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Do-It-Yourself-Game-Console
DrCarbonite writes "Andre' LaMothe is releasing a brand new game console, the XGAMESTATION which may fulfill the fantasies of Slashdot readers everywhere. 16-bit Motorola CPU with a graphics architecture "similar to the Commodore 64, Atari 800, and Apple II". Its an electronics kit being marketed as a game system that wants to be hacked/modded/rebuilt. It supports homebrew everything-- joystick adapters, displays, software, roms, the whole nine yards."
I thought the whole point of hacking and modding was making the hardware do something it wasn't designed to do.
And this is cool because lots of people have these machines and can recognise the hack.
A machine which is designed to be hacked and modded, that almost nobody will buy (compared to ps2/Gamecube/Xbox)?
Excuse me while I go and 'mod' my Amiga 500...
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This sounds great and all and just about anything LaMothe does turns to gold in the eyes of video game developers but it seems to me that the technology is just too old to be interesting for the hacking community.
Now in the realm of education... low powered, fairly simplistic systems like these are used for things such as early electronic engineering courses, introductory assembly programming courses and the like. It would be nice for students to be able to do something cool in these courses besides light up LEDs and flip switches attached to an ancient Motorola 68k. If only the academic community didn't shun anything with 'game' in the title and the site actually had information besides "please call later" in the Education section.
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While this sounds like a really nice idea, a 16-bit processor sounds a bit underpowered, especially seeing as 32-bit chips are hella cheap nowadays.
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I do... and that's my point! ;)
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It is really hard to figure what niche this is made to fill. If you are desperate to develop on a platform from the 80s can't you just develop for MAME and avoid yet another box on your shelf? If you want to muck about in clunky hardware there are plenty of places that will sell you the original 80s hardware and cartages. And speaking of cartages why is this thing using them and not going for a cheap CD-Rom drive for storing games. If the price point is way low it may take off a bit, but I just don't see it.
Unless I completely misread the article it is like those kits you can buy to make youre own radio. Sure for the same money you can usually buy an already finished ones. That is not the point!
Sure you can do this with existing platforms like the C64 mentioned but you will then have to do an awfull lot of research youreself. Here you get in one package everything you need to learn and thinker with a computer.
Oh and for those wining about the power of the processor, do you perhaps think this could have something to do with A: price B: power C: Documentation D: Cooling? How about all of the above?
This could be a nice learning tool for those not already familiar with how computers work. Now all of it is going to depend on the following things.
Nice to see someone dare to create a hacker learning tool. Pity most /. have their head so far up their ass they can't see the fun of a product like this.
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It would be
- Cheaper
- Faster
- More modern
- Compatible with PC games
- Easily use CDs and DVDs to store games
- Could be much more accessable to a broader range of people
Sure, anyone can create a MAME machine from a PC, but no one has done so in a large scale manufacturing and marketting business.The only downside I see is that it will encourage people to use the same bloated tools they are using now, rather than encouraging them to at least take a cursory glance at assembly, and gain experience in writing their own device drivers.
But then, most people won't want to touch either of those anyway (and they wouldn't have to on either platform).
There are always going to be more game programmers than driver programmers.
Besides, it'll give people an excuse to take a harder look at a few of the OS projects that are all assembly, or micro sized. Eventually someone will even come out with a cartidge that will play DVDs on these lower end systems, which doesn't happen now under windows because of the innefficiency of so many software and driver layers.
Honestly, unless the entire development kit including book is under $60, then it simply isn't worth it except to those few who want to learn a particular 16 bit uProcessor code and tinker.
Oh, and you three who will work to port NetBSD and Linux to it.
-Adam
Certainly the walk-up-and-use simplicity of the C64 and other 8-bit BASIC systems has never quite been seen again. I'm also reasonably impressed that the web site is holding up under the traffic, and frankly the web site is so pretty that it makes me want to spend money on the thing, no matter what it does. Excellent job: someone has understood how to market to geeks.
But... where is the simple programming language? I mean, I could make a stupid game in 10 lines of C64 BASIC. I don't want to have to work in C/C++ to do this today, or I'd just stick to a PC.
Give me a high-level audio and video API that does nice things from a simple interpreted language, something I can give to my kids to let them learn programming, and something that is easy to extend with bits and pieces of random hardware... that was the real magic of the 8-bit systems, and that does not quite seem to be all here yet.
Or maybe I've just missed it somewhere.
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Wouldn't a single board computer be better in almost every respect? Take a lower end mini-itx board, develop a wall plug silent power supply for it, and all you'd then have to make are compact flash adaptors and joystick adaptors.
