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Can Indrema Beat Microsoft To the Punch?
Console gaming is a harshly competitive field, though, with Sony, Nintendo, and Sega (soon to be joined by Microsoft) clawing for reputation, marketshare and all-important game sales. Don't forget that three major players (Sega, Nintendo, Sony) can make a claim that neither Microsoft or Indrema can: their consoles exist, sell, and make people happy. A Playstation in the hand offers utility that "upcoming" devices can't match.
Still, it looks like the so-called X-Box from Microsoft is the machine Indrema's box would be running against, assuming that both of them actually reach the market. Similar specs and expansion capabilities mean that either could be enough computer for people interested primarily in games and getting online, who are looking for no more than a single no-hassle combination of these. That's why the Indrema machine isn't being sold as a gaming device, but rather as a Web Console, with copious references to "the future of TV."
The game-box as everything-box market has been promised for years, and keeps turning out to be either unsatisfying and limited (WebTV), or Yet Another Gaming Machine, despite promises to the contrary. Remember the ColecoVision ADAM? The real question seems to be whether a Linux-based console from an unknown company can survive in the gaming marketplace; after that we can worry about whether it will replace recipe books in the kitchen and the cable box in the living room. After all, that "everthing console" isn't technically impossible; it's just always fizzled as PCs have surpassed the jack-of-all-trades game machines in usefulness, if not in sizzle.
Now, for a minute, forget technical brilliance, forget flexibility, forget how cool it would be to run Linux on your bedside table. Think money, instead.
Microsoft's R&D budget is bigger than the GNP of many nations in the world. The Men In Redmond have enough marketing money to buy Superbowl advertising without batting an eye. You can bet when the X-Box launches, it will have been preceded by a canny stream of attention-building hype, that it will look sexy, and that it will sell at a carefully chosen price aimed at moving it as fast as they can be cranked out and still maximize profits. Likewise, Sega, Sony and Nintendo all have plenty of market savvy and established infrastructure, right down to magazines, distribution networks and strategically-released hints and easter eggs. Not only that, but they each have a hefty stable of games, including Hollywood-names and weird-but-true fandom games like Pokemon, as well legions of rabid fans to play them and design houses to keep 'em coming. It would take a hefty treasure chest (or a lot of faith) for a newcomer in the game market to get the kind of pop-culture deal that sells games based on Star Wars, The X-Files or even Barbie.
Now think money again, but in a different way. An open-source OS may save Indrema a few dollars per box in making the console, but since the guts of the machine they describe include 100Mb ethernet and loads of other ports, a 600MHz processor, and an optional hard drive, its price will probably be in line with that of the X-Box. That is to say, probably overlapping the price range and capabilities of low-end PCs, and without the same economies of scale that Microsoft will likely generate. Even so, since gaming consoles have traditionally been loss-leaders to sell high-margin games, will an open-OS machine be used to play primarily commercial, proprietary games?
If that's the case, then Indrema will have to scramble to provide enough hot-selling games to subsidize console sales. The Sony Playstation 2, already out in Japan and due in the US next fall, boasts more than 160 registered developers worldwide. And since it plays the first generation Playstation games as well, players can choose from more than 3,000 games. By contrast, the leap from NES to Nintendo 64 may have been too great for generational compatibility to have played much of a role, something that Sony has obviously learned from. Microsoft, meanwhile, may not have as large a signed-on group, but carries enough clout (and waves enough cash) in the PC gaming industry to ensure at least a handful of blockbuster games early on. Against that kind of competition, any new entrant is playing catch-up ball.
In fact, there's little indication of what games the Indrema system would play. The box is listed as including Quake 3 Arena / Unreal Tournament, but the Indrema site lists no other game possibilities. And since it touts a "special 'DV Linux' distribution," it's unclear which games will run out-of-box. The X-box is planned to run only games written specifically for it; avoiding that fate seems tricky, since games on every platform except those written for a particular console have a way of sneakily requiring more or different resources than you've got in the box. And if the Indrema machine should have complex enough of an interface to allow users to easily modify directories, install packages and otherwise tweak the contents of that optional hard drive, would it be able to retain the ease of use the console market thrives on?
On the other hand, perhaps packaged games aren't the point at all. Every major player in the console industry is selling their systems' networkability, whether by dialup modem or broadband. Microsoft's interest in WebTV -- and the pay-per-month online games now available -- may be a taste of where the console makers would really like their revenue to come from: a captive audience willing to pay not only for games or other applications, but for access to them. Repeat business and low margins have sold billions of hamburgers, after all. It's plausible that Indrema will offer servers featuring games exclusive to monthly subscribers, or on a per-game basis.
Indrema's nearly breathless Web site hints at a Winter 2000 release: "expected to ship in time for Christmas." That's well before the X-Box is slated to ship, according to this ActiveNetwork comparison of the Sony Playstation 2 and the X-box. I hope they're right, because it seems like a head start might be the only hope for survival against the big-name establishment.
Yeah, we'll be able to hook up painlessly to all DSL/cable modem providers. Jeez.. not bloody likely. This site is full of pipe dreams and only pipe dreams. Why is this being posted? Now, if they were unveiling the box, sure, that's newsworthy. Just announcing the intention of making it is a complete non-event. I'm guessing these guys know how to get their site linked or somethin!
I just read it. They said it will be w2k w/o a browser. Didn't they once say the browser was an integral part of the OS?
i think he was talking about that stupid pokemon...
Easy, simple steps (yes, even you could do it:-
1. Moderate DOWN all posts questioning or saying negative things about Open Source, no matter how reasonable or accurate they may be.
2. Moderate UP all pro Open Source posts, no matter how stupid or inaccurate.
3. Moderate UP all posts from people saying nice things about VA Linux/Andover/Malda.
4. Watch VA/Andover/Slashdot stock $$$$ rise
and have a really good laugh at all those suckers who let them get away with it.
Hi this is tzanger. Sorry for posting that, that was dumb and I hadn't thought it all the way through.
That's all I hear about every frickin day. Damn I'm tired about hearing of this archaic Operating system everyday.
Linux's Hardware support lacks, software support sucks other than 1 or 2 applications, it feels like every app is written by a monkey wearing diapers.
You all cheer when you make a small step "ohhhh i can run icq using perl". And when other operating systems have a minor security flaw you blame it on Bill (although there are as many flaws in every OS), and when the same operating systems surpasses *n*x you say FUD.
I have finnished my trolling for the day. Long live Windows 2000 pro
Fellow Americans, for it is known that the only people that matter are Americans, Linux has triumped once more.
Praise Be! We are delivered from the Great Evil that has cast a shadow over the Land and all of us for so long.
Praise Be! We can now live our lives in peace and as God Fearing people, we can Give Thanks to Him.
Praise Be! That the Good Lord has chosen Linux Followers to cast out the devil amongst us and deliver us the embodiment of Goodness so that we may never fear the cold darkness again.
Just because Linux is installed doesn't mean it will be better than MS' X Box
This is partially correct. Nuon is not "a flop" as the head post of this thread states, if for no other reason than it has not shipped yet. =)
If I remember what I saw at CES correctly, I believe Samsung will have Nuon enabled dvd players available soemtime this spring, with Toshiba and motorola following sometime in 3rd or fourth quarter.
Yes, it was designed for mobile users due to its power saving, but a byproduct of that is low heat generation. In other words, unlike conventional x86 chips, it does not need a cooling fan - which is a good thing in a set top box. Who wants to listen to a cooling fan in a box sitting on an audiovisual rack?
A lot of people here also read The Onion. At least be original, Mr. Parens. *cough*
Hey, now, it was in response to someone else's article lifted from The Onion.
Personally i cant wait for these 2 consoles to appear later this year, if only for the effect they will have on the pc games market. with the indreama we'll obviously see more games being ported to linux and hopefull the addition of that hdd means that there should be some form of cross dstribution compatibility. the x-box will see pc developers hopefully developing there work with the x-box specs in mind so we should see developers making full use of high speed processors and ultra powerfull gpu' with graphics with high polygon counts. also the comparison between the x-box and ps2 online all seem to have the ps2 at least one up on the xbox becuase it can play psx games. well with microsofts legal team and large r&d deparments i wouldn't be terribly suprised if they shipped the xbox with a psx emulator. and i suppose the same could go for the indream machine to, if they where really serious about marketing it as a console platform. hell microsoft will probally just by-out bleam and add it to the xbox software. which would give microsoft the lead as the ps2 dosn't preform any kind of 3d effects (aside from texture soomthing) on the olp ps games, whereas bleem or some kind of theoretical emulator like it turns ps games into graphical works of art.
Having a computer with a TV tuner in it gains nothing in terms of resolution of your TV picture reception. If you're using cable, you're probably getting around 300 lines or less resolution. No better than a real TV set.
Guess it was a plot to lull Micro$oft into a false sense of security.
yu can get pc kits w/ 300 mhz cpu, just add ram and harddrive, $117 on pricewatch.com
yeah i know it's ghetto, but thse consoles will be ghetto, too -- in some way.
when you go cheap, there's always the ghetto effect -- something will bite you.
64 bits is better since you have 64 bits to tamper with, not 32. It means that you can do better integer (and indirectly floating) number calculus. Of course, now sizeof(void*) will be equal to sizeof (char[8]). However a similar thing happened when Windoze stepped from 16 bit to 32, so I don't see any real problems.
beat the moderators to give this post a -1.
I think that Sun's attempt to force royalty money from Kingston and other memory makers will backfire -- but only after the consumer feels the heat.
It seems to me that Kingston is just a victim in Sun's campaign to fight Microsoft. By attacking memory-module makers, Scott McNealy is attacking the PC-clone market (as well as the Apple market, but that's probably not the point). This undercuts Microsoft's platform.
I'm just fortunate to be using magnetic core memory still -- Sun can't touch me.
indrema also says their Indrema L600E will be excellent for pouring bowls of hot grits down your pants. thank you.
You support Linux? How many different distros of linux is there? Too many to count.
It's all about the games. Remember when James Bond was released for the N64? Just about everyone I know went out and spent the money to get the system and the game. If Microsoft can stong arm developers into producing games for the X-box they will see success. By the way, Time magazine ran an article about the X-box last week, with a screenshot. Guess what... it looks really cool. The graphics are very impressive.
If the price is right and the games are there, I would consider buying one.
By the way, for those who do not know, the console is actually shaped like an "X."
The Linux box most likely. I've had to power-cycle an NT box and have it refuse to start up again, complaining that it can't find such-and-such a DLL (which exists). Took a full reinstall. In most cases you can bring a Linux box back to life, by hand if necessary, should it crash horribly and screw some of its own system files (which is rare). Linux in a game console is viable if you keep the kernel and core system stuff in ROM, and mount only the DVD drive and a RAM disk for scratch stuff by default. The hard disk can be mounted when the user wants to save a file, and unmounted afterwards.
FreeDOS would be well-suited for something like this. With some NVIDIA, sound, and DVD support drivers of course.
Thats great for you and the other 3 people out there that have gone that route. Unfortunately that wont be enough to garner support. Linux is piss poor as far as game support goes....do you really think people are going to pay $50 for X-Bill? As I see it this one is doomed before they even make it, Linux cant even get PC Game companies to back it up now...(allowing Loki to port a handful of titles doesnt count) what makes anyone believe that console developers are going to care?
M$ has enormous sums of money. If X-box does not take the market, then X-box release 2 will. If not X-box release 2, then maybe release 3. With the sums of $$ they have, they can try for YEARS (remember Borland's C++, or WordPerfect, or Lotus 123 -- now most use Visual C++, MS Word, MS Excel)!
So long as M$ is one big company able to take advantage of their cash cows to dominate other areas, they are a BIG THREAT.
The history of companies that have gone head-to-head with Microsoft is litered with loses, near-bankrupcies, and failed companies (Corel, Lotus, Borland, Stacker, etc.).
Beware The Beast (666 := Bill Gates)!
And are they going to release the source code?
In contrast, the Win32/DirectX platform has a huge base of current, popular games and more developers on its bandwagon than anybody else. It will be relatively easy to port PC games to the X-Box, and game developers won't have to put much effort into parallel development of PC and X-Box versions.
The established players in the market (Sega, Sony, Nintendo) have cultivated longstanding relationships with developers, and provide considerable assistance to their developers.
