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I consider Windows to be a really awesome console, and in that respect, Windows has the best in latest PC gaming. It is not as "easy" as an Xbox360 or Playstation 3, and not as portable as many of the handhelds, but if you want one machine for gaming, Windows is a great way to go

One machine, or four machines? It appears that most PC game developers start from an assumption that a PC's monitor can't be bigger than 19 inches diagonal, and the developer neglects to add split-screen for people who have the PC hooked up to a 32" TV. (Most 720p and 1080p HDTVs have VGA and HDMI in; you can add a VGA input to an SDTV with a scan converter.) So you usually need a separate PC and a separate copy of the game for each user, and that gets a lot more expensive than plugging four controllers into an Xbox 360 or a PLAYSTATION 3.

I've never had a PC that could not display on a SDTV.

The desktop PCs I saw at big-box stores have VGA or DVI out and that's it. All PCs can display on an SDTV with a $50 VGA-to-composite adapter. But because big-box stores don't carry these adapters, the general public doesn't know they exist. There are aftermarket video cards with built-in scan converters, but most home PC owners never seem to replace their video card before throwing out the whole PC.

Nowadays HD is the standard

Sure, there are standards for HDTV transmission. But can you cite a source stating that the majority of U.S. homes with a TV have an HDTV? The latest figure I could find was 34 percent. As of right now, developers of video games designed to display on a TV have to target the rat's nest of mandatory DRM that is game consoles.

and the PC is better at doing that

Then why do so few PC games have a mode designed to split a 32" HDTV, compared to the 19" monitor per player that most PC games assume? It might even be a form of DRM, so that people who want multiplayer have to buy more copies of the game.

The largest monitor in a typical home is an SDTV. Consoles, unlike most PCs, can display on SDTVs.

I don't think either of those sentences are true.

As for the first: Most televisions are bigger than the typical computer monitor because they're designed for the viewer to sit farther back. And HDTV penetration in USA, Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand still hasn't hit 51 percent to my knowledge.

As for the second: I've never seen integrated graphics on a desktop PC with anything but VGA output. There are aftermarket video cards with composite output, and there are $50 adapters to convert VGA or DVI-I to composite, but most end users I've run into don't own either of those. So people who play ROM hacks in emulators have to either buy one of those adapters, buy an HDTV, or play on a comparatively tiny PC monitor.

I didn't specify live video encoding.

Your wording gave off the subtext that you thought live video encoding was commercially unimportant. I was just trying to warn you against being so dismissive.

Live video encoding is not often encountered in a desktop PC environment

Citation needed.

I would go so far as to say that the majority of video broadcasts are not live.

And you'd be right, but tell that to my sports fan grandfather or my MSNBC-loving grandmother.

Most PCs have VGA or DVI-I output abilities, and the conversion to the RCA connectors requires no special electronics.

Most PCs won't go lower than 480p[1] at 31 kHz horizontal scan rate, and they output RGB component video. SDTVs need the video downsampled to 240p or 480i at 15.7 kHz, and most also need red, green, and blue signals to be multiplexed into composite video (or S-Video if you're lucky). Every game console since the Atari 2600 can reduce its scan rate to match that of an SDTV; most desktop PCs cannot, at least without an external adapter or an aftermarket video card.

[1] In the "DOS style" text mode, the PC goes down to 400p, but that's it.

Actually this console exits it name is PC.

All video game consoles can output composite video to a standard-definition television set. PCs can output VGA video to an HDTV, but most don't come with the special video card needed to output composite. One can use a $50 adapter to downsample VGA signals into composite or S-Video, but most people don't know they exist because Walmart*, Target, and Best Buy don't carry such adapters. One can use a computer monitor, but fitting four people around one 19" PC monitor is a lot more cramped than fitting four people around one 27" TV, and buying four separate PCs is a heck of a lot more expensive. And Anonymous Coward is right that unless you target the lowest common denominator (Intel GMA), you'll unwittingly make your game on depend OpenGL extensions that not all popular video cards can handle.

