1. Re: game consoles & EU
Thanks everybody!
As usual, whenever the people in the EU forum are asked for advice, there
is more meat than potatoes given back on the plate. As for myself, perhaps
I had better first of all apologize to Robert and Junko if I have seemed to
be encroaching onto their territory-- this is not now nor never will be my
intention. To write a compiler to sit under Eu so that it would steal
business is not what I have contemplated. Neither have I given any thought
to stealing any thunder or attention away from the continuing
sophistication and refinement of EU. I like EU better than any language
that I have ever had to use. I have an enormous task in front of me, which
includes not only the thrust toward game consoling as becoming a middle
ground for C&C (computing and computation), as are wireless phones and
major household appliances slowly also coming to the front lines. No, I
have to also build a completely new model of e-banking for a major client,
and a few other things besides.
What I try to do, business-wise, is predict things that have not happened
yet, but seem to be what my gut tells me is going to come about. So, when
I talk about such strange things, please bear with me. 
Now, to address a few of the excellent replies: Yes, Intel has implemented
some RISC into its newer CISC cpu's, and that will only increase as time
goes on. Intel is a business, and to maintain its hefty market share it
has to compete. But the best chips out there right now are the
Sony/Toshiba made 'EE' for the upcoming Playstation 2. The one in use in
the the Dreamcast is the Hitachi built SH-4 (and the newest chip, which
will probably come out around the same time as the Playstation, co-designed
between Hitachi and STMicroelectronics of France... the SH-5). These two
chips, the EE and the SH-5, have quite a bit in common, whereas the
Nintendo alliance with IBM for its Dolphin-gamebox cpu is based on the
Power-PC series, and follows down a different path. Nonetheless, these are
all extremely powerful bits of silicon (the SH-5, for example runs at 1000
MIPS and it is the slowest of these three). And Sony has already anounced
the implimentation of the EE into graphics-intensive Workstations.
What I noted, and I will say it here now, is that one of the very
interesting and intriguing facts about all of this, is that to develop
'games' for any of these three systems requires, of course, a platform to
do it on. And that platform is none other than a PC, running NT or even
95. Also, it is possible to not even have to rely on a drop-in card
emulator for the pertinent cpu and its chip set in question. It is all
mainly software emulation under 'C'. This is what I meant before about
this all being more possible than most programmers realize, and what I
intend to bank on with what I am doing.
EU is built on a Watcom and a Borland (???) C compiler, if I remember
right. How close is this to what could possibly be done, I would like to
know, seeing as MetaWerks (various permutations of CodeWarrior 'C') is the
main legal supplier for almost all of the SDK stuff invlolved here. So, I
suppose I would have to build an interface between the strange parallel
world of these cpu's and EU so that EU is convinced that it is talking to a
x86 environment. Sounds whacked as emulators go, but remember that these
are very, very fast and powerful chips. Perhaps I would build the emulator
on the Haskell language and OS first, then attach EU to that.
Incidently, the Hitachi and Sony chips can be fed strings as either little
or big endian with no trouble at all, which is a big help when graphics are
concerned.
Anyway, more about this as it goes along.
Thanks and I am ruminating on what you people have already sent me to
consider; keep it coming.
Norm