The Linux game platform, which is really an oxymoron at this point, is basically ignored by all but a few game developers. For all the reasons above, the success of a Linux based console will be more dependent on the developer friendliness of its manufacturer than any other contender. Somebody has to be smoking some serious crack to believe that Linux will make a good foundation for a game console, at least in the near future.
I wouldn't use anything else at work on my workstation and on my light servers (Solaris on the high end ones). I certainly don't need all the fancy graphics and games support of Win98 or Win2k at work. Win2k has been very stable though at home for games. Haven't had to reboot it in awhile. In fact, I just use hibernate mode every night before I go to sleep and it saves the memory state to disk and shuts my computer off. When I want to use it again I turn it on and 30 seconds later it is back to where I left it including all the apps. Nice MS. I wish I could do this with Linux!
OOG NO GET, YOU BAD MOUTH OOG?? OOG NO LIKE!!! OOG BREAK HEAD!!!
As long as PC's are more powerful than Console's (will they not be for a long long time?) I am just gonna stick with my PC. F*K THE CONSOLE
From the page: HDTV Output Supports 480p, 720p, 1080i
The ADAM did have a Dragon's Lair game, but it was on cassette and wasn't a cartoon. I think it was 2D with maybe some overhead screens.
you're completely wrong to compare it to the X-Box, it should be compared to the WebTV. Yes, I know microsoft is walking away from that and that is their mistake. The indrema is for people who are moderates.. want a little gaming? ok. want full-featured web browsing and e-mail? ok. want to be able to record a TV show? ok. And that's the one that's the kicker!
If you look at the last line on the right hand column it says "Integrated Personal TV System", if that's not a euphemism for a Tivo like device which let's you save programs then I don't know what is, plus it's upward compatible with HDTV!!!
I would buy one of these instead of a Tivo an have the capability to have the extra features, plus if it has a full kernel then it should be possible to turn this into the "firewall" for the DSL connect into the home. They will have to keep it below $500 but it should be able to find it's niche if it can out-Tivo the Tivo.
me, myself, and why?
...to be hearing about this so soon. A Google search for Indrema and a similar search on a large commercial database both turned up absolutely nothing. However, a search of IPO.com...(just joking). Is this more vapor?
In the past, I never looked at the "boob tube" much. Other than watching the Weather Channel to check for storm advisories for Cincinnati, where my daughter Emily lives, I barely even turned the thing on. But with Harold gone two years this month and me not really trusting myself to take the bus to church anymore--not to mention the broken hip--let's just say I've had a lot of time on my hands. I can't even crochet or sew anymore because of the arthritis, so rather than just sitting in my blue chair staring at the wall for hours, I've started to look at the TV.
Lately, the highlight of each day is when I tune in to see what's going on in the lives of these Golden Girls. It's such a nice escape to be able to step into this wonderful world where older women wear stylish clothing, say lots of clever things, and, judging from the way they are always on the go, have no problems with bursitis, high blood pressure, or hemorrhoids.
The Golden Girls have a lovely Florida home with a full patio and breakfast nook, and they go on vacations and take dance classes together. Sometimes, I try to imagine what it would be like if their house had one more bedroom, and I lived there. Though I don't think it would be appropriate to date at my age, I would very much enjoy the companionship of some good friends. I would readily agree to do all the housework if it meant I had someone to talk to once in a while. And if I fractured my hip, I would have the assurance that I wouldn't have to lay on the floor in pain for three days, waiting each day for the mailman's footsteps so I could cry out in the hopes of getting his attention.
Of course, living in a house full of women is bound to cause some tension, especially when everyone has such different personalities. Sophia is grumpy and always has some smart-alecky thing to say. (At first, I didn't like her much, but I soon saw that even she has a soft side. Besides, you have to be tough growing up in Brooklyn.) Dorothy, Sophia's daughter, inherited her mother's mouth and is the unofficial leader of the gang. Blanche, a wild Southern belle, is quite the narcissist. Rose, on the other hand, is sweet and dim-witted. She reminds me of my dear sister Lydia, who passed on last year. Sometimes, one of Rose's silly remarks about small-town life brings me to tears, making me think about how much I miss my one and only sibling, who is gone forever.
The Golden Girls often get mad at each other. At times, they even resort to calling each other nasty names, using words I don't think one should be able to say on television. But at the end of the day, they always find a way to patch things up and become the best of friends again.
I sure wish I had some friends living close by. Ruth, my best friend of 51 years, is in a home down in Emmetsville. I haven't seen her since Christmas of 1997, and at that point, she didn't recognize me or her own children anymore.
My, it looks so sunny and beautiful down there in Florida. It's terribly cold up here. I'm so frightened of catching pneumonia like Harold did, I hardly leave the house during the winter anymore. I signed up for Meals On Wheels last month, and most days, they drop by with something to eat, so I don't have to turn the stove on anymore. (I accidentally left the gas on last December but, luckily, the neighbors smelled it and pounded on my door.)
I do get jealous of the Golden Girls, how they have each other. But I need to remember that it's not all cake and ice cream for them. They've had to face some very difficult situations recently, like when Dorothy found a lump in her breast, and the time Blanche found out that her late husband had fathered an illegitimate child, and when Rose was cut off from her husband's pension. But by sticking together, they're able to face even the worst. As for me, I am left to face the world alone.
please visit me at my site
-Taco's Mom
most of the ignorant masses will by the M$ box just cuz its made by M$ --- a company they have heard of, thus (stupidly) trust.
pest
Looks like PCs are finally catching up with c64!!
We keep visiting Slashdot so Malda and the other retards can pay their bills.
Hmm, that article seems to be a bit long for just a Linux-based box here. Did Indrema pay for it?
Sounds interesting -- do you happen to remember the title/author/* ?
If you don't remember the title or author, do you perhaps recall the ISBN number?
Hahahahahahaha.... Sorry...
For some time, the big problem hasn't been resolution, but frame rates and realistic eought rendering. There's no point in having a 1600x1200 monitor to play games with if the games render at 2 fps and are still just big ol' blobby polygons. Much better to get an interlaces 50-60Hz display with high-quality rendering and rapid refresh.
Secondly, there's the target market. Marrying up a graphics card to a monitor and getting refresh, sync, etc has been annoying in the PC world. More annoying than just plugging a console into a TV and having it work, anyway.
And lastly, I do't know about TVs in your neighbourhood, but these days, TV manufacturers are pushing bigger screens cheaper. A 21" TV costs less than a 17" monitor, and for the price of a 20-21" monitor, I can probably get a 30"+.
NuON seems to be available now, but mostly hyped as an extremely powerful DVD player chipset. While the articles state the possibility of games, they emphasize all sorts of capabilities in manipulating DVD play such as zooming 16X while playing in reverse and such.
I don't know much else about it, but its chipset is comming out on some DVD players.
In this case MS is coming into the game at a minimum $300 handicap since that's the cost in Win2K licenses it will have to eat before lousing money on that 32 meg RAM gap and the 200 Meg storage gap. ( that's how much extra you need to make it useful ).
Set top box, Computing appliance, Game console, MP3 jukebox. The names vary but in the end the functionality will not. MS will have to "pull an Amazon" and defy a few fundamental laws of mathematics in order to make the X box fly. However according to Cringly they probably have no intention of ever selling them in volume. His contention that it exists only to "confuse the market makes sense.
As for the "i600" Ingram is a volume business. They don't know how to sell small numbers of high priced crap. As such they will probably be able to make a profit selling these boxes at $200 to $300 in volumes of 50k to 100k per week. At that rate you can tune your manufacturing processes to make the thing profitable.
Note that it just says "600MHz Processor". This might be another Linus machine ( I.e. One with Linux as software and Cruso for Hardware ).
The law of gravity may be violated next.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
As most of these new game systems have internet access it would be great if these systems shipped with the distributed.net client (obviously they'd have to be ported) which would run in the background helping the distributed.net cause.
As long as it was optional I can't see the problem. A lot of people don't know about distributed.net and thia would be an interesting way of increasing it's popularity and helping to get RC5 completed sooner as well as work on the more useful OGR challenge when it's relaunched.
--
Make use of your spare CPU time!
It says that it's going to ship with Mozilla installed... I wonder if this company is contributing any development to the browser? And I also wonder if the release date of this will be subject to Mozilla's completion.
-- K
I am amaze by the fact that so many have been on the "Game Console Box" mania.
My feeling is this "trend" will not last.
It is like the "open-book" concept that had been on the tongue of many since the mid-80s (remember the dynabook?) the technology may or may not be here, but the application of the technology is such that it is like the "button-control drive mechanism of a car" GM (or Ford?) came out in the early 50s.
The concept may be intriquing, but I do not think that the people are going to stick with it.
Game may be interesting, but game is not the be-all-and-end-all thing for everyone. For game freaks, maybe, but not for most of us who have decided that we have to get ourselves A LIFE out of the box.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
What happens when Joe Average Consumer confuses this with Iridium, who seem rapidly to be disproving the old saying "there's no such thing as bad publicity".?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
sigh... the original comment of this thread wasn't about pc's competing with the ps2 in terms of performance, but rather longevity.
the point was made that current n64 software (ie games) looks/runs better than those when the platform was first released. the n64 hasn't changed. current pc software does not run better than software from several years ago on a computer from several years ago. essentially pcs become outdated much faster than game consoles. that's all. i wasn't arguing performance figures.
"onward!" cried the copper man, little knowing brass corrupts...
They've been doing it for years and on a platform that stays as constant as a console, they can tweek to give a massive speed boost. The best example is this. One the same hardware, current N64 games whoop what was available at its introduction. What PCs can do that?
"The PC's of next fall."
you're essentially making his point here. "the pc's of next fall" are new hardware, which is by definition not the same hardware used today. of course quake is going to run better on upcomming pc's than on my 486, but there's no upcomming (commercial) game that'll run better than quake on my 486.
"onward!" cried the copper man, little knowing brass corrupts...
JBuilder 3.5 is here.
My experience/problems in transitioning from a 32 to 64 in an Unix programming environment is in dealing with various data types (e.g., size_t, time_t). If one substitutes int for size_t, one then runs into problems. OTOH, if one used size_t, time_t, etc... in a somewhat consistent manner, then the transition is not as bad.
Pointers can cause lots of compiling warning messages if one does a lot of X Window programming. What is XtPointer and what if one passes an int variable as an XtPointer?
As for efficiency in running 32 bit compiled code in a 64 bit environment? SGI, for instance, provides compiler options to handle pure 32 bit, hybrid 32/64 bit, and pure 64 bit code and executables. This is not a definitive answer, but my code does run faster in this order: 32, 32/64, 64 bit. IOW, 64 is better.
I hope the pundits weren't correct at the time when they forecasted Transmeta would go nowhere and be clobbered under a continuing Intel monopoly.
Exactly. It's a carefully crafted vapor announcement to get people excited. Just count all the current buzzwords: Linux, nVidia, etc. A machine that's a step beyond the PS2 is certainly possible, but this ain't it.
You are making one mistake in you're argument. If people want games and internet they can buy a PC, but PCs are not cheap and maybe a person wants to have as many set-top boxes as TVs (its not common for people to have at least two). Also, these boxes don't take up much space, Who would want to have a desk with a PC in every room of their house?
Okay, can anyone out there help me out?
Isn't porting 32-bit applications to 64-bit
platforms merely an issue of size of data types
and memory addressing?
I don't think 256-bit GPU's address 2^256 - 1
bits of memory, they just process information
in 256-bit chunks.
Having a wider data path isn't always going to
help that much. You can only do so much in
parallel. For instance, I believe you need
mutually exclusive access to ZBuffers,
shadow buffers, alpha, etc for 3d graphics.
That's gotta place a limit somewhere, or at least
put a damper on all the things in 3d graphics
that _can_ be done in parallel (transformations
of vertices, culling, yada, yada)
Okay, I'm rambling, but please, don't always
bring up the 'bit' thing. Saying that a chip
is 64-bit can have wildly different meanings
and may or may not give it an advantage over
other chips.
Cheers,
Mike
Intel transfer the difficult from Hadware to software, for get more power, programmer need more technology. -- chinaitn
My guess is that everything's going to be run from either a CL interface, or a linear-framebuffer-based graphical interface, with X only being loaded after you decide what you want to do. This would cut down on the memory needed, addressing one of the problems you mentioned. (no WM unless you selected Gnome/Mozilla/internet stuff)
;)
Another idea would be to use a kernel patch for ext3 or some other journalling file system, to keep things stable whenever people just turn the box off instead of shutting down like they're supposed to.
