The PC, Xbox, PS2, GameCube and 2600, Together at Last

The Screen Savers have a story on their website about the building of a single box 2600/PS2/GameCube/Xbox/PC/ NES player. But this is not a mame ^? box. The builder, Yoshi, dismantled, cut,chopped and belt-sanded the consoles to make them all fit in the same Lian-76 case. I can only imagine how hot this case might get. There is a photo album here. It looks like you'd still need a video switcher to take advantage of this completely. A cool mod for this would be to pack in a wintv card for each console or something.

Comments

The Point?

[ajiva]

So what's the point of this contraption? Yes its cool, but isn't the whole point of having multiple consoles is that you can use them seperatly? Not sure about you, but having multiple TVs and multiple consoles sure does keep all my friends happy when they visit

Re:The Point?

[magicslax]

If you have to ask why, don't.

This is the sort of "because we CAN" geek project that needs no practical justification. You don't see the inate brilliance of cutting things out of their boxes and putting them in other boxes? Tough.

Re:The Point?

[Omerna]

The "point" is because that's just incredibly cool. I mean seriously, go look at the pictures. That's an example of synergy (whole is greater then the sum of the parts) plus it would look SO nice sitting on my living room floor.

Re:The Point?

[Anonymous Coward]

having multiple TVs and multiple consoles sure does keep all my friends happy when they visit

I guess it's for those of us who like to be in the same room with out friends when they visit.

Re:The Point?

[doorbot.com]

If you have to ask why, don't.

I agree. Every time there is an article along these lines (one of those things where most people say "Cool!"), there's always those few people who say "What's the point? They could be spending their energy hurling asteroids at the sun or calculating the exact value of Pi."

My question is, are these the same people every time? If so, why are they continually posting to the same kind of stories? Are they trolls? Do they have difficulty not clicking the link if they don't think it's interesting?

If you have to continually post the same responses over and over, I have to ask... what's the point?

Re:The Point?

[DarkZero]

Well, then, you must live in a pretty odd place with pretty odd friends. In my experience, people only use one console at a time when they're home. And when they're with friends, they traditionally all play the same multiplayer game on the same console. The point of this mod, beyond the "Because we CAN!" niftiness, is that it conserves a lot of space. Instead of having a PC, a PS2, a GameCube, an X-Box, an NES, a 2600, and all of the required wires and video switchers between them taking up an entire entertainment center and leaving little room for other important entertainment center appliances like stereos, VCRs, and a television, this box keeps them all together, keeps all of the wires in a small space, and cuts out their ridiculous form factors which rarely go well together. Hell, just between the main three consoles, you've got a huge rectangle, a thin black monolith, and a cube. Those shapes don't exactly go well together within an entertainment center that's divided into rather small square and rectangular spaces.

Re:The Point?

[NanoGator]

"What's the point? I can do the same thing if I just do more work." -- that's what I hear when people question things like this.

Re:The Point?

[LadyLucky]

If someone posts a story on Slashdot, and nobody says "What's the Point?", was that story actually posted?

Now what we really need is...

[Giga]

this guy to make it portable.

Re:Now what we really need is...

[ekrout]

Personally, I think this one is much sexier ;-D

- Eric
Founder, monolinux

Re:Now what we really need is...

[56ker]

portable as in the second obsolete meaning :
Portable \Port"a*ble\, a. [L. portabilis, fr. portare to carry: cf. F. portable. See {Port} demeanor.]

1. Capable of being borne or carried; easily transported; conveyed without difficulty; as, a portable bed, desk, engine. --South.

2. Possible to be endured; supportable. [Obs.]

How light and portable my pain seems now! --Shak.

Re:Now what we really need is...

[Shiny Metal S.]

Now what we really need is... this guy to make it portable.

Or this guy.

DVDA

[Professor Oompa]

Wow... so many things shoved in one box. Sounds like something you'd see on skinimax

Re:DVDA

[laserjet]

haha! moderators, mod this up! everytime i see the DVD-A acronmym I always think of something else... an obscure reference from Orgamzo...

Dreamcast?

[Frohike66]

I'm wondering where the DreamCast is located? Surely it wouldn't have been left out.

Re:Dreamcast?

[ProfMoriarty]

Colecovision?

Re:Dreamcast?

[Tofuhead]

I know. As a Dreamcast-or-die kind of fellow, it feels like someone's physically slapped my face.

An update for the U.S.-only gaming folk: SNK's King of Fighters 2000 and Treasure's Ikaruga, two of the hottest 2-D arcade games in recent history among the gamerati, are coming out for SEGA DREAMCAST. The thing refuses to die, and damn if I'll let anyone snub its memory as Sega's pinnacle console gaming achievement. It's thinking.

