Yearly Archives: 2007

HD Hotel

IMDb reports: High-Definition Movies Coming to Hotel Rooms. The story says that the capability will be provided by an outfit named nSTREAMS; they presently produce all kinds of large boxes that provide multimedia entertainment to hotels, hospitals, schools, and karaoke bars. I don’t see any boxes on their website that specifically tout HD support, but they must be coming soon.

I gained a small interest in these hotel-based entertainment solutions just recently when I came across a thorough investigation of something called the Famicombox, apparently a pay-per-play NES solution installed in hotel rooms a long time ago. These systems never made it to the U.S., but there were successors at least in the N64 generation and I believe for the SNES as well. I think PlayStation might have gotten in on the hotel action as well.

ROM-Based FMV

I found out that the Nintendo 64 version of Capcom’s timeless Resident Evil 2 features FMV. This is amazing given that that the game is cartridge-based and only has 64 megabytes of data. According to some reports I have read, the N64 version had essentially the same FMV content as the the original PlayStation version had (which came on 2 CDs and had dedicated FMV decoding hardware at it disposal).

I’m sure I’m not the only person to wonder how this N64 FMV works.

Further, I read that the Neo Geo version of the 1994 remake of Double Dragon featured a FMV clip from the hilariously absurd 1994 movie. Naturally, I’m curious how that video was stored. I believe the Neo Geo was another strictly tile-based console which would have required vector quantization.

Trixter’s Favorite Text Editor

If you think I’m obsessed with long-obsolete software and technology, I’ve got nothing on Trixter. This guy actually had a bake-off to determine which text editor performs best on an original 8088 PC. Forget vi vs. Emacs. Check out main article. Actually, vi is a contender but it didn’t fare well.

Check out Trixter’s blog for more classic hardware hacking, including information on how he is reworking his infamous 8088 Corruption PC video demo.

Streaming Trailer Set-Top Box

So the Apple TV hit the street last week. I wasn’t aware of it until a friend just IM’d me informing me that he kept up his long-standing tradition of early adoption, putting one of these shiny new units next to his Nintendo Wii and Sony PlayStation 3.


Apple TV

Here’s the killer feature he relayed to me:

You’d like apple tv. There’s a built-in movie trailer streaming function.

To think: If Apple had released this unit 7 years ago, I might never have started down the path of multimedia hacking.