XGameStation Designer Talks Specifics

Thanks to GameZone for their interview with Andre LaMothe about the XGameStation, the DIY, programmable game console theoretically due this December, but likely somewhat delayed. Although details of the XGameStation are still being finalized, LaMothe describes the specific technical details: "I think the ARM7 is going to be my choice as the final main CPU at 33-66 MIPS, and an FPGA GPU that does basic sprite, character, and bitmap graphics in 4-256 colors, with 1-4 Megs of RAM", and goes on to evangelize the software: "We will surely encourage people to port as many games and emulators as possible to the XGS. I am mainly concerned with getting MAME, Intellivision, Atari 2600, etc. ported ASAP."

Comments

Re:What's the point?

[Koos Baster]

Yeah right. Why would anyone want to buy stuff to cook his own meal, if you can go to McDonald's?
The fun't in creating something, not using it.

--
Finagle's First Law: If an experiment works, something has gone wrong

6 MB? Not quite.

[Thedalek]

That's only if you have all the MAME drivers loaded into memory at once, which is something you'll never do.

The main executable can be as small as a few hundred kilobytes, and then load the proper game driver from a datfile full of drivers (as is the case with some current distributions of MAME, like MAMEplus). There's no reason for Pac Man to require 6 MB, unless you were using some incredibly inefficent form of dynamic recompilation.

Of course, with 4 MB of ram, you can never run anything more complex than Capcom CPS1 games.

a cheap console

[theMerovingian]

A cheap console, that you can burn any game for, run emulators on, control the operating system, and totally hack apart..... Console, thy name is DreamCast.

Re:MAME Port?

[edwdig]

One thing you're forgetting. This is a cartridge based system. All your read-only data can be accessed directly from the cartridge, without need for RAM.

1-4 megs is a lot of RAM for 2D gaming when you've got most of your data stored in ROM.

The N64 had 4 megs of RAM (8 with the upgrade). The PS1 only had 2 megs. Putting 4 into this system would be overkill, considering it won't be powerful enough for real 3D. (Yes, it can run Doom type stuff fine, but you don't wanna try Quake on it).

An intersting Idea Over-all

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, As much as i would like to buy this thing i just think the system spects are too low to make any thing worthy of showing off

"Hey Guys Look at my Game i Made..
What do u mean it looks Old School...
STOP LAUGHING AT ME!!!"

I just think they should bump the system spects up.. and replace the Rom Chips with a CDR DVDR and the processor speed to 700mz with a SDL tutorial .. i mean making neet games would be much better on a system like that... it would beat the Dream cast where thier system specs are a 200mhz system that has a CDR.. with a coder cable.. The total would be around $100us...

over all i think this system would have been a good idea if it were released back in 1995 witht he current specs.. :)

Re:An intersting Idea Over-all

[single_user_mode]

the project is intended _mainly_ to teach hardware design and tinkering for consoles. if you start too complex only hardcore elctronic engineers will be able to do anything with it. it's more of an introduction to console design rather than another platform to code for but i am sure many will do just that, which is fine but not its primary purpose.