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."

Comments

Modding?

[Dylan2000]

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...

Good idea... kinda.

[LilMikey]

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.

I just don't see it.

[Roblem]

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.

This is not meant to be an PS2 contentder

[SmallFurryCreature]

Or even for that matter an amiga contender.

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.

• Documentation, is it going be clear enough to read by anyone who has an intrest without offending those who already know a bit?
• Price this is at least partly a toy, lets hope they choose for ancient tech to keep the price down.
• Availabilty, if they can get this in to hobbyshops it could work.

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.

Wouldn't a SBC be better in almost every respect?

[stienman]

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.

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

It's a neat idea...

[heironymouscoward]

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.

Should call it the Ego-Station

[Junks Jerzey]

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.

Can we make up our minds?

[JayBlalock]

Every time a "retro" gaming article posts, there're hundreds of posts lamenting the passage of the "golden age" of video games, when it wasn't about blowing $20 million photo-rendering a Japanese villiage, and when solitary geniuses could write the next greatest game ever made without corporate backing. Then this comes out, and everyone immediately starts complaining about the system speed and tech specs.

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.