Consoles, Games and Emulators.

Q-Ball Billiards Master has some things going for it in the gameplay department, and the graphics are certainly as good as, if not better than, any other console billiards game, even with the jagged edges being as noticeably annoying as they are.

Billiards is one of those genres that never really gets updated. Sure, as time passes and technology improves, the balls get rounder and rounder, and the physics get a little more accurate. But other than including a few more variants and making up new ways to include a trick shot mode, the genre hasn’t really jumped forward since the days of the NES. Of course, neither has the actual sport of billiards, so you can’t exactly fault the genre for for doing a good job duplicating games like 8- and 9-ball for the past decade.

Q-Ball Billiards Master lets you play 8-ball, straight pool, 9-ball, and rotation against a friend or several different AI opponents. The AI plays differently depending on which opponent you choose. Some opponents play a very streaky game, while others simply dominate the table from beginning to end.

When you’ve got the cue stick in your hand, you’re given all the standard options you’d expect in a pool sim. You can put a little (or a lot of) English on the ball, change the angle of your stick, switch between an overhead and a behind-the-cue-ball view, and, of course, line up and take shots of varying strengths. Lining up shots and adjusting shot strength can be done with the D-pad or the analog pad, and this game is easily the best at showing off the advantages of having an analog D-pad and analog buttons. You can tap the D-pad for slight movements, or you can mash it down for full-speed rotation. For even finer adjustments, the analog stick comes in handy.

The “new” mode added to the game doesn’t try to reinvent the trick shot yet again. Instead, this mode, called frozen game, challenges you to get as close to a ball as possible without pocketing it. In later challenges, you’ll have to pocket one ball before getting close to the frozen ball - all in one shot. It gets sickeningly hard, but it doesn’t start off in a compelling enough way to get you hooked. There is also a lesson mode, where your supervisor introduces lessons. Then, after a screen full of Japanese text, you’re left on a pool table to execute your lesson. There’s also a dictionary of pool terms.

Graphically, Q-Ball Billiards Master is a bit of a mixed bag. While the room, the table, and the balls themselves look pretty good, and the front-end menus and intro movie are imbued with more style than you’d expect from a simple pool game, the game is so dependant on straight lines that the jagged edges that have become a bit of a trademark of the early days of PS2 games stick out more so than in any other PS2 game currently on the market. Also, while the sound effects accurately convey the sounds of a pool game, the music is a bit of an annoyance, featuring a repetitive style of lounge-turned-electronica that simply doesn’t work in the context of a billiards game.

Q-Ball Billiards Master has some things going for it in the gameplay department, and the graphics are certainly as good as, if not better than, any other console billiards game, even with the jagged edges being as noticeably annoying as they are. If you’re a console pool shark, this one is worth picking up, but it doesn’t do anything to distinguish itself from other recent billiards efforts.

Researchers at Intel are working on ways to mask the intricate functionality of massive multicore chips to make it easier for computer makers and software developers to adapt to them, said Jerry Bautista, co-director of Intel’s Tera-scale Computing Research Program.

These multicore chips, he added, will also likely contain both x86 processing cores, similar to the brains inside the vast majority of Intel’s server and PC chips today, as well as other types of cores. A 64-core chip, for instance, might contain 42 x86 cores, 18 accelerators and four embedded graphics cores.

Some labs and companies such as ClearSpeed Technology, Azul Systems and Riken have developed chips with large numbers of cores–ClearSpeed has one with 96 cores–but the cores are capable of performing certain types of operations.

The 80-core mystery
Ever since Intel showed off its 80-core prototype processor, people have asked, “Why 80 cores?”
There’s actually nothing magical about the number, Bautista and others have said. Intel wanted to make a chip that could perform 1 trillion floating-point operations per second, known as a teraflop. Eighty cores did the trick. The chip does not contain x86 cores, the kind of cores inside Intel’s PC chips, but cores optimized for floating point (or decimal) math.
Other sources at Intel pointed out that 80 cores also allowed the company to maximize the room inside the reticle, the mask used to direct light from a lithography machine to a photo-resistant silicon wafer. Light shining through the reticle creates a pattern on the wafer, and the pattern then serves as a blueprint for the circuits of a chip. More cores, and Intel would have needed a larger reticle.