As far as booting from CD is concerned, I don't think that's as big of a deal as you might think. There might be some customization where you could have a login logo for the system be loaded off of the CD whenever you boot up, and have the bash login script check if there's a disc in and autoplay it when you log in... other than that, I think that'd work perfectly, and quite efficiently.
As for your concerns about processor speeds, a lot of that can be off-loaded onto dedicated hardware (ie; 3D -> accelerated video, Audio -> hardware mixing/effects) Heck, if they go with something like SCSI for the hard drive and DVD, we could get some real nice performance here..
Yeah, I realize all of these pieces of hardware are danged expensive, but they don't need to use versions that have ALL of the extras. A stripped down SCSI-like setup'd be nice; ditto the audio.
Either way, I sure hope they give their SDK all of the attention it deserves; in all honesty, I think that's what'll really make or break the system. Playstation 2 gives their developers access to EVERYTHING. When you write code for a PS2, it's as close to hardware level as you can get. What'd be really nice would be if they picked hardware solutions for video and audio that matched up perfectly featurewise with OpenGL and OpenAL, so that they could have the best of both worlds..
..they are going to be using OpenAL, right?
James
This is what Robert Cringley is talking about. Gates is freaked out about PS2, so he has thrown out some Vaporware in the hopes of drawing away some developers to slow the growth of PS2 and devices like these. he can afford to pay a few hundred programmers for a dead end project. If he is able to kill or hurt a possible competitor, even better.
I Cringley
photosMy Photostream
Boot time: what about having the thing go into "hibernate" instead of actually booting fresh each time?
(Is "hibernate" the one where it swaps the whole contents of memory to the hard disk and swaps it back on startup?)
Price: You won't save much by swapping DVD for CD. The fewer features you have, the more each feature costs. Since there aren't enough games for Linux, I'm just trying to come up with a justification for the damn thing's existence.
It's possibile that people will buy 1 feature-rich TV/entertainment box instead of 3 or 4 different boxes. We do buy boom boxes instead of tape machine+radio+CD player. If that's not true, I think they're screwed.
It's a pretty fearsome tradeoff right now. Only worth it if you truly fear technology. Certainly I wouldn't trade my 17" Trinitron for a TV. In fact, I think even TV looks better on my computer monitor.
Things certainly will get interesting when HDTV goes mainstream.
I gotta go 180 on ya.
People like us need a REAL computer in the living room, not some Linux-based console. Can you tolerate 500 lines of resolution for Quake? For the Internet? I can't. I've got a computer with a TV tuner in MY living room.
Agree there ain't enough Linux games. Disagree that installing Quake 3 will never be a one-step process. If you know exactly what the hardware is, you ought to be able to script the installation.
So when you insert the CD, it reaches out and asks a central server. The central server's directions will be correct, because all these boxes are the same.
Uh, if all of the boxes are the same, then why not just put the instructinos on the cd? I mean what would be the point of having the info on the net if its all going to be the same?
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
A veriant of that, an r4300, designed to be cheap ($35 in bulk when then n64 came out)
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
[RANT]
I'm sick and tired of seeing all these poor console comparisons flying around. . .
First of all, megahertz is a very, very, very bad way to judge speed when comparing different chips. It's a measure of speed relative to a specific architecture, not an absolute measure for comparison. Just as you can't compare a 700 MHz x86 chip to a 700 MHz alpha chip, you can't compare a 600 MHz x86 chip (X-Box) to a 300 MHz proprietary chip (Playstation 2), as is done in the comparison pointed to in this article.
Keep in mind that x86 is 32-bit, while the nect-gen consoles (Dreamcast, Dolphin, PS2) are at 128-bit now (I believe).
Memory Bandwidth is a horrible indicator unless it's the sole bottleneck. If the components can't run fast enough, the bandwidth speed is irrelevent.
Polygon Performance seems to be the best measure I've seen so far - but that's not everything. While the original Playstation can handle more polys per second than an N64, the N64 has all kinds of better effects - trilinear filtering (I believe), better hardware anti-aliasing, etc. The X-Box's 300 million polys/sec does sound pretty damn good, but don't judge a book by its cover.
Rather than judge all this now, why don't we just wait until all these consoles come out? I, for one, buy the systems as much for the games they have as for their statistics. All these comparisons in the media are just plain stupid.
[/RANT]
-- Imagine how much more advanced our technology would be if we had eight fingers per hand.
Why are console manufacturers making PC based game systems instead of simply bringing more games to regular PCs? I'd much rather play on a 1600x1200 monitor than a 500-odd line TV (maybe this will change when HDTV becomes the norm, but how many consoles support that? Any?)
Just my $0.02.
This webtv bashing is really piss me off. This is pure linux elitism. Bashing aoler is reasonable since they pay moron money. Webtv is fucking cheap, what do you want from the users!?! A used one is what 50 dollars. The webtv users's biggest concern (as far as the one I know) is getting a usable credit card to start surfing, not any more stuff.
/_____\. .......|
Webtv can pay real audio, partal js. What do you want. (okay I aware of that $99 flag screen webpad deal, but that's 3 years after webtv.) Webtv's "os" is lightyear smaller than CE and probably better than a scale up EPOC.
AND FOR YOUR IGNORANCE OUT THERE, webtv's browser's way more ergonomic than nescape or ie. ERGONOMIC. Do you understand that word? It never pre-render the page to give false expectations. It never give confusing massage in the message bar ("100% loaded" anyone?) It just have a rotating glode to make you feel time pass faster when loading. I have 4 versions of netscape and lynx and ie5. My default browser is nn3.04, maybe I know what I'm talking about.
How many times do I have to club you to remind you that webtv doesn't take off because microsoft brought it, not the other way around. Webtv's business model make money off hardware and isp plan. The "OS" is free, and the flash upgrade is free as well. How do software maker, ms make money off it?!?!!?
If webtv become the standart low end browser, how is MS going to make money, or leverage with other platform. The darn thing is so simple (which is the what the web supposed to be, I'm sick of this html 4.0 BS) Everybody can reverse engineer a box like that. Hell P.C. Richard & Son or Everybody Beats the Wiz has the expertise to make a completing set top model. What MS need is make sure this settop modle never take off, and what can gurentee such outcome besides buying the company.
Those two guys who start webtv are really young. Probably most of the money are venture capital. If the suits want to sell out, they can't do anything about it. Hell X-Box is made by webtv subsidairy, I'm afraid it will have a very ergonormic interface too.
CY
vvvvvvv../|__/|
...I../O,O....|
...I./
..J|/^.^.^ \..|.._//|
...|^.^.^.^.|W|./oo.|
once again flash the ROM i do it all the time on my palm
i know i will.
The console market will be crowded enough as is, we wont need a 5th contender.
For the 32/64 bit wars we had:
Sega Saturn
Sony Playstation
Nintendo 64
Atari Jaguar
3DO
Face it, some of these consoles will fail. The question is just which ones.
Customer: Does it play games?
Vendor: Yes, all Playstation compatible games....
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Imagine a cute, color PDA, not too expensive with a built in control pad. It would have a lower powered version of Linux specifically designed for it (still GPLed, naturally), and some way of retrieving and storing games quickly and easily.
This is not as absurd as it sounds, I know of many people who use their graphing calculators for playing games, so I don't see why this couldn't work.
Heck, I'd love one of these if it existed... well, I guess my NeoGeo Pocket is good enough for now, sigh...
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Ahem, here's my findings:
X - 8 MB
vtwm - 1.5 MB
Linux - 3 MB (And that's a FAT kernel)
Various bits of "glue" - 1 MB.
>>
A) How did you get X to fit in 8 meg? Mine hogs damn near 24 meg normally. Second, it probably won't use something like vtwm. If they wan't compatibility with normal Linux apps like Mozilla, they'll use something like GNOME or KDE. I doubt something like vtwm would fly with the general public.
The other bone I have to pick: You don't need to shutdown Linux if it runs from a Read-Only partition.
>> Whats the point of a read-only Linux disc drive? People have to mount the hd to write to it don't they? People shutdown consoles, people pull the plugs etc. You still have that problem.
How about once every two hours? That's how long the original Playstation went without crashing for a lot of people... 3 times a year would sound DAMN good.
>> Don't know about you, but I have the 2nd gen model. My claims about stability stand. Maybe some of the first gen models had heat problems, but thats only if you put it on a carpet and not a hard surface. Second and third gen models didn't have heat troubles that I have ever encountered.
I can't see the fact that people are willing to be WITHOUT their console for WEEKS when they have to send it back for repair (which, as we have seen with the PS/2 and original PS, is OFTEN).
>> Again, I don't hear to many statistics on repairs needed. After the first gen glitches, the PS was very reliable, and aside from the memory card and heat issues, I haven't heard to much about the PS2. Rest assured that these will sort themselves out by the time this hits the US.
Time for a Paradigm shift...
>> You call having to update an app that should have been coded properly in the first place a paradigm shift? Sorry, but I like our paradigm better. People bitch all day about game companies releasing unready software then patching it and you think it is a paradigm shift?!
Well, turn off that feature then. Let the game be as buggy as released. You think that console games have no bugs? Hahahahahahahaha...
>> Console games in general have far far fewer bugs than PC games do. Mario 64 has crashed on me once. Thats it. Even Blizzard games, which are extremely well polished, have crashed more often on my PC.
>It can't be difficult, it can't be unstable (reletivly), it can't take energy to maintain. It has to be transparent to use, and be easy to use as your toaster. Literraly.
>> The tivo doesn't try to do anything NEAR what this console is. It streams video to a TV and uses Linux as data manager. No interface to speak of, no X, no nothing. Certainly no web-browser and gaming services.
[sarcasm] Yeah, I mean, like TiVo NEVER released their patches and stuff. And the TiVo crashes daily. And the TiVo has 64 MB RAM. And the TiVo has swapping capabilities. And the TiVo has multiuser capabilities. [/sarcasm]
>> Excuse me? What does this comment have to do with Linux being fat? The TiVO is an entirely different beast from this machine.
A) It can put up with the overhead of UNIX, for the cost cut associated with having a working off the shelf kernel. Streaming video to a TV is not exactly a terribly tasking job, thus the proc doesn't really feel the burden of the system that much. I doubt the TiVo guys took out all the GPOS (General Purpose OS) stuff in Linux. It still has a VM, still has the concept of swap space (even if you turn it off, it is an integral part of the VM) still has security, still has multi-userness, still has a lot of concepts that a console doesn't need. Linux has something like 5 different types of IPC, different file systems, etc. Even if you compile out some of these features, the core code needed to support the is still there. (IE. Linux can't write to a raw file system. Something in its file manager must pass it off to a fs driver.) Stuff like that puts an inherant strain on the system that doesn't need to be there in a console. There is nothing so great in Linux that they put it on the TiVo for. They just did it for the hype and for the fact that it was free and off the shelf. It is not as good an OS as the PS2 libraries for a console, so whats the point of using it aside from the hype aspect?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
And remember, Nvidia said the NV25 was X-Box ONLY.
Not exactly. Actually, the NV25 is the codename for their next-next-next-generation PC graphics chip--the geForce was the NV10; the NV15 should be out in May or June; the NV20 by Christmas of this year, and the NV25 in mid-2001. The GPU in the X-Box (release date: Christmas 2001) will be an NV25, in the sense that it will have essentially the same core as the NV25 video cards for the PC; however, it will have to be custom-made to use the X-Box's 64 MB unified memory, and the X-Box's custom bus, and various other things.
In any case, you're absolutely right that this sounds like "me too" vaporware, and a rather transparent case of it at that. There will not be "NV25 Hardware Acceleration or better" available by this Christmas, except on SGI workstations and possibly some arcade machines.
SDL runs on linux so there is no need to port.
with something like indrema the uses are not limited to gaming, and that is what this particular console has the greatest advantage at right now. If this thing runs linux then it will have the greatest potential for doing a wide variety of tasks due to the open nature of the system, and the existing applications for linux right now. one of the cooler things indrema is boasting is its personal integrated tv system. which according to gamefan http://www.gamefan.com/hotinfo.asp?s=5763&rs= is something like TiVo. if this is true then maybe indrema is what i have always wanted, namely something to filter out commercials. currently TiVo is being sued by televison mega corporations and also in the process of defending itself from a hostile takeover by the same mega corporations. if there was an open source version of TiVo maybe the project could be protected. *sign* maybe someday i will be able to watch tv without commercials. heck i figure that i could save myself about 15 minutes out of every hour by skipping the commercials.
