NUON As Open Source Gaming Platform

jjustice writes: "About a month ago, Richard Miller, CEO of VM Labs, announced that "In the near future (I don't want to commit to a date until we are sure of it), we will release to the open development community the tools and documentation that were used to develop these titles - both the games and the movie enhancements. We will also release a few sample applications that can be freely downloaded from the Internet, burned onto CD-R discs, and run on NUON DVD players that can read CD-Rs. Currently only the N501 has this capability, but we anticipate that all future NUON based DVD players will read CD-R and DVD-R media." It's not Linux, but unlike Indrema, the boxes are available. And the technology may not rival PS2 or XBox, but he also says the latest version of the chip is 2-3 times the power of the existing model and cheaper to produce. Besides, I'll support any platform with games from Jeff Minter." No use for all those electronics going to waste, eh?

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A quick introduction to NUON

[Ahchay]

This has been a bit of an open-secret for a while but, unfortunately, it's not actually available _yet_

NUON, for those who don't know, is an integrated DVD processor produced by VMLabs, currently available in the US in three consumer models Toshiba SD2300, Samsung Extiva and Samsung N501. There are european models due RSN. It provides advanced processing capable of at least N64 level games as well as enhanced DVD playback (>20x digital zoom, advanced frame management) and NUON specific DVD content. It also features Jeff Minter's VLM2 which is an update to the Jag VLM and, were VMLabs to realise it, is about the coolest thing on the planet at the moment.

The NUON open SDK does exist, and _will_ be made available to the public RSN. But, it hasn't been released yet. There is a FAQ available at NuonDev.com which, although not official, does show the currently known state of open-NUON.

Cheers
Chris