Last year, Intel showed off a prototype chip with 80 computing cores. While the semiconductor world took note of the achievement, the practical questions immediately arose: Will the company come out with a multicore chip with x86 cores? (The prototype doesn’t have them.) Will these chips run existing software and operating systems? How do you solve data traffic, heat and latency problems?

Intel’s answer essentially is, yes, and we’re working on it.

One idea, proposed in a paper released this month at the Programming Language Design and Implementation Conference in San Diego, involves cloaking all of the cores in a heterogeneous multicore chip in a metaphorical exoskeleton so that all of the cores look like a series of conventional x86 cores, or even just one big core.

“It will look like a pool of resources that the run time will use as it sees fit,” Bautista said. “It is for ease of programming.”

A paper at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture, also in San Diego, details a hardware scheduler that will split up computing jobs among various cores on a chip. With the scheduler, certain computing tasks can be completed in less time, Bautista noted. It also can prevent the emergence of “hot spots”–if a single processor core starts to get warm because it’s been performing nonstop, the scheduler can shift computing jobs to a neighbor.

Intel is also tinkering with ways to let multicore chips share caches, pools of memory embedded in processors for rapid data access. Cores on many dual- and quad-core chips on the market today share caches, but it’s a somewhat manageable problem.

“When you get to eight and 16 cores, it can get pretty complicated,” Bautista said.

The technology would prioritize operations. Early indications show that improved cache management could improve overall chip performance by 10 percent to 20 percent, according to Intel.

Like the look and feel of technology for heterogeneous chips, programmers won’t, ideally, have to understand or deliberately accommodate the cache-sharing or hardware-scheduling technologies. These operations will largely be handled by the chip itself and be obscured from view.

Heat is another issue that will need to be contained. Right now, I/O (input-output) systems need about 10 watts of power to shuttle data at 1 terabit per second. An Intel lab has developed a low-power I/O system that can transfer 5 gigabits per second at 14 milliwatts–which is less than 14 percent of the power used by current 5Gbps systems today–and 15Gbps at 75 milliwatts, according to Intel. A paper outlining the issue was released at the VLSI Circuits Symposium in Japan this month.

Low-power I/O systems will be needed for core-to-core communication as well as chip-to-chip contacts.

“Without better power efficiency, this just won’t happen,” said Randy Mooney, an Intel fellow and director of I/O research.

Intel executives have said they would like to see massive multicore chips coming out in about five years. But a lot of work remains. Right now, for instance, Intel doesn’t even have a massive multicore chip based around x86 cores, a company spokeswoman said.

The massive multicore chips from the company will likely rely on technology called Through Silicon Vias (TSVs), other executives have said. TSVs connect external memory chips to processors through thousands of microscopic wires rather than one large connection on the side. This increases bandwidth.