"The importance of using technology in the right way has never been more clear."
> The list of specs on the Indrema page lists a standard video out (I think SVGA) as well as the TV outs.
Yes. Even DreamCast has this ability [VGA out.] The question is though "Are the people who buy a $200 console going to spend ANOTHER $400 for a vga monitor just to get good output?" I kind of doubt it.
Anyone who has done any porting can tell you designing fonts for a console is a pain. No tiny fonts as the text blurs together, so you're left with a big font. Are game developers going to start insisting console games need to be hooked up to a VGA (or better) monitor?
Until HDTV (or something similiar) takes off, web devices just don't make any sense.
Speaking of arrogant, uninformed rants...
... If the "off" button does a soft shutdown (something like a properly working ACPI suspend-to-disk), then the slate is regularly wiped clean and this risk will be minimal.
But The Emotion engine cannot be compared with a CPU, it's only a graphics processor.
The Emotion Engine is the main processor, not the graphics processors for the PS2. The PS2 also has a separate graphics processor called the "Graphics Synthesizer", which is about 3 or 4 times as fast as a GeForce DDR.
Nvidia have themselves already said that the X-box GPU will be several times more powerful than the PS2. So while the PS2 is doomed always to run the Emotion Engine, by the time the L600 appears it will have a GPU between four to ten times as powerful as the PS2's in terms of sheer triangle output and fill rate, and with a few new tricks as well
I'm sorry, but this comment is really stupid. A current generation graphics card in the PC (A GeForce DDR) costs about $300 and draws about 20 million triangles per second. The complete PS2 (not just a graphics card) will probably cost about $300 at launch and draws about 66 million triangles per second. Yes, NVIDIA did say that the GPU in the X-Box will be several times faster than the PS2's chip. However, they also said that it is 2 or 3 generations beyond their current crop of chips. So, no, the chip in this dealy will not be "4 to 10 times" as fast as the PS2.
The best example is this. One the same hardware, current N64 games whoop what was available at its introduction. What PCs can do that?
The PC's of next fall.
Did you even read what he said? The PC's of next fall?! What exact technological revolution is it that is going to make these magical PCs never need to be upgraded? The point is that games on the same console get better as time passes because developers have more experience with the console. It isn't a moving target like the PC. Your response is that new PCs will be more like the Nintendo 64?
This [shutdown issues]*might* be a danger (though not so much as with the MS X-box).
Kids play on consoles. Kids and dogs unplug them. A soft power-down switch won't cut it. By the way, I love Linux, but pull the plug on a Linux box and an NT box while you are playing quake and doing some other stuff in the background and tell me which fsck'n system reacts better.
Give me a part number or a pinout of the ROM and I could replace the ROM.
:-)
I used to un/solder chips to PCBs all the time. Not a problem in my world
some karma... and kinda lukewarm about it.
I have not bought the beautifully telnetable Dreamcast for its lack of a selection of role playing games. Also I wonder if worldforge games will run off it.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
If it can't play DVD's, it doesn't stand a chance against Microsoft's product.
Bwuckatah bwuckatah bahhh, bwuckatah bwuckatah bahhh!
Bwuckatah bwuckatah bahhh, bwuckatah bwuckatah bahhh!
7th Design
But for parallel calculations wider is better. Do you know what the 64 in Nintendo 64 stands for? Yup, the CPU is 64-bit!
IIRC, it's a MIPS R4400, which is what you get in (old) SGI servers (like the horrible horrible machines they run here on campus). True, it's not a P-III or Athlon, but it is a general purpose CPU (unlike, say Dreamcast or Playstation).
Won't work. The Win2000 OS of the X-Box is on a ROM. Read the article here.
:)
So when people find bugs that enable you to get remote control of a X-Box (c'mon, people find artibrary code expoits for NT4 all the time, I doubt Win2000 will be too much different, though I suppose the late ship date will give them some time), people can't upgrade. Maybe you're on a cable modem and you want to erase the games of everyone who uses an X-Box in your neighboorhood? OK. Or just put a script in cron that reboots them every 5 minutes.
All these things (X-Box, Indrema, etc, etc), are pointless as far as I'm concerned. I have a pretty decent PC, and I'll probably buy another this fall. PCs are nice, and fun to use. However...
I also bought an N64 last fall for no other purpose than to play Zelda: The Ocarina of Time on it. Happily, the next Zelda will also be on N64, but if it weren't I'd buy whatever new thing it was running on. Basically what I'm saying here is that power doesn't matter (realisically N64 is _way underpowered compared to Playstation2, etc), its games games games - not how many (I really don't care), but what they are. In my case, if they're Zelda, though I'm sure others have other favorites. I've also bought some other games (MK4, Donkey Kong, Super Smash Brothers), but they were _not the reason I bought the N64 in the first place (ie, I would not have bought an N64 to play any of those games, but since I have an N64 I might as well have a few games around, right?)
If Sony bought the rights for Zelda from Nintendo (yeah friggin right), I'd go out and buy a Playstation2 (or whatever the new Zelda will be running on). I (personally) have totally no loyalty to Nintendo, but rather to the Zelda series (I wish Nintendo would do a Shadowrun for N64, though. I miss that game. Sigh)
It's Linux, for chrissake. Now don't get me wrong -- Linux is very very good for many things. However, games are not one of them. As you mentioned, there are alot of services that you simply don't need. There are alot of layers of crap that eat up RAM which are unnecessary for a console platform. On top of that, the hardware drivers are often immature or nonexistent (HOW long were we stuck with 3dfx?).
Partly because of these factors, and partly because of Linux's small consumer marketshare -- game developers don't write games for Linux. In the PC world, they write them for DirectX almost exclusively. Only a few very talented people with a hobbyist interest write for Linux (e.g. Carmack).
So even assuming they put together a nice console with reasonable speed and low resource usage, one question remains. Who's going to design games for it? I work for a game company and I can tell you it ain't gonna happen. There is no way you'd strain our relationship with, say, Sony - just to write games for a high-risk new console.
Best regards,
SEAL
All it takes is people to use it.
/. is your source for news....validates that BSD is already there.
Don't believe it? Go here and do a find on dreamcast.
Or, if
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
You'd have to read and understand it.
With a networked scheme, the server would do all this for you.
Here's my DeCSS mirror. Where's yours?
Here's my DeCSS mirror, where's yours?
Here's my DeCSS mirror. Where's yours?
Here's my DeCSS mirror, where's yours?
Where's the WebTV bashing? All he said was it was for people who didn't want to learn how to use a computer to browse the web and send email. That's exactly how it's being marketed!
webtv's browser's way more ergonomic than nescape or ie
Perhaps, but less functional. And nobody ever said Netscape was a good browser--it's just the best we have. Mozilla is a nice browser, though, and I would use it over WebTV's any day. And no matter what WebTV does with it's browser, it will always by definition be less functional because it's not connected to a computer. Not being able to download stuff would be neutering a rather nontrivial coolness of having the Internet.
Here's my DeCSS mirror. Where's yours?
Here's my DeCSS mirror, where's yours?
Never say never, especially when referring to Linux. Microsoft can only dream of Windows improving itself as fast as Linux, who's to say this won't be streamlined better later on? If it's a source of annoyance (and believe me, it is) it will be fixed.
Here's my DeCSS mirror. Where's yours?
Here's my DeCSS mirror, where's yours?
All this about it not being a real game console
and not having a chance in the market is true,
but it misses the point. The things that make
Linux a wonderful operating system for general
computing make it a horrible OS for consoles.
Look at Linux's strengths: Multitasking, you're
not going to run Street Fighter and Final
Fantasy concurrently, now are you? Even if
you don't use it, you still have the overhead
of the context switch. Multithreading, maybe
for running the game, playing music, responding?
Nope! You'd do better to fill up the sound-chip's
buffer, when it empties, have it send an interrupt.
Player pushes a button? Interrupt. Etc. Or
stability, Linux's pride and joy, done partly with
memory protection, and drivers to hide the hardware.
Needed so concurrent processes don't kill eachother
or the kernel. But for a gaming system, you want
the entire system open, if it were x86 based
(Why? x86's a crap architecture, only reason
to use it for computers is compatibility with legacy PC software
and commodity, both not needed with a console),
you'd just want it stuck in virtual mode with a
big, flat addres space, and all hardware access
open. You might want an IP stack for multiplayer
over the internet, but not a complex system. And
you'll need some type of storage device, but the
kind of filesystem you'd need would bear more
resemblance to ROMFS or ISO9660 than to second
extended, maybe with some support for a memory
dump, to save games. For a pure gaming system
an OS is a liability, you'd just want a set
of libraries for switching graphics modes, reading
the DVD drive and such, but ones that you could
ignore completely, rather than be forced to go
through, as with OS system calls.
"It's just so horrible that the only people who can control the internet are the ones who understand it." -- CDA Advocat
I was sitting at a friend's place last night and was watching a movie on TV. We had planned to leave around 10pm to go somewhere and the movie had not finished yet, but I had to leave. And then I thought to myself. What if my Tivo box had ethernet access. I could have telnetted to it from friend's place and told it to record the current program on a specific channel. Killer application for me. Ofcourse I also want to be able to telnet or connect via web to my Tivo box from work also, browse the selection of programs and tell it to record some stuff if I want. Damnit!
Alright!
I hope that somebody will port linux to it!
Oh, wait....
Well maybe beowulf then....
Click here to read too much about my personal life
... hopefully it'll surface. Time to port SDL over, I think. :-) On a side note, if we want a Linux powered console, why don't we just put Linux on an X-Box? Sure, might mean a few chip replacements and some reverse engineering, but you ought to be able to do it.
disclaimer: opinions contained therein are not neccessarily those of my employer.
Up to 50 Gb in HD, 600 Mhz and 100 mb LAN connection.
I didnt see a release date though.
The problem with the MS box is, however, that it's going to be less powerful than the PSX2 and come out way later -- not to mention that right now we haven't heard of any support from the major game companies.
I know it's still very early in the game to be making assumptions like this, but things aren't looking up for MS.
The only thing that MS seems to have going for them is the name recognition. Since the console is being pushed as a gaming box, though... (an area in which MS hasn't been too successful in...) I'm pretty skeptical...
we shall see, however... stranger things have happened...
-- Dr. Eldarion --
I know this is a bit redundant but It looks like it is not going to be set up except for a few tailored games... Anyhow. Just an observation. It seems quite useless since it wont be especially good at any one task.. So whats the point?
Wow! this seems to be really cool! A piece of electronics that can play games, get on the internet, play DVD's/CD's! holy shit!!!
Maybe next we can slap a keyboard and a mouse on it, allow the possibility of a printer and scanner plus other peripherals...and call it a Gateway!
-FluX
-------------------------
Your Ad Here!
-------------------------
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
This is nothing more then a PC with a PC2TV video card. I don't know which video cards support PC2TV under Linux, if any. I know ATI's don't. The way to sell a game console or a multimedia set top or whatever this is, is not by selling hardware specs but by selling content. Lots of games, movies, etc. Most of the stuff they have speced currently aren't supported under Linux so they'll have to develop it themselves or wait around till someone else develops it. I wonder if they'll release the stuff they develop to the rest of the community. It would be nice.
When there's an article on /. about games, everybody rolls out the idea of a "gaming distribution": you put the CD in the drive, the computers boots from the CD and starts the game. No configuring, no user interaction until the opening game screen. Wouldn't this be that comimng true?
On another side... they're making pretty high claims for a box based on Linux. All right, Linux is cool, but for a gaming machine there are obvious points that need to be polished: 3D audio (OpenAL is still beginning, AFAIK), 3D Hardware support (they talk about a GPU, and NVIDIA's GeForce - the only GPU supported on Linux - drivers for Linux are one of the worst out there)... or these guys are the kings of vaporware, or they have a pretty solid relationship with many hardware and software vendors out there (which is pretty strange for a company that I think not many people knew before now).
I won't be comparing this to the X-Box and other gaming consoles, there's been a lot of talk about that lately, it's getting kind boring. =)
If they can really put out this product, it's gonna be very interesting to see how it goes.
