November 2006 – Page 4 – Kev's Development Toolbox

November 18, 2006

PS3 eBay craziness – too many listings on eBay may result in bargins in next couple of days?

The crazy thing about the insane eBay sales going on right now with people selling their PS3s is that there are so many PS3s listed (around 21,000?), that at some point once the initial frantic bidding dies down there may actually be some bargains to be had. There are plenty of listings currently with no reserves and no bids – it might just be possible that you can pick one up in the next few days for very close to the original paid price.

Who knows, wouldn’t it be ironic if some of these people who capitalized on the hype and demand and only bought one to resell actually ended up taking a loss? Now wouldn’t that be funny.

November 17, 2006

Netbeans 5.5 GUI Builder tutorial – ‘Building Great Looking GUIs’

If you haven’t yet found the GUI Builder feature in Netbeans 5.5 (where have you been?), this feature (previously known as ‘Matisse’), makes it incredibly easy to create pretty good looking user interfaces in Java relatively simply.

java.sun.com have a great article on their site walking through the steps involved in building a UI with Netbeans 5.5. It’s well worth a look if you haven’t seen or used this feature yet.

November 16, 2006

1 day before PS3 US launch: interesting Playstation fact #2 – PS2 backwards compatibility

The new PS3 will provide backwards compatibility with the PS2 and PSOne by including the PS2’s main processors inside the PS3’s box. Even then some known incompatibilities have already been found. These will likely be ironed out in forthcoming Firmware upgrades.

Sony took this same approach with the PS2 to provide backwards compatibility with the PSOne, by taking the CPU of the original PSOne and using it as the I/O controller inside the PS2. Not only would this processor control all the I/O operations in the machine, but PSOne games could be run directly on this chip to provide backwards compatibility.

November 16, 2006

I played Motorstorm on a PS3 last night!

Two days before the US launch I played a demo version of Motorstorm on a PS3 last night, and it was awesome! Walking through Walmart I noticed they had a screen in their electronics area that looked like it had some PS3 demos running. I walked up to take a look and the screen was showing the ‘Crossbar’ menu – I pressed a few buttons on the controller and realized this was a live PS3! And there was no-one else around even interested in looking at it!

I scrolled through all the menus and it looked like it had several demo games on the harddrive, one of them including Motorstorm. This game looks pretty outstanding – the detail and complexity in the scenery and the cars is pretty amazing. If launch titles can look this good then I think we are in for a serious treat when the developers get the hang of the new hardware in the months to come. The game plays awesome too – this will definitely be one on my shopping list..