Talk:Video game console/Archive 1

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stop the maddness the wii shoulda stayed the revolution

From Consoles

A console can be an electronic device used for entering information (input) into a computer system or similar elecronic processor.

One type, a game console, is a unit designed to play games; it is usually plugged into a television, which serves as the video device. Popular game consoles include the PlayStation, Nintendo and Dreamcast.

Another type is a HMI station used in a manufacturing facility that acts as an operator interface. See Distributed Control System.

Contents

List of video game consoles

Much of the information in this article's "List of game consoles" is duplicated in the List of video game consoles. I suggest we merge data from this articles list to it, then just link to it. The seperate list could really benefit from the extra information. —Frecklefoot 16:30, May 7, 2004 (UTC)

Done. Paranoid 15:38, 12 Jun 2004 (UTC)

About the timeline....

The timeline is nice but the dates in it are a mishmash of Japanese and U.S. launch/retirement dates. For instance the Dreamcast uses the Japanese launch date, while the PS2 uses the U.S. launch date.

NES in timeline should be OCT 85 looks like Jan 85.

Furtheremore "retirement dates" are somewhat sketchy, especially for the Japanese market, as over there the software market continues long after the hardware is no longer manufactured. For instance, there are still Dreamcast titles being produced and released in Japan to this day. (As of March 2005)

To clarify this timeline, I suggest using the earliest launch date for each console (typically the date launched in the country of the console's origin) and the retirement date should be either the official hardware retirement date in the last territory it was available in, or the date of the last recorded official software release for the console (that is, software produced through the manufacturer's distribution channels -- homebrew software like current Jaguar releases don't count. )

Any suggestions? --ForgottenHope 09:14, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I think this is probably the easiest way to handle things. When I originally created the timeline, I used U.S. dates just for convenience, since they were present in nearly all the Wikipedia articles on consoles (I believe a few didn't have Japanese/European release dates). I briefly thought over different ways to incorporate the dates of different markets, but couldn't come up with anything graceful. Using the first known release date sidesteps the issue. - RedWordSmith 18:39, Mar 3, 2005 (UTC)
Also could you clarify what the colors mean.--CVaneg 20:51, 29 Mar 2005 (UTC)

And why are TurboGrafx-16 and TurboDuo on separate lines when the Sega CD doesn't get its own line? --Damian Yerrick 03:28, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)

An anonymous user added that. While TG16 should be listed TurboDuo should not. Only main consoles. Addons and so forth shouldn't be mentioned in the actual timeline graph IMO. K1Bond007 04:04, Apr 19, 2005 (UTC)

I just wanted to say that, despite the necessary quibbles, I think this timeline is an excellent visualization of what would otherwise be a boring three paragraph section. Congratulations to whoever created it on an excellent idea. We need more of this sort of thing. Deco 23:41, 5 May 2005 (UTC)

The timeline is an excellent visual, but its portrayal of the first generation of video game consoles is sorely lacking - there should be entries for the Odyssey 2 (the most significant contemporary of the Atari 2600), the Intellivision (its first significant rival), and the ColecoVision and Atari 5200/7800 (the first migration to a "next generation" of consoles). Invalidname 23 May 2005

Is the PS1 still being manufactured and actively supported by developers? Its timeline bar looks a little long. --24.114.252.183 16:43, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Can someone update the timeline? It still marks the 360 as "projection"... and maybe split up the PS1 bar to include the PSX?

I was just wondering if someone could please make a list and poll people on the most popular game console from the 1980's and from 2000-2006

Possible article merge

This article seems like it could be merged with Console game, or at least some trade of material could go on to define the two articles better. Sockatume 22:38, 14 May 2005 (UTC)

I don't really see why to be honest. This article needs to be expanded beyond what it is right now. I think they should remain seperate, but thats just my 2cents. K1Bond007 00:03, May 15, 2005 (UTC)
The amount of overlap sort of bothers me. Both articles seem to cover the games console itself, but in different ways. Sockatume 00:14, 15 May 2005 (UTC)
Ah. Point taken. Alrighty I understand. Probably should merge here after perhaps more discussion on it to see if anyone objects for whatever reason. K1Bond007 00:19, May 15, 2005 (UTC)

The timeline idea is great, but there are definitely flaws. The Atari 2600 does not extend that far out in North America, but the Intellivision does (at least until 1987 or so). I think the timeline should extend from the original production date until the last date of production for software by major companies within the United States (not imports from Brazil or Asia where they still "support" the NES for the love of god.

Changes??

