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."

Comments

There are good reasons!

[Chordonblue]

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!

Re:Typical TiVo Troll comment

[Trelane]

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.