...Aw, geez. Friday night, and I'm at home posting in defense of a video game console. I used the words "gamerati" and "It's thinking," for Heaven's sake. Truly a new low.

< tofuhead >

Re:Dreamcast?

[DarkZero]

(Warning: I do not own a Dreamcast. I'm just a gaming addict.)

Dude, that's a pretty pathetic defense of the Dreamcast. "Oh, look, it has a 2D shooter and a port of a fighting game from a decade-old console!" Even from someone that likes the Neo Geo, that registers a big honkin' "whatever" in my book. How about bringing up the fact that the Dreamcast is going so strong in Japan that one of its new RPG (Sakura Taisen 4) bent the shiny remake of Resident Evil for the GameCube over its knee and spanked it in the sales charts? It beat the RE remake by a 3-to-1 margin, and whereas the RE remake has practically fallen off the charts, Sakura Taisen 4 is still going strong?

That, or you could just bring up the simple point that the Dreamcast is much more alive than the X-Box, which is dead last on the console charts in the US and stillborn in every other country.

Re:Dreamcast?

[Tofuhead]

Oh, bite your tongue. =P Any shmup fan wil tell you that Ikaruga alone is enough reason to place the DC on the alive and kicking end of the scale. Treasure's shooters have a history of doing this: Radiant Silvergun for Sega Saturn, Sin and Punishment for N64 (okay, rail shooter), and now Ikaruga for DC are just recent examples.

KoF2K is likewise a BFD for me. It means that SNK/Playmore, a 3rd party, feel they can profit from porting/enhancing games for the supposedly dead system. Although Sakura Taisen's numbers are impressive, Sega released it themselves, so the fanboys alone will buy it just for the melancholy Sega kitsch value, while many will see KoF2K as YA-2-D fighter (and thus more of a risk). Add to that the fact that I don't particularly care for the series...frankly, the closest I've come to enjoying Sakura Taisen is watching the first few of the OAVs and playing a friend's copy of Sakura Taisen Hanagumi Columns for Saturn. ;)

And now, a late warning from me: You may not own a Dreamcast, but I (a non-retailer and fellow gaming addict) own 14, all new and unopened. This doesn't count the two I use regularly as my own, and is down from the 16 I had last week -- and I'm now up $200 because of the difference. I'm talking about unmodified, non-bundle, made in China, Samsung-driven, U.S. systems with Indonesian controllers. Not ideal by anyone's measurement, but still well worth buying for anyone who doesn't have a Dreamcast yet.

< tofuhead >

If you got over 3,000 bucks you may get one.

[Typingsux]

Here

It won't do XBOX or PS2 natively, but you have every other emulator that you can think of.

Video switcher is built in

[__aaaaxm1522]

Saw a demo of this on The Screen Savers tonight. The video switcher is built in - it's a knob on the front panel - twist it, and it switches from one feed to another.

Re:Video switcher is built in

[eyeball]

The video switcher is built in - it's a knob on the front panel - twist it, and it switches from one feed to another.

With all that technology and ingenuity, i'm so surprized he didn't incorporate an electronic switcher with remote control.

Re: The PC, Xbox, PS2...

[rmohr02]

How exactly would one keep track of all the wires for controllers coming out of this? I have enough problems with four controllers coming out of a Gamecube and another four coming out of a PS2.

Unfortunately, you don't get great pictures of the final product, just pics of it during production. O well.

This is pretty cool though, and I assume if you could do all of this that you could add a Super NES, an N64 and other gaming platforms. Too bad I don't have the time to do this.

Also, doesn't this fit under Hardware rather than Games?

Wow ...

[ProfMoriarty]

And that really doesn't describe it.

Curious ... is there a list around of the Top 10 case mods?

This guy should definately be entered.

BTW, you could even run MAME on it, it has a 2100+ AMD with a 40G hd ...

Now what would be really cool....

[papasui]

is if it comes with a modification to allow all those consoles to be viewed via a computer monitor or even better if you could fit a flexATX or one of those micro mainboards and put in a card with a video in line so you can play multiple games in a window via an overlay.

Money?

[RealisticWeb.com]

My main problem with these kind of mods are the potential for loss. If I had and 8 bit nintendo, and an atari 2600 that still worked, I would be too worried about breaking them to hack them into bits. Not to mention spending several hundred dollars on the modern consoles to squeeze in too.

Besides, If you have hacked your xbox like that you wouldn't get any more official M$ tech support (tee hee)

Re:Money?

[Tofuhead]

Knock-off NES clones are very true to the original, come in unique shapes (Playstation-shaped, GameBoy size, etc.), and can be had for next to nothing. The electronics that go into one are really cheap.

