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History of video games/Platforms/Nuon

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  • A Nuon compatible Samsung DVD player and Nuon controller.
    A Nuon compatible Samsung DVD player and Nuon controller.

History

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Development

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VM Labs was based in Los Altos, California.[1]

VM Labs was cofounded in January 1995 by Richard Miller, the designer of the early laptop computer the Sinclair Z88.[2][3]

Development of the Nuon started in 1995 as VM Labs Project-X.[4] The system was also known as Merlin (No relation to the handheld game device of the same name).[5] 5 of the 6 hardware design team members for the Nuon were former 3DO employees.[3]

In around November 1997 VM Labs started to approach software developers, with $7,500 development systems being shipped in December 1997.[4] Development environments were officially supported on Linux, Windows 95 and Windows NT, with MacOS having unofficial support.[4]

Great effort was placed into naming the Nuon. 400 to 800 names were internally suggested over the course of a year in a half, including Active DVD, Actavid and Intervision.[6] Ultimately the Nuon name was decided by the outside firm Lexicon, with Nuon being selected because it was under five characters and possessed consonant harmony.[6] Interestingly there was an unrelated version of the Arcadia 2001 which was already named the Intervision,[7] It is unclear if VM Labs was aware of this usage, though given they didn't pursue the name, it is somewhat of a moot point.

The Nuon became one of the first consoles to boast about using ray traced graphics in pre launch demos,[3] though it is unclear if any released titles actually used real time ray tracing.

By 1999 Toshiba had publicly announced interest in the Nuon platform.[8]

Launch

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The first models of DVD players using Nuon were released in mid 2000 and sold for between $300 and $350.[9] The company had hoped to attract non-traditional gamers to the platform.[10]

Nuon games struggled in the market, with Nuon games often being accidentally placed in DVD sections in stores and less than 10,000 sales for Freefall 3050 A.D.[9]

Five Nuon players were made by Samsung, two by RCA, and one by Toshiba.[11]

The platform was discontinued in 2003.[9]

Technology

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Compute

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The Nuon was "interesting" to program on.
—Jeff Minter (Developer of Tempest 3000), Interview with Gamasutra[12]

Uniquely for the time, the Nuon platform used four VLIW Media Processor Elements, full processing cores that all ran at 108MHz.[12][9] Each processor element had four kilobytes of RAM.[12] The system was advertised as being 128 bit and capable of performing 1.5 billion instructions a second[13] (1500 MIPS). Third parties described performance as closer to 864 MIPS typically.[14]

Despite the design of the system being intended easy to program,[3] the poor performance of the system made developing ambitious titles difficult.[12]

Notable games

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Eight games were released for the Nuon platform while the system was on the market.[15] In a strange turn of events, it was announced there would be a limited official re-release for Iron Soldier 3 for Nuon in 2021.[16]

2000

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Samsung N2000

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Controllers

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Samsung N2000 Internals

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External Resources

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Wikipedia has related information at Nuon (DVD technology)

 

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Nuon (technology)

References

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Parts of this page are based on materials from:
 Wikipedia: the free encyclopedia.
  1. ↑ "VM Labs - Company Info". web.archive.org. Retrieved 7 December 2020.
  2. ↑ "After the prototype PlayStation: six more obscure games consoles" (in en). the Guardian. 7 July 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/07/prototype-nintendo-playstation-obscure-games-consoles-snes-cd. 
  3. ↑ a b c d "Inside Project X" (in en-us). Wired. https://www.wired.com/1998/07/projectx-2/. 
  4. ↑ a b c "What's the Deal with VM Labs? An Interview With Bill Rehbock". Retrieved 13 November 2020.
  5. ↑ Editors, ZDNet. "It's a DVD. No, it's a game console" (in en). ZDNet. https://www.zdnet.com/article/its-a-dvd-no-its-a-game-console/. 
  6. ↑ a b Herz, J. C. (26 November 1998). "GAME THEORY; A Name So Smooth, the Product Glides In (Published 1998)". The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1998/11/26/technology/game-theory-a-name-so-smooth-the-product-glides-in.html. 
  7. ↑ "Arcadia 2001/Home Arcade Clones – The Video Game Kraken". Retrieved 2 February 2021.
  8. ↑ Lemos, Robert. "Will Microsoft lose the living room?" (in en). ZDNet. https://www.zdnet.com/article/will-microsoft-lose-the-living-room/. 
  9. ↑ a b c d "Remembering Nuon, the gaming chip that nearly changed the world—but didn’t" (in en-us). Ars Technica. 28 June 2015. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/06/before-the-ps2-nuon-famously-tried-and-failed-to-combine-dvd-and-game-consoles/. Retrieved 25 October 2020. 
  10. ↑ Lemos, Robert. "Nuon: Game over before it began?" (in en). ZDNet. https://www.zdnet.com/article/nuon-game-over-before-it-began/. 
  11. ↑ "Nuon • VM Labs • 2000 : RAM OK ROM OK". Retrieved 7 November 2020.
  12. ↑ a b c d "Llamas In Space: Catching Up with Llamasoft's Jeff Minter". www.gamasutra.com. Retrieved 13 November 2020.
  13. ↑ "NUON-Dome - www.nuon-dome.com". www.nuon-dome.com. Retrieved 25 October 2020.
  14. ↑ "System Overview: System Overview - NUON Technology - Beyond the Mind's Eye - Thoughts & Insights from Marriott_Guy". www.rfgeneration.com. Retrieved 28 October 2020.
  15. ↑ "Video game console DVD player:Toshiba NUON Enhanced DVD Player - Toshiba Corporation". Google Arts & Culture. Retrieved 25 October 2020.
  16. ↑ "For Some Weird Reason, Iron Soldier 3 Is Getting A 2021 Rerelease For One Of The Most Obscure Consoles Of All Time". TheGamer. 7 December 2020. https://www.thegamer.com/iron-soldier-3-nuon-rerelease-2021-nuon/. 
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