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

Lemme at it.

[ActionPlant]

I've always been a fan of Apex, and this looks fun. Competition for the Xbox with configurable, customizable components? And support for PC games? I'm all for it. It's about time we see something that isn't proprietary.

Damon,

Did somebody just...

[inode_buddha]

see a marketplace where modded X-boxes used to be? Makes me wonder....

Okay! Hate to be a cynic, but...

[wrinkledshirt]

Dumb question. Couldn't you pick up a full PC for that price by the time this thing comes out? Wouldn't that also give you a wider library of games?

X this X that

[munch0wnsy0u]

One has to wonder when the completely overused and tired X will be phased out. I for one would be happier if the marketing people would find something just a tad more innovative. X is so overused - bleh!

X-Box Killer?

[lynxuser]

This sounds like it has the ability to become the X-Box killer, for gamign systems that run like PCs.
Upgradable, running an OS (instead of a agaming OS), ability to put Linux on it. Yum. I can't wait for this to outshine PS2, GCN and Xbox.

Re:Mmm.. Cheap Linux workstation?

[aflat362]

The reason it has an embedded version of Windows XP is so you can play PC games on it. This is a game console. I see no benefit of Linux on this system. If you want a cheap workstation build a cheap workstation. You could probably do it chaper and better than this box anyway.

Say it ten times fast:

[tepples]

Competition for the Xbox with configurable, customizable components?

Configurable, customizable components cause console crashes.

Consoles "just work" because the games know the exact quirks of the fixed hardware they run on. Console games don't have the incompatibilities with video cards, incompatibilities with CPU models, and even incompatibilities with optical drives that PC games tend to have.

Re:Say it ten times fast:

[jeffkjo1]

Honestly, my friends X-Box crashes quite frequently, and I've heard that this quite common. For a console, this is completely unacceptable, but for some reason, people keep buying X-Boxes.

You know what this means?

[Lord Kano]

MAME CONSOLE BITCH!

Seriously, I don't think it will take very long at all before some enterprising individual or group of individuals starts homebrewing their own Mame32 CD for this baby. Think about it. It has a special version of WinXP, that means access to the Win32 API. It will also mean standardized hardware.

Something like that will make the system marketable to grandparents and uncles. People who have no interest in Max Payne or GTA VC just might want to play Burger Time or Space Invaders.

Now, we just need for the owners of the copyrights to those old games to come to the table to negotiate licensing. Even if they don't I'm sure that something like this will sping up eventually anyway.

LK

Re:You know what this means?

[Chordonblue]

Yes but with all of those examples it means hacking the shit out of things (not to mention the expense). And God help you if you use a hacked ROM on Xbox, leave it activated and then go on Xbox Live. They kick your ass!

Also, look at it this way; with a standardized and relatively open platform it might mean that a multitasking processor is finally good for something in a console.

Yes but will it run Linux?

[__aailob1448]

Considering that:

1- The Xbox, with all its "mighty" Microsoft DRM was made to run linux.

2- It's a PC that, according to the article, geatures a non-proprietary formatting, standard USB ports, ethernet ports and whatnot.

3- comes from a manufacturer that allows you to disable region-coding on its DVD players just by hitting a couple buttons on the remote.

4- does not have any real hopes of signing up the big game developers (especially not japaneese behemoths like SquareEnix, Capcom or Konami)

I think they definitely want their units to be hacked to death. And if they don't, they are blind, ignorant fools. I mean, this is obviously the ultimate set top box. Wireless gamepads? Please! More like wireless remotes...

You could stream media from your computer, install mythTV and record your favorite tv shows, back them up to the computer over ethernet, emulate old arcade/console games. Basically everything the Xbox can do, only more and better thanks to the increased amount of ram and cpu speed. The possibilities are too many to list.

It would be funny if I got it all wrong and this becomes the next ps2...

Doomed to failure

[Anonymous Coward]

Full disclosure: I work for one of the Big Three console manufacturers. Still, I think the points I'm about to make stand by themselves just fine.