Nowadays you can go for a mid to low range processor and a 100$ graphics card

You need four mid to low range processors and four 100$ graphics cards unless you want to take turns.

Between that are 30-40$ games while console owners pay up to 70-80$

It becomes a $120-$160 game unless you want to take turns.

(It is even worse in Europe where companies constantly sell 1 USD for 1 EUR)

Compared to the United States, sales tax in Europe is higher and more often included in the MSRP.

Use it as a media center. That is, connect it to your TV

How does one use a PC that has only VGA out with a CRT SDTV that has only composite in? I know about scan converters, but the electronics stores in my area don't carry them, and most people won't think to shop online.

When PC gaming dies

It was stillborn. If you have three gamers in the house and one who visits, the hardware costs $2,400 (four PCs with monitor at $600 each) and the games cost $160 each (four copies at $40 each because few games support Starcraft-style spawn installations). I think the lack of PC titles that support the console-style model of a big screen and USB gamepads comes from the fact that since the late 1980s, most monitors with a VGA input have been sized for one person. HDTVs can display PC signals, but those haven't been affordable for long enough to replace the CRT SDTV. And VGA to SDTV converters aren't sold in retail stores.

and Nintendo no longer sells ROMs on the Wii

Let me know when Nintendo resolves the conjectured legal issues holding up release of Mother and Earthbound on the North American Wii Shop Channel, and we'll talk.

For $180 less you can get a PC with the better specs than this thing that also runs Linux.

Does a $200 PC have composite or S-Video output? No; that's a $50 extra.

The screen size issue can be solved when people realize that giant screens (as long as they are high def)

And that's a big "as long as". In this economy, a lot of people don't want to go into $600 of debt buying a 32"[1] HDTV to replace a 27" CRT SDTV that's paid for and still works. And unlike for ATSC converters, there's no federal coupon program for the $40 converter needed to run a PC through an SDTV.

are great for computer usage as well as watching TV :)

I've tried word-processing and coding with a 32" Vizio TV as a monitor. It was disconcerting at first how I could see the pixels; I had to turn the font size way down to compensate. My neck got tired of moving my head to see the whole screen. I had to use pillar-boxed 1024x768 because 1280x720 was blurry and 1360x768 (the panel's native resolution) was unavailable, as you mentioned. And a single TV usually[2] can't display TV and computer signals at the same time, except possibly through a picture-in-picture feature that blurs text to oblivion.

[1] By the Pythagorean theorem, you need 22% more diagonal inches to get the same picture height on a 16:9 monitor that replaces a 4:3 monitor.

Most TVs sold in the last year are HDTV

Most TVs in homes are not sold in the last year. Instead, they are CRT SDTVs, possibly up to a decade old. My aunt's TV, for instance, is so old that it doesn't even have composite in; she has to use an RF modulator to watch DVDs or play PlayStation 2.

most high end video cards have s-video out

Most video cards in homes are not high-end. In fact, no desktop PC sold in Office Depot has S-Video out; instead, you get a VGA port and if you're lucky a DVI port. (I guess nobody has to make a presentation and display the slides on a big-screen SDTV.) I couldn't even find a VGA-to-S-Video scan converter in Best Buy or Office Depot; a Best Buy sales associate told me to try online.

shouldn't you invest $300 and upgrade?

Most people don't open their PC to upgrade the video card. They need something external. Should I just make a game for Windows and point customers who own an SDTV to PC to TV on sewelldirect.com?

But even a scan converter won't help with the all-too-common case where the family TV and the family PC are in separate rooms.

PC homebrew can't easily run on a big screen. The PC and TV need to be in the same room, and either the TV needs to be an HDTV or there needs to be a $50 scan converter between the PC's VGA out and the SDTV's composite in.

Most TVs sold in the last year are HDTV and most of those have VGA or DVI inputs. But if not, most high end video cards have s-video out. If you can't even do s-video with your TV, shouldn't you invest $300 and upgrade? Cheaper than a console...

