Late policy: The homework will be graded out of 30 points. Homeworks submitted after class starts will lose 5 points. Homeworks submitted the next day will lose 5 additional points per day. (We understand thst sometimes multiple assignments hit at once, or other life events intervene, and hence you have to make some tough choices. We'd rather let you turn something in late, with some points off, than have a "no late assignments accepted at all" policy, since the former encourages you to still do the assignment and learn something from it, while the latter just grinds down your soul.)
Note there is no "right" answer to the questions posed in (1) and (2). These are intended to get your brain cells firing about these sorts of issues. Enlighten and entertain us with your answers. You should consider the capabilities of the graphics hardware in addition to the capabilities of the main CPU. You can find information about the systems discussed on Wikipedia and through futher Googling.
1) Sega's original advertising pitted their Genesis against the NES. This was not really a fair comparison, since the Genesis came out much later. A fairer comparison would be to consider the Super NES, which came out in 1990, but that isn't really fair either since the Super NES came out a couple of years after the Genesis. The SNK Neo Geo came out at around the same time as the Super NES. Compare the Super NES with the Neo Geo. Decide which of the two you think has the best "bang per buck" (notice the Neo Geo was much more expensive than the SNES!), and convincingly explain why in somewhere between 1/3 to 1/2 of a page of elegant prose. (Yes, I am being deliberately vague about what I mean by "bang per buck.")
(As an aside, I just stumbled across Last Hope, a homebrew game created for the Neo Geo and Dreamcast in 2006!)
2) In the lecture on Friday, 8/24, we looked at the Sega Saturn, Sony Playstation, and Nintendo 64, which were the most successful consoles of that generation. A couple years before that, the Atari Jaguar, Amiga CD32, and 3D0 Interactive Multiplayer were released. Although they were nice pieces of hardware, they were all commercial failures. Choose two of these three devices. Decide which of the two you think is the most "powerful," and convincingly explain why in somewhere between 1/3 to 1/2 of a page of elegant prose. (Yes, I am being deliberately vague about what I mean by "powerful.")
3) This problem is intended to get you used to working with Visual Studio and XNA, so you can get minor confusions out of the way before we start anything serious. All you will need to turn for this problem are two screenshots.
The machines in the back two rows of Klaus 1446 should have Visual Studio 2005 and XNA Game Studio Express 2.0 installed on them. You can also do your work on your own machine, and in fact are encouraged to do so to lighten the contention on the lab machines; see here for instructions on setting up your machine with XNA. Even if your graphics card is insufficient to run XNA games, you can still edit and compile. (If you're running Visual Studio 2008, you could try this hack, but we make no guarantees.)