mendaliv
Posts: 21
Joined: 6/22/2003
Status: offline
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Ah, but the reason for games always working out of the box on consoles is both the true beauty of the console, as well as a fatal flaw.
Think back to the 80s, and maybe even the early 90s. Remember the computers from those days? If you had an Apple ][e and an Apple ][gs, the programs weren't interchangeable. The same is true of a Playstation and a Playstation II.
Why? They didn't have the hardware abstraction layer back then; each program had to conform to the specific needs of the computer it was meant to run on.
Now, we have hardware abstraction layers, which serve as a buffer between the hardware and the software. The abstraction layers takes the software's needs and makes sure that the hardware performs as intended.
Now, this is all well and good for PCs: you can run the same program on AMD and Intel processors (in most cases), or on VIA and Intel chipsets, or using nVidia or ATI video cards.
Well, you cannot (directly) play a PS2 game on a Dreamcast or Gamecube. The reason being that there is essentially no hardware abstraction layer. It is totally unnecessary in the case because all PS2s are alike, all Dreamcasts are alike, and all Gamecubes are alike (let alone SNES, Genesis, Atari 7200, etc etc).
The beauty of this is that it is more efficient: the programming code is optimised to run on that specific hardware configuration.
The problem is that the hardware cannot be majorly updated (though I believe there is room for minor ones, i.e. when the Xbox went to the cheaper TV-Out chip). None of the software would work anymore. At the very least, it would be crashing all the time.
If you think that publishers and devs are skipping proper testing, you're in some cases right. They aren't testing every possible hardware configuration like the people who make consoles are. However, they do test on a good deal of configurations. Generally enough configurations to make the devs confident that the program would work, and if there was a problem, it'd almost certainly be because of a very odd hardware configuration.
I can guarantee you that PC software devs spend a lot more time testing than console software devs. All you need to do is look at how long Neocron was in testing and development. 4 blasted years in the making...
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