--
Marcelo Vanzin
Marcelo Vanzin
Wait a minute, who exactly is Microsoft buying their OS from? Themselves?
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
the person typed the m and the a wrong:
In Dream
--
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Things have changed. Back in the Nintendo days, you could keep people enthused with games inferior to the ones on my calculator. Now the people want internet...
How many companies have made a fortune with no more than good advertising on the basis of "Easy Internet Access?" Let's see. There's AOL, which offers pretty much nothing at high cost. Yet AOL is rolling in cash and the stock soars. Then there was Web-TV (What a dumb idea that probably made some money for a while...) Much better are companies like E-Machine, that provide cheap computers for little more than internet access. It's supply and demand at its finest...
Problem: Some of us don't want a cheap little computer. But it's becoming more and more difficult to find an ad for a good computer these days.
It seems virtually anything can be advertised on the basis of internet access. Sega tried it with the Dreamcast. But their network still isn't up and is only for multiplayer gaming anyway.
The X Box and this new thing both promise internet access. The well known company advertises the power of their machine. (It makes my PC look kind of sorry. I need a new one...) This new guy focuses on the fact that it provides internet access. They'll make a fortune, no doubt. However, it seems that anyone who advertises heavily on the internet is using it as a facade to cover up a cheap product.
These guys may change the trend. The fact that this thing is going to run Linux suggests that they are trying to cater to the geeks, not the masses who are impressed by internet access alone. The interesting thing about this product is that they list pretty good specs, but only seem to espouse the internet. I'm curious to see how this thing operates, let alone how it does in stores.
At the very least, they're going to have some trouble marketing this thing. The masses are going to complain about having to learn Linux (boo-hoo) whereas an ad campaign aimed toward geeks probably wouldn't be cost effective.
It's going to be interesting. But with all that competition, we can at least expect a wide variety of high quality consoles and games. Even if it fails, it will have done some good...
"I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy." -Richard Feynman
Another thing I think all these net/game consoles are missing is that the web isn't designed in any way/shape/form for display on a TV. 90% of my time spent online I'm reading or writing. I'm not gonna do that on a fuzzy and flickering TV screen, it just ain't gonna happen. I don't think many people are going to see browsing on TV as a replacement for using a PC or net appliance. HDTV is a few years away from being widespread, and until that quality of a display is available cheaply, I don't think the net is ready for TV and vice versa.
Still, we'll have to see what's actually going on when everything comes out, but I don't see that much of a future for the X-Box.
I think the emphasis should be on the first part of your statement. When Sony first came into the market, there was SERIOUS doubt as to how well it would do. Saturn was coming out months before it, and the Sega name would capture a serious portion of the market, and Nintendo loyalists would forgo the PSX waiting for the obviously technically superior N64.
Then, Sega squandered their lead with an outrageous opening price, not many good games, and generally poor support in advertising and third party game creation. Sony came out at a good price, threw money at effective ads, and had new games flying onto the shelves (cooperation and simple game creation for third parties was key) - all the while pressing the point that their second generation of games would be an order better than the ones we were seeing. And Nintendo suffered delays, negative press about cartridges, and had practically 2 games at launch. "Quality not quanity" wasn't good enough -- there were many more than 2 great games for PSX already.
Of course, I suspect that most people here knew all that, but the point is that the fate of these companies are very likely to change from what we think will happen.
Perhaps more importantly, the console market is a fairly controlled environment when compared to all the uncertainties of PCs. Microsoft will deliver a product that works, squelching all that knee-jerk stuff. If they promote it (mostly) as "X-Box" and not "MS set-top-gaming-plus-this-and-that", they have a fair chance.
After all, I bet MS making mice seemed pretty silly until you tried that intelli-mouse, huh?
All that said, I won't buy one. I've had maybe a dozen gaming systems - but after the N64 (right before I went to college, and had discovered that money was better spent on beer or hard drives), I told myself I was done with consoles. However, I might get a PS2 instead of that Apex DVD player, becuase I'd like a stand-alone DVD. I dunno yet. I'm not in a hurry.
.sig last updated Jan. 14, 2000
Sounds interesting -- do you happen to remember the title/author/* ?
Years ago, I read a science fiction story about a computer that could predict the future. This computer predicted the birth of a man who had a wrongly formulated scientific theory, but he was absolutely convinced it was correct and charismatic enough to convince other people that it was true. No matter how many disasters were caused by putting the theory into practice he wouldn't give up on it, and eventually a flawed machine based on his theory destroyed the entire universe.
.sig last updated Jan. 14, 2000
They say it has HD component output; that means 1280x720 non-interlaced or 1920x1080 interlaced.
In fact this could be *the* major selling point of the system - other compaines like Sony charge developers a hefty fee to develop for their boxes, whereas developing for this would in essence cost nothing and have a pretty much guaranteed audience.
...and an interesting feature pops up - "MP3/VOB Storage and Playback System". Finally an aboveground system to play "backup" copies of DVD's from their VOB streams. Just a query though how high res graphics from games like UT/Q3 will look on a standard TV (even with an S-Video in/out)
>Customer: Does it play games? >Vendor: Yes. Any game for Linux will work on it. Correct. Unfortunately linux games are not not exactly as readily availiable as windows games. Unrela Tournament and Quake 3, great, im even a first person shooter fan, the only problem is that games like starcraft and someothers are gonna need a little coaxing [wine] to get working. The novie user is not, definately not, ready to install quake 3 on a linux box, its never been a one step process and never will unlike windows. I can't offer a solution all i know this would be a badass box to have in MY room, not in a playstation junkies.
Anyone wonder if they can format this bad-boy down and stick whatever i want on it. thing is a bet not, they probably dont want to have to deal with the tech support calls. I REALLY really want this but i want to be able to do what I want with it.
Not that ordinary consumers want to run linux (or X) or even know they are running them in the living room.
The reason the living room could be the killer app for linux is the open source development community. None of these home-audio-video computers and web/tv boxes have really been a platform for ordinary programmers to show off their stuff. But what better place to show off your stuff than in a million living rooms.
A box with a processor, linux or other free*nix, multi-use video card like the ATI All-in-wonder 128 or similar with capture, various TV outputs, ethernet & modem, dvd drive and cd-r (ideally together in one drive), and bays for hard disks -- this would make a tremendous platform for the development of various cool home applications.
You've thought of most of them -- digital VCR like Tivo. CD and MP3 and DVD player. CD writer and general great audio mixer/editor. Home video editor with firewire port. Web surf while watching TV. Digital TV and HDTV decoder.
But the point of this is that as an open platform, people would come up with their own apps. All sorts of cool apps. Or better user interfaces for the above apps.
Games are cool but forget games. They eat processor and require expensive video hardware. This box could run on the aging PC the family wants to throw away.
If the video apps themselves were open source, people would improve on them. If not, they would add they own. All the benefits of open source -- if you don't like it, fix it -- would come to something many people use a lot more than their ordinary computer. It's not that the OS is free that matters, it's that you can change it.
One interesting way to beat the other tools is that today they use expensive hard drives that are quiet enough for the living room.
But the open home audio device, in one incarnation, might depend on there being a home ethernet going back to the home PC (and the DSL box or cable modem of course.) If it's 100mbit ethernet in particular, just slot all the cheap hard drives in the home PC. They are donw to $7 a gigabyte now -- that's about $20 for an hour of high quality video.
In fact write a Windows app to act as server for a network bootable computer and the thing doesn't have to even have a hard drive if they are willing to run the cable.
People would write cooler commercial eliminators that could never be beaten by networks since they are updated nightly. Search engines that rely on reading all the closed capton tracks at once. And lots more.
The public would not know or care it was linux, they would care it was an open platform. And this might cause more linux to be run than all the servers and nerd workstations in the world.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
If this company fails to deliver, this will serve MS's advertising department to no end, I won't even go into the possible catch phrases. If they do, however, deliver in full then it could be looked at as a victory for the open source community, and illustrate linux's power, versatility, and perhaps more importantly, ability to fit into the home environment (i.e. not the server room). Will David beat goliath? Tune in tomorrow night folks!
-- Just the FAQs Ma'am.
Now that this out I cn finally get rid of my Play Station partition. :P
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
Ahem, here's my findings:
X - 8 MB
vtwm - 1.5 MB
Linux - 3 MB (And that's a FAT kernel)
Various bits of "glue" - 1 MB.
Total used: 13.5 MB. Total free: 50.5 MB.
That's a HELL of a lot more than 16 MB.
The other bone I have to pick: You don't need to shutdown Linux if it runs from a Read-Only partition.
>but console users would be up in arms if their console crashed three times a year!
How about once every two hours? That's how long the original Playstation went without crashing for a lot of people... 3 times a year would sound DAMN good.
>Second, I can't see people accepting the fact that their kernel needs to be updated.
I can't see the fact that people are willing to be WITHOUT their console for WEEKS when they have to send it back for repair (which, as we have seen with the PS/2 and original PS, is OFTEN).
>And the hardrive. The guy who decided to put in a harddrive ought to be shot. I say this because console software is released as good as it will ever get. It has to be, it can never be patched.
Time for a Paradigm shift...
>People aren't going to accept, "please wait... Downloading latest patches for Mario 64."
Well, turn off that feature then. Let the game be as buggy as released. You think that console games have no bugs? Hahahahahahahaha...
>It can't be difficult, it can't be unstable (reletivly), it can't take energy to maintain. It has to be transparent to use, and be easy to use as your toaster. Literraly.
The TiVo matches these features well. It runs Linux. Why can't this box do it?
>Linux is too fat for a console. A console has no need of many things that are in the kernel that can't be taken out. There is no need for all the security and multi-userness inherent in UNIX, no need for console support, no need for any process management (or memory protection for that matter) no need for a VM, no need swap management, etc. Again, these could probably be coded out, but that would be an assload of work, and most Linux progs wouldn't work afterwords.
[sarcasm] Yeah, I mean, like TiVo NEVER released their patches and stuff. And the TiVo crashes daily. And the TiVo has 64 MB RAM. And the TiVo has swapping capabilities. And the TiVo has multiuser capabilities. [/sarcasm]
What I will agree with, though, is that perhaps they chose the wrong processor. That's it.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
The console market will be crowded enough as is, we wont need a 5th contender. I easily ee another crash in the videogame industy like the one in the early 80's.
It seems that lack of interest after a "Wow! I can do that with my SNES/Genesis/Saturn/Dreamcast! Where do I sign up?" begins to set in. Such ill fated examples as the American rollout of web-capabilities for the Saturn and the XBand service (a modem that went into your SNES or Genesis that allowed you to play SF2 or any multiplayer game online, albeit slowly, or into a very crappy chat program) faded out after awhile. The usefulness of the Internet game box has yet to be proven with the Dreamcast, as well.
Why shouldn't a linux-based console be a riotous hit? What drives a console gamer to buy a console? Not just games anymore, but features. If Indrema's machine can deliver the features it promises, console gamers and maybe some hard-core PC gamers will want to try it. People want whats best in the available market, even if they think that they are "only a Sony fan" or "devoted Nintendo fan." This will not play a part in people buying the Indrema box if it delivers. Unlike Dreamcast, which fizzled out, if a linux based console can appeal to linux users and regular console gamers by giving outstanding features, it will sell, not dissapoint. The console market will not become crowded, it will only gain a new console with the largest share of the market, making it the best. People want highest quality and best price, and as Indremas machine will fall well below the price of a similar PC, and it will have future. As long as it's the best.
That was most certainly not me. Spin off, coward. Spin off and die.
What exactly is "GPU TBA" 3D accelleration? Graphics Processing Unit - To Be Announced?
It sounds neat (the box, not the accellerator) -- the 4 USB ports sounds like they want to hook up the controllers that way (Gravis has a neat gamepad or three) which is a very wise move IMO. I wonder if they will support regular cable and DSL modems through the network connection as well. Does anyone have more info on "DV linux"?
Alot of people will buy this box if you can configure it to the way you want (of course you may void your warranty ). If this is to up agianst playstation, nintendo, x-box, sega and any other I forgot mention. The greatest selling point will be this your box the way you want it. You make it into anything you want without our permission The company then can sell thier knowledge of how to programm in thier enviroment To companies who want to support. Also there can also be games that are officially supported but that doean't mean that you can't put another game on there but if it is not an official game we can't help with it. There is alot of things that can be done on the marketing side of this they just need a great spin doctor
http://theotherside.com/dvd/
A Pentium is a 32 bit machine.
