Understanding Your Platforms

Knowing your hardware means knowing what your limitations are. While this is not the place to discuss platforms in detail, we will take a look at them in brief. (Besides, these machines will be years and years out of date by the time your son or daughter reads this for his or her high school research paper.)

Game Consoles

Microsoft's Xbox is currently at the head of the pack for tech muscle (see Figure 3.2). It boasts a hard disk as well as more RAM and, especially, more audio processing than the PlayStation 2 or GameCube has. Its format is 4.3 GB DVD. It also has 64 MB of RAM for use by all systems—sound, art, NPC artificial intelligence code, and so on. However, that doesn't mean it won't compete with a high-end ...

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