Or, you could have the PC emulate almost any vintage system of this era with impressive accuracy, to the point where you wouldn't need to hack any hardware at all (unless you wanted to use the system's actual game cartridges and not ROM files).

< tofuhead >

You know these guys read slashdot

[zaffir]

They've had tutorials on how to build your own Teddy Borg, among other things. I do wish they'd give credit to the originators of the design on the show and the website, instead of just the site, though.

2600 receiving mainstream press

[I Want GNU!]

I'm glad that they are bundling the newest issues of 2600 into this mad leet new blue box! Free Kevin!!!!!!

Two microsoft OS'es in that close a proximity?

[nobodyman]

This guy sounds like a sadist. Hopefully he grafted a ctrl-alt-delete key on the joysticks.

Oh, and the next guy to even THINK about mentioning a beowulf cluster of these things should die a slow, painful death.

Heat concerns?

[Self-Important]

Even though that Lian Li case is aluminum, I imagine that we're talking about an insane amount of heat that must be dissipated in that cramped little space. How long will this thing last before one of the components dies?

Seseme Street

[DanThe1Man]

...Xbox, PS2, GameCube and 2600...

One of these things is not like the other, one of these things just dosn't belong.

PS + PC already working

[famazza]

Built by afrotech. Take a look here

Maybe he can help too. ;o)

I'm buying a GC

[WildBeast]

I have an XBox and I'll be buying a GC to but there's no way I'm gonna risk voiding my warranty so I can have a little fun with the boxes. I can't afford it. I don't like Nintendo's graphics, but they do have some good games.

Re:I'm buying a GC

[zerOnIne]

totally ... super smash bros melee is the best reason to have at least 3 friends!

Re:We all know.....

[Tofuhead]

I still think that 8-bit is the highest that I'll emulate. For SNES, I prefer the actual console. I remember playing the original Final Fantasy VI for the first time under emulation, and hearing the wind sound effects under the lackluster audio emulator of whatever emu I was using at the time (snes9x or zsnes) really had me wishing I was playing on my actual SNES. (BTW, playing it on Playstation has me feeling the same way, since the SNES midi synth sounded much better than whatever was used to make the PSX tracks...which don't even loop seamlessly -- very disconcerting!)

< tofuhead >

Old consoles are cheap

[freeweed]

I currently own 8 NES units, and 6 2600's, all picked up for basically nothing (got them at garage sales as a bundle with some games for the most part). They all work. In fact, I have yet to find a completely dead console unit (we won't talk about the controllers, mind you).

Just for fun I took out the mainboard from one of each, and hung them on the wall. Also from my spare Sega Master System and Intellivision. Kinda keeps me humble to remember the roots of the whole thing, ya know? It's actually scary just how well the old units are built. Other than the power switch etc, all solid state. Pretty damn hard to break one. Post-PSX... the cd drives are typically the first things to go on a modern console, and I can't imagine what you'd do if the hard drive fails and it's some proprietary standard.

Of course, hacking apart a new $300 unit is something else entirely...

C'mon

[_ph1ux_]

doesnt this kid read /. - that case should be black & with neon lights and a window so I can see all the innards

Just feels half assed

[interstellar_donkey]

There is no doubt there was a great deal of good engineering going on here.. but in the end, it's just taking a bunch of off the shelf components and putting it into a box.

This would be much, much cooler if the guy had figured out how to use the onboard computer to A: do the video switching, and B: taking one controller, and re-directing the wires to the proper consol unit from one single controller. Then we'd have something to write home about.

to minimise box clutter

[DABANSHEE]

PC + NES + X-Box + PS2 + NGC + old Atari thing = a lot of boxes cluttering things up & a mess of double adaptors, powercables, powersupply briquettes & video cables.

Sticking it all in one box & working out some sort of switching setup so all devices can share the same power imput & video output queues clutter effect.

Re:to minimise box clutter

[bastion_xx]

I bet they bought all the pieces-parts online from PayPal vendors.... and used a TechTV MasterCard!

WTG Yoshi, now can you make one for me? Oh, throw in a Colecovision too please.

But, but, but..

[FortranDragon]

-=:Begin magic /. incantation:=-

I'll probably be modded down for this...

-=:End magic /. incantation:=-

;-)

Am I the only one that thinks this mod is just butt-ugly because of the PC case? I mean, if this was in an old, unworking arcade console it would be snazzy and something you would want in your living room. How many of us living in places other than a dorm room would really want a PC case next to their TV?

Utility is useful, no doubt about that, but let's have some more style please.

You mean "XCube Station 2"

[gkbarr]

Heh, just like PVP

-G