What About Intel's Open Arcade Architecture?

AtariDatacenter asks: "Randomly surfing the Web, I stumbled across Intel's Open Arcade Architecture overview. It was billed as an open architecture PC reference platform for the arcades and the home. Was Microsoft's X-box a response to this, or was this a failed attempt by Intel to fight back?"

Re:A developer's view

[superlame]

Do you happen to know who ended up with the IP rights to the game? Perhaps we could petition them to open the game up.

Prevention.

[Malk-a-mite]

1st post prevention.

Says it was started in 97 - when did the X-box start up?

Malk-a-mite

well

[nomadic]

The web site implies that it's over, and was mildly succesful (though this might be spin). Sounds like it might have just been a sort of intraindustry seminar that Intel hoped would gain it access to the arcade market, but just ended up as a way for various companies to network with each other...But that's just my interpretation.

Re:A developer's view

[Dr.Altaica]

It's XS-G, Website at http://www.gstone.com/xsg/ It's a good game I played it at the Metreon.

Re:A developer's view

[Adam Wiggins]

Probably Interactive Light's creditors. I wouldn't bother, though: they, like most game publishers, are a bunch of pricks that would never do anything that they didn't stand to profit immensely from.

Needless to say this is my personal view, not the position of any company that I have worked for. :)

A developer's view

[Adam Wiggins]

As it so happens, I was a developer for one of the "flagship" games for the OAA. Allow me to dispel any myths for you: it was a horrible attempt by Intel to create a market for their upcoming high-end processor, codenamed Katmai. (We all now know it as the Pentium III.) Basically, they were concerned by the fact that most people didn't seem to care very much about new processors, because their computer was fast enough anyways, and it was becoming common knowledge that a faster hard drive and more RAM was a better investment.

It didn't work. My game (Savage Quest [angelstudios.com]) was originally slated to use a Katmai 500, but ended up going down to a PII-450 (you read it right, a P2) for the production machines. In the meantime they shifted to other ridiculous strategies, like telling you that you need a faster processor in order to browse the web effectively.

Most of the games that came out for OAA really sucked. I consider Savage Quest to be an exception, although it is not without its flaws. They were mostly ugly, low-framerate, boring, and completely trite compared to the other coin-op games around them at the time. I played most of them at various arcade convetions that I attended during the development of Savage Quest; except for one (some space-racer called "XCF" or something) I never saw a single one in a real arcade.

I wouldn't mention this, but this is slashdot, so I suppose I shall. I developed the game entirely on a Slackware Linux box. I wrote drivers for the arcade hardware (coindroppers, joysticks etc) and we used dual Voodoo boards for display. I still have the game and it runs beautifully on your average Athalon+Voodoo system, but unfortunately the company that owns the rights (Interactive Light) just went out of business a month or so ago, so I'm afraid that no Linux port is on the way to store shelves, or ever will be. A shame, it's (in my not-so-humble opinion) a darn fun game.