1. The spec is not that great. Developments in graphics and CPU are mostly driven by the games industry (do you really need a Radeon 9600 to run Word?), and from what I've heard, all future consoles from the Big Three will have specs that make 1.4GHz look a little lame. Hell, 1.4GHz is only twice as fast as the Xbox processor. The minimum spec for next-gen consoles is an order of magnitude higher than their current ones. At 1.4GHz, it wouldn't be able to run many of today's PC games, let alone the ones to come 5 years hence (the length of the usual console lifecycle).
2. "The OS will not be locked down." A critical key to the success of any console is publisher support, and publishers will not support a console that does not have reasonable copy-protection. If the OS is not locked down, then copy-protection goes out the window.

   An open OS also screws up the business model of all console manufacturers, which is to get royalties from licensed publishers. Why would publishers bother to get a license if anyone can write software for it?

3. Who? Via may be famous for their PC hardware, but that is not the same thing as knowing how to run a games console company. They'll have to work very hard to convince publishers that they're a credible competitor for the Big Three. You could argue that Microsoft (and indeed Sony) were in the same position when they started, but I think they had enough money to throw at that problem.

As the HardOCP article suggests, this could be a kick-ass DivX box, for watching all your media on a big TV. Well, I sure hope so, because you won't be playing many games on it.

Re:Doomed to failure

[-tji]

You're thinking in terms of the current console makers - selling the console for a loss, locking it down, and raping the consumer on the games.

At $300 to $400, Apex/VIA are not losing money on the hardware. These are two companies with a lot of experience in dirt cheap manufacturing.

They can make a healthy profit on getting the hardware out there. Maybe they can also get some game licensing revenue, or maybe they avoid that altogether and see if the PC game makers will do a trivial port to this platform and keep a bigger slice of the pie for themselves.

VIA has had good results with the Mini-ITX community. This could be just an extension of that effort. Put a cool reference platform out there & let people hack the hell out of it.

Re:Doomed to failure

[cgenman]

The minimum spec for next-gen consoles is an order of magnitude higher than their current ones.

7 GHz!?!? I have serious difficulty believing that.

No, an order of magnitude overall. The PS2, for example, has many bottlenecks. Inadequate RAM for one, and tortured processor scheduling... Not to mention that terribly slow DVD drive. The PS2 was released in Japan in the beginning of '00. If Moore's law holds up, that means a system released in the second half of 2004 should be 8 times as powerful.

Here's an experiment for you to try some time: When your next-gen console comes out, claim it has anti-copying technology in it, but don't actually put any in (just stick in a delay loop for checkDiskIsValid()). See if anyone notices.

I'm betting they won't. Because the fact of the matter is, whatever effect anti-copying support has on sales, those effects are completely swamped out by larger issues, such as sales and marketing efforts, distribution deals, "network effects," and the vagaries of the buying public. If you have a successful platform, no one will much care that discs can be copied. And if you have a crap platform, copy protection won't save anyone's ass.

Developers were right ticked about the rampant piracy with the PS1. I've heard very reasonable estimates of a 10% sales loss due to piracy on that platform, and piracy there required soldering. While that 10% wouldn't have saved 3DO, it will keep a studio running for a long time if the game looks like it is doing well, because that money is entirely cream. 10% of sales of a successful game is another entire game that you can develop. Any executive that doesn't sweat those lost sales shouldn't be heading your team.And once again, that level of piracy was in spite of an actively modified protection scheme.

With the current relative rarity of DVD burners, piracy on the PS2 has been much less of an issue. But with burners just hitting the 100 dollar mark, if someone releases a platform without any copy protection at all, you can bet your tail it won't draw many developers. In fact, please do that. Bet your own tail. Don't advise other people to bet theirs, because they're going to lose it.

Why would publishers bother to get a license if anyone can write software for it?

Because the tech support is better? Because they can get a turnkey development system rather than have to locate and pay for expertise to cobble one together? Because they can get co-marketing support? Because "outsourcing" is still a buzzword among executive circles?

But Activision is large enough to take over all responsibilities in-house. Electronic Arts will probably create a consulting service better than what the console makers offers, and for less money. Truly terrible games will make it to market (worse than today), and half-assed unfinished ones will be pushed out the door without quality assurance. The IBM PC platform is arguably the creation of IBM, but do the millions of programmers out there flock to big blue when they're writing software?