"...some consoles can have full Linux operating systems running with hard drives and keyboards (like the Sega Dreamcast or Nintendo Gamecube) (one university has even created a Beowulf cluster of PlayStation 2 consoles), and Microsoft's Xbox is basically a stripped down PC running a version of Microsoft Windows."

Neither the Dreamcast nor GameCube have hard drives. Only the Xbox and modified original PlayStation 2 have hard drives. Neither of them have "full Linux operating systems" either - in fact the Dreamcast is (according to its very own shell) 'compatible with Windows CE'.

Also, I am unsure that the Xbox is running "a version of... Windows". It's clearly running some sort of OS, but not a Windows-based one.

~Skye~

The XBox uses a modified kernel from windows (i don't recall what version of windows), also have a port of Direct X to easy transition of games from windows

- Fernando Valero

Technically speaking it is using a stripped down version of Windows 2000; however, there really is no resemblance to Windows2K at all and it's hardly worth mentioning because a good amount - the majority, perhaps 90% or higher has been removed. It uses a completely different file system, it has no Windows-like functionality, etc... there are no similarities. One could definitely argue that it's a new OS altogether. K1Bond007 19:56, July 18, 2005 (UTC)
From a technical point of view, the Xbox system software is a strippeddown Windows 2000, yes. And it REALLY is a Windows OS, although all the window and mouse stuff has been eliminated. It uses a Windows kernel, with lots of known Windows kernel calls, it had libc, Win32 and DirectX libraries. For a programmer, it behaves just like Windows. Apart from that, the Xbox hardware is 99.9% that of a PC.

GameCube image

Does someone else agree with me that putting a GameCube image at the top of the article may give the impression of favoritism? Just wanted to know. – DarkEvil 17:48, July 25, 2005 (UTC)

I'd rather have any pictures displaying examples of game systems being the most successful and prominent ones. NES/Famicom, Super Nintendo/Famicom, or original PlayStation come to mind. Smoove K 07:48, 21 September 2005 (UTC)

Why Consoles?

One point this article completely ignores is whether Gaming Consoles hold any advantages or disadvantages over PC games. Surely a PC has far more capable processor, more RAM, more VRAM, more verything. So it should be able to support greater quality and performance. Why does anyone us e a console? What is the situation PC vs Console? Some help here will be apreciated.

Request that this post be archived as an example of why we don't do the "Consoles vs PCs" thing on the wikipedia.Sockatume 23:36, 15 August 2005 (UTC)

bits in consoles vs computers

The one sentence in this article is all I have found on this entire site on this subject. all the 'next-gen' consoles use 64-bit processors like the PowerPC from IBM, but they won't be called 64-bit consoles, that is what the PS1 and N64 were. Can someone who knows why this is explain this phenomenon, ie why are consoles quoted as being higher bit than they actually are? This is my first post ever, let me know if I went about this the right way, if not, sorry. Beardedfish 21:13, 17 September 2005 (UTC)

Where is this stated? All I see is "Note that the advertised bits of current generation (32-bit, 64-bit and 128-bit) consoles were in large part created by the console makers' marketing departments" - this, although not written that great, I think is referring to the current generation (Xbox, GameCube, PS2) as being the 128-bit era. Only the PS2 is technically a 128-bit system. See more on the subject at Sixth generation era. K1Bond007 01:07, 18 September 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for the link, it helps a lot, but it doesn't fully explain the whole phenomenon. For example, right now the big processors are the AMD64 and the PowerPC 970 (aka apple's G5) and they are 64 bit, but the PS2 is supposedly 128, but doesn't crunch the graphics as well as those two as evidence by the superior graphics of PC games (I know the graphics cards are part of this whole thing as well). Then when one looks up 8-bit through 128 bit, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/128-bit, it just refers to the concept its self and seems to be coming from the PC side of the argument. All in all it just seems to me a subject worthy of clarification, especially since more and more people know the tech specs of consoles, not just PCs. 205.247.103.36 02:03, 18 September 2005 (UTC)

Bits really don't mean much. Increasing from 8-bit to 16, then eventually 32 was a big deal, but not until recently (which is arguable) has there been any sort of worthwhile reason to really go beyond that. It really depends on what the processor is used for. We're just now seeing a leap from 32-bit to 64-bit processors on the PC, but most of what is released are still 32-bit. Just because a processor may be 128-bit doesn't make it better. K1Bond007 03:36, 18 September 2005 (UTC)
Even if they don't mean much, to which I agree, a bit of clarification could fit in the article quite well. Consoles have been referred often by the number of bits (at least up to the 6th gen, I'm not seeing this so much on the 7th gen). --Outlyer 12:27, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

