I've been following it and even done some development around 98-99. It was a bizarre system with tools that were not at the level even with the 5th/6th gen consoles available at the time. You pretty much had just a gcc port with some serious bugs, an optimizing assembler (it's VLIW so the assembler had -O option and the bigger number you put there, the better it will optimize, at 6 though it was running out of memory on any non-trivial code) and a broken debugger, written in XLisp for some reason, which I never managed to use productively.
The thing had 4 PUs, each with local memory and a DMA controller to access system and video memory. You could run one of them in a CPU emulation mode, where local memory was used as cache and it was the only target the C compiler supported. If you wanted local memory and/or more than 1 PUs - you wrote assembly and debugged by writing into the frame buffer.
Even then I was wondering how it's going to compete with the DC/PS2 it was coming up against but my bosses told me it's fine because it's going to be in every DVD player and everybody is going to by a DVD player pretty soon so the game consoles are pretty much already dead.
It's really funny, because all throughout reading that article I was thinking "this thing never had a chance". A custom architecture based on principles that are notoriously difficult to write tools for (VLIW), probably adding 50% to the BOM of very price sensitive consumer electronics, and an attempt to create a gaming platform by a company with no capability of producing first party titles and no commitments from credible publishers to do third party games either. How could that not fail?
But then the article ends with all of these people believing - even with 15 years of hindsight - that they genuinely were just on the verge of breaking through. Their technology was just too far ahead of its time and people didn't yet understand it!
>Miller had been heavily involved in the creation of Atari's 64-bit Jaguar game console, which was already petering out after just a year on the market. "We were very proud of it," he said in a recent interview. "But it did not succeed because of the lack of content and a chicken and egg issue
noo, Jaguar was TERRIBLE to program, and from what pandaman writes Nuon was just the same.
> "I kind of hoped that it would be a real computing platform, much as the Atari ST had been a platform that was used for games as well,"
Atari ST was also pretty TERRIBLE, it was used for games _despite_ being terrible, not because it was a good computer.
>He also brought in lawyer
and this explains why it failed. 3DFX history was similar, they also toured Japan, but instead of lawyers they got a finance guy, they build hardware themselves, none of that 3DO CD-I licensing rubbish lawyers love so much.
This is fascinating to me. It's worth noting this was from the same console generation as the PS2, Xbox, Dreamcast, and GameCube.
I found some specific information about it here [1]
> The technology in the few available NUON DVD players raised the price around $100 over comparable players.
> Only eight games were ever released for NUON. The graphics are comparable to early PlayStation 2 games and are most notable in Iron Soldier 3, a mech combat game.
Here's a video showing the Iron Soldier 3 graphics [2]
> The best game is generally regarded to be Tempest 3000 (many sources consider it the only truly playable game)
The wiki also lists 16 homebrew titles including an Atari 800 emulator and Doom.
On the NUON-Dome site [3] there's a homebrew release announcement from 2014, as well as Amazon links where you can still buy some discs and hardware.
It also features a "Video Light Machine" [4] which as far as I can tell is Winamp-style audio visualization.
One of the main developers hired to write games for Nuon was actually the legendary Jeff "Yak" Minter, he of the Attack of the Mutant Camels fame. He wrote Tempest 3000 for it, as well as the Video Light Machine. Both were sequels to previous work; Minter wrote the original Tempest 2000 (itself a sequel to Tempest), and the VLM for Nuon was version 2.0 of a synth he did in the 90s.
3DO came out with a multimedia machine that played music CDs, photo CDs, could play video CDs with a daughter board. The original 3DO player was released in 1993 making it the first non cartridge video game player by several years.
The M2 was being designed and prototypes built in 1995-1996. M2 featured a dual core powerpc and was designed to ship with a DVD player making it truly the next generation player. The plans to the device were sold to Matsushita, they demoed it at E3 in 1996 but failed to bring it to market.
3DO suffered a lot of the same troubles as Nuon except about 5 years earlier. 3DO went out of the hardware business in 1996 but continued publishing some very successful and revolutionary game titles before finally going out of business completely in 2003.
Point being this has all happened before, and it will happen again.
Interestingly the converse (game consoles that also play DVDs) were much more successful. Not sure how much that feature was really used, and today it's pretty much moot because online streaming has supplanted physical media for most people.
When it came out the PS2 was a rather cheap DVD player considering it also was a gaming console. I think the PS3 was among the cheaper if not the cheapest bluray player when it was released.
And I found pretty cool that my ps1 was able to play audio cds with a neat interface.
The consoles want in on the online streaming market too, though. The Xbox 360 has sports streaming from MLB.tv, ESPN, etc, and Netflix support is on the major consoles.