There's no home brew better than PC home brew

PC homebrew can't easily run on a big screen. The PC and TV need to be in the same room, and either the TV needs to be an HDTV or there needs to be a $50 scan converter between the PC's VGA out and the SDTV's composite in. This difficulty is why your 17" laptop doesn't have a lot of party-style games (like Mario Party, Super Smash Bros., Mario Kart Wii, etc.) for it, even though PC operating systems support four gamepads through a USB hub.

The most accurate true to life simulation - eg. flight simulation - compared to arcade games on most consoles

But some people want arcade-style games. If I want to develop party games, and my business isn't yet big enough to have a detached office, which platform should I be on?

Something like this costs about $60. http://sewelldirect.com/PC-to-TV-Converter_specs.asp

Advantage to it is that it down-samples up to a 1280x1024 resolution to 480i. Most standard computer svideo/rca out seems to only support downsampling from 1024x768.

I've used a VGA to Component(RGB) input adapter that I picked up at my local Microcenter years ago. It has dipswitched (480i/480p/720p/1080i) output and works with many types of monitors, but doesn't rescale the computer's resolution.

You could also buy a videocard with s-video out for less than $20.

Walmart.com will gladly sell you a HP Pavilion Slimline

Yeah, for $1,000. I could buy all three major video game consoles for that amount of money. I saw another HP Pavilion Slimline PC in Office Depot that costs no more than a PLAYSTATION 3 or an Xbox 360 Elite. But here's the kicker, from the "Specifications" on the page you linked:

External Ports: 6 USB 2.0 ports (2 Front, 4 Back) , FireWire (IEEE 1394) port (Back), Headphone (Front), 2 PS/2; Digital Audio-out; LAN; Microphone/Line-in/Line-out; VGA-out (Back)

No composite video output. My aunt's CRT SDTV has composite video and analog audio inputs (yellow, white, and red RCA jacks), and the PC you recommend has a VGA output (DE15) and a 3.5mm stereo audio jack. Adapters for the latter are easy to find, but the only way to turn VGA video into composite is a scan converter. All three consoles come with a built-in scan converter, and some discrete video cards have one built-in, but none of the desktop PCs in Office Depot have it. And the only scan converter on Walmart.com has 1 star out of 5.

Monitor extra.

Most people already have an SDTV monitor in the living room that's large enough for four people holding gamepads to sit around. Consoles have the advantage over low-end slim PCs in that consoles work with SDTV monitors.

Using a PC just plain sucks and rarely works without major hickups

What kind of shit PC are you using anyway?

One without a composite video output. People like to sit in a recliner or sofa to watch long-form video, and this needs a large monitor. I was at Walmart* last night, and the large monitors that Walmart sells for under $300 have only composite video input because they're CRT SDTVs. You would need a $50 device called a scan converter to translate the 480p, 600p, or 768p RGB output of a computer into the 480i composite signal that an SDTV expects.

Or one in the other room. Almost any TV over $300 is an HDTV with a suitable VGA input. But even people with an HDTV often don't have a PC in the same room as the TV.

Or one that's in use. The operating systems used on most home PCs aren't capable of mapping the remote control and one video card and sound card to one user session (the TV) and the keyboard, mouse, and a second video card and sound card to another session (someone else in the house who is surfing the web or working on a spreadsheet).

You can do DVI with baluns, they are just a bit more complicated and hence expensive. I found this one for a bit over $200.

Unlike most PCs, a game console has SDTV outputs, and most PCs would need a $40 adapter to simulate that.

Every pc I have bought for more than five years has had SDTV video out. Business laptops, gaming video cards, even a cheapo desktop solution. That said, as long as Nintendo is designing consoles with that sort of game in mind, (and they have been for what, a decade now?), most party games are going to be made for a Nintendo system. After all, who wants to go to the effort of making it work on a PC when a Nintendo console seems so affordable? After spending 250$ on more controllers and so forth, that has less relevance, but as a perceived value thing, it usually kicks in.

Even if OS did produce a line up of great games (which at this point, it hasn't IMO). They could not be made available for the Xbox.

