Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Andre Lamothe Launches XGameStation

Posted by michael on from the everything-old-is-new-again dept.

TheAdventurer writes "Andre Lamothe, author of many popular video game programming books, has released his XGameStation. The initial offering, the XGameStation Micro Edition, is a retro level hardware platform, similar to the old Atari and NES systems, designed to teach enthusiasts and students the elements of console hardware design and effective low level programming skills. The unit comes with an e-book written by Andre on how to develop on the platform using its assembly language IDE (included) and how to make your own extensions to the device. It is priced at $199."

2 of 173 comments (clear)

  1. Take this with a grain of salt by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    A bit of background on Andre....

    I'm posting this AC because I know this will get modded down as flamebait.

    I've been working in the game industry as a programmer for 15 years, and have never regretting purchasing a single technical book (and I've bought hundreds) until, one day when I was at Barnes & Noble, buying six by Andre Lamothe thinking they might be useful.

    Not only are his books terribly tied to specific platforms (he wouldn't know how to program if sample code wasn't handed to him on a platter by Microsoft--most of his sample code is taken STRAIGHT out of Microsoft's examples), but he can't write a paragraph without factual errors to save his life.

    I remember a whole section where he was talking about 56 Kbps modems having a total of 56 Kbps of bandwidth split between incoming and outgoing data, and if you sent more, you could receive less. And another where he dismissed NAT because IP addresses on the internal network would conflict with those on the Internet and the idea would never catch on (he'd never heard of reserved netblocks, apparently).

    He has become just a name and a marketing tool; do NOT rely on him for actual game programming tips and information.

  2. Dreamcast Programming by ecliptik · · Score: 5, Informative

    200$ is a bit expensive for a hobby video game programming system. Why not just pick up a dreamcast for cheap and use it?

    There are plenty of resources for it and some good examples of homebrewed games and applications already out there.

    Not to mention it's a lot more modern and you can use some nice rendering hardware.

    Linkage:
    Dreamcast Programming
    Dreamcast Homebrew
    Dreamcast Emulation