Science Daily — The prototype for a revolutionary new general-purpose computer processor, which has the potential of reaching trillions of calculations per second, has been designed and built by a team of computer scientists at The University of Texas at Austin. Floorplan of the TRIPS prototype chip. (Credit: The University of Texas at Austin, Department of Computer Sciences) Ads by Google Advertise on this site Distributed Computing Event stream processing (ESP) for distributed computing architectures www.progress.com/apama Banner Corporation Technology Marketing Agency Media, Advertising, Interactive www.b1.com Calculadora Para La PYME Calculadora de valor gratuita de SAP para empresas en crecimiento SAP.com All High Risk Merchants GFA - Professional Payment Experts US & Int’l - Adult/Gaming/Moto/Inet www.globalfundingalliance.co.uk UniRisX Insurance Service Innovative Insurance Technology Deliver any product via any channel www.unirisx.com The new processor, known as TRIPS (Tera-op, Reliable, Intelligently adaptive Processing System), could be used to accelerate industrial, consumer and scientific computing. Professors Stephen Keckler, Doug Burger and Kathryn McKinley have been working on underlying technology that culminated in the TRIPS prototype for the past seven years. Their research team designed and built the hardware prototype chips and the software that runs on the chips. “The TRIPS prototype is the first on a roadmap that will lead to ultra-powerful, flexible processors implemented in nanoscale technologies,” said Burger, associate professor of computer sciences. TRIPS is a demonstration of a new class of processing architectures called Explicit Data Graph Execution (EDGE). Unlike conventional architectures that process one instruction at a time, EDGE can process large blocks of information all at once and more efficiently. Current “multicore” processing technologies increase speed by adding more processors, which individually may not be any faster than previous processors. Adding processors shifts the burden of obtaining better performance to software programmers, who must assume the difficult task of rewriting their code to run well on a potentially large number of processors. “EDGE technology offers an alternative approach when the race to multicore runs out of steam,” said Keckler, associate professor of computer sciences. Each TRIPS chip contains two processing cores, each of which can issue 16 operations per cycle with up to 1,024 instructions in flight simultaneously. Current high-performance processors are typically designed to sustain a maximum execution rate of four operations per cycle. Though the prototype contains two 16-wide processors per chip, the research team aims to scale this up with further development.

Granted, you have to give props to AMD and Intel for coming up with new and upon first sight worthwhile incentives to go out and buy a new PC, or upgrade an older one. Dual core and quad core processors are all the rage at the moment and both companies are advocating the need for these new processors as according to their marketing departments two processors can do more than one, and four … well, you get the point. But at the risk of repeating myself, although some things obviously need repeating, don’t expect to see any major leaps in performance from these. Two cores don’t mean twice the performance, nor do four cores quadruple the performance. Confusing? Not really, just a different game altogether, a few years ago things were clear-cut and obvious, every increase in processor clockspeed equaled better performance, or rather all software would automatically take advantage of the faster execution. So basically more MHz meant more performance, simple really.

Not today though, you’d think that two processor cores running side by side would surely be faster than a single core right? And four cores working simultaneously would certainly run circles around it? Well no, only if the application that you are running is multithreaded and thus can take advantage of the extra cores, remember that about 99% of all software available today is programmed to run on a single core processor. Hence isn’t multithreaded and thus in the vast majority of cases you won’t see a speed up, as the second, third or fourth core is just sitting there idling, or handling simple operating system tasks that don’t eat up a lot of processing power in the first place. But wait a minute, you must have that backwards, dual and quad core processors speed up your operating system considerably and hence overall performance goes up. Well, no again, if running the operating system was such a resource hog and would eat up heaps and heaps of CPU-cycles then the difference between a 1GHz Pentium III and a 3GHz Dual Core processor would be astronomical wouldn’t it, well, rest assured, it isn’t.

So what’s needed to get these dual and quad core processors to offer genuine leaps in performance and make us forget about single core processors altogether? Well, basically the same thing that needs to happen with 64-bit support: software needs to be written, or a whole lot less likely, rewritten, to take advantage of these extra cores. And most software we use today, that includes your favorite browser, email client, etc. is not going to see much of a speedup, if any, from these optimizations. No, for dual and quad core processors to show their strengths you need some heavy applications that can benefit from parallel execution such as video and photo editing software, games, simulation and CAD/CAM software, etc. Don’t expect the mundane office applications most of us use during the day to run any faster though. So without software support dual and quad core processors simply are not going to shine, they’ll just be a novelty.

And unlike slapping on a few extra cores which is relatively easy, writing software to make use of these extra cores isn’t. So for the next few years we’ll be left wanting while the majority of the dual and quad core processors are idling until software finally catches up. Keep that in mind when you’re thinking about spending some of those hard earned savings on a new PC equipped with a top-of-the-line quad core processor.

