BelBoz's Dev Jag & CD, Atari Flashcart & Goat Store's SkunBoard) for upcoming University/College coding contests. I will be speaking at the upcoming 5th annual Computer Games Boot Camp - an Australian Monash University run event with 1,000+ daily attendees that goes for the period of 7 days.

My aim is to make available my dev tools to groups of students interested in showcasing new games projects for retro gaming systems. My goal is to focus on the Atari Jaguar and strengthen the big cat's 'Neo-Retro' gaming library. I love my NUON (have an N501 & SD-2300 as well as the entire Western release games) and as such would jump at the opportunity to be able to offer a NUON dev system to the Australian University students to code and breath new life into this system as well!

In any case i hope that whoever adopts the gear (or has already attained it) will be able to do something positive with it.

Great to hear from you again Scott! All the best from Down Under,

Serby
 
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