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3DO tried something similiar back in the early 90's. As well as their console, you could purchase a 3DO Blaster for your PC which would allow you to play 3DO games on your PC. It failed miserably. http://assembler.roarvgm.com/3do_blaster/3do_blast er.html

If the objects are in near-earth orbit, then at some point it the future their orbits should all decay into the earth's atmosphere, at which point they will incinerate themselves. Sounds like a self-correcting problem to me! The only question is: when? Anybody have any guesses on how long it will take all this junk to deorbit if we just leave it alone?

But on the way down, these object may collide with each other, and create many more smaller pieces of space junk (kind of like a real world version of the Asteroids video game).

It's a real shame the laser solution with the Space Shuttle doesn't work...this image could become reality.

Join us at Assemblers forum: http://assembler.roarvgm.com/

Amstrad sold a PC with a MegaDrive (Genesis) built into it.

http://assembler.roarvgm.com/Amstrad_megadrive_com puter_1/amstrad_megadrive_computer_1.html

I agree with most of the sentiments here:

1.) Would be way cool, and if they did I'd buy it immediately.

2.) Not likely given Nintendo's long, LONG history of iron fisted rule over their games and hardware

But,

1.) We were already told that the Revolution is going to play old Nintendo games. Its already going to have a framework for downloading and running non-Revolution code (most likely via emulation). Perhaps Nintendo will release DevKits that produce code that'll run on those emulators. I guess that would be like releasing NES/SNES/N64 DevKits (which they couldn't sell to developers anymore anyways).

2.) Saturo Iwata is not Hiroshi Yamauchi. We really haven't seen what his influence on Nintendo is going to be like - he may push for something, well, revolutionary like this.

I'd also like to point out that home brew is not without precedent on the consoles http://assembler.roarvgm.com/Yarouze/yarouze.html

It would also be nice if these multimedia cards contained the same hardware as the current console market. So you could either buy a console for your TV, or buy a multimedia card for your computer.

Hey, you just predicted the 3DO Blaster!

... and we all know what a smash hit that was!

No one has heard of GameAxe

This was tried around 15 years ago by Virtuality. But back then, the helmets were absolutely massive, with a mini CRT monitors for each eye. At the companies peak, there were Virtuality booths close to every Underground station in central London. You could pay around 7 pounds for 20 minutes play. Although the games were simple, they were fun. One game was a first-person shooter, where you tried to shoot flying pterodactyls while trying to avoid being snatched or shooting other players.

Atari and the other console makers also jumped onto the VR bandwagon, even though the headsets were much lighter (later versions of the Virtuality helmet.

Obviously, you could do the same thing today, with consumer VR hardware, but the problem is cost. Consumers are more aware of the cost of playing in an arcade vs. playing at home. If the average game plays for one unit of currency for three minutes, and one person wants to play for three hours, thats 120 units of currency. For three months play, that amount of money would allow you to buy buy a PC + VR headset + broadband. Plus with headsets being as small and light as they are, they would very easily be stolen/broken. And that's not taking into account having to pay for parking, expensive drinks/snacks, worry about your belongings being stolen, your car being broken into, being mugged on the way home, or spend time finding a parking space.

Altered Beast for the Sega Genesis had a bad ass cover imho... seen http://www.roarvgm.com/COVERS/GENESIS/altered%20be ast-USA.jpg there.

Yeah, it'd be kind of like the Fujitsu FM Towns Marty! [assembler.roarvgm.com] That would be awesome... that was such a cool system, and the FM Towns computers in Japan were quite interesting and powerful for their time.

"Back that up."
Ok. Take a look here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. And for more plenty more links to back it up, Google has you covered. Hope that helps.

No. Nintendo didn't offer Online play because NO ONE WANTS it except a VERY small percentage of players. Why? Because if I have broadband, I probably have a PC, if I have a PC, I can play online. In fact I can even play same games online you can't play online in the console versions(Halo), and I have access to a userbase that DWARFS anything any of the consoles have. And, to top it all off, unless you're playing an MMORPG, it's FREE.

I find it incredibly funny that you criticize Nintendo for this, but you do not criticize Sony. The XBox's online play is the clear winner between the two. Sony's system simply sucks. Nintendo could try to compete with MS, but really, what's the point. The crowd that goes out and buys that console isn't generally the same crowd that goes out and buys a GCN. Only the truly dedicated gamer owns all three consoles.

They were the first to offer something like internet capability, btw, with their Famicom network system in Japan. This was before you probably had any idea there even WAS an internet. That link only refers to the fact that you could bank and trade with it, google for it, you'll find other things.

It went down like a ton of bricks in post-collapse Japan. The idea was before it's time. They still, however, were the first console company to do anything like that.

Nintendo will offer online service when the time is right, but to say you got screwed because they didn't bundle a $40 network adapter in with it is ridiculous. Sony didn't either! I prefer to save $50 and be able to buy a $50 plug in network adapater, personally. If there aren't any network-capable games I want to play, I've just saved $50. WTG Sony and Nintendo, modularity rocks! Sure, they could've included DVD playback, but by the time the GCN came out, DVD players had fallen in price and anyone who wanted a combo game-device/DVD player already owned a PS2. So, once again I ask, what would be the point?

