Wasn't it cool when games had a ton of ports/variations?

[Hobie-wan]

On the other hand, I find myself buying more console ports these days to choose a different flavor of DRM.

FTFY

[jfrost]

Platforms are so artificial anyway.

I wonder how things would be if the movie industry adopted a proprietary system like the one we have for games. "Gotta buy the Foxbox to watch the next X-Men... Though Spider-Man is gonna be an exclusive to FilmStation. Such a dilemma, dammit."

[AppleQueso]

Platforms are so artificial anyway.

I wonder how things would be if the movie industry adopted a proprietary system like the one we have for games. "Gotta buy the Foxbox to watch the next X-Men... Though Spider-Man is gonna be an exclusive to FilmStation. Such a dilemma, dammit."

This, truthfully I wish we had a single format/platform for video games.

I don't have to buy 3 different dvd players to watch all the movies I want, I don't need to get 3 different cd players to listen to all the music available, why should I have to buy 3 different expensive consoles to play all the games that come out?

There's also the fact that old movies and music get rereleased in new formats all the time, while for old games its relatively uncommon. That's gotten better this gen thanks to stuff like Virtual Console and PSOne Classics, but it's still an issue.

[Hatta]

The problem with this is that it makes it hard to know which version of a game to play. If I'm going to sink 60 hours into a CRPG, I don't want to choose the wrong platform. I was thinking about starting the game Hacker over this holday break. Hacker was written on the Apple II, but released on just about everything. I couldn't find any information on the relative quality of the different ports. Does the C64 add anything over the Apple II original? What about the Amiga? Were any of the ports rushed? Did they introduce or fix bugs? What did most people play the game on back in the day?

The problem is there's probably no right answer, and I do poorly with those kinds of problems.

[FerretGamer]

There's also the fact that old movies and music get rereleased in new formats all the time, while for old games its relatively uncommon. That's gotten better this gen thanks to stuff like Virtual Console and PSOne Classics, but it's still an issue.

I never understood that as well. It's fucking free money essentially.

[CRTGAMER]

Platforms are so artificial anyway.

I wonder how things would be if the movie industry adopted a proprietary system like the one we have for games. "Gotta buy the Foxbox to watch the next X-Men... Though Spider-Man is gonna be an exclusive to FilmStation. Such a dilemma, dammit."

This, truthfully I wish we had a single format/platform for video games.

I don't have to buy 3 different dvd players to watch all the movies I want, I don't need to get 3 different cd players to listen to all the music available, why should I have to buy 3 different expensive consoles to play all the games that come out

This could be good if everyone could build the same game console. Look at PCs and Apple computers. Both are great but then the prices jump when a system is produced by only one company. Competition is always a good thing.

[Hobie-wan]

There's also the fact that old movies and music get rereleased in new formats all the time, while for old games its relatively uncommon. That's gotten better this gen thanks to stuff like Virtual Console and PSOne Classics, but it's still an issue.

Changing a movie to a new format is relatively simple. As long as it looks close, it can range from 'good enough' to 'perfect'.

Porting software to a completely different piece of hardware with different instructions or making an emulator to pretend to be the old hardware and making absolutely sure that every little proper instruction and many undocumented quirky ones work like the original is not. Some things might work if they're 'good enough' but some other things may render the whole thing unusable if not fixed.

[Jmustang1968]

There are also a bunch of licensing issues when bringing back old games

[MrPopo]

Platforms are so artificial anyway.

I wonder how things would be if the movie industry adopted a proprietary system like the one we have for games. "Gotta buy the Foxbox to watch the next X-Men... Though Spider-Man is gonna be an exclusive to FilmStation. Such a dilemma, dammit."

This, truthfully I wish we had a single format/platform for video games.

I don't have to buy 3 different dvd players to watch all the movies I want, I don't need to get 3 different cd players to listen to all the music available, why should I have to buy 3 different expensive consoles to play all the games that come out?

There's also the fact that old movies and music get rereleased in new formats all the time, while for old games its relatively uncommon. That's gotten better this gen thanks to stuff like Virtual Console and PSOne Classics, but it's still an issue.

Time for a lesson in computer architecture.

A movie is a series of still images which are displayed at a high enough rate that the brain melds them together to create the illusion of motion. Thus, it is relatively trivial to adapt an existing movie into a new media format. You started with film, which was just the images that a light was shone through to project them on a screen. Then came VHS, which converted the still images into their magnetic equivalent, and then the DVD, which was the optical data equivalent. But there is no difference between the actual data when it is decoded; you still have a series of pictures and the playback device shows them to you at a predefined rate.

A computer, on the other hand, is much more complicated. A program is a series of instructions to the various chips in your computer that tells those chips to perform a specific task. And these are VERY low level tasks. One task might be to add the value of two registers (fixed size data stores). Another might be to move the value of a register into a position in the RAM. A third would be to jump to an arbitrary point in the series of instructions, instead of just following them sequentially. When you sum up the eventual effect of all these instructions you have a computer program, which might be something as simple as drawing a dot on a blank screen. The key thing here is that instructions are hardware specific; the Intel x86 family uses a different set of instructions than the PowerPC family used in older Macintoshes. While some instructions might have a one-to-one analog, many do not. So this means that if I want to run my code on two different types of machines I need to recompile it on both types of machines, to generate the proper instructions for each machine. However, because there is not a one-to-one relationship, this can cause the exact same code to run at very different levels of performance on each machine. This then requires a lot of tuning and potential restructuring to be able to get the program to run similarly on both machines. And this is all assuming identical hardware specs. In the world of consoles you have to reoptimize for different kinds of memory layouts, for example. And usually you need to rewrite your low-level graphics code because each machine handles graphics very differently. So porting a computer program over is actually quite difficult. There is a range of difficulty, though, depending on how well you structured your program at the start.

When you think about it, though, the consoles are actually a natural outgrowth of the original PC landscape. At the start you had many different kinds of PCs, all with different architecture. Apple II, Atari ST, Commodore 64, etc. A console is a stripped down version of these early PCs which lacks a lot of the expandability that these machines had. On the flip side a console can be architected to do certain tasks much better than a general purpose computer; things like graphics and sound. But then Intel made a genius move with their processors; they reused the instruction set for the next generation. Instantly the IBM Compatible becomes the standard for business machines, as now you could upgrade to the latest and greatest without having to rebuy your software. Consumers also pick up on this. This is the point when PCs really diverse from consoles. The x86 processor becomes a juggernaut and PC game development shifts over there. Meanwhile the consoles stay on the same path of special purpose machines. This works well for consoles, as their specialized input devices mean they really are only good for playing games on, and by making them special purpose they can save a fortune on manufacturing compared to the now ubiquitous modular PC. Plus, because consoles don't run OS (or in the case of later consoles, a lightweight launcher OS) they can get more bang for your buck, as you don't waste resources on an OS like Windows.

But now we're starting to see a convergence. It started with the Xbox, which was a cheap PC with a light OS on top. Now you have all three consoles which really resemble full on computers with their inclusion of things like a real OS and non-gaming applications. At this point they have only two advantages over a PC; ease of TV connectivity/use (most people wouldn't be able to operate a mouse and keyboard in their TV setup) and price compared to the equivalent gaming PC.

I think if there was a push to get consumers to connect their PC to their home TV and it took that would be the death of the home console.

[AppleQueso]

I should've probably mentioned somewhere in my post that I'm aware of why these things aren't feasible and whatnot. I don't need a lesson in computer architecture, etc.