i think OCZ sould provide a lot of support to this product... its a new start to the way of relation game-user
i also saw that there is a restriction to only gaming by the forum managers... hmmmm its not bad for start but u also should , lets say , insist on an extenction of its use
After many months of urging, pleading and offers of help, OCZ has, as far as I can tell, not even acknowledged our interest in their product. In addition to the lack of participation in this forum and the missing mention in their documentation or FAQ, they have not responded to queries I've sent by email.
I gather that the only way we're going to see results is if some other company takes this up and produces a competing product. If OCZ is too rinky-dink a company to recognize this kind of opportunity, then it's probably better that the massive software development capabilities of the open source world be directed at a product that's more likely to stick around for a while.
It's a pity. Really, a huge missed opportunity for OCZ. The NIA seemed like a hot item. I guess it will instead be remembered as the fly-by-night tease that launched whatever product we'll all settle on any time now when someone else has cloned the hardware at a comparable price.
I'm with ghoti on this. Enormous shame. Strange that OCZ took the risk of manufacture but not the (seemingly lesser) risk of backing open source development.
At a guess the reluctance is that it would help competitors too much, so perhaps their stance will change once alternatives are released.
On the bright side, this saves me 100 quid or so
It really is a matter of releasing the specs.
I agree. OCZ is not being asked to actually write the drivers. Is it that bad to release specs so that people can do work for a company for 'free' which in turn would encourage sales?
I also agree that there are more than thirty people (Desktop users) who use Linux (maybe many of the people at NYSE, NASA or Dreamworks that might have used it at work).
If it's a question of licensing well... They might have made some sort of agreement with Brainfingers. It is sad and disappointing to want to buy something and have the seller say "Although it would cost me nearly nothing to have you as a customer, not only am I not interested, but I actively discourage you to express interest in my product." Of course, vendors can't court everyone's business but to actively discourage an entire market segment. huh. There are more Desktop Linux users than Mac users and I hadn't noticed that vendors considered Mac users insignificant.
Long story short, I'm another Gnu/Linux desktop user who would be interested in buying a NIA.
I dont know if there's IP issues with it, but opening the spec would be IMMENSELY helpful. Say "here's the spec... we stand by it... drives are your own thing to worry about"
Even if the spec only covers how to get the BRainBody signal out... thats the part that interacts with hardware.
I think that you must relase the specs. If you dont want to officialy support *nix platforms, that's a pity, you are loosing market, but if you only relase the specs, we can create all drivers an programs which are need to do the work, and you don spend a cent. And yes windows is the most used operating system, but how much people uses it for gaming? I meet more people who uses *nix platforms and wants to buy the nia (and use it for non-gaming tasks) that windows users that want to buy the nia. If you probably relase the specs and the comunity create the drivers, the product will be bought by tons of geeks who uses linux
I somewhat agree.
While I can understand that they don't want to give away their software for free, giving us the documentation on what values are actually sent through the HID device api is the least we can ask for. With this documentation, OCZ would not only have the option of selling more hardware (to curious developers), but might gain the luxury of some of these developers cooking up "better" ways to handle the raw-data -> function splits. They might actually get reduced costs AND more sales with a single action.
//Svein
Linux and gaming in 2009
I see a lot of happy penguins, playing a lot of games.
Those are the fellas, that would buy a nia, code the drivers, and share their results.
If only they had better access to the specs, it would be done by now.
They already would be working on new, special nia-games for all platforms.
It is interesting you mention a lack of participation in the nia forum because I am not sure where this idea comes from. It is so easy to point fingers and believe me, we have gone above and beyond with supporting the nia but there are limitations in what we can do. I also don't know who you sent emails to, because I am responding to about 3 or 4 per day but if you sent them to any generic address at OCZ, they might not have been forwarded to me.Originally Posted by ghoti
If there was an easy way to come up with linux drivers, or OSX, we would have done that but that's not the case. We are trying to make it work but there are priorities, for example the scaling of the GUI with text size, an auto-balance function, potentially a mouse cursor function etc., all of which require a tremendous amount of work. In addition, if you have informed yourself just a tiny little bit, you will know that OCZ is licensing the technology, which includes the core part of the software so we don't have access to the source code, in other words, you are barking up the wrong tree.
With respect to the specs, I am still at loss what specs we are supposed to release. THE SPEC is very simple, the nia is an HID that transfers data via USB - is that what was missing? Everything else is essentially done in software.
Thanks for listening
I think specs pretty much refers to the information these guys are trying to find out on their own: here.
And other information of that nature.
The complaint about lack of activity and response in this forums is absurd.
This forum is being read and answered frequently. Even if we dont always like the answers.
The main problem is that this kind of forum-software is not good for pooling and structuring information, compared to todays standards.
Yes, technically a forum is already web2.0 ... but it was more a 80s-90s thing and it certainly cant replace a Wiki.
Thank you, Sir!
Basically, we have two signals that are inverted with respect to each other and a center reference. On the hardware level, a common mode rejection is done already on the analog portion of the hardware, after which the differentials are digitized and sent to the PC via a USB interface. Those data are, as mentioned in the Sourceforge article, raw EEG data and all the software does is deconvolute them into the different frequency bands.
I am not a software engineer but there were enough posts early on by some users that it was the easiest thing to write their own API and do the filtering their own way. I don't know whether that is true or not but FFT has been around forever, so what is the problem of writing that type of application? Most of the "specific" nia secret sauce deals with porting the signals directly into DirecX, and that doesn't apply to Linux anyway or am I mistaken?
THANK YOU, UNREGISTERED!
In that single post, you gave us more info on the data the box sends than anyone has done before, and gave us a fair chance to work with the hardware to create drivers for you, without infringing in the intellectual property contained in the NIA app.
Any chance we could get a more details on this level? What we need, is the actual "packet template" on the data that is being sent to the host machine via the HID interface. If we have that, we can pretty much start working on our own, and help you, and of course if we are REALLY nice, we can use a split-license model, where some of the major libraries can be dual-licensed both BSD and GPL, and thus (due to the BSD license model) OCZ can use those libraries in their closed-source app with no risk of having to opensource their own app.
What you gave us here, is what we have been asking for since before christmas (and what others probably have asked for before my time here)
THANK YOU again!
//Svein
a minor p.s. to this:
Is there already a wiki where we can collect the needed info, assign tasks, etc, or should I Shanghai one of you used to administering a wiki, and set up a dedicated vmware guest for hosting our work? (I have the bandwith and server space for this, right here at home)
//Svein
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