HP makes a computer called the Pavilion Slimline that's not much bigger than an Xbox 360. Install Linux onto such a slim PC and plug it through a VGA or DVI-to-HDMI cable into an HDTV, or plug it through a $40 converter to an SDTV. So the dearth of Free games is still a software issue.

The wonderful thing about computers is they can simulate anything else -- including a game console

Unlike most PCs, a game console has SDTV outputs, and most PCs would need a $40 adapter to simulate that. It's a lot easier to fit four people around a 27" SDTV than around a 17" monitor, even though the 17" monitor has a higher resolution. Most party games are either single-console exclusives or on everything-but-the-PC because their publishers assume that customers using a PC aren't going to buy the $40 adapter and a $10 USB hub to plug in four game controllers.

I'm another person that moved off the PC to consoles, as much due to social reasons as anything (playing with friends on the TV is just nicer)

For under $200, you can get set up to play PC games on a TV. Plug four $20 Logitech gamepads into a $20 USB hub, and run the PC's video output through a $10 VGA cable into an HDTV or through a $40 converter box into an SDTV. Load up a game, and you're set.

Any time I've ever lived with people who game, all of us had their own PCs.

You have a point about M rated games like Diablo III is expected to be, as each player is expected to either be in college or have a job. But E, E10+, or T rated games have players under 18, who due to school and child labor laws usually can't work to buy their own PCs and have to play on the family PC. Besides, two copies of a $40 game without single-screen multiplayer are more expensive than one copy of a $60 game that includes it.

you had to both huddle over 1 PC

A sufficiently large monitor should not require "huddling".

with a split screen

Diablo shouldn't have to split anything if both players' characters stick within a few meters of each other. Secret of Mana didn't.

#1 hdtvs in stores (and sometimes in people's houses) OFTEN are displaying SD material,

Of course. The DRM system, HDCP, won't let you run multiple monitors from the same protected source. The player and monitor do a cryptographic key exchange to authenticate the monitor, then exchange session keys. So each player-to-monitor session has a unique key. You can't just split the output.

There are multiple-output HDCP-compliant splitters., and they're not cheap. $750 for a 5-output unit is typical. These are certified DRM devices that do the cryptographic handshake on both sides, decrypting and re-encrypting within a single IC, as required by the HDCP consortium. You might find these in use at a high-end video store, but the local discount electronics retailer won't bother. Our local Fry's and Costco are still piping analog S-Video into most of their HTDV monitors.

I might suggest not buying laptops from Best Buy and buying business notebooks instead of consumer oriented ones. Better choices

I have a nc8430 which is now discontinued but it is workstation class and doesn't generate too much heat. Yes it can get uncomfortable if I leave it on my laptop for six hours with the charger plugged in but if I'm off battery power all is well. It has held up rather well and it gets beat on pretty bad.

Others have suggested it though and I don't disagree, if you need a powerful workstation a desktop is a better and more ergonomic solution. I have to travel a lot and need the horsepower on the road so I'm rather stuck but it works out rather nicely for me. Pretty soon I'll have a tablet and my workstation notebook that will be used for the heavy lifting at my temporary desk setups while I use the tablet when I'm walking about the site since the place is saturated with wifi it's quite easy for me.

My next addition to my current laptop is this multi-monitor adapter, so I'll have pretty much everything I need in a very small and very portable package.

...on the same web site :

http://sewelldirect.com/IDE-to-SerialATA-Converter .asp

a little pricey, IMO, but it's there if you want it.