There is often no obvious "number of bits" for computing devices, and terms such as "16-bit" have been used to refer to many different kinds of things. That's why I think it's quite nonsensical to talk about the "number of bits" without knowing what the number actually refers to. Some examples:

  • Amiga 500 was called a 16-bit computer because its data bus was 16 bits wide. However, the general purpose registers in the 68000 processor were 32 bits wide, so the machine could have been marketed as a "32-bit computer".
  • Pentium's data bus, on the other hand, was 64 bits wide and its general purpose registers were 32 bits wide. However, Pentium was never called a 64-bit processor. This was because the commonly understood meaning of the ambiguous term "number of bits in a computer/processor" had changed.
  • Dreamcast was marketed as a "128-bit console" because it had a couple of CPU/FPU instructions that operated on 128-bit-wide data. Using the same marketing logic, any modern PC or Mac could be called "128-bit" because of the SSE and Altivec instruction sets.
  • In other "128-bit" consoles, the marketed "number of bits" could refer to totally different things, such as the width of the bus between the video memory and gpu. So, the "number of bits" wasn't actually even comparable between devices, and the whole "128-bit generation" was a misconception based on marketing nonsense.

About a year ago, I even wrote an article (in the Finnish Wikipedia) about the various (often ambiguous) meanings of "number of bits". Perhaps the English Wikipedia would also need this kind of article. -- Viznut 12:53, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

Image sillyness

The state of the images in this article is ridiculous. We have a currently have a stack of 4 Nintendo consoles followed by an Atari 2600 along the side of the page. The reason that stack started was that there was concern (above) that any single console would show favoritism toward that platform. Even if the latest edits were reverted, there would still be a big ugly stack of only partially representive consoles. With the addition of the future Nintendo console we have even bigger problems - are we going to have pictures of every single major present and future console in this article? And if we do, are we also going to have any past consoles, or are we just going to forget about them? It seems to me that we should have one solid picture to demonstrate the concept of a video game console, instead of trying to show all consoles at once. People can click through to the individual console articles, after all. - RedWordSmith 20:40, 25 September 2005 (UTC)

  • I agree with the suggestions. The way the images are setting up makes it like Wikipedia is favoring Nintendo systems. Oh by the way, we also like the Atari 2600. --J. Nguyen 21:45, 25 September 2005 (UTC)
  • I suggest making a small collage (see Game controller for examples) with a few consoles from each era, favouring as much variety as possible: the Atari VCS, a NES, a Mega Drive/Genesis, a PlayStation, an Xbox and a random of the next gen stuff and place it on top of the article. As it is now, the article could well be named "Nintendo consoles". wS;✉ 22:52, 25 September 2005 (UTC)
    • This could work. I just want the image we have to be reconizable to most people (not different designs or versions) and to show both the controller and the base (if we're going to use 1). I think the GameCube one does a good job of this. I made the Nintendo and Sega images at Game controller and I uploaded them as fairuse, but I'm not really sure if that's the correct tag. Do you know the proper tag? All I did was take existing images and throw them into photoshop. The image should probably state this as rationale anyway. K1Bond007 23:02, 25 September 2005 (UTC)
      • What about this one ? (Please read file info there, there isn't much point in duplicating here). wS;✉ 11:23, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

European dates?

Does anyone have a source for the approximate lifespans of consoles in Europe? Especially release/discontinuation dates for systems unique to the market.--24.114.252.183 04:01, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

Europe is often overlooked, as releases of consoles distribution and names of games is often different. I think that this article and the timeline would benifit from additional information about video games consoles in Europe. Also I'm interested in the whole 50hz thing that we have in Europe causing games to usually have narrow black bars at the top and bottom of the screen. Y control 19:05, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

Neo Geo

Neo-Geo is currently missing from the timelines. It should be added, since it was also available as a home console. Shawnc 02:41, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

I would, if I could find reliable dates for its lifespan. --72.137.173.201 04:10, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

Suggested list

Since we have the numbers for most consoles, what about a list of best-selling video games? igordebraga ≠ 13:21, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

This article is about the hardware, not the software. --72.137.173.201 01:29, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

RCA Studio 2

In 1976 there was RCA Studio 2 console (Studio 1 never existed however) which I owned and I think it was first cartridge-based console. There was like 10 games available. Painting and Biorythm programs were in the ROM (In the version I had). Console was sold around the globe later until 1985, I think. I had german version. Screen was 64*32 in four colors (US version was 2 colors because of tweaking video output for price cuts).more here: http://www.classicgaming.com/studio2/

Video game consoles. igordebraga ≠

i really cant wait until the wii's r released

Another new console

I found Game Wave via randompage. Maybe someone could plug it in here? --Snargle 21:03, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

Names of consoles too cramped.