Sander Sassen.

Emulation was occasionally employed by console manufacturers in the early 1980s to allow games from other (and sometimes competing) hardware to be run on the manufacturer’s device. During this time, the Atari 2600 was by far the most emulated system. Atari’s platform was the most popular early game console, and many developers touted compatibility with the system’s vast library of games to attract customers. Coleco’s Colecovision and Atari’s own Atari 5200 provided peripherals that allowed 2600 cartridges to be played, and the Atari 7800 provided this functionality right out of the box. Generally, the emulation was accomplished through special hardware — unlike modern console emulation, which generally reproduces the functionality of a system entirely through software.
 By the mid-1990s personal computers had progressed to the point where it was technically feasible to replicate the behavior of some of the earliest consoles entirely through software, and the first unauthorized, non-commercial console emulators began to appear. These early programs were often incomplete, only partially emulating a given system, and often riddled with computer bugs. Because few manufacturers had ever published technical specifications for their hardware, it was left to amateur programmers and developers to deduce the exact workings of a console through reverse engineering. Nintendo’s consoles tended to be the most commonly studied, and the most advanced early emulators tended to reproduce the workings of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), and the Game Boy (GB). Programs like Marat Fayzullin’s iNES (which emulated the NES) and VirtualGameBoy (GB), the Pasofami (NES) and Super Pasofami (SNES), and VSMC (SNES) were the most popular console emulators of this era.
  

    

Bloodlust Software’s Nesticle, version x.xx

In April 1997, Bloodlust Software released version 0.2 of NESticle. An unannounced and unexpected release, NESticle shocked the nascent console emulation community with its ease of use and unrivaled compatibility with NES ROM images. NESticle arguably provided the catalyst with which console emulation took off: More and more users started experimenting with console emulation, and a new generation of emulators appeared following NESticle’s lead. Bloodlust Software soon returned with Genecyst (emulating the Sega Genesis), and others released emulators like Snes9x and ZSNES (SNES). This rapid growth in the development of emulators in turn fed the growth of the ROM hacking and fan-translation community. The release of projects such as RPGe’s English language translation of Final Fantasy V drew even more users into the emulation scene.
  As computers continued to advance and emulator developers grew more skilled in their work, the length of time between the commercial release of a console and its successful emulation began to shrink. Many fifth generation consoles such as the Nintendo 64, the Sony PlayStation, and the Game Boy Advance saw significant work done toward emulation while still very much in production. This has led to a more concerted effort by console manufacturers to crack down on unofficial emulation. Because the process of reverse engineering is protected in U.S. law, the brunt of this attack has been borne by websites that host ROMs and ISO images. Many such sites have been shut down under the threat of legal action. Alongside of the threat, link rot has occurred at several links without update to the webpages.
 On the other hand, commercial developers have once again began to turn to emulation as a means to repackage and reissue their older games on new consoles. Notable examples of this behavior include Square Co., Ltd.’s rerelease of several older Final Fantasy titles on the PlayStation, Sega’s collections of Sonic the Hedgehog games, and Capcom’s collection of Mega Man games for the Nintendo GameCube, PlayStation 2 and Xbox. The most recent, and probably the most notable example is Nintendo’s Virtual Console, which will come packaged with their new seventh-generation system, the Wii and will allow for emulation of NES, SNES, Nintendo 64, Sega Genesis, and TurboGrafx-16 games.

Consoles-Emulators.com is a console games decicated site. In this site we will review the best games of all plataforms, such as Ps2, Ps3, Dreamcast, Game Cube, Xbox 360, Super Nintendo, Megadrive, Nintendo 64 etc… This site is also dedicated to Emulators. A console emulator is a program that allows a computer to emulate a video game console. Emulators are most often used to play older video games on personal computers.