I see no value whatsoever in online console gaming, maybe you do, fine, our opinions differ. Nintendo has been burnt once and they're waiting until the time is right. Sony and MS are doing all of the research, stumbling, and testing FOR them. Hell, Sega even had a system where you could play Sega games through your cable. At some hotels you can play N64 games through your TV, downloaded over a Network. The idea is not new, and it's failed time after time, and it's still, to go by market penetration, FAILING.

It was offered by the other two console companies not for the benefit of consumers but as a gimmick to sell more systems, and Nintendo, this generation, made the right decision. If you feel so cheated, go buy a $40 network adapter and install warp-pipe. Boom, you can now play a bunch of nintendo games online.

Also, to claim that MS cares about consumers is so laughable it's not even worthy of a rebuttal. They don't, they want to dominate the market so they can get away with selling you crap. They will only offer value until they dominate, at which point you will be SOL. Remember the NES days? Nintendo was a pretty benevolent dictator.

Compare the quality of games then to the quality of MS's other products prior to the rise of open source. Who would you rather support? Who still produces(produced) quality in spite of having a virtual monopoly? Super Mario 3 versus Windows ME, anyone?

Compare the longevity of Nintendo hardware(Every system I've bought from them is still working, and it's been played ALOT[plus up until recently I could still buy replacement NES parts direct from Nintendo, not that I've ever had to.]) to the longevity of Sony hardware or to MS's Software versions. So Sony bundled a lot of stuff in, it turned out to be more expensive and they didn't build it to last. Microsoft likes enforcing an upgrade cycle/subscription plan.

Nintendo also has the most customer friendly warranty/fix policy around. Th

I never understood what all the hype was about the Game Boy series.. When every 3rd kid lugged around a thingy with a b/w screen and tinny sound, I had an Atari Lynx with four-channel stereo sound, 16-bit graphics with 3-d instructions and up to 6 players via network. 12 years ago. So don't talk about nintendo being 'innovative'.

Quite old, actually, here you go, the Phantom System.

It's a NES clone released in Brazil in the late 80s. It was actually pretty good, with the design copied from the Atari 7800 and controllers copied from the Genesis. :)

PS What would be more interesting? An Apple Game Console, or an IBM Game Console???

[i]One thing many posters have ignored is the price of a GB SP + a good mobile phone, namly which is going to be ~$100-$200.[/i]

Not sure if many people know about the Pioneer Laseractive, but it was a Laserdisc player that you could buy add-ons for. The three add-ons that were released were a Genesis add-on, a Turbo-Grafx-16 add-on, and a Karaoko add-on. If you had the Genesis add-on, you could play Genesis games, SegaCD games, as well as special MegaLD games that came on laserdisc (guess how many of these actually came out). Similarly, the TG16 add-on played carts, TurboCD's and TurboLD's (Which were apperently completely different from the MegaLD games, and NOT compatible). This actually sounds like a good idea, since you'd be able to combine all your entertainment stuff into one unit.

However, the add-ons cost around $700 each. Naturally, everyone realized that buying an actual Genesis + SegaCD was about half that price, and the thing sold very poorly. It would make a nice collectors item these days though.

Here's an even better site.

It may not have made the article because: A.) It was primarily sold in Japan, and B.) It was more of a premature "digital convergance" box than a pure game machine per se. A co-production with Bandai, the Pippin used a PowerPC 603 processor and a slimmed-down version of Apple OS.

Information on this system is surprisingly hard to come by for a machine released in the mid-1990s, but here's an ancient page listing the specshttp://karx.narod.ru/tmegames/pippin.html.

And another link from a retrogaming site: http://assembler.roarvgm.com/Apple_Bandai_pippin/a pple_bandai_pippin.html.

Very very insightful. Your thoughts do bring back to my mind the Amstrad Megadrive. This was a bit of a flop, mainly because well most prefered the snes to the megadrive.

The applications for linux on a console are also pretty well documented for developing countries. I'm sure someone (most likely either MS, Sony or Nintendo) will see this very good way to drive up sales. "Much more than a console". The smart money must be on Sony or Nintendo packing Linux into future systems or MS chucking on some version of windows.

One problem with relying on TV sets is that you can be restricted to crappy resolution rates if you have a crap tv.

Sega's decision to become a third-party dev instead of a console manufacturer just keeps working better and better, eh? Maybe we'll see a Sonic game on the Palm .. *drool* Or better yet a Genesis emulator. Except you'd need the m500 series for that (or one of the others with expansion card support) because the ROMs would be way too big to hold in RAM. Still cool, though

Genesis?!?! Damnit, does noone rememeber GAMEGEAR ...

Believe it. This isn't that odd to me. I had to write some routines for a wireless base station for one of the first PCS systems, which had only 128 bytes of RAM. You had to do everything in this, including your stack. Plus the chip did not have multiplication as a native operator, so if you wanted to multiply two words, it would be 8 bytes on the stack (4 for the pc and tos, and the two words. The routine I did didn't take any more than that). We had 128K, though, not 4K. This was also problematic when it came to ram because calling from one 64K area to the other took an extra 5 bytes (multiply was in both sections).

I just learned about this a few days ago, but Apple was working on - and did finally produce - a game console called "Pippin." It was essentially a 66mhz Mac with lots of funktastic hardware. It could run MacOS though (or at least supported a huge chunk of MacOS Toolbox), so there were internet plans and all. Check out some info at:
http://assembler.roarvgm.com/Apple_Bandai_pippin/a pple_bandai_pippin.html

If I had more info, I'd provide it. Do a search on your favorite search engine to find more info.