Hey, i'm looking at the prediction for the PS3 but i cant read the word. Even though I know it's the console. LOL.

Fix please?

Historical ignorance in the "ambiguity" section

I think this section may have a point but it represents the ambiguity of "console"/"computer" division as a somewhat new thing which it is not. Some examples:

  • Nintendo Entertainment System could be expanded with a keyboard and cassette drive, after which it could be used for hobbyist BASIC programming just like the home computers of the era. See Famicom BASIC.
  • Colecovision could be expanded to Coleco Adam, which was considered a full home computer. Even the CP/M operating system and a letter quality printer were available.

Also, the term "video game console" may have become popular in the early 90s, but the division has been in place since the days of the early mass-marketed home computers and "TV gaming machines". For examples, check out any microcomputer magazine of the early 1980s.

-- Viznut 07:40, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

Did some fixes now, --Viznut 08:13, 16 May 2006 (UTC)
There was NOT a cassette and/or keyboard expansion for the NES. Maybe such things existed for the Famicom, but not the NES.
You're right, the expansion was officially released only for the Famicom. Fixed the article. Viznut 08:24, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

about games and consoles ?

A video game console is a dedicated electronic machine designed to play video games. Often the output device is a separate television or a computer monitor. The main input device is a controller.There are a range of game’s in the world for many different console’s .There are different type’s of game’s like action game’s marvel game’s sport’s game’s war game’s fighting game’s adventure game’s and wrestling game’s .There are different graphics for different game’s on different console’s .There are also many different range of console’s in the world like super Nintendo , Nintendo 64 , Nintendo ds , gameboy pocket , gameboy colour game boy advance , game boy advance sp , play station one , play station two , play station three x box x box 360 , Nintendo revolution and many many more .The x box 360 is the best console out now that is because it has got amazing graphic’s and you can go online to verse people around the entire world .Games are made on paper and on the computer .Firstly the game makers draw all there characters on paper .Then they draw all the character’s clothes and weapon’s if they have eny .After that they draw the environment .Secondly they simulate all the character’s movement’s .Firdly they make the character’s on the computer and add loads of texture .Fourthly they make the main menu and the options menu and pause menu .That’s how old console game’s are made .Today’s console games are made totally different like x box 360 and future consoles .Firstly if the person is real on the game and is still alive they get micro cameras and spread them all over there faces and they take a picture which goes to the computer .Secondly they make a body .Firdly they get the pictures and make them how a game would be.Fourthly they make it all like the environments and stuff .For unreal character’s they just do what they usto do but add way more texture and colour to the character’s and environment .Different consoles take different types of media like super Nintendo takes a cartridge , Nintendo 64 takes a cartridge Nintendo ds takes a mini cartridge , play station one takes a disk , play station two takes disk , play station portable takes a umd , x box takes a disk , x box 360 takes a powerful disk , play station three takes a powerful disk and the Nintendo revolution takes a powerful disk .Did you know that a x box 360 is so powerful that if you move it while a disk is moving it will make a very deep scratch and that disk will not ever work again .Did you know that you can get gun’s for shooting game’s and a steering wheel for driving game’s there only for play station two x box play station 2 x box 360 and play station three .You can get different accessories for different consoles like a hard rive , memory card , controller , wireless controller , gun , steering wheel , fishing rod , light , stickers , face plate , cleaners , camera , mini television , triple socket , head phones , network adaptor , network cable , speakers , security lock and a hd cable .Did you know that a Nintendo ds can take eny game boy cartridge .Did you know that a game boy advance sp has got a light built in it .Did you know that a play station three has got blue ray built in it .Did you know that a x box has got a camera built in it .Did you know that the x box 360 has got media centre built in it .Controllers or game pads are the input devices for consoles. These devices used to called joysticks but since the mid-1980s console input devices have become much more complex than a simple stick and button. A modern console controller features two mini joysticks, and eighteen or nineteen buttons .Did you know the psp got 8.2 out of ten on it’s rating and the Nintendo ds got 7.3 , the x box got 8.2 , the x box 360 got 9.1 .

by bilal chaudhri