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Look Up: (916 Terms)
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Audio (80) Business (59) Community (19)
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Contributions by ravuya
3DFX
A company that used to make the Voodoo series of 3D accelerator cards. Notable for its innovations (SLI mode) as well as arcade hardware (some of Midway's arcade machines, including Hydro Thunder and Gauntlet Legends, were basically PCs running souped-up 3dfx cards). After a number of disappointments following the voodoo3 series, they (and their proprietary graphics API, GLIDE) were purchased by NVidia in 2000.
See Also:3D Accelerator Card, Glide
ACT File
.ACT files are the actor files for Genesis3D - also referred to as models.
C#
An ECMA-compliant programming language developed in part by Microsoft in order to spearhead their .NET initiative. As a .NET language, it has many of the benefits of Java with its VM. In addition, the language adds many features (such as reflection) that are not found elsewhere. It is currently unpopular with game developers but is slowly gaining momentum due to the push of Microsoft and compatibility with Managed DirectX.
See Also:DirectX, Java
Dolphin
An early production name for the IBM/ATI-based Nintendo GameCube.
See Also:GameCube
PowerPC
A RISC microprocessor designed by IBM and Motorola and Apple. Most well known for its presence inside Macintoshes, although it is quite popular in IBM's server lineup. The most powerful model at the time of this writing is the POWER4 (Server, 64-bit). It has been modified to produce the PPC970 (G5, Desktop, 64-bit) for desktop machines.
QNX
An RTOS popular for embedded machines. Has a reputation for being rock solid (rumours place it at the centre of some nuclear power plants' computer system). WWW
See Also:RTOS
Simcity
A series of games from Maxis that allowed the player to create a town. Progressive installments in the series added sewage, garbage disposal, and other resource management to the player's plate. Notable for being one of the first games to simulate a complex reality-based system on the relatively underpowered machines of the time. In series: Simcity, Simcity 2000, Simcity 3000, Simcity 4000 (Multiple expansion packs released for each). Computers/Consoles: SNES, Saturn, PlayStation, PC, Mac among others
Smalltalk
An object-oriented programming language designed in the early days of Xerox PARC. Popular for its powerful English-like syntax and array of features only now coming to other programming languages (such as Java and C#). More information can be found here. It is extremely unpopular in game development, particularly due to the lack of large corporate backing -- it is nonetheless a good environment for learning and playing with the extremely powerful API.
See Also:C#, Object Oriented Designing
UNIX
A multiuser operating system originally designed in Bell Labs. Not as popular nowadays, but its spirit lives on in the popular GNU/Linux system, administered by the GNU (GNU's Not UNIX) project.
Xbox360
The successor to the Microsoft Xbox, this console uses new ATI graphics chips as well as multi-core IBM PowerPC CPUs capable of running six simultaneous threads in hardware.
See Also:PowerPC, XBox


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