Turn Your New Opteron Into A One-Game Console

An anonymous reader writes "A new 64-bit Linux CD can instantly turn an AMD Opteron-equipped PC into the ultimate gaming console, according to Super Computer Inc. (SCI). The company has created a distribution of the popular America's Army multi-player strategy game on a bootable Linux CD, that it says was developed in partnership with AMD, nVidia, and the US Army."

Big deal....I'd like more than one game thank you

[inteller]

try 100s... www.mame.net

Hang on....Gentoo?

[reality-bytes]

Didn't Gentoo already do this when they created an Americas Army LiveCD for "any" x86 system?

Well, alright, it didn't actually run on "any" system - maybe on ran on "some" systems but I seem to remember this was quite a while back when Icculus [icculus.org] first ported it.

They Mean...

[Anonymous Coward]

... The Ultimate Gaming Console except any 128 bit machine and the upcomming PS3. When compared to anything other than those systems, it's the ulitmate. yeah.

Re:A 64-bit gaming console?

[LaserBeams]

Opteron 140:
$248 USD

Gamecube:
$99

Re:The 65 bit Port - The difference??

[0x0d0a]

The console "bit range" issue was significant at one point. At one point, the palette size depended upon word-addressable values on consoles. Thus, each "bit increase" that came along resulted in games with a wider palette.

Now, of course, all that's ended, and much fun was poked at the "64-bit" generation, which was pretty much entirely a marketing oddity.

Fast America's Army Download

[sameb]

FYI,

You can download America's Army from multiple sources very quickly at magnetmix.com [magnetmix.com]. It'll download off of everyone who has downloaded it on Gnutella.

Re:Mame.dk

[edmudama]

A company just started that has legal ROM downloads for a reasonable price if you want to legally play some of the old classics.

http://www.starroms.com/

I think we're all missing the point....

[trevorcor]

But this is a 64bit CD!

I've had the amd64 (nee x86-64) manuals that AMD is giving away for free on x86-64.org [x86-64.org] for a while now. I've been waiting for the Opteron and the Athlon64 with anticipation. And part of the deal with amd64 is that, while AMD was defining a new x86-ish ISA, they made some other changes -- like doubling the number of general purpose registers as well as the number of registers available for MMX and SSE.

But these extra registers are only available when using the new amd64 ISA -- i.e. when executing 64 bit code. We've seen lots of benchmarks and tests with the introduction of the Athlon64 running 32 bit windows, but next to none of the amd64 architecture in 64 bit mode.

But this CD boots the amd64 port of Linux, capable of using all 16 GPRs. And it reads like the America's Army version on the CD was compiled 64 bit too -- so it has access to 16 GPRs, 16 MMX and 16 XMM registers instead of the 8 available to standard x86.

It's the first 64bit game available for the Opteron and Athlon64! Somebody needs to go get this CD and benchmark it next to a 32bit x86 version of America's Army. Anyone, anyone?