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VIA/Apex Game Console Details Leaked
DammiTT writes "It seems that Apex are releasing a new PC-based 'console', using VIA components, later this year. It'll be announced during CES on January 8th." However, HardOCP already has some initial pictures and details up on its site, for this "ApeXtreme Personal Gaming Console and DVD Player", or PGC. According to this early, unconfirmed report, it's running a 1.4Ghz VIA chipset, the CN400, and "will be powered by a near-instant-on version of WinXP (embedded) with Windows Media Player, and... will have removable media in the form of DVD/CD." It comes with "a 40GB IDE hard drive... you can play DVD movies, audio and video CDs... [and] the price points will be at US$299 and US$399."
Read the article. It comes with slimmed-down XP and can play PC games straight off the Best Buy shelf: "Obviously, you can play DVD movies, audio and video CDs, and PC games on the box." This means you get at least the entire Intellivision, NES, Game Boy, Game Gear, Sega Genesis, Super NES, N64, PS1, and GBA libraries in emulation, along with hundreds of emulated arcade games.
That said, the 4-in-1s are still a mess, so if you're not having any problems with the built-in Windows drivers, don't install the 4-in-1s. IIRC it was just a couple of months ago that VIA released a 4-in-1 set that caused massive IDE corruption if you had more than 1 GB of memory. The more things change, the more they stay the same . . .
Via is the reason I still use Intel. I've always thought AMD made good CPUs, but were held down by bad motherboard chipsets. The funny thing is, a lot of the issues weren't common between boards. I'd have identical machines that had different issues. It always scared me away. I used to call it "Playing the Via lottery."
Cthulhu Saves.
The suggestion that this could be used to play divx encoded video is very tantalizing. $300 for something that could replace my gamecube, DVD player, and the cabling/SVCDs I make would be very well worth it.
How do they do it? All their products are made in China.
Okay, simple:
1) This baby not only has Composite and S-Video, but also COMPONENT Out!
2) Portability and suitability for the case design.
3) Pre-assembled and parts guaranteed to work with each other.
4) A single platform that can safely be written for. Because it is wide open, you could well see significant Linux development (PVR, games, etc.) without the usual PC worries over sound, gfx, or chipset drivers.
Think of all the time a company like Valve has had to spend making sure that their games work on 'X' brand's gfx card. Then there are differing generations within that company's platform!
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Indeed.
I'm working on recycling my PII-400MHz [512MB RAM; 30GB disk] into a MythTV box. It by itself isn't very beefy, but I've dropped an extra $80 (on top of the regular $100 for a midrange tv tuner card) to buy a WinTV PVR 350, so that the encoding and decoding can be moved off to a dedicated processor, freeing the main cpu and keeping me from having to upgrade. At least, that's the theory; we'll see how reality goes. :)
Eventually, I'll get a mini-ITX board that I can put in a cute container my SO will accept; for now, she's fine with hiding my huge tower behind the sofa. ;) When I do that, I'll see if I can myabe get another, cheaper card; the hardware encoding on the 350 will still be a boon then; I'll be able to easily do 2 streams at once. [so she can watch HGTV and I can record Sci-Fi. :]
That's the other good thing about rolling your own--it may be about equal to the cost of a tivo+subscription, but you simply cannot say that the freedom the MythTV box gives you compares to the highly locked-down nature of the TiVo and such; I can add and remove parts; add more hard drives or external drives; stream it across the 'net so I can watch TV or recordings in my study or at school, etc. I see this as being a big reason for a school to work on such a system--they'd have an extremely flexible system for doing audio and video in the classroom; they need only have enough bandwidth and a client in the room; they could have a big beefy server in the back office storing all the clips for the school, all nicely indexed.
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
Any TV-out is generally pretty crummy with a regular TV, but supposedly this will have component video output (better than S-video) capable of HDTV, which would look much nicer. Also, hopefully this thing will be capable of playing MPEG4 (including Xvid and all of the DivX codecs) - though they didn't mention it.
DVI should by all means be the best of the supplied connections. I am just sad that they didn't include HDMI (including sound) which would have been the absolutley easiest and best.
Let's be honest, a cheap "do everything" product is not going to have high quality D/A converters for picture nor sound. Then it is much better to make use of D/A converters further down the line. This is why cheap DVD players can't compete with expensive ones when it comes to picture quality, although you do need a good display to see it (14" TV nope, good Panasonic 32", could think so, 50" plasma, jupp, 200" expensive projector, you bet).
I'd be happy to see old horrible legacy connectors die. It is bad enough to get par, ser, PS/2, ISA Bios, PATA, PCI, VGA, gamepad, etc on computers when USB2, Firewire 800, DVI, PCI-express, SATA, etc isn't just a whole lot better, but also cheaper (to make) and easier to use.