It's interesting how fragmented from an end-user POV the streaming services are -- it's like a 100-way betamax vs VHS fight. I suppose you could argue there's only one "format": the web browser, but that's not true in the home theatre/console/smart tv space.
I think it's pretty interesting that people at Sony were upset with Kutaragi for putting DVD functionality in the PS2. People argue today that it was a small part of the mass adoption of the format. Perhaps, along with the disastrous unveiling and launch of the PS3, it contributed to his downfall at the company.
I wonder how this affected Toshiba's own processors -- MeP, then Cell.
Some of MPEs (Nuon's processing units) only had access to its small local memory and needed DMA to access the main memory. This is kind of similar to Cell's SPEs. Each SPE has only 256 KB of directly accessible memory and required DMA to get to the main memory.
You can say it's not uncommon in DSPs, but it's still interesting Toshiba has been involved with these.
[+] [-] pandaman|10 years ago|reply
The thing had 4 PUs, each with local memory and a DMA controller to access system and video memory. You could run one of them in a CPU emulation mode, where local memory was used as cache and it was the only target the C compiler supported. If you wanted local memory and/or more than 1 PUs - you wrote assembly and debugged by writing into the frame buffer.
Even then I was wondering how it's going to compete with the DC/PS2 it was coming up against but my bosses told me it's fine because it's going to be in every DVD player and everybody is going to by a DVD player pretty soon so the game consoles are pretty much already dead.
[+] [-] jsnell|10 years ago|reply
It's really funny, because all throughout reading that article I was thinking "this thing never had a chance". A custom architecture based on principles that are notoriously difficult to write tools for (VLIW), probably adding 50% to the BOM of very price sensitive consumer electronics, and an attempt to create a gaming platform by a company with no capability of producing first party titles and no commitments from credible publishers to do third party games either. How could that not fail?
But then the article ends with all of these people believing - even with 15 years of hindsight - that they genuinely were just on the verge of breaking through. Their technology was just too far ahead of its time and people didn't yet understand it!
[+] [-] rasz_pl|10 years ago|reply
noo, Jaguar was TERRIBLE to program, and from what pandaman writes Nuon was just the same.
> "I kind of hoped that it would be a real computing platform, much as the Atari ST had been a platform that was used for games as well,"
Atari ST was also pretty TERRIBLE, it was used for games _despite_ being terrible, not because it was a good computer.
>He also brought in lawyer
and this explains why it failed. 3DFX history was similar, they also toured Japan, but instead of lawyers they got a finance guy, they build hardware themselves, none of that 3DO CD-I licensing rubbish lawyers love so much.
[+] [-] lunixbochs|10 years ago|reply
I found some specific information about it here [1]
> The technology in the few available NUON DVD players raised the price around $100 over comparable players.
> Only eight games were ever released for NUON. The graphics are comparable to early PlayStation 2 games and are most notable in Iron Soldier 3, a mech combat game.
Here's a video showing the Iron Soldier 3 graphics [2]
> The best game is generally regarded to be Tempest 3000 (many sources consider it the only truly playable game)
The wiki also lists 16 homebrew titles including an Atari 800 emulator and Doom.
On the NUON-Dome site [3] there's a homebrew release announcement from 2014, as well as Amazon links where you can still buy some discs and hardware.
It also features a "Video Light Machine" [4] which as far as I can tell is Winamp-style audio visualization.
[1] http://www.giantbomb.com/nuon/3045-85/
[2] https://youtu.be/0nypv2_qvSg?t=173
[3] http://www.nuon-dome.com/
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nJlY4Z8v-A
[+] [-] lobster_johnson|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dopeboy|10 years ago|reply
Seems like a 3D version of space shooters...?
[+] [-] Narishma|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] denimboy|10 years ago|reply
The M2 was being designed and prototypes built in 1995-1996. M2 featured a dual core powerpc and was designed to ship with a DVD player making it truly the next generation player. The plans to the device were sold to Matsushita, they demoed it at E3 in 1996 but failed to bring it to market.
3DO suffered a lot of the same troubles as Nuon except about 5 years earlier. 3DO went out of the hardware business in 1996 but continued publishing some very successful and revolutionary game titles before finally going out of business completely in 2003.
Point being this has all happened before, and it will happen again.
[+] [-] danseagrave|10 years ago|reply
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philips_CD-i
[+] [-] kubiiii|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rayiner|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ams6110|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kubiiii|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcpherrinm|10 years ago|reply
It's interesting how fragmented from an end-user POV the streaming services are -- it's like a 100-way betamax vs VHS fight. I suppose you could argue there's only one "format": the web browser, but that's not true in the home theatre/console/smart tv space.
[+] [-] TheBranca18|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agumonkey|10 years ago|reply
https://youtu.be/3lpViVaMtrM?t=570
[+] [-] comatose_kid|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kazuya|10 years ago|reply