Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Maciej Maciesowicz

Derek H Smith

Brian Lloyd Schmidt

Jon Marcus Randall Whitten

Gregory A Martinez

Christopher Michael Pirich

Joshua G Poley

Michael Cory Maston

Barry Aaron Steinglass

David Pickford

Communication between a game console having a communication port and a portable device is facilitated by determining that a portable device has been directly connected to the communication port, determining the protocol associated with the portable device, and communicating with the portable device using a driver associated with the determined protocol. An ancillary application may handle the communication between the game console and the portable device while a game or entertainment application executes concurrently on the game console. The game application may execute in a reserved predetermined amount of hardware resources of the game console while the ancillary application may execute concurrently using the remaining hardware resources.

Game console communication with a device

The subject invention relates to a Universal Graphics Adapter (UGA) that is a hardware-independent design that encapsulates and abstracts low-level graphics hardware in a standard manner through firmware. UGA is a firmware standard, intended to wrap existing or planned hardware, including VGA. UGA does not require the use of real-mode assembly language, direct hardware register, or frame buffer access to program, thus providing advantages over conventional systems. UGA supports basic drawing operations, continuous display modes, and power management. As a firmware-based standard, UGA facilitates updating a system to support both evolving and new hardware features. UGA includes the capability to determine ranges of output display capabilities for multiple devices and determine an overlap in capabilities of the multiple devices.

Universal graphic adapter for interfacing with UGA hardware for support of ranges of output display capabilities

A game system utilizes a codecs abstraction laver (CAL) to allow the game system to accommodate new and/or modified codecs without requiring the game application code to be modified. The CAL, functioning as an application programming interface (API), operates between media sources and the game application. The game application interacts with the CAL and not the codec. Differences between codecs are transparent to the game application. New codecs can be introduced and used by existing applications without modifying the existing application code. The CAL processes media from a variety of sources such as memory, files, http sources, queues, custom sources, external drives, or game media sources (e.g., XMedia). The CAL determines the source of the media, the type of media being received (e.g., audio, video, image, animation, or game), and the codec used to compress the media. The CAL provides the decoded media to the game application.

System for abstracting audio-video codecs

The subject invention relates to a Universal Graphics Adapter (UGA) that is a hardware-independent design that encapsulates and abstracts low-level graphics hardware in a standard manner through firmware. UGA is a firmware standard, intended to wrap existing or planned hardware, including VGA. UGA does not require the use of real-mode assembly language, direct hardware register, or frame buffer access to program, thus providing advantages over conventional systems. UGA supports basic drawing operations, continuous display modes, and power management. As a firmware-based standard, UGA facilitates updating a system to support both evolving and new hardware features.

Universal graphic adapter for interfacing with UGA hardware via UGA virtual machine and means for abstracting details of the UGA hardware

Universal graphic adapter for interfacing with UGA hardware for support of a plurality of emumerated devices

Universal graphic adapter for interfacing with hardware and means for determining previous output ranges of other devices and current device intial ranges

Universal graphic adapter for interfacing with hardware and means for encapsulating and abstracting details of the hardware

Growing community of inventors

Duvall, WA, United States of America

Maciej Maciesowicz