The Unix world is moving to 64-bits. Some vendors have moved. Some are moving there. Eventually that will filter down to PCs. In the meantime trying to port 32-bit applications to 64-bit systems is painful.
But for parallel calculations wider is better. Do you know what the 64 in Nintendo 64 stands for? Yup, the CPU is 64-bit! The Playstation 2 has a 128 bit emotion engine. Sega's Dreamcast is also at 128 bits. Nintendo is rumored to have a 256 bit CPU on their upcoming Dolphin.
Now any PC gaming fanatics know that a good video card really improves gaming. Do you know why? The reason is that the video card is a special-purpose CPU (typically 128 bits) that absolutely creams your general-purpose CPU on graphics calculations.
Therefore you have a choice. Compatible with existing 32-bit programs. Great as a dedicated gaming platform. And never the twain shall meet.
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
Quick, is an int a long?
What size is a pointer?
How many bytes do you need to allocate for any of the above?
On 32-bit machines an int is a long will hold a pointer, and all take 4 bytes. On 64-bit machines that doesn't work any more. If code gets it wrong, then porting becomes a nasty process. (Usual solution. Offer a slow 32-bit compatibility mode...)
As for the wider data path, it usually helps a lot for graphics. What you use the data path for is to process multiple pixels at once. Sure, you need mutually exclusive access to lots of things between processes. But the majority of the work can be done several pixels at the time. Graphics is extremely parallelizable (which is why some of the graphics benchmarks have Linux machines at the top).
But in general, you are right that 64-bits is not always better than 32. It is better if you need to deal with numbers over 2-4 GB. Which is why with larger amounts of RAM it makes sense for computers to switch. It also makes sense for parallel calculations. But for general purpose computing it can mean that programs need to toss around larger chunks of data to do the same thing, so it can be slower. (Which is why general purpose computers are only now making the switch now that available memory and file-sizes are running into problems with 32-bit machines.)
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
Which is basically a stripped down 4400. Here is a link to a detailed description.
However I would hardly call this a general purpose CPU. It is a stripped down relative of SGI's 4400. If you recall SGI was known for being a graphics powerhouse, and most of the changes they made to the chip were to make it inexpensive, and even more specialized for graphics. True, they didn't put the same level of energy that went into later generations of gaming consoles. But it had a lot of design decisions that would not make sense for a general purpose CPU!
Compare that to the early Pentiums selling at around the same time-frame which were a true general purpose CPU for a home machine, and the differences leap out at you. The Nintendo 64 ran circles around several generations of home PCs in its intended use. Had it been used for running software closer to Windows 95, it would have been limping pitifully instead...
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
Linux in a game console is viable if you keep the kernel and core system stuff in ROM, and mount only the DVD drive and a RAM disk for scratch stuff by default. The hard disk can be mounted when the user wants to save a file, and unmounted afterwards.
<p>
Good point. I wonder if they have the wits to realize this? Fsck can be run automatically to avoid having to bother the average console punter, but even with the legendary recoverability of extfs (and the upcoming journalled filesystems) it'd surely fsck up sooner or later even so.
<p>
Another method might be to include a mini-UPS attached to the power supply so that removal of mains power would cause the system to shut down gracefully, but this is unlikely because of the component cost.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Nobody is contending that the PC's on store shelves *right now* could compete with PS2.
The PC's of next fall are precisely what the argument is about.
Remember, the specs put out by Indrema are purposefully vague, eg. "GPU TBA". They will surely take advantage of the price/performance available at the point when they finally have to order parts to begin manufacture. That will be in the fall.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
You exaggerated first! :o)
:o)
This particular set-top is *not* specialized at all. That is its advantage. No longer do you need a four-foot high stack of single-function black boxes under the telly for your AV entertainment needs; one box will do.
MIDI might not be as popular as Super Mario, but since it comes "free" with good sound cards, with the right software it'd be a plus for anyone who likes making their own music. Widening the appeal of the thing still further.
QNX is a capable system for a narrow range of applications. Multimedia is not one of them AFAIK. You said:
"QNX can do everything that Linux can do yet fits in like 1/50th the space. Mainly because QNX is optimized to do these, and leaves out a lot of cruft Linux keeps in."
Eh? First you say that QNX has all the features of Linux, then in the same breath you state that it's a fiftieth the size because it's had most of the features taken out! Make up your bleeding mind!
AGP 8X engineering samples are already available. Past experience with earlier incarnations indicates that within 6 months products ought to be available.
Do you have any hard figures on transfer speed to go with your claims for VRAM? If it goes significantly faster then 2GB/sec I have my doubts that any other part of the system would be able to keep up with it. And VRAM is expensive; DDR-SDRAM will be priced like SDRAM is now.
I never mentioned a 2GHz CPU, by the way. The CPU isn't even that important, with hardware MPEG decoding and video acceleration.
What it all boils down to is this: the standard PC spec by next Christmas when this Idrema is due to come out will be substantially better than what we have now. I think it'll be something like this: 1GHz processor (133MHz FSB), 256MB PC266 DDR-SDRAM. UDMA66 20GB HDD, 128bit 8xAGP graphics card 64MB (or possibly 128MB). The Idrema will be lower specced in order to keep the price down. They seem to have pegged on a 600MHx processor for example, and I expect to see most components integrated on the motherboard making their cost negligible. If they can fit what they want into 64MB core memory then the most expensive part by far will be the graphics subsystem. But with even this integrated, it's quite possible the whole thing could be manufactured for under $300.
I still think you're arguing with your emotions rather than your reason. We'll see who's right by next Christmas
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Like many people have said, this looks like more of an all-in-one device than a true gaming machine. It looks to me like it wants to be a TiVo that can play Quake. What these guys will (as well as M$) will realize too late, console systems are about games. There's either really radical gameplay and fun factor or graphics that make you change your boxers. In some cases there's cult appeal, the Pokemon colour GameBoy (FF7 and 8 are the only reasons for me to have a PSX). The X-Box and i600 seems to appeal to the geeks who love their PC games rather than the 8-14 crowd that awes at Street Fighter 2 and gobbles up Mario Kart. The PSX and Dreamcast do have slightly more appeal for the 15-25 crowd that likes fighting and driving games. The PC game geeks don't mass NEARLY enough for the X-Box/i600 to compete with the DC and PSX/PS2.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
You've got a good point about games for Linux. I think that's a real weakness if they're marketing this as a game machine.
I imagined the OS would be behind the scenes. Rather than "It's Linux a computer for your living room", the marketing should be "It's a console that plays Linux games." I don't agree that no one will want Internet access. There are lots of people who don't want to learn computers just to surf and send email. There are more people using WebTV to surf than Linux.
The reason I gave that example of "The Sims" was to show how you could turn it on, insert the CD, and start playing. If it's going to succeed, it needs to "just work".
With a networked scheme, the server would do all this for you.
Do what for you, and why can't your computer do it? I understand perfictly, if the boxes are all the same, and the CD's are all the same, what's the point of having a server help to install information of the CD onto the computer?
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I'd like to take this opportunity to announce the specs for my new console, with an ETA of April, 2001.
-------------------------------
Name: Extrema Bullshit
CPU0: Optimized AMD Athlon Thunderbird-700 processor (2.8GFLOPS).
CPU1: NVIDIA NV26 GPU, 600m Matrix x vector operations per second, capable of transforming and lighting 150 million triangles (100 million vertices) per second. Collision detection and vertex blending is integrated into the core at no extra cost.
SPU: Emu E12000 Environmental Extender, real-time 1536kbps DTS-ES 6.1 compression, THX Ultra Certified, 130 dB signal/noise ratio, 96 hardware accelerated 3D voices. Psychoacoustic technologies allow simulating sounds along the vertical axis.
Rasterization Processor: NVIDIA NV26R, 4.8GPixel/sec fill rate, 8 programmable hardware texel units and polygon normal interpolation, yielding 120 million 8-level multi-textured phong shaded 25-pixel polygons / sec. Supports all HDTV resolutions including 1920x1080P, all at 8-bits per channel plus an 8-bit stencil buffer and 24-bit Z Buffer. Also, supports 15 million triangles/second in distributed raytracing mode, with radiosity.
Memory:
CPU0: 64MB Wide Direct RDRAM, 6.4GB/sec
Rasterization: 32MB Texture RAM, 12MB frame buffer
embedded, 64GB/sec
SPU: 4MB compression cache and 16MB sample cache, 1064MB/sec
Storage: 8X DVD, 75GB hard drive, 8MB memory card
Media: CD-ROM, CD-DA, DVD-A, DVD-Video, DVD-ROM, CD-RW, CD-R
Network: built-in selectable 10/100/1000BT ethernet, and an optional ATM switcher ($75)
OS: Solaris MultiMedia
Development: Open
Output: HDTV, SDTV, NTSC, PAL, VESA. 1x Progressive, 1xSVideo, 1xComposite, 1xVGA, 1xSCART, 1xStereo, 1xTOSLINK
Extra: Plays DVD movies, DVD Audio, VCD, CD audio, Playstation, Saturn, and DirectX games. And it can be programmed to download porn while you sleep.
Cost: $300
This does 2 trillion operations per second, so you can get double photo-realistic results.
-----------------------
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Agreed.
If they said they'd created a Linux-based "mid-weight client" that happened to play games but more importantly had fast networking, support for multiple output devices, a convenient size and low price, maybe more people would buy in.
I'd like one of these for the living room, and one in the basement (two places currently computer-free in my house) so I could tap out email, check the Web, play a game
They're playing up the wrong aspects.
Warning: IAMNAMarketingManager type.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
The list of specs on the Indrema page lists a standard video out (I think SVGA) as well as the TV outs.
...
And that makes sense, given the availability of cheap cards from ATi and others that offer the choice between S-video or standard video in addition to the reg. monitor out
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Despite what a lot of corporations want to believe, consumers just don't want an all-in-one web browser / game console / e-mail client. If people want games and Internet utilities, they can buy a PC -- or they can buy a console if they just want games.
I think you are referring to smart consumers. There are still many, many people who don't have a computer let alone want one. They turn away from having to buy a $900 machine they have not the fondest idea how to use.
People who understand computers don't want have anything to do with these all-in-one systems, but will probably end up buying one for the video game feature.
I am glad Sony has not taken the step into trying to classify their machine as a PC. They instead have made it a hacker's challenge equipping it with PCMCIA, USB and Firewire to set imaginations wild. They are calling it a gaming console - that's all they care about, the rest is up to you.
- Detritus
"I never really liked computers, but then the server went down on me"
The open source side of this is interesting, but I wouldn't expect to leverage much success from the Linux coding community, because:
1. The number of coders who have demonstrated any usability sense at all are very rare; rare enough that they should be snapped up by wise companies.
2. The Linux game coding community is *horrible*. Yes, I mean that. This is 2000; we have amazing multi-hundred-megahertz machines. We have graphics cards that speed things up even more. And what are we seeing: clones of Asteroids and Tetris and Tron light-cycle games. Ugh. Yeah, we get some ports and some people try to conjure up some inkling of creativity, but it just doesn't look good.
I loved that thing! It was a computer/word processor system that came with a daisy wheel printer, tape drive (no floppy) and a keyboard. You could plug it right into your tv so a monitor wasn't necessary. That helped to bring the costs down. It also came with a space game and an Apple-like BASIC programming language. It also came with a cartridge slot that played colecovision games !
I would spend days copying game listings from magazines only to find that they didn't work because they were designed to run on true Apple systems.
The ADAM was out around the time Draqon's Lair was the top arcade video game. Coleco kept promising to release a laser-disk and a Dragon's Lair game. I think that was my first experience with vaporware.
The printer would print about 1 page per minute. The only problem was there were glitches in the printer system that would cause the printer to spew out garbage intermittently. I remember my cousing coming over one night to type up a paper that was due the next morning. It took us 8 hours to get a 10 page paper done. He left my house at 5am.
Ah, the memories.
Hates people who have stupid little sigs
Whoa boy, outdid me in the comment length department. You're wrong on most counts however.
1) Being a set top is a specialized job. Nothing in a GPOS makes it any easier than a specialized set-top OS.
2) I know UNIX guys want to stuff in every feature under the SUN, but face it. 99% of the consumer base has no clue what MIDI is!
