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Building Consoles For Fun
tierra writes "Indiviuals writing their own games is one thing, but try building your own console. Russ Christensen, and his team put together in class, dive into the fun of using an old Nintendo system to house their customized XSA-50 Board. They also uses a XSA Extender to hook their personal console up to a monitor instead of a TV. They programmed Tetris and Space Invaders for their console using a system they call CASM."
If you're going to make the games yourself, and the console yourself - dammit, build the TV yourself too, you lazy bastard!
"Moderate drinking can help prevent amputated limbs" -- Abigail Zuger, NYTimes, 12/31/02
For the love of God, what does he think he's doing?
[flame off][humor on]
"Our professor allowed us to take a different approach, using an ICDS Enhanced Hot Water Drill, a cage full of GM hamsters and some pantyhose we have created our own version of the worlds very first Wheel. We carved it straight of a rock wall! We call it Wheel Revolution. The wheel was a revolution, and it revolves, so we're getting double-usage out of the name. Bob is able to put his hands on the axis of the wheel while Pete holds his ankles and runs. We'll be holding a public demo for a few days so stop on over and try it out!"
" Our engineering professor liked the idea of us really getting back to the basics."
Operator, give me the number for 911!
Even if you could get it below $100 it would never compete with the GameCube unless it had a similar sized/similar quality game library. In other words, not going to happen. Not to mention a huge marketing push.
A few people, including the Linux-Indrema team, have had thoughts such as this before. Neat idea from a tech-head view, but business-wise its nothing but a disaster waiting to happen.
From what I've read, the X-box is nothing more than a PIII PC with some mods to make it "different".
...
Some very serious mods to make it different. For starters, it has little to no OS overhead, it's memory structure is unified and more efficient than a PC's and it doesn't waste memory managing memory since all of it's ram is dedicated to the single application (game) that is running.
If this has already been done, please post links.
Just do a search for XBox emulation. It hasn't been done, and the primary reason is that the XBox game discs are written in reverse order from regular DVDs. This gives the advantage of speeding up read access because the data is read from the outside in, but also it prevents piracy.
There are a whole slew of other reasons why the XBos isn't just a PC, and why a PC can't really just magically be turned into an Xbox without some serious software trickery. I once thought it would be possible, but after looking into it I realized it's going to be a little harder than anybody initially thought.
Now -- what I -- WOULD -- love to see is a project very closely resembling the Indreama, put together by someone who really knows a whole lot about video game consoles, and willing to take a risk on a different business model than has traditionally been used by the video game industry.
Hmm. Maybe I should post my ideas in my journal....
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
I love projects like this. May just the fact that they succeeded inspire others to try the same thing.
On a tangent, this is the kind of thing that's been very possible for some time, but most people blindly assume that it's much too difficult. Similarly, writing a compiler for a high level language is a relatively easy project. You could do it in a semester course, or a month of spare time, but mention "writing a compiler" to the great majority of programmers, even those with lots of experience, and they run away in terror.
Personal chip design reached critical mass back around 1994.