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Technology Stocks : 3DFX -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Joe C. who wrote (10602)	2/10/1999 11:42:00 PM
From: Piranha	Respond to of 16960

A Voodoo3 review link I found (of all places) on the TDDDF board. 3dhardware.net Piranha

To: Joe C. who wrote (10602)	2/10/1999 11:50:00 PM
From: Ben Wu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 16960

The PC/console compatibility sound interesting, but probably a no go. requirements for PC games change too quickly and would obsolete the console after a couple of months in the marketplace. Internet play sounds interesting as well and it's already being looked at as being add-ons to the dreamcast and the N64. true it's not hard to make a console, the hard part is getting developers to develop for your console. With 2 viable platforms out there (PSX and N64) and one coming out (dreamcast), there is no way that a developer will develop for all of them much less for a fourth one. Therein lies the catch-22, the good developer will only develop for platforms that are well established, a platform will only get well established with good games. The console market is littered with casualties and competition is very brutal. former console makers that come to mind are 3DO and atari and even Sega with the Sega Saturn... even though Saturn was technically a beautiful piece of hardware, toward the end of it's lifetime the Sega Genesis (the genesis was the predecessor to saturn) was outselling the Saturn! why? because the games were HORRIBLE. then you have to worry about different markets. for example N64 is doing pretty well in the states where action/sports games rule the market, but in Japan (where the real money is), it's getting slaughtered because of the lack of quality RPGs (though Zelda 64 is doing much to repair nintendo's reputation in the japanese domestic market). All in all, it will be hard for 3dfx to break into the console market by themselves but it can be done (look at playstation). if 3dfx wants to survive in the console market, they first need to figure out where their target market is (US or Japan). Then they need to get an amazing internal software development team (or two, or three). After they get good decent press, then they need to hit up on the big boys of console development (Konami, Capcom, Square, etc). The money in consoles is all the in the software and the royalties paid to the platform. All you have to look at is $129 for a playstation, $129 for N64, and est. $250 for the dreamcast, and you can tell how margin starved these companies are. that rumor posted back about a Japanese console maker that's creating a "super console", is probably false. i seriously doubt it's nintendo or sony (and you sure as hell can bet that it's not Sega). nintendo will go with the SGI spinoff, and sony is working with toshiba, and sega with videologic. i know there are a couple of other consoles that are for the japanese market only, but don't know tho makes them. OT -- i've always wondered how that old nintendo gun works. does here anyone have any clue on how it's done? i mean you point the gun at the screen and shoot, and somehow the system knows exactly where on the screen you hit. obviously it some kind of transmitter/dectector in the gun itself, but how does gun determine which sector of the screen it's pointing at? what does it use as reference?