3) Don't get too cocky with the GPOS thing. QNX can do everything that Linux can do yet fits in like 1/50th the space. Mainly because QNX is optimized to do these, and leaves out a lot of cruft Linux keeps in.
4) Where do you get all these technological marvels? AGP 8X will not be out anywhere near Q3. More like Q3 2001. (AGP 4X is barely out NOW.) DDR SDRAM is still nowhere near as fast as embedded VRAM. Latency is lower. It has special grpahics functions, and the bus width is about 8 times wider. Even if the DDR-SDRAM runs at twice the clock, the Embedded VRAM is 4 X as fast. Take a look at what you're saying. A 2GHz PIII with a GPU capable of beating the PS2 is nowhere near Q3 this year. Even if chip power continues at its present astronomical rate, a chip cheap enough to put into a console at 2GHz is a year away. Computers evolve quick, but not THAT quick.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
All the manufactors that are pushing Web TV consoles/devices seem to keep forgetting the resolution of TV. Since TV gives you free temporal anti-aliasing (along with spatial anti-aliasing) which is GREAT for graphics, it however makes READING TEXT very tiring on the eyes compared to a "real" monitor.
:)
People use monitors for a reason: Namely a clear rock steady image. Personally I find anything less then 100 Hz to be an eye strain, but what do I know, I'm just a graphics programmer
Cheers
This product isn't a good idea. If it wasn't running Linux, I don't think that anybody would even notice it. Here is why:
1. They say that it has a 600 Mhz processor, but don't mention what kind it is. Any Slashdot read worth their salt should know that listing the clock speed of a processor and nothing else is like listing a motor's RPMs and nothing else; It doesn't mean anything useful. The only reason that they say this is because the X-Box has a processor running at the same speed.
2. It has a hard drive. I know that the X-box also has one, but I don't like that either. I own a computer. In fact, I own 6. If I want to have to manage hard drive space and fsck's, then I'll use a computer. If I want to play q3a, then I'll use a computer. If I want to play Mario, then I'll use my Nintendo, and I won't worry about having an optional hard drive upgrade. I guess what I'm saying is:
3. If I want to play computer games, I'll play them on a computer. Why would I buy a separate machine to play games on? OK, I did, but it is just another computer, which I also use for development and such. If I want to play console games, I'll play them on a console. The web site offers nothing to make me believe that this isn't a computer with a different case and TV out.
4. The graphics chip isn't announced. If you play games, you know that this makes the entire announcement virtually meaningless. The most important factor in a game machine's ability is the graphics card. A PII-233 with a GeForce DDR would smoke a PIII-1000 with an S3 virge in just about any game. The (already mentioned) fact that they didn't even mention the type of processor makes this announcement totally meaningless.
5. It has an OS, and it is Linux. I love Linux. I want more games for Linux. However, having an OS isn't really that good for a console, IMHO. The Dreamcast has a port of WinCE, and nobody uses it. This is because it really isn't useful. A full blow OS, like Win2K (X-box) or Linux (this thing) is very bad in the context of console games. A protected memory, paged memory, multi-tasking, mult-threaded, multi-user, OS is very slow. It cuts the performance of a machine at least in half. The Dreamcast has a 200 MHz processor, which is probably on par with a PII 400 (if I remember correctly) in terms of FPU horsepower, and a graphics chip which is a bit more powerful than a voodoo 2. In spite of this, games like Soul Calibur look much better than anything available on a PC with a PIII 600 and a TNT2 ultra. It doesn't waste CPU time on context switches, memory security and other things that are critical on a multi-user, multi-processing system.
Personally, I'm waiting on a "Next-Next Generation" console until the PS2 comes out, and maybe even until it has some games. I could be wrong, but I don't think this thing will even tempt me as much as the X-box.
or rather, the developers of those games! playstation, nintendo, sony, as well as microsoft, all have a slew of developers enlisted to "make the games." Microsoft in particular is able to wrangle in developers with API's that work on it's X-Box as well as desktop PC's. Developers like this, since they can easily port/cross-develop their games to 2 platforms. As much as Microsoft API's suck, are poorly designed, etc, they are being used, and used widely in PC game development.
Now consider Linux. Now think about games for Linux. Until now, the only commercially sucessful venue for games on Linux has been Loki. And all they do is ports (and according to the recent interview with the head of Loki, thats all they're interested in doing for at least the near future). My point is that for this machine to be a successful game platform, they'll have to convince developers that game development is rewarding, easy, powerful, etc. For this to happen, there needs to be proven, standard API's that are of commercial quality (open-source, or not), with support, usage statistics, examples, demos, everything! (Some tools/environments come to mind, such as OpenGL/AL; just gotta convince the developers.)
In terms of the non-game aspects of this machine, everything seems fine to me. Linux has already proven itself capable of internet-oriented tasks, and would, in my opinion, make a fine WebTV style device. However, to simply tack on "and it'll play your favorite games!" without thinking it through is not prudent, and I doubt it would sell, to either developers, or consumers.
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
Ahhh....But did you catch the lines about the 100Mbit ethernet port and the choice of HD's?
I would by this thing if it was reasonbly priced for the MP3 possiblities alone. I want a box that is ethernet ready and dedicated to storing my music collection. If I could use it to surf too, then that's a bonus.
I think the price is going to be an issue.
Yeah, Yeah, I could build one myself, but who has time. I dig the look of the thing and the compact size.
Jason
http://packetnexus.com
When I was reading through this, I was very impressed by the Timothy's response to the article, but I wanted to note a few things that may be important.
I've seen others mention the importance of this box in the grander scheme of things, both pushing against M$ and the existing game console companies (Sony, etc.) and I think that these are all valid points, but...
Who is going to 'root' this system? Are there going to be instant upgrades available like the Flash upgradable I-Opener Internet Appliance? Since the system is run on software on top of the hardware and not from eeprom and chip saved commands like the game consoles, but with a REAL OS ... When does it get upgraded? Who does the upgrading? Who gets access to root?
Another problem, then, is also security. We have a REAL OS here, connecting to the Internet. How long before these boxes start getting hacked? What do consumers do then? Buy an upgrade? Buy a patch?
Where then, does the line get drawn between this box taunting the world with Linux and the ever?-powerful M$ get drawn?
"The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely." -- Carl Jung, Psychologist
See the following detailed article from xboxpc.com based on an interview from Kevin Bachus, one of the originators of the X-Box on why the X-Box isn't anything but a game machine. It won't even have a web browser.
Microsoft Says by Any Other Name, Still Not a PC
Can I start playing games as soon as I hit the "on" button? (10 seconds is too long for a quick game before you go out).
What about price? Isn't it better to buy the features separately; that way someone can watch a DVD, while someone else is playing a game.
Crusoe is intended for mobile applications. Like cell-phones, PDAs, and the like. But if you expect to plug it into the wall, then the Crusoe's power savings are unlikely to be a huge win.
In their market Transmeta is actually doing quite well. And long term Transmeta probably hopes to move into the mainstream market as well. After all one of the basic problems that chips face for getting faster is keeping from melting down. Low power implies low heat which implies a design that can scale.
Another win for Transmeta's design is that they can take advantage of future architectures much more easily than can a traditional chip design. The value of this freedom is immense, but again only in the long haul does it really pay back.
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
people can just buy the PS2 to get set-top capabilities PLUS awesome gaming.
A general purpose machine running a general purpose OS (even if tweaked for multimedia performance) will always be capable of more things than a hardwired console which doesn't have the capacity for a fully fledged OS.
1) Power, power power. The proc in this machine sounds something like an Athlon or PIII 600. That is ridiculously low powered compared to the 300 MHz emotion engine. You hear all those mac heads preaching MHz!=power. Well this is a case in point. The fp power of the Emotion Engine (herefoth refered to as the EE in amiga tradition) is much higher than a PIII. It is designed to do one thing well, 3D graphics calculations.
Exactly. In other words, you are comparing apples with oranges. You went on to say that Indrema would need a 1.5GHz PIII. But The Emotion engine cannot be compared with a CPU, it's only a graphics processor. To see how the Indrema box compared to a PS2 you'll have to wait to see what kind of graphics card it ships with. And by Q3, allowing plenty of time for a last-minute redesign and tooling up for manufacture before Christmas, the AGP graphics cards out there will be two generations on from where we are now. Nvidia have themselves already said that the X-box GPU will be several times more powerful than the PS2. So while the PS2 is doomed always to run the Emotion Engine, by the time the L600 appears it will have a GPU between four to ten times as powerful as the PS2's in terms of sheer triangle output and fill rate, and with a few new tricks as well. At HDTV resolutions and frame rates, this will mean 3D game animations that look even more like live video than the PS2's.
This being so, the PS2 in its current form can't possibly compete. Even if Sony introduces an uprated GPU, the only way they'd be able to overtake the L600 in graphics quality terms would be to put in more hardwired features rather than just upping the clock rate. Then it's a PS3, effectively, and software compatibility issues come into play.
Then there is the 4 meg of EMBEDDED VRAM with a 150MHz bus and a ridiculous bus width (DDR eat your heart out.) I don't think I have to elaborate.
But by Q3 this year, a standard PC motherboard will probably be running PC266 DDR-SDRAM with a memory bandwidth on the main system bus of 2.128GB/sec. Support for 8xAGP may well be widespread on motherboards and high-end 3D graphics cards by then too, giving us 2GB/sec to the graphics card as well. Thus, any high-end PC by this fall might be able to give the PS2 a run for its money. And all without even having to resort to some ugly proprietary local video bus scheme...
2) Selvteness. When will people learn that using the right tool for the right job is best. Why the hell did they decide to use Linux? Sure it is a great server or workstation OS, but is seriously too big for a gamestation.
But this is not just a "gamestation". It will play MP3's and CD's, and DVD's like Playstation II. It will also surf the web and handle email. Unlike the Playstation though, it will also probably be able to record broadcast video (and perhaps delay broadcasts like Tivo and Replay). Since it'll be running a general purpose OS which just happens to have a huge available application code base, and since it'll be festooned with USB ports, I guarantee that nobody can foresee right now what else people will be doing with it.
It's all down to what software gets written for it I suppose. I can easily imagine that we'll be doing Karaoke on it, hooking up MIDI keyboards to it, ordering the shopping from the local supermarket, checking the bank balance and so on. All the things you could do from your sofa with a TV if that TV also happened to be a powerful internet-connected computer.
You can cut it down, but it even then it is still too big, and by the looks of the spec sheet, they seem to be using full blown Linux/X. This poses many problems.
A) Linux is too fat for a console. A console has no need of many things that are in the kernel that can't be taken out. There is no need for all the security and multi-userness inherent in UNIX, no need for console support, no need for any process management (or memory protection for that matter) no need for a VM, no need swap management, etc.
Really? Remember this is not just a games console. All that multitasking power could be put to good use I dare say. Like recording a movie off the TV while you're playing Quake. Can a Playstation 2 do that? Perhaps the L600 can't either, but you can bet that the next version will be able to.
Again, these could probably be coded out, but that would be an assload of work, and most Linux progs wouldn't work afterwords. The PS/2 OS will be simple. Some libraries for setting of graphics, OpenGL, etc, talking to the hardware, taking to devices, and a TCP/IP stack. Most of all, it gets our of your way real fast.
So can Linux if you don't have a whole bunch of demons running and you've compiled out all the unnecessary device and networking support.
Don't be surprised if many game developers forgo OpenGL or whatever and access hardware directly.
I doubt it. The OpenGL API means that PC games houses, who've been using OpenGL for years, can feasibly port their games to this platform and Linux in general, in short order. It's already happening.
They've been doing it for years and on a platform that stays as constant as a console, they can tweek to give a massive speed boost. The best example is this. One the same hardware, current N64 games whoop what was available at its introduction. What PCs can do that?
The PC's of next fall.
B) They're using X. (They say they use Mesa and DRI.) What kind of ridiculous interface is that? Am I to assume they'll write their own WM. Then who will re-write the apps to take advantage of it? Shoehorning a big UI into the wrong place has been seen before. Its called WindowsCE. And why the hell use DRI? What else is using the graphics hardware?
I'd expect them to use a lightweight X-based WM for applications, something like ICE or Blackbox. But the games will bypass that mostly, so no overhead there. The X code will be completely swapped out while the game is running.
