

Nuon, the gaming chip that nearly changed the world but didn’t - lermontov
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/06/before-the-ps2-nuon-famously-tried-and-failed-to-combine-dvd-and-game-consoles/

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pandaman
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.

~~~
jsnell
Thanks for the reality check :-)

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!

~~~
soup10
Game developers go where the market is, regardless of the technical
challenges, if they got their chips shipped with enough dvd players, people
would start making games for them and it would snowball. Would it replace
dedicated gaming hardware? Probably not, but it certainly could of eaten some
of the casual market like the iphone did to the gameboy.

~~~
jsnell
Yes, non-gaming platforms will eventually get games just by being popular. But
that requires millions of units at a minimum, and even that might not be
enough (what was the state of desktop Linux gaming in 2012?). For this path to
work, the platform needs to become popular first. For the PC the early value
proposition was productivity applications. For the iPhone it was good mobile
web browsing, maps, etc.

A gaming system (which this was) can't wait for that popularity to happen
through some other means. The games are the raison d'être of the system, the
only reason for people to buy one. What was the end-user pitch here that'd get
one of these to the hands of millions of consumers? "You can buy some other
DVD player for $200, or this one that might some day play games for $300". Not
very compelling, when both of them do an equally good job with the main task
you're buying a DVD player for.

~~~
ethbro
_> Yes, non-gaming platforms will eventually get games just by being popular._

I wouldn't say this is an inevitability. Look at Nokia feature-phones.

Sure, from what I've heard and read an incredibly poorly designed ecosystem
and lack of carrier interest, but you can't tell me Snake was the best the
market could come up with...

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lunixbochs
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.

[1]
[http://www.giantbomb.com/nuon/3045-85/](http://www.giantbomb.com/nuon/3045-85/)

[2] [https://youtu.be/0nypv2_qvSg?t=173](https://youtu.be/0nypv2_qvSg?t=173)

[3] [http://www.nuon-dome.com/](http://www.nuon-dome.com/)

[4]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nJlY4Z8v-A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nJlY4Z8v-A)

~~~
lobster_johnson
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.

~~~
osi
I wanted one just for the VLM, to replace the one from my Atari Jaguar :)

------
denimboy
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.

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danseagrave
Sounds a lot like Philip's CD-i [1] but a decade later to the party. In was in
the living room with games, video (VCD) and internet access...

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philips_CD-i](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philips_CD-i)

~~~
kubiiii
It had a competitor, the Commodore CDTV (basically an amiga).
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_CDTV](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_CDTV)
Pretty cool machine, CD rom drives were sparse in 91.

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rayiner
Techno-optimism at its silliest. Even if it had succeeded it wouldn't have
"changed the world."

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ams6110
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.

~~~
kubiiii
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.

~~~
ethbro
This has always been a strength of Sony. I remember it was one of the reasons
I ended up getting a PS2.

Not sure how you'd do that now given that the cost of adding Netflix or
streaming support is negligible, but Sony definitely made smart moves with
their timing and put forth the proposition that "For a little more than a
DVD/Bluray player, I can get a PS2/3."

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TheBranca18
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.

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agumonkey
The controller fail got me smiling:

[https://youtu.be/3lpViVaMtrM?t=570](https://youtu.be/3lpViVaMtrM?t=570)

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comatose_kid
I worked there in 2000 as a graphics engineer - it was an interesting tech,
lots of bright people.

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kazuya
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.