Face it, without lock-in no XBox developer would be paying Microsoft's exhorbitant console developer fees... they would buy a copy of Visual C++ and put in the effort to change some function calls. Co-marketing only happens to a select few big boys, "outsourcing" is still fought against by notoriously protective game developers, and development systems for new consoles are pretty cobbled together as is. As for tech support?

You're talking about re-doing all of the mistakes that the industry made in the 2600 era. Somehow I don't think that is a good way to run a business. Many consoles fail for many reasons other than unmitigated access to the hardware for all developers and users. But no console has succeeded under such circumstances.

As a game player, I want a platform that everyone can develop for, can extend, and over which I have full rights. It's called a PC, and it set me back a grand. As a game developer, I want a target platform with known parameters, whose players purchase games instead of pirating them, and which has an extensive user base. That's a console, and they hit the sweet spot somewhere between 200 and 250 dollars.

Get the fsck over yourself.

Re:Whats with the 300 dollar price point...

[Gherald]

> $300.. my graphic card alone cost that much.. getting ripped off from Nvidia and ATI here.

Who modded this insightful? It is obviously a troll.... if you are paying $300 for a graphics card, you are getting a premium product, at a premium price.

Why should this be surprising?

$300 NV/ATI offerings are years ahead of anything S3 has to offer. Here is a massive benchmark that includes (presumably) the best S3 has to offer.

If you want something superior to that S3, look at NV/ATI's offerings in the $100-200 range. There's pleny of options for any need.

If you want a recommendation, based on current market prices, I would go with either a 9200 (for casual gaming/video) or a 9600 pro (for moderate gaming).

9800 would be a step up if you have a need for it, but really only necessary if you want to do 1600x resolution with the latest games.

Not an X-Box killer

[stephenisu]

With Microsoft supplying the OS, this is most definately going to fail as a console system. If it ever got popular, Microsoft would kill it off.

Re:Typical TiVo Troll comment

[Afrosheen]

I've been thinking of building a freevo box for awhile, but until I go through my next upgrade cycle sometime later this year, it'll be expensive.

Re-using your own legacy hardware for a pvr is what makes it cheap. Rolling your own with new parts is where the high price comes in. TiVO is always cheaper than what you can build NEW, but if you're recycling your 'old' p3 1ghz or so, then it can be more cost effective.

Rabid Reflex Post Rebuttal

[Chordonblue]

You can disagree and not be disagreeable, but apparently that's not your... Uh. Style.

I'm not going to call your post 'dumb', but we certainly have a difference of perspective and opinion.

We'll have to wait and see about the video quality won't we? Last I checked, Apex has never used Via components before (unless you know otherwise). Via's Epia quality is excellent. I should know - I've installed at least 6 of the Nehemiah-based Epia's here where I work. Simply beautiful design. Perhaps this is the very reason why both companies decided to work together on this project.

As to the physical design, my point was that it is designed as an entertainment component rather than your average beige box. Sure, you can get a small form factor machine but the cases alone are very expensive for what you get IMHO.

I'm *not* assuming about the "wide open" part. If you read the article you would have noticed that this is being marketed as being hackable.

Where Valve is concerned, well EVERY video game manufacturer deals with card/gfx manufacturer issues. When you're as big as Valve you can expect companies to design their chips and drivers around your game - to an extent. But what about the old cards still floating around? Only a small percentage of people out there are going to actually run out and buy a new gfx card just to play a certain game.

Example: Valve spent months trying to get decent framerates on GeForce FX hardware because of their poor pixel shader implemementation. Gee, why'd they do that? Why didn't they just 'let it go' at 20 FPS? Because they knew quite a few customers out there have this series of cards.

And what's with this assertion that DeltaChrome is 'shitty'? For what purpose? I've seen the test results, and it's certainly no Radeon 9800XT, but consider that you'll be dealing with lower resolutions on TV. Even on 480i HDTV. So then, the difference becomes running Quake III at 400+ FPS on some top of the line card or around 80-100 FPS on the S3. Wow. Funny, I didn't notice the difference either.

How about thinking things through before YOU post next time?