In its latest bid for world hardware domination, Intel Corp plans to go after the specialist games companies and introduce a hardware specification based on the Pentium II in an effort to turn it into a single standard to which all games developers will write. According to the San Jose Mercury News, the aim is to address the problem that games developers may want to write four versions of their games – one for arcades, and one each for Sega Enterprises Ltd, Nintendo Co Ltd and Sony Corp’s consoles. What makes the idea a little less than convincing is that the customer for games for a $150 64-bit Nintendo console is hardly the same person as the owner of a fully-featured $3,000 multimedia machine – and as long as games for consoles remain enticing, there will be many more of the former. The spec includes 266MHz or 233MHz Pentium II with 16Mb, a fast graphics board and Windows95 or Windows NT. Intel expects that to cost $2,000 by the middle of 1998.
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