http://sewelldirect.com/SerialATAtoIDEConverter.as p

1. Software RAID - does well in benchmarks, but it does rely on the CPU. This has gotten better with the advent of multi-core and especially multi-cpu + multi-core, but the other thing to keep in mind is that the OS IS doing other things. What this means is that an errant program does have a chance of affecting your RAID. Could be absolutely disastrous. RAID (true RAID, not RAID0) only works if the RAID manager is doing what it is supposed to do. I wouldn't rely on OS software RAID. There are too many variables. Also, things like hot swapping might not be available. A RAID where you have to bring the system down to do a harddrive replace isn't all that beneficial IMHO.
2. Hardware RAID card - This works in conjunction with an OS driver. Combined with hotswap capable backplanes, this can be a pretty good solution. The problem with HW RAID is that the processing power of the cards is often times week. Upgrading to a faster processor sometimes isn't possible without compromising the entire RAID set (esp. true if changing vendors). End user machines (until PCIe) were somewhat bandwidth limited. 33Mhz PCI, which is what most (somewhat older) desktop machines have is not enough oompf for a large RAID. Linux driver support can be spotty... and buggy. LSI, for example, has made some interesting RAID products, and while Linux users enjoy using older equipment, LSI pretty much doesn't support some of their older cards anymore. Granted, those older cards (which were top of the line 5 years ago), probably aren't that great today, but the fact that they are losing their driver support is frustrating.
3. JBOD - Well.... not much to say here... there isn't much benefit. However, realize that if you can separate disk pathways AND you layout your disks to use each drive efficiently (e.g. /usr/bin on one disk, /usr/lib on another, etc.) you can get some pretty dramatic performance gains, even without RAID striping.
4. RAID subsystem - This is the one not specifically mentioned and it's what I recommend. The benefits of an external RAID subsystem is the flexibility. These units can often times be shared across multiple machines (and NO I'm not talking NAS... I'm talking direct attached SCSI, iSCSI or Fibre channel), can support large amounts of cache and can offer good RAID levels. Since the device manages it's own space, the device itself can notify you of hardware failures and such with relying on coordination with a proprietary driver. Since the computer device just sees a normal drive, there are no driver issues. I can completely saturate (easily) a 2Gbps fibre with one of these (with a relatively small array). There a several manufacturers out there that use inexpensive SATA drives... but there are SCSI and fibre drive based units out there too. I like Nexsan, http://www.nexsan.com/ probably the most. I have also used VERY inexpensive Arena based units, http://www.maxtronic.com./ Both work really well. Pretty easy to get 100MB/s to 200MB/s with these devices and still have almost equally as fast writes while using RAID 5 or RAID 6. If you are looking for a cheap mirroring INTERNAL subsystem, I have used Accordance ARAID systems. I recommend those as well if you just need a two drive mirror. Obviously you get more of performance hit.... but good if you want OS independent HW subsystem RAID that is internal, http://sewelldirect.com/araid-2000-sata-raid-1.asp ?source=froogle&utm_source=Froogle&utm_medium=cse.

I can pretty much guarantee that once you've switched to a HW RAID subsystem, you'll probably never use anything else. The extra money spent on those is well worth it (IMHO). To keep costs down, ebay is obviously your friend. I've purchased 4 drive Arena units for less than $400. I

I opted for a Mac Mini over an AppleTV when rebuilding my home entertainment setup.
Although the AppleTV has HDMI, component etc., it isn't fast enough to run the emulators I primarily want it for.

The Mac Mini has DVI video out, and the audio I/O is on combination optical digital/analog minijacks. The optical output is converted to co-axial S/PDIF using a M-Audio CO2, and the DVI and S/PDIF are combined into a HDMI signal using a Gefen adapter.
The same connectivity is available on your MacBook Pro, but it is a kludge, and the audio and DVI are on opposite sides so it's not very neat.

As someone points out below, this was supposed to be part of the promise of Firewire - but just like MLAN, it didn't deliver. And yeah, the only difference between modern "consumer" and "professional" connectors is DRM support.

Its called an itheater
http://sewelldirect.com/i-Theater-Personal-Theater -System.asp
Looking at the box I'm pretty sure its the exact same thing.

The box takes the HDMI input and makes the HDCP authorization routine happy. The switch will output via component video.

Yeah - I know this one is $1500. But it takes just about any input and converts to just about any output. I've seen early products (seems like it was from Sweden) that just did the HDMI-to-component video conversion for $150.

I know that the HDCP technology can dynamically be updated to turn off the compliance key in these devices. But there will be two problems: (1)there will be a zillion of these on the market; and (2) consumers (and their lawyers) will be screaming.

Get a pile of hard drives, and a pile of these:

USB to IDE cable