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

MAME Port?

[ianpatt]

He's going to have some trouble getting a MAME port with only 1-4MB of RAM to work with. Even games with relatively simple hardware go over that easily: pacman needs about 6MB just for the emulator core.

On the other hand, if the graphics chip is thoroughly customizable, we might see some dedicated single-system emulators that use the built-in graphics and are designed with low-memory situation in mind. Could be pretty cool.

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.