[...]The only downside I see is that it will encourage people to use the same bloated tools they are using now, rather than encouraging them to at least take a cursory glance at assembly, and gain experience in writing their own device drivers.
I think this is exactly the point: have a computer with lots of ready-to-use-software, OS, libraries, and you don't learn nearly as much as if you need to write all those nifty things yourself. And let a beginner use somethink like OpenGL/DirectX8 and they won't understand simple basics like "How do I draw a 3D cube on a 2D display?"
While I think the choice of CPU was not the best (I'd gone for a 16 or 32 bit microcontroller like NEC VR or Motorola Coldfire or IBM small PPCs), having a simple system do simple games makes you understand games (or any task) much better than buying or just installing a new program.
I for example had a Color Genie while every one else had a C64. Everyone except me knew lots of games. Me learned how to program.
In this light, the chosen CPU might be a good idea after all. 32 bit microcrontrollers with their PCI bus, memory configuration etc. are clearly more tricky to handle than a (fast) 8 bit type with no such things. And given all the power of a fast 32 bit CPU, you'd want to create very complex games, which will be more difficult for most beginners than they can handle.
I've been looking through the S12CPUV2 Reference Manual (downloadable from Motorola's web site). The CPU architecture looks very much like an MC6800 with 16-bit extensions. It has two 8-bit accumulators (A & B) that can be paired into a 16-bit accumulator (D). It has two 16-bit index registers (X & Y), a 16-bit stack pointer, a 16-bit program counter, and an 8-bit condition code register. Most instructions can use A, B or D. It can do 16-bit arithmetic but some instructions, such as boolean logic, are limited to 8-bit operands. I'd describe it as a 16-bit superset of the 8-bit MC6800.
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From the "About" page:
Before 1994, the idea of walking into a bookstore and seeing entire shelves of books on real-time graphics and game programming was almost unheard of. The very techniques and sciences driving the games that were already making billions of dollars for the Ataris and Nintendos of the world were still well-guarded secrets. That all changed, however, with the release of Tricks of the Game Programming Gurus by computer scientist Andre' LaMothe, and within only a few years, an entirely new genre of technical books had seemingly taken over the world.
Uh, I hate to mention it Andre, but this simply isn't true. There were dozens of books about graphics and game programming on 8-bit home computers. COMPUTE! had a whole line of them, for example. You could pick up at least two magazines for each make of computer that included source code listings for games written assembly language and making full use of the hardware. Heck, you could buy the hardware reference manual and even the full operating system source code from Atari. Even the source code to Atari DOS, with full commentary. was available in a $12 book. The source code to Chris Crawfords' award winning Eastern Front, widely considered one of the most advanced commercial games of its time, was also available for purchase. In a number of ways, things were more open and free back then.
Oh those old Compute Magazines were GREAT.
They talked quite in depth about how the hardware worked for the Atari and Commodore 64 computers and Vic 20, etc. They published short games for each, which was obviously the source code and people used to TYPE THEM IN.
And if that wasn't enough, there was INSIDE ATARI, which went through the sound, video and joystick hardware all in depth, how to hook the vertical blanking interrupt, how to change the color registers on a horizontal blank interrupt. There was all sorts of stuff that one could do.
But then VGA came out and PCs were better, so f--- it.
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From their FAQ:"The processing power of the XGameStation is approximately 10x that of the Super Nintendo (SNES), and it's graphical capabilities are approximately 50-200% more advanced than the SNES."
Now, assuming that this isn't advertising doublespeak (I'm curious if that means it can handle Mode-7 equivilent equivilent graphics and what the exact specs on the output are), doesn't that sound reasonable? If this is a box for hobbyists and amateur enthusiasts, can you really conceive of much more power being necessary? Once you get past the SNES era, you start REALLY needing lots of people to use the console effectively. And for (according to the site) less than $100 for the entire package?
This sounds like a great idea, and if the geeks embrace it could be one of the hot toys for gamers who want to get away from the Microsoft-Sony-Nintendo trifecta. But ultimately that's going to decide it, how much the people embrace the system. It sounds like the specs are fine for those of us with fond memories of Bionic Commando and Sonic the Hedgehog. The question is whether anyone will pick up on this and make it worth having.
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What about schools that teach QBasic? Or MS Visual C++/Basic/Java/C#/whatever? Isn't that the same thing? Besides, the programming can be done in C on the XGameStation. C is C, whether it be on the XGameStation, a PC, a Mac, whatever. The XGameStation is no more "proprietary" than any other system they may program on.
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