The VM Labs Nuon

Started by davyk, February 09, 2013, 13:16:58 PM

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Rogue Trooper

Quote from: "The Laird"
Quote from: "nakamura"I love those Iron Soldier menu screens.

What's a Nuon? I can't remember!  :-[

The Nuon was a console/DVD player hybrid developed by VM Labs, who included several ex-Flare Design staff including Jaguar co-designer John Mathieson and former VP of Atari Richard Miller. Jeff Minter was also involved in the project.

The technology was licensed to people, much like that of the 3DO, with people like Goldstar and Toshiba producing models. Unfortunately they didn't see the PS2 coming with it's built in DVD player support and that killed pretty much any early momentum the system had.

The Nuon has sequels to a number of Jaguar games such as Iron Soldier 3, Tempest 3000 and Merlin Racing (Atari Karts 2)

And least we forget, at the time a KEY engineer who'd been working with Sony on the Playstation 2 hardware, left the company to go and work on the development of Nuon.

The thinking was that by getting the Nuon chipset could exploit the DVD market, as to decode the information stored on a DVD, they needed an MPEG2 decoder, so NUON designed a chipset that not only had MPEG2 decoding, but was also a dedicated games playing piece of kit along with offering internet surfing etc.

NUON offered things like 20X Zoom In (with no loss of clarity), smooth picture searching (forward+Back) and Samsung models could add strobe effects to films, so it was a very impressive video decoding chipset.

Rogue Trooper

Iron Solider 3 appeared on PSone (and is rock hard) and Tempest 3000? Minter was looking for publishers to back him to convert it to the Game Cube, but none took him up, sadly.

TL

Here is the glory of Tempest 3000 for those who have never seen or played it.

I once played this on a projector screen in a dark room, it totally wrecked my head!!!!   :43:
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ty6t0Hmu8uk

nakamura

Tempest is always a game I wanted to like but it just never grabbed me. I can see the quality though. I did like N20 a lot though.

TL

Quote from: "nakamura"Tempest is always a game I wanted to like but it just never grabbed me. I can see the quality though. I did like N20 a lot though.

Each to their own. The soundtrack on that Nuon version is incredible too, really adds to the whole experience.

nakamura

Yeah it does look nice. Much smoother visuals that the older version. I always loved the Tempest music too.

I don't hate it or anything, I can see why so many love it.

tomwaits

Here's a video of my favorite game from the Yaroze Classics 3-pack Nuon homebrew. The video is poorly edited with abrupt transitions between different levels, but it's the only video I could find.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWsfk59Y5xY

TL

Never seen that before, thanks for posting it Tom!  :111:

Looks like a really nice take on Galaga with some insane on-screen action going on. That Tempest like trance mode at the end of the video is really interesting too!

nakamura

Yaroze?

Is this a homebrew port of PS1 homebrew?

TL

Quote from: "nakamura"Yaroze?

Is this a homebrew port of PS1 homebrew?

It seems that way, here is a great link that talk about it:

http://www.dragonshadow.com/-/yc/

nakamura

It's cool to see things like that get ported. The Yaroze was a great thing and I loved seeing the home created games on demo discs. Sony do not get enough credit for this.

TL

Quote from: "nakamura"It's cool to see things like that get ported. The Yaroze was a great thing and I loved seeing the home created games on demo discs. Sony do not get enough credit for this.

Yeah I agree with that, good thread on PS1 Net Yaroze HERE!

TrekMD

Those videos of Iron Solider 3 are pretty good.  Love the music in the menus.  :)

Going to the final frontier, gaming...


Rogue Trooper

(whistles....post's link:)

http://www.worldofstuart.excellentcontent.com/t3k.htm

(fuse lit....She's gonna blow! :-) )

TL

Quote from: "Rogue Trooper"(whistles....post's link:)

http://www.worldofstuart.excellentcontent.com/t3k.htm

(fuse lit....She's gonna blow! :-) )

Considering who wrote that I am not even going to start reading it, I value Rev. Stu's opinion on video games as much as the catholic church's!