C) Wheres the RAM? Sure it has 64 meg, but after Linux/X plus the WM, only like 16 or less will be left. You're telling me the console is going to hit the SWAP?
This is typical console-player arrogance. It may surprise you to know that there are many people who play 3D video games on operating systems much worse than Linux. Swapfiles are used appropriately. If the game is written to run within available physical memory, swapping will only take place at startup and between scenes. It doesn't impinge on game play. It's simply irrelevant.
3) They're way out of their league in terms of customer slickness. First, Linux isn't that slick to begin with. I'll give them the benifit of the doubt and assume they can make Linux/X as easy to use as the playstation.
Yes, it'll have to look a lot more "appliance-like". But that can be done.
(No boot sequence, no logging in, no actually even starting the app.
Oh, come ON! Even console users have to switch on, plug in, and navigate past the opening screens!
Want to play a CD? Stick it in the drive and re-boot. The CD player app comes up.)
Do PS2 users have to reboot to play a CD? Linux users and Windows users don't.
Are people actually going to SHUTDOWN their console? Linux is way too unstable and buggy for consoles. Sure 100 days without a crash may seem stable to PC users, but console users would be up in arms if their console crashed three times a year! More like once every three years is about right. (My N64 has crashed once in 5 years, and my PC hasn't crashed in the 3 years I've owned it.)
This *might* be a danger (though not so much as with the MS X-box). It depends how much stuff is running, and whether there are any memory leaks in the window manager or the browser etc. If the "off" button does a soft shutdown (something like a properly working ACPI suspend-to-disk), then the slate is regularly wiped clean and this risk will be minimal.
Second, I can't see people accepting the fact that their kernel needs to be updated. No, sorry, no dice.
I don't see why the kernel should ever need updating if people don't want to (or if the manufacturers don't want them to). There are Linux-based web servers out there still running kernel 1.0.9, you know.
And the hardrive. The guy who decided to put in a harddrive ought to be shot.
I am rather glad of the hard disk actually. Especially since it means video recording capability, on-system storage of MP3's etc.
I say this because console software is released as good as it will ever get. It has to be, it can never be patched. People aren't going to accept, "please wait... Downloading latest patches for Mario 64."
Why not? Fully automatic software updates sounds like quite a neat feature. Not having to put up with permanent bugs like console software has sounds like a good idea. Of course, if such a feature is implemented it will be optional and upgrade downloads won't happen without the user's consent.
These people need to get a clue.
Personally I think the clue they already have is better than yours...
This is a machine that everyone from age 6 to age 60 will be using. It can't be difficult, it can't be unstable (reletivly), it can't take energy to maintain. It has to be transparent to use, and be easy to use as your toaster. Literraly.
That's the only thing you've said that I can actually agree with. The basic functions *must* be easy to learn. I hope it's better than my Thomson VCR, which was designed by a complete idiot.
Its nice to get Linux on yet another devices, but ask yourself people, how stupid of an idea is it?
I rather think that this device isn't about getting Linux out there, it's about delivering a flexible, fast and reliable set-top computer and entertainment device. That requires a general purpose OS. Of such operating systems, many people believe Linux to be the best choice for this kind of embedded work - for a whole raft of reasons. But this post is quite long enough already.
I just want to add in closing that I believe this machine is the right thing for the simple reason that I've been waiting for three years for one to appear. For all that time I've wanted a single box to go under my TV which would do off-air video recording, 3D games, music, web surfing and general LAN access. Up to now, the hardware hasn't been up to it; all the graphics cards I've seen so far have really crap TV-out displays. But this one is supposed to support HDTV so I'm hopeful of home cinema quality output at last. And it'll surely cost me far less to buy it from them than it'd cost me to design and build it myself from scratch.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I don't think that the line "yes, it will play any game available for Linux" is a good selling point, at this point in time.
And forget about piling on more and more "features". It doesn't need to to anything but play games! Notice how well the WebTV is selling? Didn't think so. People need to realize that the set-top box market and the PC markets are completely different. If someone wanted to have a PC, they'ed have bought one.
Some features are very well suited for inclusion with a set top box... DVD player is a no brainer, as is a CD player, but only because the DVD player will play CD's. Web browsing software? No. Email clients? No. KDE? No. Those are all functions that really don't serve the set top market very well.
Even a "visible" OS is kind of against what a gaming console stands for. Who cares if the underlying OS is Windows, Linux, or any other operating system. You should turn the machine on, insert CD, pick up controller, and press start. The OS should only be there so that developers have a common API to code for in order to use things like the sound chips, graphics chips, and read from the CD.
One way to avoid the classic console/pc problems is to take advantage of the flexibility of the PC. to add value. Picture this:
Customer: Does it play games?
Vendor: Yes. Any game for Linux will work on it.
Customer: Does it play CDs?
Vendor: Yes.
Customer: What about MP3s?
Vendor: Them too.
Customer: DVD?
Vendor: Yeah. They have a license from the DVD Forum. Faster/easier DVD playback than any other linux system.
Customer: What ReplayTV and Tivo?
Vendor: It does that, too.
Customer: What about the Internet?
Vendor: You bet. Have a look at Mozilla. . .
That's a lot of features.
The way I see it, a high-speed internet connection and a unified platform are a potent combination. Say Loki ports The Sims to Linux. Your box doesn't know how to install it. So when you insert the CD, it reaches out and asks a central server. The central server's directions will be correct, because all these boxes are the same.
Dunno if it will succeed, but these ARE the days of the sub-$500 PC.
I mean, I'll never get this. Money should, in theory, make almost anything respectable (ok, porn is the obvious exception). Games and game machines are a big, huge money industry. I mean people talk about the Internet revolution in the news all the time, but it seems that the video/computer gaming revolution has always been a stealth revolution.
Now, don't get me wrong, it always sickens me the way these days everyone (in the mainstream media) seems to think money is the only important thing about the information age. But you'd think something that has made fortunes for people at Sony, Sega and Nintendo wouldn't be able to get its jokes from Rodney Dangerfield. Now... I don't want people to think there are no innovative minds in American gaming hardware. For example, I'm fairly impressed by the way that Alienware markets gaming optimized computers. They don't try to pretend they've got "socially redeeming value" they just give their boxen cool names like Hivemind and put decent hardware inside of them.
When 3DO was first announced this was an actual advertising slogan:
Years ago, I read a science fiction story about a computer that could predict the future. This computer predicted the birth of a man who had a wrongly formulated scientific theory, but he was absolutely convinced it was correct and charismatic enough to convince other people that it was true. No matter how many disasters were caused by putting the theory into practice he wouldn't give up on it, and eventually a flawed machine based on his theory destroyed the entire universe.The quasi-educational set-top box is like this for the American gaming industry. Somehow, business people who back these things need to be convinced that the quasi-educational boxes are uncool and unsexy and it is the game machines that are cool. After all, there is no reason why a Linux based set-top box couldn't be used to create decent games (I mean besides Nethack... though that would be pretty cool on a big screen TV ;) especially considering Gameboy is still selling very well. It's just a philosophical problem... chain the investment bankers up and have them repeat the mantra "games are cool, games make money" until they understand it.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
This sounds a lot like Vaporware - The components are almost exactly the same as the X-box, with a few added 'upgrade' options.
They also say "NV25 Hardware Acceleration or better."
Or better? They don't know yet? And remember, Nvidia said the NV25 was X-Box ONLY.
Sounds as if this is timed to draw some hype on the coattails of the X-box.
signature smigmature
- James
Its a sad but true fact that this set top will get nowhere. They don't seem to comprehend quite a few things, all of which will lead this to be unusable (compared to the PS2) as a game console. That fact will also hurt its sales as a set-top, because people can just buy the PS2 to get set-top capabilities PLUS awesome gaming.
1) Power, power power. The proc in this machine sounds something like an Athlon or PIII 600. That is ridiculously low powered compared to the 300 MHz emotion engine. You hear all those mac heads preaching MHz!=power. Well this is a case in point. The fp power of the Emotion Engine (herefoth refered to as the EE in amiga tradition) is much higher than a PIII. It is designed to do one thing well, 3D graphics calculations. It can be very parallel, and have a ton of hardware dedicated to just that task. There is no way anything below a 1.5 - 2GHz PIII will outperform it. Take a look at the special SH3 powering the Dreamcast. Remember the Top500 super computer list? Number 2 and 3 were measly 64 way SH based chips. Sure they might not be as hot as a 256 chip origin for general computing, but for their very specific task, they whoop. Thats they same family of chip thats in the dreamcast, and EE promises to be even better. Then take the GPU. Looks to be something like a GeForce. Might be nice, but remember, even in terms of clock speed the PS2 GPU outperforms it. (120MHz vs. 150 MHz) There are also a lot of optimizations in the architecture that the PS2 can make that the more general purpose PC arch can't. Then there is the 4 meg of EMBEDDED VRAM with a 150MHz bus and a ridiculous bus width (DDR eat your heart out.) I don't think I have to elaborate.
2) Selvteness. When will people learn that using the right tool for the right job is best. Why the hell did they decide to use Linux? Sure it is a great server or workstation OS, but is seriously too big for a gamestation. You can cut it down, but it even then it is still too big, and by the looks of the spec sheet, they seem to be using full blown Linux/X. This poses many problems.
A) Linux is too fat for a console. A console has no need of many things that are in the kernel that can't be taken out. There is no need for all the security and multi-userness inherent in UNIX, no need for console support, no need for any process management (or memory protection for that matter) no need for a VM, no need swap management, etc. Again, these could probably be coded out, but that would be an assload of work, and most Linux progs wouldn't work afterwords. The PS/2 OS will be simple. Some libraries for setting of graphics, OpenGL, etc, talking to the hardware, taking to devices, and a TCP/IP stack. Most of all, it gets our of your way real fast. Don't be surprised if many game developers forgo OpenGL or whatever and access hardware directly. They've been doing it for years and on a platform that stays as constant as a console, they can tweek to give a massive speed boost. The best example is this. One the same hardware, current N64 games whoop what was available at its introduction. What PCs can do that?
B) They're using X. (They say they use Mesa and DRI.) What kind of ridiculous interface is that? Am I to assume they'll write their own WM. Then who will re-write the apps to take advantage of it? Shoehorning a big UI into the wrong place has been seen before. Its called WindowsCE. And why the hell use DRI? What else is using the graphics hardware?
C) Wheres the RAM? Sure it has 64 meg, but after Linux/X plus the WM, only like 16 or less will be left. You're telling me the console is going to hit the SWAP?
3) They're way out of their league in terms of customer slickness. First, Linux isn't that slick to begin with. I'll give them the benifit of the doubt and assume they can make Linux/X as easy to use as the playstation. (No boot sequence, no logging in, no actually even starting the app. Want to play a CD? Stick it in the drive and re-boot. The CD player app comes up.) Are people actually going to SHUTDOWN their console? Linux is way too unstable and buggy for consoles. Sure 100 days without a crash may seem stable to PC users, but console users would be up in arms if their console crashed three times a year! More like once every three years is about right. (My N64 has crashed once in 5 years, and my PC hasn't crashed in the 3 years I've owned it.) Second, I can't see people accepting the fact that their kernel needs to be updated. No, sorry, no dice. And the hardrive. The guy who decided to put in a harddrive ought to be shot. I say this because console software is released as good as it will ever get. It has to be, it can never be patched. People aren't going to accept, "please wait... Downloading latest patches for Mario 64."
These people need to get a clue. This is a machine that everyone from age 6 to age 60 will be using. It can't be difficult, it can't be unstable (reletivly), it can't take energy to maintain. It has to be transparent to use, and be easy to use as your toaster. Literraly. Its nice to get Linux on yet another devices, but ask yourself people, how stupid of an idea is it?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Nowhere does Indrema even refer to its machine as a games console; gaming is just one of many jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none "features". It's mentioned that it can play Quake and Unreal Tournament, but so can a PC. Neither of those games are exclusive, either, and exclusive games are what really determines a console's success (why would I want to buy Indrema Quake when I just play it on my Linux box?). Given that it's not even being pushed as a game console, the chances of this console getting support from any important third-party console developer (Konami, Capcom, Square, etc.) is just about nil.
Sorry to rain on the parade, but this isn't a game console, let alone a commercially viable one. An actual Linux-based console would be very interesting to see, but we're going to have to wait a while longer before it actually appears.
Green Monkey